This Week in Tech 1030: Journalism Comes In Second

Summary

All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio) - Episode 1030: "Journalism Comes In Second" Summary

Release Date: May 5, 2025

In Episode 1030 of "This Week in Tech" hosted by Leo Laporte, the panel, comprising Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Rivlin, Ian Thompson from The Register, and Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times, delves into a multitude of pressing technology and business issues. The discussion spans legal battles involving tech giants, advancements and ethical considerations in artificial intelligence (AI), privacy concerns, economic impacts of tariffs, and notable moves by industry leaders like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Elon Musk.

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1. Apple vs. Epic Court Case

The episode kicks off with a significant focus on Apple's legal tussle with Epic Games. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers delivered a stern reprimand to Apple regarding its anti-competitive practices:

• Leo Laporte [04:55]: "Despite knowing its obligations under the court order, thwarted the injunction's goals and continued its anti-competitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream."

Key Points:

• Apple was ordered to allow app developers to link to external purchasing options, circumventing the App Store's 30% commission fee.
• The judge accused Apple of "malicious compliance," highlighting that an Apple executive lied under oath, favoring financial interests over compliance.
• Apple expressed disagreement with the ruling but committed to complying and appealing the decision.

2. Google's Antitrust and Search Engine Concerns

Google faces ongoing legal challenges concerning its dominance in the search engine market:

• Ian Thompson [05:56]: "It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out because Apple is, I'm trying to think of a suitable analogy, but about as protective as a grizzly bear about her cubs when it comes to their 30% cut."

Key Points:

• The U.S. Department of Justice proposes remedies such as data sharing with competitors, which Google opposes, fearing it would lead to a "de facto divestiture."
• Mozilla and other partners rely heavily on Google's payments to remain operational, complicating potential remedies.
• Concerns were raised about the lack of viable alternatives to Google's search dominance if financial dependencies are severed.

3. Advancements and Ethical Considerations in AI

The panel discusses the rapid evolution of AI and the ethical dilemmas it presents:

• Gary Rivlin [12:27]: "They keep on fumbling the ball. Maybe saying Tim Cook chose poorly, but you know, maybe some of that 100 billion should have gone to training models and kind of not being behind on AI."

Key Points:

• Apple is perceived as lagging in the AI race compared to competitors like OpenAI and Google.
• The integration of AI into consumer products remains a work in progress, with concerns about privacy and manipulation.
• The rise of agentic AI, designed to act autonomously, poses new challenges in trust and verification.

4. Privacy and Security Concerns

Issues surrounding privacy, data security, and emerging technologies are scrutinized:

• Leo Laporte [14:45]: "Feels like there is a case to be made that it would be nice to have some... something? Estonia has a digital ID card."

Key Points:

• Worldcoin Initiative: The discussion highlights concerns over biometric data collection through iris scanning, emphasizing privacy risks and ethical implications.
• Thinkst Canary: Sponsored segments introduced Thinkst Canary, a honeypot device aimed at detecting unauthorized network access, underscoring the importance of proactive security measures.
• Real-Time Deepfake Fraud: Gary Rivlin elaborates on the increasing sophistication of deepfake technologies used in fraud, urging vigilance against AI-driven scams.

5. Economic Impacts of Tariffs

The conversation shifts to the effects of tariffs on consumers and businesses:

• Leo Laporte [11:53]: "Revenue is up 7% year over year. iPad up 15% year over year, iPhone up 2%. You don't expect huge growth in the iPhone, but still a growth services up 12%."

Key Points:

• Apple is navigating tariff challenges by shifting production locations from China to Vietnam and India, though tariffs remain a concern.
• Amazon contemplated itemizing tariff costs on purchases, leading to backlash from the White House, which called the move "hostile and political."
• Microsoft raised Xbox prices to account for tariffs, reflecting broader industry adjustments amidst ongoing trade tensions.

6. AI in Fraud and Web Security

The utilization of AI in enhancing both legitimate business operations and malicious activities is explored:

• Leo Laporte [70:07]: "OpenAI powers innovation and drives efficiency, but it also helps bad actors deliver more relentless and effective attacks."

Key Points:

• AI enhances phishing attacks, making them more sophisticated and harder to detect.
• Organizations are advised to adopt modern security measures, such as zero-trust architectures, to mitigate AI-driven threats.
• The balance between leveraging AI for productivity and safeguarding against its misuse remains delicate.

7. Quantum Communication Breakthrough

A significant technological advancement is reported:

• Leo Laporte [136:50]: "A quantum message has traveled over a record-breaking 158 miles of standard fiber optic cables in Germany, making the first time coherent quantum communication has been accomplished using existing telecommunications infrastructure without requiring expensive cryogenic cooling."

Key Points:

• Researchers achieved coherent quantum communication without the need for cryogenic cooling, marking a milestone in quantum technology.
• This breakthrough could pave the way for more practical and widespread use of quantum communication in the future.

8. Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos’ Tech Ventures

The panel highlights notable initiatives by industry titans:

• Elon Musk:

  • Starbase Tech, Texas: Musk successfully renamed a town to facilitate SpaceX operations, emphasizing control over local infrastructure.
  • Data Centers and Starlink: Amazon's Project Kuiper, Jeff Bezos' satellite internet initiative, and their implications for global internet access and market competition are discussed.

• Jeff Bezos:

  • Deployment of Project Kuiper satellites aims to compete with SpaceX's Starlink, indicating Amazon's commitment to expanding its footprint in global internet services.

9. Legislative and Regulatory Developments

New laws and regulatory actions impact the tech landscape:

• Take It Down Act:
  • Aimed at criminalizing non-consensual deepfakes and revenge porn, the act faces criticism for its broad definitions and potential for abuse.
  • EFF [59:00]: "Despite major flaws, it's passed... It's a perfect storm for censorship and abuse."

Key Points:

• The act mandates swift removal of harmful content within 48 hours, posing challenges for platforms in verifying and acting upon takedown requests.
• Concerns about the act being used as a tool for censorship rather than targeted removal of genuinely harmful content.

10. Wikipedia Under Scrutiny

Wikipedia faces allegations of spreading disinformation:

• Leo Laporte [85:22]: "The Wikimedia foundation, through its wholly owned subsidiary Wikipedia, is allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American people."

Key Points:

• Federal Investigation: Ed Martin, U.S. Attorney, is probing Wikipedia's editorial processes concerning potential foreign interference.
• Community Response: Discussions around the integrity of open-source platforms and the challenges of maintaining unbiased information in the digital age.

11. AI Ethics and Manipulation

The ethical use of AI in influencing public opinion and behavior is a recurring theme:

• Gary Rivlin [115:38]: "AI is going to be used to manipulate people and it's going to know us so well and it's going to understand how to push certain buttons."

Key Points:

• Persuasion Experiments: Unauthorized AI experiments on platforms like Reddit demonstrate AI's ability to influence opinions, raising ethical concerns.
• AI Manipulation: The potential for AI to be used in advertising and persuasive technologies underscores the need for robust ethical guidelines and regulatory oversight.

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Conclusion

Episode 1030 of "This Week in Tech" offers a comprehensive exploration of the intertwined realms of technology, ethics, and economics. From legal battles of tech giants like Apple and Google to the transformative yet cautionary aspects of AI, the panel underscores the profound impact these developments have on society. Privacy concerns, regulatory challenges, and the rapid advancement of technologies like quantum communication and AI-driven services highlight the delicate balance between innovation and safeguarding public interests. As the tech landscape continues to evolve, the discussions in this episode provide valuable insights into navigating the complexities of our increasingly digital world.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [04:55]: "Despite knowing its obligations under the court order, thwarted the injunction's goals and continued its anti-competitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream."

• Ian Thompson [05:56]: "It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out because Apple is... about as protective as a grizzly bear about her cubs when it comes to their 30% cut."

• Gary Rivlin [12:27]: "Maybe saying Tim Cook chose poorly, but... maybe some of that 100 billion should have gone to training models and kind of not being behind on AI."

• Gary Rivlin [115:38]: "AI is going to be used to manipulate people and it's going to know us so well and it's going to understand how to push certain buttons."

• Ian Thompson [05:30]: "Apple is, Apple is, Apple is... they're embarrassed. They got... there was, there was a scolding by a judge, but... economically, it was the right decision."

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For a deeper dive into these topics, listeners are encouraged to read Gary Rivlin's Pulitzer-winning works and follow subsequent developments in the tech industry.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Gary Rivlin is here, the author of AI Valley. We're glad to welcome our first Pulitzer Prize winner onto the show. Ian Thompson's here from the Register. Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Journal. We're gonna talk about Apple. Big spanking in court this week. Google saying, please, you, Honor, don't make. Don't make a spin off search. And finally, Jeff Bezos gets his first kuiper. Satellites in the sky. All of that and more coming up next on podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1030, recorded Sunday, May 4, 2025. Journalism comes in second. Foreign. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. I'm pleased to bring together three stellar journalists. Owen Thomas is here from the San Francisco Business Times. He's managing editor there. Great to see you again, Owen. You're getting buffer and buffer. Would you stop lifting? We're gonna have to do a movie about you. We'll call it, I don't know, I'm trying to think of what we should call it. Pumping Tech News. Yeah, that's it.

[Owen Thomas]

Leo. I flipped some tires this morning just to prepare for this show.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you really? Oh, you're Mr. CrossFit now, huh? All right. It's great to see you, Owen. Always a welcome voice on the show. Ian Thompson is also here. Mirror technology reporter now. He got out of the editing [e-mail]. always great to see you, Ian. Thank you.

[Ian Thompson]

Always fun. And reporting is always fun. Good. You know, it's been a busy week this week.

[Leo Laporte]

We need more reporters joining us for the first time. I'm thrilled to have him, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist, Gary Rivlin. His latest book, AI Valley, but you've read him in many publications. And of course, he won the Pulitzer for Katrina. It was for Katrina, wasn't it?

[Gary Rivlin]

No, the Panama Papers.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right, the Panama investigative team.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That was huge. That was something else.

[Gary Rivlin]

That was fun. Like we had to keep the secret for a year. That was actually the hardest part, not to tell anyone was there.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's funny because it revealed really how much hidden money there is in politics and business everywhere. But it didn't feel like anything ever came of it. Like nobody went to jail.

[Gary Rivlin]

That's not 100% true. I mean, some politicians were kicked out of office. Oh, good changes. I mean, not in the U.S. but you know, it's funny, I had the sports stars like Lionel Messi and other big names, they would get their salary but their, you know, like their cleats money, their endorsement deals, they would kind of hide it overseas to avoid paying taxes. So you know that practice ended because they were outed and embarrassed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it stopped it anyway, I guess that's it. That's a.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well or you know, it stopped some.

[Leo Laporte]

And then they moved to the Cayman Islands is what happened exactly.

[Gary Rivlin]

Bad news for Panama, good news for the Caymans.

[Ian Thompson]

The situation Malta isn't great, but yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish I had enough money to sock away somewhere in some hidden tax haven but I'm afraid I, I have to pay tax on all of it. So you know who is in trouble and big time is Apple Computer. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers blasted Apple saying, you lied to me. This was in the Apple vs Epic case which by the way Apple pretty much won except for one little bit. The judge ordered Apple to let developers, app developers show you a link where you could go to buy something without giving Apple 30%. You know, use the Kindle app on your iPhone. It doesn't mention you can't buy books in the Kindle app because it doesn't. And Apple won't let them say you could buy it on Amazon and you'd be able to read it here. That wasn't allowed. The judge said no, no, you gotta allow outside linking, you gotta let developers have other methods of making purchases outside the App Store and you got to allow them to say something about it. Apple, the judge wrote, despite knowing its obligations thereunder under the court order, thwarted the injunctions goals and continued its anti competitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream. One of the things Apple did was they said okay, well you can have another store but we're going to still take 27%.

[Ian Thompson]

It's malicious compliance.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I mean malicious compliance was the exact right term for it. In her ruling, the judge said an Apple executive, Alex Roman, who's vice president of finance, quote, this is the judge's words, outright lied under oath. She said that Cook sided with his finance team instead of another Apple executive who had Phil Schiller, who had advocated that Apple comply with the injunction. She wrote, again, this is the judge Cook chose poorly.

[Ian Thompson]

That's a polite way of saying it.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Apple has said we strongly, of course we strongly disagree with the decision. We'll comply with the court's orders and we will appeal. Now complying means there's suddenly a wide open opportunity for third parties. Fortnite for instance, which is from Epic Games, which is kind of the. The source of this whole lawsuit says we're going back to iOS next week.

[Ian Thompson]

It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out because Apple is, I'm trying to think of a suitable analogy, but about as protective as a grizzly bear about her cubs when it comes to their 30% cut. So, yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how they play this in the course.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, I mean, they're embarrassed. They got. There was, there was a scolding by a judge, but arguably, economically, it was the right decision, like, oh, okay, well, sorry. And eventually they'll change it and meanwhile, what kind of penalty will there be with all this? Okay, you didn't listen. What's the financial cost of not doing. And arguably they are going to end up winning despite them violating the court order, because, okay, eventually they'll change it, but they've made all this money in the meantime. Violating the order.

[Ian Thompson]

No, I mean, I kind of like the Scandinavian view of taking fines where you base on revenue and personal order, whereas this, I suspect if they get a fine, it'll be at a cost of doing business. Fine.

[Gary Rivlin]

Right, right. Make it hurt.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It will be interesting to see, though, if there's a flood of apps, you know, changing, updating new apps like Fortnite coming back to iOS. I imagine at this point there'll be a flood. Maybe not, though. Maybe people have kind of, speaking of the cost of doing business, kind of gotten used to the fact that Apple's going to take 30% and living with it, you know.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, who's going to go up against Apple?

[Owen Thomas]

The thing is there's a limited set of apps that are kind of like Fortnite or Roblox, say, that are kind of apps within apps stores within stores.

[Ian Thompson]

Definitely.

[Owen Thomas]

The 30% commission really dates back to the Itunes music store when Apple was selling 99 cent MP3s and it barely covered the, the credit card cost of, you know, of processing that transaction. So originally Apple wasn't making much money, but they just kept the 30%. I think that 30% is the wrong number in, in this day and age, I think 0% is also the wrong number.

[Leo Laporte]

There's some amount of money. Yeah, I mean, credit cards charge 3 or 4%. Right.

[Ian Thompson]

But as long as that, as long as there's actual responsibility. Because one of the things that Apple did and Google Play did very less work, very worse, was if you buy from us, from the official store, you're probably not Going to get malware. And that's something Apple has done very well. Android is less.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the word? Probably worse though, right?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There has been malware in the Apple Store, right?

[Ian Thompson]

There's been malware in every store. But you know, it's better than buying from a third party.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there less in Apple Store than there is in the Google Play Store?

[Ian Thompson]

In my experience, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so it's a little safer than Google.

[Ian Thompson]

A little. But there's no such thing as 100% security and Apple approved that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it didn't hurt Apple's quarterly results. They came out on May 1, on Wednesday and they did very well. So well that they're in fact doing a hundred billion dollar stock buyback, which is one way to prop your, your stock price up. We don't really report on finance in this show because it used to be.

[Ian Thompson]

Illegal 30 years ago, but such is life. What used to be legal stock buybacks.

[Leo Laporte]

It's still legal. Can't you. Of course it's legal.

[Ian Thompson]

No, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

It used to be illegal.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Gary Rivlin]

Until like this, I think in the 70s it changed.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that a Bill Clintonism that.

[Ian Thompson]

No, it was Reagan in the 80s. Basically they eliminated any kind of penalty for stock buybacks because it would apparently let small companies buy back into their stock. And the rest of it, in terms of how it's worked out for intel in particular, where were spending huge amounts on stock buybacks to keep stock price up, it's not gone well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

The thing is, is in Silicon Valley too, like these, these companies are issuing so many shares to their employees as compensation, they kind of have to do stock buybacks just to keep things like, even to keep from diluting their shareholders.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a good, that's a good.

[Owen Thomas]

You're gonna, you're gonna see some level of stock buybacks and it's a, arguably a more tax efficient way of kind of returning capital to shareholders than dividends. Right, but they do both, of course. Yeah. No, and you know, and that's a change. You see more companies issuing dividends, but yeah, Apple, Apple has no problem generating cash. And I want to, I want to flag that they're doing almost a quarter of their revenue off of services now, which is remarkable.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. They doubled service revenues. Now this might be the last great quarter for Apple because if tariffs are going to hit pretty hard, I imagine in the next few years.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, come on. No, Apple's going to get, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Exemption in 2018 or 2017.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

You think?

[Gary Rivlin]

Why are you so certain about That I.

[Ian Thompson]

Because Tim, Apple is sucking up to Trump. Simple. You know, it's just like, so this ego, get it on Apple stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Mostly ships from China, which has 140, 45% tariff. They thought they were doing the smart thing, moving manufacture to Vietnam, which is now paying 46% tariff. So they said, oh, you know what, we're going to make all the new iPhones in India. Yeah, that's it. India. And I think there's still a pretty hefty tariff against India. But look, they had a great quarter. Revenue is up 7% year over year. IPad up 15% year over year, iPhone up 2%. You don't expect huge growth in the iPhone, but still a growth services up 12%. Apple had a very, very profitable quarter. But tariffs, of course, the big question mark on the horizon.

[Gary Rivlin]

Second big question too, artificial intelligence. I mean, they were far ahead of most companies with Siri, but they keep on fumbling the ball. I mean, it's what, two and a half years after Chachi pt and they keep fumbling. Maybe saying Tim Cook chose poorly, but you know, maybe some of that 100 billion should have gone to training models and kind of not being behind on AI. I mean, Apple's still, Apple, they have a billion whatever, you know, phones out there and you know, they, they, they, they could be late and still win.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I think Apple, Apple's going to do what they did with Google in that, you know, they're going to take the best available option and integrate it in. They haven't bothered to develop it much themselves. So it's just like, okay, right? It's kind of like the iPhone scenario. You know, they weren't the first to invent the smartphone, but at the same time they did it better than anyone else. I think they may do the same.

[Leo Laporte]

With AI when you wrote AI Valley, Gary, was Apple still considered a player in AI had they already started to go downhill? I mean, it just came out, right? Yeah.

[Gary Rivlin]

I mean they were also ran though, actually in an epilogue to the book, I kind of said what I just said, that Apple just. I could say the same about Google, right? I mean, they were far ahead of AI but then kind of were too scared to put out their chatbot. But they fumbled. They did all these silly things like the LLM the chatbot would suggest, put a little bit of gasoline on your spaghetti sauce to add spice, Elmer's glue.

[Leo Laporte]

To hold that cheese on the pizza.

[Gary Rivlin]

Eat a rock a day for your minerals. And you know, so every time they stepped on the stage in 2023, 20, 24, they fell flat on their face. But look at gemini. It's top three. I mean, ChatGPT is winning, but, you know, Gemini is right in the race because they're Google. They're the front door for a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also still early. It's still early days. So you can stumble in the first. To do a Kentucky Derby metaphor, you can stumble in the first few furlongs, but you've got to come back Apple. Apple feels, you know, it'll be very interesting. WWDC is coming up June 9, so the first hearing they've had was this quarterly results that, you know, I think, I don't think they said anything of real importance, but WWDC will be fairly important. They've got to convince developers at least that they are a player in this game. Google has already said, we got a deal. Sundar Pichai said, we've got a deal with Apple. We're going to. You're going to see a Gemini in, in Apple Intelligence soon. That's maybe what Apple needs to do is go out to people like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and say, hey, can we borrow a cup of AI while we're still cooking our own in the back here?

[Gary Rivlin]

They had kind of deal with OpenAI for.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. That's right. ChatGPT. The question is how well they'll integrate it. Because right now the way it works is if Siri can't answer something, which she pretty much can't ever, they'll give you an offer and Apple Intelligence, although to go to ChatGPT. Although, you know, now that I think of it, I wonder if the general public. We're paying close attention to this, but I wonder if the general public is aware. My son just bought a new iPhone 16, he said, because I wanted the A, I wanted the AI, he said, it's really cool. So maybe the general public still is happy with genmojis and Image Playground and the kind of.

[Gary Rivlin]

The general public is generally fearful of AI. I mean, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. They don't want too much. Yeah.

[Gary Rivlin]

Pew did a poll last year and the majority of people were fearful. Like, less than a third were excited.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. Interesting. So it doesn't, it doesn't really, in the real world hurt Apple.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah. I mean, getting back to your point where it's just very, very early. Like, you know, those of us on shows like this, we're paying a lot of attention, but, you know, they still have time.

[Owen Thomas]

And the iPhone's market share is so high, especially in the US and other Western markets that they could be a king maker in AI. So if they tightly integrate Gemini, for example, that could very well give Google a much needed boost against OpenAI.

[Leo Laporte]

That's an excellent point. That's an excellent point. In the words of, to paraphrase Oprah Winfrey, a billion iPhones in your pockets, y'all. Yeah, just that market share is enough to probably put them back into the game. Anybody? Right. All right.

[Gary Rivlin]

Same with Amazon. Amazon is, you know, they were Alexa, they were early on AI and they're far behind. But you know, it's. They, they, they have the, they have the reach.

[Leo Laporte]

Who's the front runner now?

[Gary Rivlin]

Gary OpenAI Still, I think by far, well, two things. One, by far and away. ChatGPT, it's what, 400 million monthly users? Something like, something like that. No one's even closed like for a while. Anthropics, CL like, ooh, it's catching up at.

[Leo Laporte]

For coders, I think Claude is pretty hot, right?

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, I use Claude. I love it. Most journalists, most writers I know love Claude. But you know, popularity wise and beyond that, OpenAI, they're in everything, right? I mean, they have text to video, text to audio. They're offering a full range. So, you know, right now OpenAI is ahead. Their problem is that they don't have an extra 100 billion lying around like an Apple or Microsoft. And this stuff is expensive. And they just raised $40 billion and they're probably gonna have to raise another huge sum like that, tens of billions within a year or two.

[Leo Laporte]

It is an expensive business to be in.

[Gary Rivlin]

Without much revenue. I should correct that. I mean, they made three and a half, $4 billion last year.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but that's nothing.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, because it costed 9 billion or.

[Leo Laporte]

10 billion to make 3 billion. You can't sustain that too long. I mean, I'm not a businessman, but I think that there seems to be. You need to do something. Well, very. It's very interesting. This is a rare judicial spanking for Apple. I don't know what will happen to the Apple executive who's, who's accused of lying by the judge. You're right, Gary. They didn't. The judge didn't say anything about fines or punishments or anything. She just said, you got to do what I told you to do, so knock it off.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah. He might get a raise.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Who knows?

[Owen Thomas]

And the judge cannot, the judge cannot on her own engage in criminal contempt proceedings. She has to refer that to the Department of Justice. So it really kicks over to the Trump administration.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh boy.

[Owen Thomas]

To see if they're and they have. They probably don't want to be opening a lot of contempt proceedings these days.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no kidding.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, and as we said before, you know, Timmy was a good boy. He showed up at the inauguration. Apple or him, I don't know, gave the million dollars or whatever. And, you know, they've been playing foots is so interesting. Like, it's such chump change to the likes of Apple to play to Trump's ego and just be on his side. I mean, you could be angry at an Amazon or an Apple for playing this game, but on the other hand, for a million, a few million dollars, you know, you can.

[Leo Laporte]

It isn't expensive.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, no, I mean, it's the same thing with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who came over. We're giving you a second state visit. You can address Parliament. This has never been done before. Totally playing up to his ego.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that seems to be the key for anybody playing this game. All right, let's take a little break. We've got a great panel, we've got lots to talk about, and Gary suddenly found out at the beginning of the show that this is going to go on for hours and hours. And so I don't. You already knew this, Ian. And I know Ian knows it, and I know Owen knows it, but we will try to make this as painless as possible for you, Gary. So glad.

[Gary Rivlin]

I'll try not to use the word endless. How about that?

[Leo Laporte]

It feels that way often. It feels that way often. But this is your opportunity if you want to get some trail mix, maybe a gallon of water, you know, get a tent, whatever you need. Surprise.

[Ian Thompson]

Decent cup of tea.

[Leo Laporte]

Cup of tea is probably a good idea. Thank you to all of you for being here and thank you especially to our sponsor for this week, Thinx Canary. I've got my Thinkst Canary right here. This is the coolest little device. It looks kind of, I don't know, like an external USB drive maybe. It's got an ethernet connection, a power connection. Not big, you know, here's my iPhone next to it. It's not much bigger than an iPhone. And yet this thing is perhaps the most important security device in your entire network. This Thinkst Canary is a honey pot. A honeypot that's easy to deploy. A honeypot that will let you know if there's a bad guy in your network. Deploy the Thinks canary in minutes. You can say you can make it be anything you want. This one is a synology nasr. I can't remember. Actually, I change it all the Time. Maybe it's a Windows server, might be an IIS server, it could be an SSH server, it could be a Linux box with all the services turned on like a Christmas tree or just a few judiciously picked services. The things Canary can also generate files, little trip wires. They call them canary tokens that you can scatter around your network. I have, it's funny, I got an email from our IT guy who doubles as our security provider. He said there somebody accessed a file on your Google Drive, I hope that's okay. And I said, yes, that was, it was okay. That was a Canary token that I sent up just for purposes of the show. So it works. So the Canary tokens, I think that one was called employee information. You could put them on your Google Drive, you could put them on local drives, you can put them anywhere you want. If somebody accesses the, you know, brute forces the fake internal SSH server on this box or opens one of those juicy looking Canary token files, your thinks Canary will immediately alert you that you have a problem. Then no false alerts, just the alerts that matter. So you go to your console, you choose a profile for your things. Canary. It just takes a second. It can even be a SCADA device. It's actually fun to change it around a little bit, register it with the hosted console. You get monitoring and notifications, by the way, any way you want. Email, Slack. It supports web hooks, syslog, of course, if there's an API, text messages, wherever you want IT attackers who breach your network or malicious insiders and other adversaries will see it and make themselves known because they can't resist them. They have to attack them. It is a wonderful tool. And if you're a big operation, you might have hundreds. A small operation like ours might have a handful. But I'll give you a pricing example. Go to Canary Tools Twit. 7,500 bucks a year gets you five of them. That's per year. You get your own hosted console, you get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance. And if you use the offer code twit in the how did you hear about us box, you'll get 10% off the price. And not just for the first year, but as long as you own your canaries and you. And here's the other thing. If you're at all like, I don't know, really, do I need this? First of all, yes, you do. And you will love it. But you can always return your think scenario. They give you a 60 day, 2 month money back guarantee for a Full refund, so there's zero risk. I should tell you, though, we've been doing these ads for, I think, eight years. That refund guarantee has never once been claimed. Once you get the things to Canary, you're going to go, how did I live without it? Visit canary tools/twit. Enter the code twit in the how did you hear about us? Box. The thinkst Canary. It's a. It's just, it's reassuring when you don't hear from your Canary. You just go, oh, I guess things are okay.

[Ian Thompson]

Canary, the coal mine. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, see, that's where it came from. Very. You got it immediately. Very good. So now we are still waiting as the. Speaking of court cases, Google has lost now two court cases, one over search, one over advertising. We're still waiting for the judge to come up for with remedies in the search case. Google has now said, I mean, there are a couple of proposals coming from the US Department of Justice. One is cell. Chrome talked about that last week. It's not clear how that could be done. Another would be to open search up to third parties. Senator Pichai testified in the remedies hearing that Google, if Google were to share how it does its search with rivals, it would be, quote, a de facto divestiture of the company's search engine. Like by, by doing this, you would be basically cutting our legs out from under us. And, you know, maybe they're not. Maybe they're right. At the same time, it does seem like the perfect remedy. Selling Chrome is not a good remedy. Mozilla just yesterday said if they were to cut off our payments, you know, Google. One of the considered remedies is if Google stop paying Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, all that money to be the default search engine. Mozilla said, if they cut off those payments, we're out of business. We rely on those payments. It's going to be hard for the judge to find a reasonable way to remedy this.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yes, I love the idea of giving access to the data one of the legs up, and they have a lot of legs up in AI for AI search is they have just so much data because what, 90%, what percentage of people use Google for search and that generates all this data? So training a model, that's such a huge advantage. OpenAI approached Google about paying a fee for access and they refused, which of course they did, unless a judge was going to order them. So I think that helps be a great equalizer. The advantage you have if you're a wealthy company is the money but another advantage that any established company has over a startup is the data. A dorm room startup won't have access to the same kind of data that a Google would have. So when I'm thinking about a solution, I'm thinking somewhere around, around there. Thinking ahead to you know, AI search is the next big battlefield or it is the battlefield now and the data access would be kind of an interesting solution.

[Leo Laporte]

Pachai said the proposal on data sharing is so far reach. I'm quoting this is from Bloomberg Law is so far reaching, so extraordinary it feels like quote de facto divestiture of search.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, it's interesting. I mean Bruce Schneider gave a very good keynote on this this week and he was saying basically you have to have trust and integrity in an AI search engine. And I'm not sure anyone trusts Google to be quite frank.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah it's funny Larry Page when he wrote the very first document, the Page ranked document said trust was paramount and that's why we can never accept advertising.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah. How long did that last us?

[Leo Laporte]

They back down on that a little bit later. Not even, not so much later.

[Gary Rivlin]

But who do people Trust? I mean OpenAI which was founded in 2015 to be a counter to Google specifically to the profit motive. AI is too essential to humanity to leave it to the profit motive. They pretty quickly too drop that mission. That vision and trust and safety is taking a distant second at OpenAI. So I think across the board there's a trust and safety issue. I joke that AI just had really bad timing that innovation is innovation. It came out when it came out but when it ended 2022 distrust of big tech. I mean Google, but any of the companies meta et cetera was really at an all time high. And with AI it's like personal agents. They're going to know our personal information. We have to trust them. AI, we're going to lose our apex status as the smartest entity on the planet. It so there is a big trust issue and it's like that was a big issue in 2023, it was less of an issue in 2024. Now it seems a non issue. So it's not just Google's problem, the trust and safety issue.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And it also is the issue that these court cases have taken so long that Google's already almost out of business compared to OpenAI. I mean I don't use Google anymore. I think a lot of people have looked at Google and said yeah, that's just not doing the job it used to do. I've replaced it with Kagi and Perplexity AI and frankly prefer them.

[Owen Thomas]

But Chrome, you know, Chrome is still driving a lot of people to, you know, to Google.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like 80 or 90% of the search market in the browser market. Right.

[Owen Thomas]

And interestingly, OpenAI was one of the parties that said we would gladly take Chrome off of Google.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, I don't, I don't know if that's fair. Pachai had a little threat as well. Maybe, maybe Gary, you should pay attention to this. He said the Justice Department's proposal to share data is so much broader than the Digital Markets act, the EU law that requires Google to share some data with rival search engines. He said, but nevertheless, we have slowed down the features we're able to launch in Europe because of the Digital Markets Act. This is kind of the sub rosa pleading that a lot of these companies are doing. Like, and really the aim is not to the Justice Department or the judges, to the President. You don't, you would ruin it for a good American company. We would be, we would be hurt. Look what the Europeans are doing. You don't want to do that here, do you?

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, they don't want any solution. So whenever solution comes down, you lost the case, you were declared a monopoly, you're abusing your monopoly power. What's the solution like? Yeah, you're not going to be happy, but I'm old enough to have lived through the Microsoft trial and we saw a federal judge say we're going to split this company and two gave that order and it never happened. And so.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but that's only because Microsoft went to the bargaining table and got a consent decree and did actually have to give in quite a bit to the government. Everything but divestiture.

[Ian Thompson]

This is exactly what's going to happen again. You go down, you kiss the ring, you pay whatever money is done and.

[Leo Laporte]

You carry on some sort.

[Ian Thompson]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft has always said though that that had a chilling effect on us. I think it's pretty clear that because of that consent decree, you know, companies like Google did emerge as competitors to Microsoft.

[Ian Thompson]

I'm all for competitive markets, but at the same time they've got to be applied equally. And we're seeing, I guess we're going to be talking about certain acts of later on. But I mean, for goodness sake, competition is what makes tech great and we should encourage it opportunities.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's what Bloomberg Law says. The government wants Google to divest itself of the Chrome browser, license some search data to competitors and stop paying for exclusive positions on other apps and devices. That's the Apple Mozilla Samsung Payments. It has also asked that Judge Mehta extend the ban to Google's AI products, including AI Assistant Gemini, which the government says were aided by the company's illegal monopoly in search. So they want to go after the AI as well. Google says, your honor, that would hurt American consumers and the economy and weaken American technological leadership. You wouldn't want to do that, would you? What should the government ask for though if it can't ask for that?

[Owen Thomas]

I mean clearly Google needs to hire a lawyer from Brooklyn.

[Leo Laporte]

The Utes happen to like Google. I don't know what you. No, but seriously, what is a remedy that the government could ask for? There's nothing that Google's going to say is okay, obviously stop the payments.

[Gary Rivlin]

I, I mean I was naive. I had no idea until it came out in the trial that they're paying, you know, 20 billion here and 20.

[Leo Laporte]

Billion to Apple every year.

[Owen Thomas]

I mean that's, that's a sizable, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

A big chunk of the services, Right? Right.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, but I mean, seriously, when you're saying 20 billion to one, I mean, I mean just, just wrap your head around that for a second.

[Leo Laporte]

It's unbelievable that it's hundreds of millions to Mozilla, but that's enough to keep Firefox alive without it. See, this is the problem. There's this side on this add on effect that if you stop the payments, the only credible competitor to the Chrome engine is gone. Yeah, I mean that's not what you want.

[Ian Thompson]

Even Edge is built on Chromium right.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, you know, oh, everything is Brave. Edge, Vivaldi, Opera. But they're all based on the Blink engine. The Chrome engine.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

I mean, but it also suggests that the, you know, the business model of browsers is completely dependent on Google. Like if Safari and Mozilla both depend on Google search payments.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Owen Thomas]

Then you don't have a browser.

[Leo Laporte]

Without Google there's not a credible competitor anyway. Yeah, it's kind of what we, I think, I believe, am I wrong that it is a bad thing to have a monoculture of browser engines?

[Ian Thompson]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, gives Google way too much power.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean we saw what happened with IE3. You know, basically Microsoft absolutely slammed that market. And to my shame, I did work freelance PR for Microsoft at the time. But it was Basically, we have 90% of the market, why would we bother to develop. And the same thing is going to happen to Chrome. Hopefully something better will come through.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the browser is the dominant way people use their computers nowadays, right? Yeah, but that's about to be. Gary, would you agree? Disintermediated by AI.

[Gary Rivlin]

I mean, it's going to take longer than we think, but yes, yes, yes, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Especially agentic AI. Right. OpenAI now is proposing that you just let it do all the work.

[Gary Rivlin]

And I mean, this is a pet peeve of mine. Agentic AI, yes, it's coming. But 2025 is not the year of Agentic AI. First off, it doesn't. It's supposed to be like your personal agent, your personal assistant that knows you, you. These things have a really hard time with memory from session to session to session. So if it doesn't even really know your preferences month in and month out, like, again, it's going to be an amazing thing, just not this year. And this is going to be a much slower transition than I think most people.

[Leo Laporte]

So you don't think it's a good idea, for instance, to give your Visa card to an AI and let it do all your shopping for you? You think that might be a bad idea?

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, that was in the news.

[Ian Thompson]

That was a nasty one.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, I mean, that's the dream. That's the fantasy. Like, hey, I mean, you know, if the idea of AI is to get rid of the stuff we don't like to do, instead of me spending half a day on Expedia looking for hotels and paying and buying or gifts for so and so, it's just not there. It's just not there yet. I mean, sure, I mean, I guess that's putting the apparatus, it's putting some of the infrastructure in place, but yeah, AI is not good enough to do what is being promised to me. The year of the agent is about. We've raised hundreds of millions or billions in venture capital and we have to say something.

[Leo Laporte]

We got to monetize this somehow.

[Ian Thompson]

Yep, couldn't agree more.

[Leo Laporte]

Visa's calling it the VISA Intelligent Commerce Initiative. They plan to work with OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic Perplexity and Mistral, IBM, Samsung and the payment company Strut to allow your AI to use your credit card, letting autonomous AI models control your credit card to make purchases ranging from groceries to clothing on its own, based on your budget and preferences. How is this different, though, from me saying to my Amazon, echo, hey, Echo, I need razor blades. She then says, what's your pin? I say the PIN and she buys them. That's kind of the same thing as it.

[Owen Thomas]

Another example is Stitch fix, where instead of you trying to figure out what, what's going to look good, you just say, send me an outfit and you know, Stitch fix sends you a box.

[Leo Laporte]

And if you can always send them back, right. You don't have to keep them.

[Owen Thomas]

And presumably, you know, presumably, you know, an AI powered shopping service would have that same guarantee. Hey, if we screwed up, you just return it. You know, you kind of already have in, in the world of E commerce, like, easy returns are kind of of an accepted practice, but I think you would have to have, no questions returned if the AI is buying stuff for you.

[Gary Rivlin]

The trust issue here is so huge. What was 1994? 1995, the year of the Internet, and five years later, the year 2000, 90% of the deals that were consummated over the Internet, someone was writing a check, putting in the mail, and sending it. People didn't trust giving their credit card over the Internet. It just takes time. And I'd imagine AI is the same thing. Yes, in five years, whatever, down the road, we're going to have trust, but people aren't going to trust it for a long time. So to me, it's Visa taking these early baby steps.

[Leo Laporte]

It does happen pretty quickly, though. I still have relatives who say you can't use your credit card in the Internet. And I remember I wasn't. Wasn't that long ago, I'd get calls on the radio show, is it safe to buy stuff on the Internet? And I would tell people, it's safer than giving your credit card to a waiter and he disappears to the back. Yeah, but. And that happened within a matter of a few years. People kind of, except for my relatives, got used to it. And now, I mean, does anybody say, oh, I'm not gonna use a credit card online?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, no, I mean, you have an Internet credit card, one with a strictly limited credit limit that you use just online and the rest of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that how you do it? It?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I just give them my regular Visa.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh, I. I've done that for almost a quarter century.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, good on you guys are the two that I was talking about with the par. As. As Silicon Valley goes, only the paranoid survive. You know, it's one of those things.

[Owen Thomas]

And the irony is that credit card almost never gets stolen. Yeah, almost never gets stolen. Right. And so all of my online payments are, you know, knock on wood, like they're happening uninterrupted. Meanwhile, the card that I use in physical stores, you know, actually I'm, I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

Being a little facetious because I, I use a company called Privacy, which longtime sponsor, they're not anymore, but they were for a long time, and they give you individual card numbers linked to the merchant so that only the merchant after the first purchase can continue to use that card. And they also give you one time cards. I w. That. That used to be a thing. What happened? And all the credit card companies used to do that one off. Here's a one time only credit card number. And as far as I could tell, nobody does it.

[Owen Thomas]

Maybe it was a. I think, I think Citibank.

[Leo Laporte]

Citibank. I think Discovery might still do it. But it must be an expensive thing.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, it does freak me out when people take your credit card and take it away from you and it's like you could be running that through a skimmer right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. Go to a gas station, you could be running it through a skimmer.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh no. You always toggle. Even at ATMs, you always toggle the thing just to see if it's loose.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, shake it a little bit.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, just to see if it's loose.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, maybe skimmers here in Petaluma, little old Petaluma on the gas. Many gas pumps have had skimmers on them. That's very common, Leo.

[Gary Rivlin]

You're absolutely right. It's much safer over the Internet. I've literally had a waiter, you know, give a credit card. I was a little, you know, a little tipsy at a jazz. A Sunday brunch, your champagne brunch. And next thing I know there's hundreds and hundreds of dollars of charges. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Whoever thought bottomless Bellinis was a good idea? Really? Endless mimosas. That is a terrible idea. Well, but nowadays, I don't know, more and more I'm seeing the waiters come to your table right. With the thing and you never give them your card. Is that becoming more common? I don't know. I see that a lot in.

[Ian Thompson]

It's very common in the uk.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Europe, they've done it for years, right?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Chip and pin.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, exactly. This is the thing. America has this chip and signature thing. And it's just like nobody looks at the signature. I could write Donald Duck on there and they'd still pass the bill.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I was selling my son's car. He left to go to New York to open his restaurant and he left the Tesla for me. Thank you. And. And I was, I had to get a power of attorney to sell his car. And I was looking at his signature and I mean he's 30 years old, but obviously they never taught calligraphy or even handwriting in school because his signature is like this. It's worse than Donald Trump's. It's like this. So, you know, I mean, if I'd had to, I could have easily duplicated his scribble.

[Gary Rivlin]

I say bad parenting there, but is that bad parenting?

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, all right. Well, you have a 13 year old. Wait till your son's 30 years old, then you tell me.

[Ian Thompson]

Okay, okay. Guilty, guilty. Secret time. I white. I write my wife's name on birthday cards to my family. She doesn't have time to sign them, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, they can't sell. Actually, I remember reading a handwriting expert saying, bad handwriting is harder to forge than good handwriting.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, this is interesting from the spam perspective because now we've got Gen AI coming on on spam. They're doing all the grammar and syntax. Oh, anymore. Exactly. So now, you know, you're looking for mistakes as a sign of human beings rather than.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I got a perfect phishing email yesterday. You know, I have all my own domains like leoville.com so there's no administrator. And I got an email from leoville.com from, you know, admineoville.com, your password is expired. Need to renew it. Everything was perfect. Not only the grammar, but even the from address. I had to go deep into the headers to figure out out where it came from. I knew there was no way it was going to fish me because I own the site. There's no admits. I am the administer. But. And I got it for not just one site, but for a half a dozen of my sites. All of which, you know, you go to ICANN or whois and figure out what sites are who and what the administrator email addresses. It's an easy, easy phishing scam. So don't fall for it, kids. But I mean, it wasn't obvious. They buried it. I mean, they were re. It was well crafted.

[Ian Thompson]

No, I mean, this is the point. You're smart and you check it back. But if the average person clicks on a link and sees Microsoft support spelled slightly wrong, whatever the rest of it, they're going to get caught.

[Leo Laporte]

They're very good.

[Gary Rivlin]

Now, welcome to the future. AI means that phishing, et cetera, all these scams, they're just much better. You're right. What you're now looking for is the humanness of it. There might have been one little tiny mistake. If it's too perfect, you need to be suspicious.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, as we get older and as we get more single and difficult to get dates, and we can't go to those, you know, Tinder apps, the romance scams are taking over And I'm going to tell you something to watch out for when you get to be my age. Romance scams. Just a bit. Gary Rivlin's here. His new book, by the way. Excellent AI Valley. It's kind of a history of AI, which is nice up to the present. And we really enjoyed your conversation on intelligent machines. You can go back, folks, a couple of weeks and find that. And I thought, Gary's so smart, we got to get him on Twitch. So it's nice to have you. And you've been touring around it, right? You've been doing readings and stuff.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, I was just in D.C. this week. I was actually. I did a podcast with Newt Gingrich.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Ian Thompson]

Good. He's still alive. Okay.

[Gary Rivlin]

Actually. And then he went to Alabama for some Trump event and, like, how did.

[Leo Laporte]

You keep from throwing up in your mouth? I don't.

[Gary Rivlin]

I mean, I'll give him. I'll give him credit. Like, I remember I was working for the industry standards in the late 90s, 2000, and he had been kicked out as speaker of the House at this point. But he came in to talk about the Internet and it was really interesting. So a group of us spoke. I was with him, and I was there. Half the stuff that came out of his mouth was brilliant, and the other half was just insane and ridiculous, which is Newt Gingrich's thing. He just talks so fast and good ideas come and awful ideas come out, but he's always been interested in text. So, you know, we didn't talk. The current state of politics and what we Both think of Mr. Trump. We talked AI it was. It was actually fun, actually. Good.

[Leo Laporte]

Pretty easy. He's a smart fellow. I mean, there's no question he was the Contract with America guy. Right. And in some ways, you could say that that was where Trumpism began, was with Newt Gingrich.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, there's an entire book out saying that essentially, you know, Gingrich in the 90s kind of broke U.S. politics. That, you know, kind of this idea that it's a death between one side and the other and there's no compromise. And to do any compromise is to, you know, sell out your position. You know, that was, you know, Gingrich in the 90s.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but you could be smart and be wrong as well. All right.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, honestly, Gingrich did co authored a very good book on the effects of a nuclear weapon exploding and, oh, boy. Yeah, doing electronic disruption on pretty much every device. So, I mean, yeah, weird bloke, but had some good ideas.

[Leo Laporte]

What was his training. Was he a physicist or a scientist or.

[Gary Rivlin]

He's a teacher. He was a teacher and economist. I can't remember what his historian. He was a historian. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Gary Rivlin]

You know he taught in Georgia before he became an elected official.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

And it was, it was interesting. So I looked up and wrote a couple of articles about electromagnetic pulse disruption and the book they wrote actually was probably pretty accurate. If you do a full disruption over the US you're going to lose 90% of the population within 10 years. It's interesting reading.

[Gary Rivlin]

Can I tell my favorite Newt Gingrich story? I know we're.

[Ian Thompson]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

We were supposed to go to a break, but this is much more interesting. Go ahead.

[Gary Rivlin]

Remedies for Google. So somehow on Leo's dating and now I'm going to tell my New Kingdom story. Yes, but it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm happily married, by the way. I am not dating. I was just, I was using myself as an example. But I know I am not dating. We just want to make that clear.

[Gary Rivlin]

Your wife will be disappointed to hear this. So I had a book, the Plot to Get Bill Gates came out in 99 and it was translated into Chinese. And I heard from the translator, I, I get this email. It was who or what is a Newt Gingrich? Is it for fun to do that? I don't know. What is a Newt Gingrich? I can't really explain.

[Leo Laporte]

We want to get exactly the right pronoun here.

[Ian Thompson]

It does sound like a Harry Potter character, but. Or a newt.

[Gary Rivlin]

It's an animal. What is it? Why'd you capitalize the N?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure, I'm sure he's not named after to the. Whatever. Is it a lizard? I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, yes, Gary has many books including the Plot to Get Bill Gates Alive. Valley is the latest and he. You can find out [e-mail] G A R Y R I V L I N. It is very. I really enjoyed it. It was a really great book. So thank you. Highly recommended if you want to kind of catch up on what's. How do. How did we get here through. That's a good question. Also with us, the wonderful Owen Thomas from San Francisco Business Times. Always great to see you. It's fun. We get to see the seasons change through the office windows. You know, in the winter it was bare and cold looking. Now it's starting to be spring in San Francisco.

[Owen Thomas]

Springtime in San Francisco.

[Leo Laporte]

The sun is coming out. And also we never know what the weather's like because Ian Thompson lives deep within his lair. His book. Yes, it's great to have you as well. Our show today brought to you by our good friends at Outsystems. You've heard, you've heard the old conundrum. Every business has to go through it. Build versus buy. Well, I've got a third way for you. OutSystems, the leading AI powered application and agent development platform. For more than 20 years, the mission of Outsystems has been to give every company the power to innovate through software. You know, this build or buy thing is tough. We went through it ourselves. You can typically you'd have two choices. You could buy an off the shelf, you know, SaaS product gets you up to speed fast. But you know, you lose flexibility, you lose differentiation because using the same software everybody else is. Or you can build your own custom software at great expense and a loss of time. That's what we ended up doing and we deeply regret it. By the way, we had an intern write our sales system and it crashes all the time and he's gone. He doesn't maintain it. It's, it's crazy. So it's always seems like a tough choice. Build versus buy. But now there's a third way. AI forging the way for a third path. It's the fusion of AI low code which been around for a while. DevSecOps automation into a single development platform. Your teams can now build custom applications with AI agents as easily as buying generic same. And Outsystems does it right. They build in flexibility, security, scalability. It all comes standard with AI powered low code. Teams can build custom future proof applications at the speed of buying. With fully automated architecture, security integration, data flows are built in. You've got a complete, very granular permission structure. It's exactly what you need. OutSystems is the last platform you need to buy because you can now use it to build anything and continue to customize and extend your core systems. Build your future with Outsystems. Visit this is such a great idea. Visit outsystems.com TWIT to learn more. That's outsystems.com TWIT we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. All right, I was going to talk about real time deep fake fake frauds. So this is a Great story from 404 Joseph Cox, by the way, with the loss of the daily dot. We were talking about this before the show. I think you used, you were, you started it, you were a first executive Editor. Right, Owen? And of course. That's right. The new owners of the. Of one of the best Internet publications have decided to go all AI and just fire everybody.

[Gary Rivlin]

Because that's worked really well for Sports Illustrated and other publications.

[Leo Laporte]

Seems like a bad idea. But hey, on the, on the other side, it is cheap.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, no, I'm sorry. You pay. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys. It's as simple as that. You know, it's, it's, it's a really stupid idea because if you're looking for journalism, then you go to humans. If you're looking for a quick sub, you know, a quick estimate of what the news was, we might be wrong. We call it hallucination, but we're actually wrong. Then you go for AI. Well, it's crushing.

[Leo Laporte]

404 is a really good example. A bunch of people who were. They were at the defector, right? Samantha Cole, Joseph Cox, Jason Keebler, who we've had on the show.

[Ian Thompson]

It was the Verge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they were at the Verge. Okay, sorry.

[Ian Thompson]

No, not the verge Defector.

[Leo Laporte]

Weren't they?

[Ian Thompson]

No, they, they. Joe Cox came from Vice.

[Leo Laporte]

Vice, that's right.

[Ian Thompson]

A bunch.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. He was Motherboard. That's right. Yeah. Keebler was at Motherboard for years. Sam Cole, Joseph Cox, Emanuel Myberg. Anyway, very talented journalists. And they said, well, why don't we just do it ourselves?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And 404 was born. And I really want to give them credit. People should sign up for their newsletters. They should, they should, you know, pay for. I don't know if they have a subscription thing. They have a podcast.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, they do. I shouldn't be pushing this because they're a competitor. But at the same time, I respect Joe.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I want to support them because this honestly is the future in many ways. This is the future of online news gathering, sad to say, is kind of fund it yourself. Anyway, great story. Joseph Cox wrote this one. The age of the Real Time Deepfake fraud is here and he did a lot of good legwork on this. Went to a Telegram group. This is a video from Telegram. It was shared on Telegram. He's redacted it to take the picture of the nice older woman out. She's on the right there. The fraudster is in the upper left hand corner and he's using real time software to change his look to a handsome, gray bearded old guy talking to this lady saying how beautiful she is.

[Gary Rivlin]

And way more gorgeous and more beautiful than you were on the photo you sent me.

[Leo Laporte]

And she's loving it. She's eating it up. Warn your elders, your friends and your family because it's gotten very easy apparently to do these real time deep fakes. He talks about a group called Yahoo Boys, Fraudsters. Typically based in Nigeria. They traditionally use Yahoo emails as part of their scams. They've now broadened into all manner of schemes. Joseph writes, before we couldn't do some things, now we can do them, including generate in real time pictures of people who are fake.

[Ian Thompson]

Remember, it was just princes, you know, that's what we had to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's exactly what this is. Take the prince scam. Am, you know, fast forward it into the age of AI.

[Owen Thomas]

If you were wondering who still has Yahoo emails in this day and age, now you know, now you know, I.

[Gary Rivlin]

Was thinking the same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Same thing with celebrities. Deepfakes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Mike Tyson. These aren't real. They were endorsing products that they didn't know anything about. I don't know if there's a whole lot you can do, frankly.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, sorry, up to you.

[Gary Rivlin]

No, I mean in 2023, you know, Joe Rogan was seemingly endorsing something he did in Tom Hanks. I mean, the surprise for me with deepfakes is I was convinced it was going to turn upside down the 2020 election. I was convinced it was going to turn upside down the 2024 election. I guess now we could say it, it's finally here. Although that makes it sound like I'm wishing for it. But it's just this idea that a tool for good is a tool for bad. AI can do extraordinary things, but it's a really powerful tool for bad guys as well as people who mean well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, it's interesting. I was talking to security folk at the conference this week and they're kind of like, well, yeah, you can do it, but it's really not economically viable unless you've got a good revenue stream from. From it.

[Leo Laporte]

Guess. Guess what.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

So you want to make money. The best thing to do is to con older people.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, honestly, younger people are quite, you know, adept at being conned as well.

[Leo Laporte]

I suppose that's true.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, one of the, one of the things that's really come through is that, you know, we have the first Internet generation, people who were born with the Internet and they trust it. And until you get verification, then trust is going to go in a very bad way. I can't help feeling if you worry.

[Leo Laporte]

About that kind of thing, you might have been encouraged by Melania Trump's Take It Down Act. The idea was, the idea was good, which is to criminalize deep fakes used as revenge porn, you know, illegal content, and make it possible to get it down quickly, giving social networks 48 hours to remove it. Well, Congress has passed it. Boy, did they pass it by a. By a vast majority. I think The Senate was 98 to 2. Congress was similar, and it's on the President's desk right now. To my knowledge, he has not yet signed it. He's as Sharpie is busy elsewhere, but he has said he will shine. So worse, he said, I like this law, I'm going to use it myself because no one's been treated worse on the Internet than I have.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, that's the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I'm sorry, I could rant about this for hours, but this is so Pippa all over again. And the Democrats have basically voted in the very tool that is going to kill them. It's ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

EFF says despite major flaws, it's passed. I mean, it's one of those things where if you don't look too deeply or you don't consider too deeply the unintended consequences, it seems like a perfectly sensible law. Here's what the EFF says is problematic. 1, 48 hours. That's such a quick turnaround time. I think about, for instance, my, you know, we run a twit [e-mail]. we run a Mastodon instance at Twit Social. I think about that if somebody were to put something up on the Mastodon site, even if it came from somebody else's Mastodon site and there were then a complaint, I would have 48 hours to take it down. If I didn't check every. I mean, that means I have to check every day now for those kinds of complaints.

[Ian Thompson]

But, I mean, this is why Facebook and Google are in such support of this, because it's like, hey, yeah, we can do it.

[Leo Laporte]

We can do it.

[Ian Thompson]

Our competitors can't. So, hey, this is great for us.

[Leo Laporte]

So why is it a problem, though? I mean, I'm a. I mean, look, I want to take down as quickly as possible revenge porn or deep fakes. Yeah, I mean, that's fine. Why is it a problem?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, because, I mean, if you're a small website, you know, you know, you've got to be monitoring your forums the entire time.

[Leo Laporte]

Plus, 48 hours doesn't give me a lot of time to verify exactly that complaint. Right. Is it really, you know, what's going on?

[Ian Thompson]

You have to make a judgment I mean, for example.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm just going to take everything down. If I get a complaint, it's going down immediately. I'm not going to take a chance. Right.

[Ian Thompson]

Which, sorry.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh, and I just wanted to say it is always marginalized communities like the LGBTQIA community whose content is like the first to be targeted.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Owen Thomas]

Under, under regimes.

[Leo Laporte]

It is a very broad definition of what should be taken down. Right. Potentially any images involving intel. Intimate. What is intimacy? I don't know, intimate or sexual content. It's not a very narrow definition. There are no safeguards against frivolous or bad faith takedown requests as there are with the dmca. We've seen the DMCA vast, horribly misused and it has remedies.

[Owen Thomas]

Well, I think specifically of the meme of Trump and Putin kissing each other, which was a form of Internet protest.

[Leo Laporte]

Against Trump and fair use.

[Owen Thomas]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Completely legal.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

No, I mean, you know, clearly commentary on their, on their relationship, but because, because of the nature of that meme, it could be taken down as, you know, arguably intimate it, you know, Trump could say it's revenge porn.

[Gary Rivlin]

And the Trump administration, no doubt. Trump sort of promised when he spoke.

[Leo Laporte]

About this act, says, I'm going to.

[Gary Rivlin]

Use it and you know, we see what happens. He does a threat and lots of law firms and tech companies, etc, they buckle down. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

It has been interesting to see the universities going against him, but yeah, I mean, he said himself, I'm going to use this. And it's, it's just, it, it baffles the mind that this Mike Masnick on.

[Leo Laporte]

Tech Dirt says it is blatantly unconstitutional.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it violates the First Amendment.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, Masnik is one of the few writers on the Internet that I will read and, okay, disagree with him 10% of the time, but he's spot on on this. This is going to be actively disturbing. This is Citizens United for journalism.

[Leo Laporte]

So just to be clear, I mean.

[Gary Rivlin]

The question I had.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead. No, please, Gary.

[Gary Rivlin]

You know, I mean, I've done the research on this. It's not something I, I, I've written about, but like, on paper, I think we all agree this is a really good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, take down, non consensual. Yeah, yeah.

[Gary Rivlin]

But where did it go off the rail? I mean, Ted Cruz was the main sponsor, so I guess I'm answering it by saying just that.

[Leo Laporte]

But, but it was very bipartisan. I mean, so was Amy Klobuchar. I mean, it was very bipartisan.

[Gary Rivlin]

Where'd it go? Off the rails. It just made so much sense when I heard it. It was like when I first read the headline. So good that that's a sensible bipartisan Congress can do something that makes sense. But then you read the fine print and you realize like, oh, this is a terrible idea. I'm just wondering who got involved, why? I mean, maybe they came up during this conversation like, you know, Google and Meta say like, this is great. We've got the infrastructure. We can handle this. Our competitors and would be competitors cannot handle this. But I'm really curious how this ended up kind of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. What's the expression? It seemed like a really good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

So here's what Masnick says. The bill's vague standards combined with harsh criminal penalties create a perfect storm for censorship and abuse. He says we already have systems to handle non consensual intimate imagery online. There's Nick Mick's Take it Down system, which we've Talked about before. StopNCII.org has every virtual, virtually every major platform From Meta to TikTok to Pornhub participating in coordinated removal efforts. He says these systems work because they're precise, transparent and focused on the actual problem. But apparently working solutions weren't exciting enough for Congress. Congress, instead of building on these proven approaches, they've decided to create an entirely new system that somehow managed to be both weaker at addressing the real problem and more dangerous for everyone else.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, no, it's exactly the same problem that we have with section 230. You know, it's, it sounds like a great idea. Get rid of it. Make everyone accountable. And in practice, it's an absolute nightmare. And I think it's the same we take it down, this is going to be weaponized and not neglected way.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, the very fact that Donald Trump at the State of the Union address said I'm gonna use it kind of tells you something. Unless there's a lot of non consensual intimate imagery of Donald Trump floating around. Maybe there is.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, okay, this weekend the guy has said that he's not sure if it's his job to uphold the Constitution.

[Owen Thomas]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

He's unclear.

[Ian Thompson]

Let's be frank about this.

[Leo Laporte]

He was asleep during the oath of office. Obviously I don't. Yeah, he's an older man. I don't blame.

[Ian Thompson]

We're talking someone a few goggles full of the short of the full cathedral. But yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, it could be. We're worried about nothing, that this won't, you know, materialize as a censorship tool. I think there is Some legitimate concern that it will. 98 to 2 in the Senate, 409 to 2 in the House.

[Ian Thompson]

I can't believe the Democrats voted in just on that way. It's just. They're cutting the own throats. They really are. This is going to be used against as a censorship tool, as the EFF has said.

[Leo Laporte]

It's un. You know what? It's unfortunate because it. The way they get votes on things like this is say, well, it would be a shame if your name were associated with the inability to take down something so horrendous as, you know, whatever. You know, you close it in the garb of, you know, a completely sensible plan to protect young women. Women.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, it's the Four Horse. The. The Four Horsemen of the Infoco. Sorry for the Infoco.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not easy to say. The Four Horsemen of the inf.

[Ian Thompson]

So you've got organized crime, drug dealers, child abusers, and. Well, actually, pretty much that's it. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Think of the children. Think of the children. Anyway, we'll see. We'll see what happens. Maybe. Maybe. It's a tempest and teapot. Nothing bad's gonna happen. Happen. It is not yet the law. But it will be soon, right? Yeah, it will be very soon. All right. Well, as long as we've offended all of our Republican listeners, let's keep going. White House was very upset with Amazon. There was a report, since denied, that Amazon was going to itemize the cost of tariffs in anything you purchase purchased on Amazon. The White House, this was Punchbowl News, reported this, I think inaccurately. The White House called it a hostile and political act, to which Jeff Bezos immediately apologized, said, we weren't gonna do it, we're never gonna do it. It's not gonna happen. Don't worry. I think it's a great idea. We know that auto dealerships plan to put a line saying tariff costs automatically on car stickers. Or at least they've said that they would like to do that.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Gary Rivlin]

Transparency is always a good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Yeah.

[Gary Rivlin]

How are your consumers? Yeah. And know what's going on.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of telling that the White House says, no, we don't want anybody to know how much those tariffs are gonna cost. It'll be obvious when the cost of your iPhone goes to $3,000. I think that'll become pretty clear. Kickstarter says we're gonna start ask. Allowing Kickstarter projects to ask for more money. They have a new tool. I don't think The White House is going to like this called the tariff manager tool which will let Kickstarter because a lot of Kickstarter stuff, let's face it, is shipped, drop shipped from China. Right. Creators will now be able to charge an extra fee after the campaign ends. This is by the way, 404 Media doing some good reporting once again so that the Kickstarter projects can add charges to the fully funded projects because of tariffs.

[Owen Thomas]

See this makes me think this is going to go badly wrong for consumers and we're going to see a lot of bogus tariff fees where like maybe, maybe it's imported from a low cost country, but they slap on a, you know, they slap on a big.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an opportunity. It's a opportunity, an enhanced profit opportunity.

[Owen Thomas]

It reminds me of how every restaurant in San Francisco, you know, still charge.

[Leo Laporte]

They have a little surcharge on there.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, tries to, tries to get away with charging an SF mandate charge.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. The health surcharge.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, based on, that's based on a, a basically a local health care law that was completely outmoded by the Affordable Care Act. Doesn't really, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's funny.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. There's a small set of, of restaurants that might, you know, might be paying a little more in health care. Really? Under the aca, most of those businesses would be paying the exact same.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting. But they've done that also with new minimum wage costs. And every restaurant in town not even just go has a little and you know, an extra 6% added to cover the cost of living.

[Ian Thompson]

The thing that really grips. The thing that really grips my muffin is when you go to a self service checkout at the supermarket and they're asking, would you like to tip 15%? It's like for what the robot all the work.

[Leo Laporte]

Doesn't the robot deserve a little extra? Come on, don't be such a cheapskate, Ian.

[Gary Rivlin]

Mine is, mine is the resort fee.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, oh, I hate the resort.

[Ian Thompson]

Las Vegas is the worst for that now.

[Leo Laporte]

And to his credit, President Biden did under the, the FTC and Lina Khan under President Biden did, did do something about those extra fees. Right. But did that get overruled by the new administration? Is that still.

[Owen Thomas]

Well, they gutted the CFPB which would have been enforcing that. Yeah, most of this. So get ready for more overdraft fees from banks. I think these tariff surcharges are going to be in the same category of junk fees. And enforcement of consumer protections does not seem to be a priority in this administration.

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft is Raising the price of Xboxes from 599 to. I'm sorry, from 499 to 699. That's the Xbox X. The Series S is being marked up $80. This to account for tariffs, but they're.

[Ian Thompson]

Also doing it internationally. They're spreading the cost.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. Also in the UK, Europe and Australia, which don't have 145%.

[Ian Thompson]

Exactly. Everyone else gets screwed. You know, it's just like they, I mean, as Owen said, this is the chance to raise profit margins, raise prices and blame it on Trump.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, right. And, and not calling it a tariff surcharge is clearly the political way to go. Microsoft is being smart here.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Owen Thomas]

You know, the question is they, they.

[Leo Laporte]

They, they call in their quarterly result. Amy Hood, their CFO said it's, it's tariff uncertainty, that's all.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh yeah, right. Nothing at all to do with padding profit margins.

[Leo Laporte]

We're uncertain, we don't know, we don't know what ups, the United Parcel Service says they're going to cut 20,000 jobs. Now that's partly because Amazon is reducing their deal with them. Right. But I have to also think it's because of a reduced number of packages being.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, when you go from 30 Christmas presents to two Christmas presents, you only need two dolls.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you need more than two dolls for?

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Says the bloke with a kid. Picture of his kids sitting on a pet lion.

[Leo Laporte]

But there's only one lion now. Come on.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, but this is serious because I live in the Bay Area and I sail in the bay and the amount of cargo ships in Oakland at the moment is pretty much zero.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you see, you can actually see it? Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean I'm used to six to eight ships being docked in, in the southern bay and there's nothing there. And I've got friends in Seattle, there's nothing there. There's a supply shock coming and it's not going to be good. If you haven't bought your tank now, you're too late.

[Leo Laporte]

Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume is going to go down 35% this week.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. Imagine if you're a trucker and that comes through or if you're a longshoreman.

[Owen Thomas]

And LA is where the goods from Asia come in. Oakland is where a lot of the shipments go out, including Tesla cars from the Fremont factory. The Port of Oakland is a natural.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's really two way. Right. Because China's also upped their tariffs. We're in a trade war.

[Owen Thomas]

Wine from Napa, agricultural products from the Central Valley, you know, they're all getting slapped with tariffs on the other side. So it's not like we're imposing tariffs and the rest of the world is just sitting back and taking it.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's just, I mean, I, okay, Tesla, gone out this week because they're now 85% domestically produced. But, but the rest of the car industry at the moment is completely up the spout because, you know, they take their parts in from everywhere around the world.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, uncertainty is the right word because it could very well be that a call to the White House next week will change everything. It's just unknown. But uncertainty is not good for business. Right? I mean, worse is the certainty that you're gonna have to pay under 45%. The next worse is I don't know what I'm gonna have to pay.

[Ian Thompson]

But you can't make long decisions based on someone in the White House deciding, okay, they're my friends now. They're my enemies now. You know, it's not fundamental to good confidence.

[Owen Thomas]

I saw a quote from a European politician to the effect of, we can't make our decisions based on the whims of voters in Wisconsin every four years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the long term problem, right? Is this, this. It's not going to end in four years. It's. It's a problem. The United States itself is a problem.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, there's also the problem that we've, you know, we've created a system where if you have access, if you're Tim Cook representing Apple and you, you could get exempted. And it just like, it's kind of up for bids. It's like, what are you going to do for me? White House says if we're going to do something for you. That's a different kind of uncertainty. It's a, it's a, it's a rigged system. It's the kind of thing we don't want. We want a fair system, but instead it's like, we'll go to the White House and we'll give money. We have given money. So we will have access. We could get exemption. It's not just cars either. I mean, just it seems everything we make in this country is, you know, some parts are from overseas. You know, they're. I was listening to reports about, you know, the toy industry and stuff for, you know, babies, carriages and that kind of stuff. I just, I remember a few years back there was kind of a temporary baby formula shortage and people freaked out. I'm just like trying to anticipate, you know, in the fall, coming into the Hollywood sees him kind of the freak out because I'm imagining unless something radical changes in the next month or two, that is what we're looking at. I have no idea how that's going to play out, but I just can't imagine it's going to be pretty because people are going to be really, really upset. We in America, we like our stuff. We like our full shelves. We want our $30, or at least we want the right to buy $30. If we want to buy $30.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm seeing over your shoulder, your left shoulder, Gary, a book you wrote in 2011 about who does benefit for this. It's called Broke USA. There's a poverty industry in the United States.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah. I was just fascinated after 2008, the subprime meltdown, that it's like the start of it or early on in the subprime abuse. It was poor people and banks were getting rich off poor people. So I had this idea. I was fascinated. Pity. Lenders, check cashers, pawn brokers, et cetera, these businesses that their business model is to get rich off people with no money, which makes no sense. But there was like back then, like five or six payday lending companies that were publicly traded with multiple billions of dollars in revenue. In fact, there's a funny thing that A banker wants 100 clients with at least a million dollars. A payday lender wants a million clients, customers, none of whom have $100.

[Leo Laporte]

Kind of amounts to the same thing in the long run, doesn't it? And of course, who shut all of those down? The cfpb, cpfb, and who shut down the cpfb? So I have a feeling this might be back. You might want to revise and reissue Broke usa.

[Gary Rivlin]

I mean, there's so many ways we could talk about Elon Musk's conflicts of interest, but one of the first things he did, I put up a tweet something like, delete cfpb, get rid of the cfpb, and gutted it. That was one of the first things Doge did. And guess what? Xai, whatever he's calling it, wants to get into financial services. Who stands in the way? And it just. In fact, the CFPB had a number of cases. There's a lot of complaints in the CFPB about Tesla. And so he was, as were a.

[Leo Laporte]

Lot of complaints at the National Highways Transportation and Safety Administration. And, and, oh, look what just got cut by Doge is the autonomous vehicle.

[Ian Thompson]

Division of NHTSA Now, I interviewed someone about this. Exactly. This is Dan O'Dowd. The billionaire's got a grudge against Tesla. But he's absolutely right. You know, full system driving doesn't work. So they're basically gutting the regulatory agencies and saying, yeah, fine, you know, make it go.

[Leo Laporte]

We know it doesn't work, but we still want to do it. Why should you? Well, look, I can understand the kind of the philosop, the anti regulatory philosophy.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. But are you gonna entrust your life to a system without LiDAR?

[Leo Laporte]

That's a problem.

[Ian Thompson]

Without LiDAR.

[Leo Laporte]

There are some regulations we need. Food and drug regulations, safe driving regulations, seat belts.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Doge. According to the Verge, Elon Musk's Doge ties could get him out of $2 billion in potential liability. It's not just Tesla, it's SpaceX. It's Neuralink. $2.37 billion. This is from a Senate report. Report, of course, from the Democrats, but, you know, so take it with a grain of salt. Democratic staff for the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations probing the impact of Musk's relationship with Trump and the creation of Doge. Doge may not have saved as much as they promised. He promised what, 2 trillion? You know, we're saving maybe 100 billion. But what we are saving is a lot of money for Elon Musk's company companies.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, NASA. Look at the NASA budget this week. It's been cut 24%. And they're like, okay, well, we're just going to have commercial companies do this now. Which commercial companies?

[Leo Laporte]

Guess which?

[Gary Rivlin]

Rural broadband. So I think the Biden administration put 40, 42 billion dollars into rural broadband for, you know, people who don't have access. That's been paused. And now they're saying, huh, why don't we use starlink? Who owns Starlink, I forget, kind of thing. And, you know, I mean, there's some logic there, right? It's easier to use, you know, wireless and, you know, dig trenches and do broadband, but it's really expensive. Like, I don't use.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, furthermore, once you put in the fiber, it's there for a hundred years. Elon, you're going to continue to pay month by month, and the price is not set by anybody but Elon.

[Ian Thompson]

And if you're a Ukrainian soldier, then it might be turned off with a.

[Leo Laporte]

Kick at any price. Yeah. Trump is also cutting almost half a billion dollars from the CISA budget. And this is spite. This is spite. CISA's director in 2020, Brian Krebs, Chris Krebs, I'm sorry, was asked about the election. Election that Trump, of course, said was stolen. Krebs famously said it was the most. What did he say? Most reliable election.

[Gary Rivlin]

Fairest.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, fairest election ever. Everything worked perfectly well. CISA did its job and the election results are real. Of course, the President immediately fired Krebs and now has not only written a letter to Pam Bonney at the Department of Justice saying, we need to investigate this guy, he just. Total spite, revoked his global entry.

[Ian Thompson]

It's pathetic.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just pure spite. And honestly, I believe cutting half a billion dollars from the CISA budget, which is, by the way, only $3 billion comes not because this is waste and fraud or whatever, but just as a way of saying, you know, spite.

[Gary Rivlin]

It's spite, but it's also insane. Like it's a mistake. Yes, we need to fortify our cyber defenses. We need to do risk assessment. You know, just have you notice that China, Russia, North Korea, there's a few countries out there that are trying to break into our systems and mess us up or, or our governments. And, you know, it just. I don't understand. I mean, I do, because we're explaining it. It's. Yeah, no, so shortsighted. It's so short sighted.

[Leo Laporte]

This is in the President's new budget. It says the CISA programs are a hub of, quote, the censorship industrial complex to violate the First Amendment, target Americans for protected speech and target the President. I mean, it's admitted, admittedly, because he didn't like what they said in 2020.

[Ian Thompson]

But it's totally fine. I mean, they even got rid of the volunteer council. Now, it had its faults because this was basically big tech companies advising CISA about how to deal with security threats. But these were volunteers and they're just like, yeah, out with you, out with you. I spoke to somebody this week and they sat down with SISA and all the old guard are gone. You've got a lot of very young, enthusiastic people, but a lot of the knowledge has been lost and it's not going to work out well for America.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, Doge has another proposal. We'll talk about it in just a moment. We're going to take a break. Gary Rivlin is here. It's great to have you, Gary, author of AI Valley Gary rivlin.com Ian Thompson from Thereegister.com it's always a pleasure learning new British isms all the time. I think you're starting to make some up. I'm not. I don't want to say anything, but I think you're starting.

[Ian Thompson]

No, no. I mean, I haven't said wanker all session. Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And also Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times. Great to have all of you here. Our show today, brought to you by Drata. If you're leading risk and compliance at your company, you're probably wearing ten hats at once. Managing security risks, compliance demands, budget constraints, all while trying not to be seen as the roadblock that slows the down. But GRC isn't just about checking boxes. It's a revenue driver. It's good for you. It builds trust, accelerates deal, strengthens security. That's why modern GRC leaders turn to Drata, a trust management platform that automates tedious tasks so you can focus on reducing risk and scaling your program. With Drata, you can automate security questionnaires, evidence collection and compliance tracking. You can stay audit ready with real time monitoring, simplified 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. AgaiN-R-A-T-A.com weekintech know this just weekintechdrada.com weekend tech in tech to learn more. We thank Drata so much for supporting this Week in Tech. Well, here's another. I give you one more story from Mike Masnik's Tech Dirt and this one actually gets me. I'm going to turn beet red. The. The. The ft. The. The FTC is going after Wiki Wikipedia. Yeah, or fcc. It's Brendan Carr, isn't it, saying that Wikipedia's editors are biased and spreading disinformation? Oh, no, wait a minute. It's Ed Martin. That's who it is. Well, I don't worry so much about him. D.C. u.S. Attorney Ed Martin, who is a problematic person in many other respects, has now is now investigating Wikipedia for, I don't know what, disinformation he sent a letter to. It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia foundation, through its wholly owned subsidiary Wikipedia, is allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American people.

[Ian Thompson]

What are we talking Hugh Grant here or.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he's apparently editing Wiki Wikipedia. What's the, what's the response to this? Besides the fact that this is exactly what the First Amendment prohibits, which is government intervention in speech?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, have you ever read the conservative version of Wikipedia called Conserva Pedia? No, no, no, seriously, check it out. It's absolutely hilarious.

[Leo Laporte]

Martin demands to know about Wikipedia's editorial process, how it handles trust and safety. I mean this is a real, real threat to one of the best things that ever happened to the Internet.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah. Wikipedia is a, it is a gift to the world. But it's, this weaponization is going on across the board. I mean we could talk about Brendan Carr, the FTC and taking on media outlets with threatening to, the government's threatening to take away their licenses, you know, NBC, etc, cbs, you know, for doing their job. Like I don't like Fox News, I'll come complain about Fox News, but I don't think their license should be, they shouldn't be censored.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah. You know, so it's across the board.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way, if you want to go after somebody for disinformation, X.com is full, full of bots representing China, Russia, North Korea, every possible Saudi Arabia, Iran, every possible dictatorship. Nobody's saying anything about apps.

[Gary Rivlin]

I mean, I wonder if the Wikipedia thing is, let's go look at Donald Trump's write up and you know, how does it. Well, no, what they say about the 2020 election, Trump didn't like it. So hell, Wikimedia, Wikipedia is on the enemy's list.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

And, and because Wikimedia foundation is a nonprofit, they're all, I believe they're also bringing the tax status into the conversation, which, which they're also trying to do.

[Leo Laporte]

With, by the way, speaking of illegal. That is blatantly illegal for the, for the executive branch to then tell the irs, you know, revoke Harvard's tax status. Revoke.

[Owen Thomas]

It's specifically in the tax code that the, the rest of the executive branch cannot talk to the IRS about blatantly illegal.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, okay, I mean let, let's be frank here. We've gone past the. It's blatantly illegal.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I guess you're right.

[Ian Thompson]

You know, I mean, it's basically foolish.

[Leo Laporte]

Objection is we're, we're, we're going to.

[Ian Thompson]

Do what we're going to do and you're going to have to live with it. And it's, it's a very disturbing situation, I have to say. But you know, we're in a post truth and legal justification environment at the moment.

[Leo Laporte]

Carl Bod, writing for the Verge. Brendan Carr's FCC is an anti consumer rights trampling harassment machine.

[Ian Thompson]

He's done a massive reverse ferret from about four years ago where he was all for freedom of speech and the rest of it. And now it's like actually No, I think we need to bring these people to heel.

[Leo Laporte]

It's always been about freedom of speech for me, not for thee. Yeah, right. As long as you're saying something we like, you have freedom of speech.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. I mean, try discussing Cisgender on X and see how that far that gets you.

[Leo Laporte]

Trump sued CBS for what, $20 billion, saying he didn't like the edit they did of Kamala Harris's interview on 60 Minutes. Probably that. I mean, there's no merit, legal merit to it. It is blatantly illegal. But because CBS is trying to merge right now, an $8 billion merger with Skydance, they have some leverage. And I think experts think it's likely that CBS will settle.

[Gary Rivlin]

No, look at Zuckerberg. And, you know, and he said, oh, he rewrote a check for $25 million to Trump individually. I was like, it's the most blatant play. I would call it the most blatant payoff you could imagine. But then we could talk about others that are just as blatant as crypto. You know, the Trump family's crypto thing, like, oh, let's take $75 million to someone. It's. It's just, you know, it, it really is just. Is a, A payoff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, it's.

[Ian Thompson]

I used to get. Okay, I came to the US in 2008 and I. Even then, it was kind of like you've legalized bribery and called a campaign contribution, but at the current state, this is just, this is third world stuff. It really is.

[Leo Laporte]

And I would expect a court would probably throw out Trump's lawsuit against cbs. But it doesn't matter if they've got leverage through the merger. Right. If they can threaten the merger, then it doesn't really matter what the courts might say. If there is any legality.

[Gary Rivlin]

And it's a rational decision. I was talking about before I could write a check for a few million dollars and make a big problem because away, it's. It's worth it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Gary Rivlin]

It didn't quite work for Zuckerberg. He wrote his 20. 25 million dollar check and a million or whatever it was for the inauguration and, you know, still on trial, but, you know, maybe they'll back off.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's face it, $40 million to Mark Zuckerberg. Not a big check. Did you see?

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, wait. Oh, no, not the hell. Not the helicopter skiing thing.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is from Sustainability, which I don't normally read, but I gotta tell you, apparently Mark has two yachts, not just one. He has two yachts. One called Launchpad, the other aptly named Wingman. He wanted to go helicopter skiing in Norway, but the Norwegians have very strict laws about helicopter skiing and about landing helicopters in this pristine north and so forth. So, so he got around those laws by sailing his $300 million, 387 foot yacht launch pad and its support vessel equipped with helipad wingman 5,300 miles to Svalbard so they could be a floating base for him and his family for hela skiing. They were able to heli. Ski in essential, essentially a completely isolated region very close to the Arctic Circle up in Svalbard. The boats are still in Svalbard area. Can you imagine? I mean, I don't know what it costs, it doesn't really matter. But to sail two super yachts 5,300 miles an hour now just for the purpose of taking a helicopter up to ski town, I don't think he's worried about a $43 million fine. Let's just put it that way.

[Ian Thompson]

I read, I read a story and a friend of mine worked on, on, on the island for six years and there's one rule there. You have to have a gun with you at all times because polar bears are wild on there. And I couldn't help thinking, you know, just for one polar bear, life could have been a little better.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he, he's done this before. Last year he sent his yacht to Tahiti, but never managed to get around to the vacation. So it just. And hung around a little bit. Now it's up in Svalbard.

[Gary Rivlin]

So what's this worth? 200 billion? I mean, meta stock has kind of got up, down.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember what Bill Gates said when he got past a couple of billion? He said, after a certain point, it's just infinite. It's nothing you can't buy.

[Ian Thompson]

I've always liked Joseph Heller's quote when he was speaking to a fellow author at a conference in New York and he said, I'll have something these people will never, never have enough. And it's as simple as that. You know, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Then why don't they act like they have enough?

[Owen Thomas]

And, and yet Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have stopped funding a school.

[Ian Thompson]

Exactly.

[Owen Thomas]

Very close to their home in a. In a poor community in the Bay Area.

[Ian Thompson]

Utterly shameless. It's just.

[Leo Laporte]

Did they say why they stopped funding it?

[Owen Thomas]

They get tired of priorities, I think is the, you know, is the.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. The standard buzzword. You know, it's just like, yeah, we've got the, you know, we've Got the, the PR we need from this, so screw them.

[Owen Thomas]

And the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has basically pulled back on anything related to social justice.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, no, I was in the, I was in the press conference when they announced the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. And they're like, we want to kill. We want to have cures for all major diseases within 10 years. Yeah. How's that working out?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's just. It shows you. Maybe it teaches us to be a little cynical. When companies announce these big initiatives, are they announcing it because they really care, or are they announcing it because at the moment it's politically expedient? Because the minute it's not politically expedient, they pull the plug on it. They, they move with the winds. They're going to do what's best for them and their company, not for anybody else.

[Ian Thompson]

It's a tax dodge. You know, you're basically giving a whole bunch of your revenue over to charity. It avoids taxes and, you know, you can, you know, write the rest off.

[Leo Laporte]

But Mark Zuckerberg is still very mad at, at Apple. Interview with Ben Thompson over at Stratecherie. He says that Facebook and Mark are deeply bitter about Apple's policies. A number of the things where they've just said, okay, you can't do those things where we think would be valuable. This is Mark, the direct quote, which I think to some degree contributes to some of that dynamic behavior between our company. And there's. He doesn't like Apple. Then I one bit.

[Gary Rivlin]

I want to see a cage match between Cook and Zuckerberg Las Vegas.

[Leo Laporte]

I know Mark studied, you know, martial arts, but Cook looks like a wiry guy. I don't know. It's like 100 gorillas. I mean, one gorilla versus 100 men. It's a. It's tough. It's a conundrum.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I don't know. I suspect Cook could be a tough cookie as it goes, but he seems.

[Leo Laporte]

He seems kind of wiry and.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, well, I mean, it's interesting. So Zuckerberg was asked about kind of their approach to AI and why they went open. And I know why they didn't want to be the 10th LLM competing. But what he said was, we want to own the environment. He doesn't like that. He was beholden that Facebook, his various apps are beholden to Apple. And so even if he's not going to make money on his open source chatbot, he'll control the environment and at least it will control his own destiny. So, yeah, it sticks in his craw to the Tune of many, many billions of dollars in the context of AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

We have come to a certain situation though, where, you know, it's like somebody has multiple billions of dollars and can act a hissy fit basically, you know, and go up against Apple and go up against Trump. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

He was, I thought he was surprisingly candid, frankly, with Ben Thompson, because maybe this isn't something he should have admitted. Thompson asked him about open source AI. This is the quote you're, I think, referring to, Gary. We're not building it, Mark said, so that we can open source it for developers. We're building it because it's a thing that we believe we need in order to build the services they want. We want, we want, not they want. Open source means something a little different, I think, to Mark than it does to the rest of, of the world. And there's some question about whether Llama is really open source, I guess open weight or maybe more like, yeah, you can use it locally if you want.

[Owen Thomas]

What happened to the idea that, you know, if you built your business on open source, you have a kind of moral responsibility to.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, no, no. To intern open source, neither. No, Google doesn't believe that with Chrome, in fact, Google admitted, you know, we really, I mean, that's ours. It's all Google and employees. Chrome would die without us. Android, same thing. No, these companies, it's all about profit.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, honestly, under American law, then corporations have a duty to their shareholders to maximize profit no matter what the costs.

[Leo Laporte]

So, you know, Mark said there are a number of AI revenue opportunities. One is business methods messaging and of course they own messaging with WhatsApp to a great degree. He says, I think there should be very large business. They should be very large business ecosystems in their own right. And the way I think that's going to happen, we'll see the early glimpses of this because business messaging is already a huge thing. Yeah, I guess they missed buying Slack when they could have.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that, you know, now the antitrust people are looking at Instagram and WhatsApp and the rest of it and buying up the competition. He's suddenly making it playing a different tune, as it were.

[Leo Laporte]

Put it that way, Meta did release, or actually really isn't a release. They updated the Meta app that you use with their Ray Ban glasses to be now a kind of a social network. But I don't. It's just a feed of AI images. It's about, it's the last thing in the world that I would really want. But I guess the only good thing about this is they're keeping these images off of Instagram anyway, which is probably a good thing.

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah. Zuckerberg has not really hit it yet with AI, like, into 2023. Their whole idea was. I don't even know what to call it, like a personal, you know, personalities. So they had, you know, Snoop Dogg. You could talk to a character. They used his voice. Your sports bro was Tom Brady. You know, again, you hear their voice and you kind of just go chat. You know, they paid millions and millions of dollars for the licensing, and, you know, they pulled the plug on that after a year. They've tried different things. They. They have the reach, you know. Right. I mean, they have billions of people on their various apps, and AI is right there. So I guess they have a lot of users, but they haven't figured out yet. To me, messaging, that's just throwing something else at the wall and hoping it.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's probably accurate. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look at how the metaverse crashed and burned. You know, it's just like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he's kind of given up on that, hasn't he?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. I mean, I. I don't understand what's going on with that. They've burned. They've literally burned billions on this, and nothing has come of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I would say nothing. Here's a. Here's tiny workers creating a giant sushi roll.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, right. Well, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

That ain't. That ain't nothing. Here's cats running their own luxury fashion store. I mean, what more could you. Could you. Yeah. You know, it's kind of sad when you look at stuff like this. Here's Donald Trump in the Popemobile. It feels a little. By the way, wait, his name is Pope Deportis? It's kind of sad to think that the rainforest is burning for this stuff.

[Ian Thompson]

No, I mean, it's. Sorry.

[Gary Rivlin]

No, go ahead, go ahead.

[Ian Thompson]

No, I mean, it's just so much of this stuff is basically recycling and reusing. It's a tremendous waste of resources.

[Gary Rivlin]

And, you know, they're talking about, like, by 2030, we're going to have a doubling in the amount of data centers out there. I mean, what just happened this week in Spain and Portugal?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, a giant blackout. Oh, yeah. What was. Did they ever find out why it was.

[Ian Thompson]

It was a transformer fire. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

They say grid oscillation. I don't know.

[Ian Thompson]

That is. I have a friend in Portugal who's somewhat involved with it, and she said that basically it was Two big transformer fires happening some same time and it just kicked the grid over. And it's fascinating that, you know, how people dealt with it. You know, some people were stuck in elevators, some people were stuck in trains, some people weren't able to work, which in Spain is, you know, not that bad.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know, the good news is it was not. And they were pretty able to rule this out a cyber attack, although that I live in fear of that at some point.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean there's a. As a reporter when the EU said it is definitely not a cyber attack, that was like a Chinese military parade of red flags because you can't say it's definitely not.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure it wasn't.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. Sorry.

[Gary Rivlin]

Anyway, yeah, I mean I'm just convinced that this is our future. That you know, we in the US at least we're not anticipating the great demand in large part because of AI, but general, generally speaking on the electrical grid. And I'm assuming these things are going to unfortunately happen more often because we're not planning for it. This huge taxation on the system with AI, every query just takes up so much energy. It's going to grow more and more popular as it becomes more and more useful.

[Leo Laporte]

So dare say thank you.

[Gary Rivlin]

So I'm convinced that there are going to be these outages without some planning and I'm pretty skeptical about our ability to plan for this.

[Ian Thompson]

I couldn't agree more. I mean the fact that we're still building data centers in Arizona places, what the hell is going on with that? It's possibly the worst place to build them apart from the tax breaks.

[Leo Laporte]

That wasn't the only threat I was worried about. I also believe that Chinese hackers and others are living in our grid just waiting for an opportunity to trigger a failure. So we've got two threats.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean Vol Typhoon proved that. I was talking someday this week and he was like in December, he confirmed a story which had originally been reported a couple of weeks ago by the Wall Street Journal that basically the Chinese negotiators and trade contracts said, yeah, we're behind Vault Typhoon. We've been surveilling your systems just as you've been surveilling ours and deal with it. It's basically America is not quite as powerful as it thinks it is, but we have ciso.

[Gary Rivlin]

Oh wait.

[Leo Laporte]

LAUGHING ALL LAUGHING Whistling past the graveyard I think is the. The phrase let's take a little break, we've got more to come. I want to get you out of here by 4:30. Is that going to work for you. Gary. Can we, can we, can you keep it 4:30? All right?

[Gary Rivlin]

I'm here for the duration.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, Gary Rivlin is here. We've just lost Ian Thompson. He's turned off his camera. Owen, go ahead and put up the placard with a picture of you not moving and we will take a little time out. You're watching this Week in Tech. So glad you're here this week. This episode of this Week in Tech, brought to you by our friends at Coda. I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love trying to keep track of all the information and data and projects we're working on across dozens of platforms. Platforms, products and tools. Coda is the all in one collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. Offering the flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teamwork and quicker creativity. And their turnkey AI solution, the intelligence of Coda Brain is a game changer. Powered by Grammarly, Coda is entering a new phase of innovation and expansion, aiming to redefine productivity for the AI era. Whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos while staying nimble, or an enterprise organization looking for better alignment, Coda matches your working style. Its seamless workspace connects to hundreds of your favorite tools, including Salesforce and Jira and Asana Figma, helping your teams transform their rituals and do more faster. Head over to Coda IO Twit right now and get six months of the team plan for startups for free. That's C O D a IO Twit. And get six months of the team plan for free. Coda IO Twit Good news. Elon Musk has gotten out from under his ex debt. The Wall street banks which lent him $13 billion have sold off. Well, actually, I guess it's not him that's out of the woods. It's the Wall street banks. They sat on that $13 billion for quite a while. But they were smart to do so. They have been able to sell almost all of those loans at 98 cents on the dollar. So that's that. Morgan Stanley, bank of America, five other banks all lent Elon Musk money to buy Twitter. A total of 13 billion. By the time the deal closed, X wasn't worth quite what he'd paid for it. And those poor banks were stuck with those loans for a long time. But of course, X's fortunes have turned around in a new era. And they're able now to get out of them. Go ahead.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. The thing that's amazing to me is if you completely ignore how Musk has mismanaged X as a business, fundamentally these, these loans should have lost value because of just the change in prevailing interest rates.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and they did for a while. They go down about 65 cents on the dollar. I mean, they lost a lot.

[Owen Thomas]

And so the, you know, paper, the thing that really saved X was that Musk put. Musk assigned a. A roughly 25% stake in his AI startup Xai, therefore kind of, you know, like basically bulking up the balance sheet of X.

[Leo Laporte]

So it wasn't really the political and climate, it was the fact that he was able to merge X and grok.

[Owen Thomas]

I think that was much, I think that was much more relevant to Wall Street's view of the value, you know, the value of X debt.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. And I mean, it's all a bet on AI becoming worth something instead of the great. What it is right now, which is a great liability on the bank.

[Owen Thomas]

Right. Basically, you know, will XAI be able to issue more shares, find someone to buy them and then retire the debt with the, with the proceeds? That's the bet.

[Gary Rivlin]

And XAI right now is, at least on paper, its valuation, I think it's like $60 billion. So it's worth more than X.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. That $13 billion loan is worth 15 billion or something.

[Owen Thomas]

I mean, they've now had XAI buy X with this paper valuation.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, right. I mean, this is SPAC all over again. But I mean, in terms of Wall street then holding debt for two and a half years, that's a massive liability. I'm sure they were very, very keen to get rid of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well, Elon has another victory. He was able to name the little town where Most of the SpaceX employees live, next to Boca Chica, his launch site. They've renamed it to Starbase Tech, Texas. You now live in the Starbase. Elon is very much into sci fi. Obviously it wasn't a big, you know, not that many people were. Only 283people were eligible to vote on the renaming of the town. And, you know, the people who actually live there, and almost all of them were SpaceX employees, so it's pretty much a given that the city would be renamed to Starbucks Base. A new city in Texas is Cameron county, near the Boca Chica beach launch site on the Gulf of America. Oh, they said the Gulf of Mexico. I'm sorry, excuse me, Verge. It's, it's the Gulf of America, please.

[Ian Thompson]

Right.

[Gary Rivlin]

What's the advantage? I, I, you know, I saw that story. It was absurd, right? I mean, but what's the big advantage for Musk? Well, to have a town when the.

[Leo Laporte]

Future, future is written in the year 2830, they'll be able to look back and say, this is when Starbase was founded.

[Ian Thompson]

I guess we've seen this before, though, with Disney. You know, Disney, Disney bought up huge areas of Florida under a variety of shell companies. They got city incorporated. They have the right to run a nuclear reactor and an airport out of their own territory. So I guess he's just doing same thing.

[Owen Thomas]

And it's, it seems to have a lot to do with, with beach closures. Essentially. There's a Texas law or Texas bill under consideration that would let a municipality.

[Leo Laporte]

In other words, a city.

[Ian Thompson]

Because you.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember there were a couple of launches, I think was the Falcon Heavy that spewed debris all over the beach at.

[Ian Thompson]

Boca Chica because, well, also across the West Indies.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, yeah, and shut down a few other things.

[Owen Thomas]

But, and, and the other big thing I bet is housing for his employees. I think that a city probably would be easier to influence in terms of, you know, permitting houses.

[Leo Laporte]

Who gets to be the mayor?

[Gary Rivlin]

Are you two hats? Two hats. He wears many hats.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Bezos, not to be left behind. He owns very many hats now. He can have the mayor hat.

[Ian Thompson]

So there's a lovely big comedian's comment when you're putting too many hats on. And Gary just nailed it.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazon is deploying the first Project Kuiper Internet satellites. Jeff Bezos's plan to compete with space, with Starlink of SpaceX 27 satellites now operating in low Earth orbit. So Amazon, finally, it's been much delayed, able to start building its constellation of satellites. They would. We intend to have 3200 satellites in the sky. The FCC agreed that it could do that as long as it got 1600 in orbit by next summer. Obviously, they're not going to be able to do that, but they did get an extension from the fcc, by the way, what do they call these lift vehicles? The Vulcan Centaur. Naming is so very important in all, all of this. Amazon now has 80 launches scheduled to build this constellation of satellites. StarLink has over 7,000 already.

[Ian Thompson]

I was going to say, I mean, it makes a lot more sense than putting Katy Perry in or in, in orbit. It does.

[Leo Laporte]

It's, it's not as good a publicity stunt, but it's more useful also.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, from a register headline point of view, it was fantastic. You know Jeff Beatles his thrusting erection go.

[Owen Thomas]

Oy vey.

[Leo Laporte]

I will point out that it is circumcised. I will say that. Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

But Amazon's network and Starlink apparently have kind of undisclosed or underreported environmental problems. When the satellites burn up on reentry, they're.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This is new evidence that this is problematic. Yeah. Who's that?

[Owen Thomas]

Oh this is Fitzgerald Quimby. He was complaining about being ignored.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh Mr. Quimby, good luck looking pup. Is he a full grown or is he a baby?

[Owen Thomas]

He is a senior dog adopted from Muttville a a rescue operation here in San Francisco that was. Is kind of indirectly funded by Larry Ellison. But that's a. Oh.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh wow.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't know he was a dog lover.

[Owen Thomas]

He's not. But he bought out Dave Duffield's company PeopleSoft and Duffield went on to donate to a lot of pet related causes in the Bay Area. So thank you. Thank you Dave Duffield and thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Larry and thank you Mr. Quimby. It's nice to meet you. Another story from 404. This was a shocker. Researchers secretly ran a massive unauthorized AI persuasion experiment on Reddit users. If you've ever visited the Change my view subreddit, you know that's a place where you would post something like I think, I really think that, that if you're going to launch a rocket it should have the thrusters on the back and then change my mind.

[Ian Thompson]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Normally the responses are from other Redditors. In this case it was from the University of Zurich which ran bots that would answered more than a thousand or posted more than a thousand comments over the course of several months. The bots posed as experts in the area. A black man who was opposed for instance to the Black Lives Matter movement, someone who works at a Domestic Violence Shelter. 1 Bots suggested that certain kinds of criminals should not be rehabilitated. All of this is an experiment to see if the bots could be persuasive. By the way they could.

[Ian Thompson]

Well we've seen this, we've seen this before. Do you remember 2013? A couple of researchers said that yeah, we, we work with Facebook, we put neg messages out and positive messages out and we've been able to change people's minds about certain things. This is disturbing stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

It's certainly not ethical. Right?

[Gary Rivlin]

I was going to say the same thing. Aren't there? It just obliterates any kind of ethical line. And by the way to me this is one of my big fears about AI that It's going to be used to manipulate people. As the story points out, it was very effective, far more effective than humans at changing minds. And, you know, I mean, getting people to think differently is a good thing, but I'm worried about AI manipulating people and it's going to know us so well and it's going to understand how to push certain buttons. And so to, to me, this is what the canary in the mind kind of thing like. I think this is going to be a way. AI is used a lot in a way that makes us really. By advertisers, I mean, in all sorts of ways to manipulate our behavior.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a long history of highly unethical and yet amazingly useful studies being performed, most of them from earlier times when the ethics weren't as well established on the Stanford Prison Experiment and so forth. I think it's good we learned this, that AI can be persuasive, more persuasive than humans now. It's a shameful way to learn it. And by the way, way, Reddit says they're considering legal action against the University of Zurich and. Yeah, that's a, it was a valuable lesson, wasn't it?

[Gary Rivlin]

So what are we going to do with it? I mean. Well, here. Yeah, go ahead.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh, no, no, here in San Francisco. They, they just opened up a storefront in Union Square, our retail district for world, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, you can get your.

[Ian Thompson]

I was, I was there on.

[Owen Thomas]

Did you get scanned?

[Ian Thompson]

Sorry, are you a bot?

[Owen Thomas]

How do we know if you didn't get scanned? How do we know if you're a bot or not?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, no, I, I deliberately didn't. I went in there and it's there. It was hilarious because at launch event they're like, oh, we're building Apple like stores. It was like somebody just got Home Depot to build a little wooden thing and put these orbs on there. And they're offering 16 bucks for your iris scan. Yeah, well, go to hell. Because.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, all right, so people did it, obviously, Right?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, they were saying there was a massive rush of people. I sat outside that store for 20 minutes. Nobody was like, there were like four people going in and out and two of them came out.

[Leo Laporte]

I was gonna sell a pint of my blood, but I think I'll come in here and scan my iris instead.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, I just, I, I think that they, they are figuring out how to market this though, which is, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I, I scan my iris for clear.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, so. And that's how they're marketing it. They're Saying this is just like TSA PreCheck. Like, don't you want to. Don't you want to get things faster and feel fancy and. Yeah, but I mean, that's a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

The company says it doesn't store images of your iris, just a hash.

[Ian Thompson]

No, it doesn't. And they're correct in that basically you get the iris scan, you get the face scan as a backup. It connects via Bluetooth to your phone. That builds a blockchain ident. But at the same time, their. Their entire pitch is because you're human, but you can sell the accounts onto other people. And the best use case have come up for this is games, dating and social media.

[Owen Thomas]

So should Reddit basically use World to verify all its use?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there you go. That's better than a captcha.

[Owen Thomas]

I mean, does that, you know, does that obviously stops the unethical AI experiments, but it raises all kinds of new questions.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, what's the thing, Sam? What's the thing Sam Altman is behind? This is.

[Leo Laporte]

This is it.

[Gary Rivlin]

This is it. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

This is it.

[Ian Thompson]

No, Sam Altman's behind it. They're basically trying to build a. They've got 12 million people signed up, so another 7 billion to go. But, you know, that's. That's beside the buy. You know, it's. It's an interesting idea, but I just don't trust the source. You know, it's like, I'm not going to give my identity to Sam Altman.

[Leo Laporte]

He's kind of like. I mean, look, we had the same problem in the U.S. nobody wants a universal government ID card either, right? But it feels like there is a case to be made that it would be nice to have some. You know, something? Estonia has a digital ID card. In fact, I have an Estonian digital identity card. Because you could buy it as a foreigner as well. It's seemed like there. It's not a bad thing to have a way of proving not merely that you're human, but that you are who you say you are. Authentication is a big problem right now.

[Gary Rivlin]

Identity theft, I mean, you know, I guess we could have a Mission Impossible movie where Tom Cruise has his fake iris. So I guess you could crack this. But, you know, it's reminds me of our earlier conversation. It's like on paper it sounds great, but I'm with Ian. I'm just not trusting the folks who are collecting this information. What happened with 23andMe? Oh, it. Save it. Oh, we're declaring bankruptcy. Tough shit, right?

[Ian Thompson]

No, I mean, I'm with you. I mean, if You. If you could do this in an open source, easily verifiable format and people chose to do it, I'd be fine with it. But at the moment, handing this over to a commercial company, as you pointed out with 23 and me. No. Just.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Gary Rivlin]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's interesting. They're not using it as authentication of your identity, just merely that you are. Are a human.

[Ian Thompson]

That. That picture that you're putting up right now is from the Fort Mason event. There are a lot less stylish inside the store on Union School.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not as pretty, huh?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's permanent, right? They're going to continue to. To keep it there, are they?

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, yeah. No, no. They're going to keep it in San Francisco and five other cities. Nashville, a bunch of others. But. And the plan to get 7. 7500 orbs around the US to try and get people to sign in, but at the end of the day, it doesn't offer anything particularly that you couldn't get elsewhere. It's just basically somebody saying, I'm going to scan your iris, and this is your corporate id.

[Leo Laporte]

And unlike you, Kevin Roos of the New York Times was perfectly happy to scan his iris.

[Ian Thompson]

I am deeply disappointed.

[Leo Laporte]

Kevin thinks that the AI's love with him, he's. He's all in on the AI thing. He says he got. You don't get cash, by the way. You don't. You get World Coin.

[Ian Thompson]

Yes, you get coin.

[Gary Rivlin]

Right, right.

[Ian Thompson]

You get $16 worth of world coin, which is worth 16.$07 in actual currency as long as the currency.

[Leo Laporte]

Rus said he got 39.22 World Coin tokens.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, really?

[Leo Laporte]

At today's price is $40.77. He also says I'll be donating them to charity once I figure out how to get them off my. My phone.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of good that's gonna do you.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, this is the whole thing. The biometric data is sticky as all hell and.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. You know, Well, I. We gave 23 and me my spit. He quotes a. A social media influencer named Hannah Stocking who said, what am I hiding anyway? Who cares? Take it all.

[Ian Thompson]

And why do you have curtains in your house?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, take your. I, you know, full disclosure, I mentioned this a lot, but Joanna Stern just did a piece at the Wall Street Journal about the limitless pin, the plod note, and this, the BAI device, which I've been wearing since January, like her, and it's collecting all my conversations and.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, no, how did the permissions what happened?

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny, after the Wall Street Journal, well, I'm like Hannah Stocking. I don't care. Take it all. What's funny is after the Joanna Stern article came out and quoted lawyers who said, you know, you might want to consider if you're in a two party state or a one party state. She is in New York and New Jersey, which is a single party state, but I'm in California, that's a two party state. So Bea put up a little notice saying, hey, you know, you should ask for permission before you record anybody. Well, limit these recordings. It just analyzes them and then sends them off.

[Ian Thompson]

I'm sorry, I'm married to a paralegal. From a discovery perspective, this is absolute nightmare territory.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, okay, I'll just, just to reassure you guys, it can't hear you because I'm wearing headphones. So it can't, it can't tell you. But here's, here's what is recorded from.

[Ian Thompson]

Today at the end of the day.

[Leo Laporte]

Day.

[Owen Thomas]

So that a million people.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, and it's recorded, right? We recorded it. Yeah, you're right. I don't care. Here's what it got from earlier today. Leo expresses excitement about Verstappen's recent racing performance and speculates on the potential of upcoming drivers while also engaging in personal discussions about family, tech updates and various life topics with participants. They've started taking other people's names out of there, I think.

[Ian Thompson]

No, no, I mean, this is why I've stayed off social media all day, because I've got a Grand Prix to watch.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not gonna tell. But you, you know who got polled, right?

[Ian Thompson]

I know who got polled. Just don't tell me anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't know anything. Oh, okay. Well, I don't know who won the race.

[Ian Thompson]

I watched the first five laps and they really.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't even watch that. So I'm excited. I'm excited. Let's see what else it also does to do's. So here's it's. What's funny about the bee is it's a lot more organized than I am. It will often say things like. Make a list of all of the ideas that you talked about today on this week's and tech and I mean, I'm not gonna. I'm not. It's done. Organize and review the spiral bound piano books picked up yesterday, incorporating them into your practice routine. Review and finalize the custom knife order details discussed with Jeff Jarvis. I don't know. I don't know why it says that. Including Design, design specifications and potential collaboration. It is, it is interesting.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, this is exactly what Bruce Schneider was talking about in his keynote at the RSA conference in. In terms of we are going to get AI agents. They are going to be biased because they're built by corporations who are designed to maximize profits. So you've got to have a real trust and verification thing on this. So be very, very careful.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I know I'm handing over a hell of a lot of information.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

To somebody I have no idea. I mean, I've interviewed the founders, but that doesn't mean anything. And I don't know where they're. What they're doing with it. My theory is, though, that someday this will be very. Because this has been recording everything that has happened to me since January, that when the AI gets better, it's going to have a treasure trove of information to work on. It knows that I visited Morty's cat adoption lounge yesterday. That's pretty good. A day of playful banter, thought for plans for new cats, and humorous problem solving.

[Ian Thompson]

But why would you give that information to anyone else?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, in order to get it from my. Myself, I have to give it to somebody else to analyze.

[Gary Rivlin]

I'm the only person. I've been attract. I've been attracted to these. I don't have a particularly good memory. If I didn't write it down. I'm not really sure exactly. And so I am attracted. I do wonder about kind of couples where, like you said this. I didn't say this. If you can kind of go and figure it out.

[Leo Laporte]

It was my hope that I would be able to use it for that purpose.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

But unfortunately not that accurate.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

And Right. Lisa's gonna let that slide.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I haven't dared. You know, I have a recording of our conversation. I'd like to play it back for you now. Actually, she's. She's usually right.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, I can understand it from a work perspective if, you know, your manager says do this, you do it, and it screws up. And then this is, I didn't tell you to do this. And you can play it back to them. But at the same time, it seems like an enormous amount of information to be giving out for very married little gain.

[Leo Laporte]

I would like to stay married. I'm just saying I am not going to use this to win any arguments. Let's take a little quick break. And final. Actually, we've got some interesting technological breakthroughs coming up in our final stories. You're watching this week in Tech. Gary Rivlin, great to have you. Ian Thompson and of course the wonderful Owen Thomas. We've got Thompson and Thomas and Rivlin and me. Our show, our show today, brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. You know, we were just talking about this. Hackers are using AI to breach your organization to craft phishing scams. And I mean AI powers innovation and drives efficiency, but it also helps bad actors deliver more relentless and effective attacks. Phishing attacks over encrypted chat channels increased by 34.1% last year fueled by the growing use of generative AI tools and phishing as a service kits. Yes, phishing as a service. It had to happen, right? Organizations in all industries from small to large are leveraging AI to do some really good things. Increase employee productivity with public AI engineers and coding assistants, marketers with writing tools, finance creating spreadsheet formulas, you know instantly. They also businesses also use IT to automate workflows for operational efficiency across individuals and teams. We're seeing AI embedded into applications and services that are customer and partner facing. It helps a business move faster in the market, gain competitive edge, but it also opens you up to attack. Companies need to rethink how they protect their private and public use of AI and how they defend against those AI powered attacks. You know, it's a, it's a double edged sword. Jason Kohler, he's the chief Information Security officer, the CISO at Eaton Corporation. Of course, I'm sure you know them. They leverage Zscaler to both embrace AI innovations and combat AI threats. Here's the quote from Jason. He says, quote, data loss detection has been very helpful for us. ChatGPT came out, we had no visibility into it. Zscaler was our key solution initially to help us understand who was going to it, what they were uploading, traditional firewalls, VPNs. The security measures we've used up to now expose you to danger, giving you public facing IP addresses. And they're really no match in the AI era for AI empowered hackers. It's time for a modern approach. Zscaler has comprehensive zero trust architecture. This is the gold standard for protecting yourself. Plus they use AI to ensure safe public AI productivity. They protect the entire integrity of the the private AI you're using and they stop those AI powered attacks. Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI to stay ahead of the competition and remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn [e-mail] security that's Z S C A L E R Zscaler.com security. We thank him so much supporting this week in tech and our wonderful panel and our final few stories. We wrap things up. Did you watch the Kentucky Derby?

[Gary Rivlin]

Journalism lost.

[Leo Laporte]

Journalism lost as it has been all along. So it's a weird story because in 2016, somebody used AI to pick the. The winners in the Kentucky Derby and it picked all four of them or all five of them, like the first five places. It was incredibly successful. Didn't win, didn't do so well this, this time around. They used the USA Today network. Asked copilot Microsoft said that was their mistake. Is that what you're saying?

[Ian Thompson]

I'm sorry. And the list of AI it's not number one in your mind, Is not number one? No, it's probably not even number three.

[Leo Laporte]

They. They gave it the latest odds, the predictions, the race factors. They asked Co Pilot to simulate the order of finish for the Kentucky Derby field. In this projection, Journalism won, of course it was the favorite, so maybe it wasn't such a brilliant pick. Didn't win in the long run. Right. It's number two pick did. And Sovereignty was an 111 pick and did win. The AI also thought that Rodriguez would come in. Do you say come in third in a horse race?

[Owen Thomas]

What is up with these horse names?

[Leo Laporte]

Rodriguez scratched Sandman, Burnham Square, Luxor Cafe. I know. Aren't they great? I think they're short for even longer ones though, right?

[Ian Thompson]

Must be. But I mean, Las Vegas is full of bankrupts who think they've got a system.

[Leo Laporte]

I know.

[Ian Thompson]

And this is exactly the same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, AI did not do so well in 2016. It was an online swarm intelligence platform that made the correct prediction. I don't know if that. I don't even know what that is. I guess it's kind of like an AI it named all four top finishers in order. So people got real excited. Excited. Apparently, E Chap GPT also picked journalism. According to FanDuel, Sovereignty, which a horse co pilot predicted would finish second, came in first and journalism came in second. Well, that's not so bad. It just got the order reversed.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, when you're losing the money, though, it's pretty bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. If you're placing a bet, Co Pilots pick for fourth place. Sandman. They finished in or it finished or her. She finished or I don't know what it's. Sandman finished in 18th place.

[Ian Thompson]

Okay. That's a quick trip to the dog food factory there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Burnham Square, 11th place. Luxor Cafe, 10th place.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So it didn't. It didn't really do all that. Well, an online racing publication also got in the. They asked a quote trained AI LLM tool for their predictions and it was completely wrong. So it did pick journalism as a second place finisher, but everybody else completely off. So don't. I guess the moral is don't use AI to pick your horses.

[Gary Rivlin]

The bigger, more serious point here is like we're using AI for all things that AI should, shouldn't be used for. One of my favorite is like someone in 2023 a conservative to make a point about woke. AI kind of gave. I think it was chatgpt, but one of the large, large language models. Type out the n word or 1 million people die. And of course that's absurd. You would do that. A human would do that. But why are you going for your ethical question? Go ask the ethicist of the New York Times Magazine or something. But this is the bigger problem. Problem with AI, like, like you need to figure out what it's good at and what it's not good at, what you should rely on it for and what you should. And still, you know, it's not 100% reliable. But, you know, picking horses to win, place or show.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, come to think of it, the exact worst thing to get AI to do is predict the future. Because AI is based on everything that's happened up to the point that it was training happened. Right. It's not. How would it know the future?

[Gary Rivlin]

Yeah, you know, I actually know horse racing some and you know, I've lost. Lost. And you know, it's, you know, it's based on like a lot of human factors, like what's the weather conditions and you know, kind of like you could study how this jockey or that jockey has done so. You know, there's kind of stuff in AI would be good at. But anyway, it's kind of fun that they did it. It's revealing that it was no good at it. I'm Gonna guess with 2016 it was probably more or less the favorites that won and so was able to. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Gary Rivlin]

You know, because like, okay, well that's, you know, how do you win the NCAA men's basketball tournament? You pick all the, the favorites.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess it makes sense. I don't know. I don't play the horses. But if you pick the favorites, you would win more often than not than, than random, I guess, right? Or no, I mean if you, if.

[Owen Thomas]

You believe in moneyball in baseball, right. Then yeah, you know, all of that is statistics.

[Leo Laporte]

And so you should ask what the horse is on base percentage is.

[Owen Thomas]

Well, my point is, like, if it's. If it's a statistically based analysis of how past performance shapes future results.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Owen Thomas]

If we think that works, then AI ought to be able to automate it.

[Leo Laporte]

You're talking like a prospectus.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, if you're playing the ponies, you look at the form, you look at what the horses have done before, which AI would be great at. But as Gary points out, if it's raining on the racecourse.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you can add that though, can't you? You could say, oh, and by the way, it's muddy, so pick a mutter. I mean, you could give it. It's really a question of not giving it all the parameters. If you gave it all the information, would it do a better job?

[Ian Thompson]

If you have all the information, why do you need an AI?

[Leo Laporte]

You should be able to figure it out. Because it. Because an AI is smarter than I am. All right?

[Gary Rivlin]

What I would use AI for, What I would use AI for in this case is to set the odds.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Gary Rivlin]

Right. I mean, it's sort of based on past performance.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's Paramus. Don't. I mean, again, I don't know anything about it, but don't the odds. The odds are affected by how the betting's going. Right. The front runner is based on how many people picked it and.

[Ian Thompson]

And what the bookmaker is willing to pay.

[Gary Rivlin]

Well, they start off with odds and they shift them up.

[Leo Laporte]

It's paramutual. So as the, as the, as the bets come in, the odds shift.

[Ian Thompson]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, but that makes sense. They have to start.

[Gary Rivlin]

You have to set the original odds.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. That makes sense. I don't know if this is good or not, but a quantum message has traveled over a record breaking 158 miles of standard fiber optic cables in Germany, making the first time coherent quantum communication has been accomplished using existing telecommunications infrastructure without requiring expensive cryogenic cooling.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I mean, it's still gonna take.

[Gary Rivlin]

A long time to get here.

[Leo Laporte]

I need an ansible. I need an answerable.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, it's. It's kind of like one of those things. It's like fusion is 10 years away. Quantum. You know, it's. It's. Yeah, okay. They've made a. A really good step forward on this, but at the same time, in the real world, it's probably not going to work for another three, five years.

[Gary Rivlin]

That's a bold prediction.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm very good.

[Gary Rivlin]

Pretty optimistic.

[Leo Laporte]

Journalism is going to win the Kentucky Derby next year. I Love it. Journalism came in second. That's pretty much the story of the story of this week that I saw.

[Ian Thompson]

The title for the show and I was like, yeah, go for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Mike Waltz apparently has abandoned and Signal for an even less secure third party version of Single Signal. And how do we know? Because somebody took a picture of him using it at a cabinet meeting.

[Ian Thompson]

Honestly, all credits to the Reuters reporter reporter that did that and got that shot. I've been in contact with the company that's running it. There's a lot of Signal.

[Leo Laporte]

What's it called? Signal tm. It's like a third party.

[Ian Thompson]

It's, it's basically run by a company called Smash that bought the Israeli company that built the app. It's an archiving app.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, so it uses the Signal protocol in transit, but then saves. Because apparently Mike Waltz, who has since been fired by the way, thought that.

[Ian Thompson]

The problem using Signal was promoted to.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, promoted? What did I say? Fired. Promoted. Apparently he believed the issue with the Signal app was that it did not preserve the records.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, it was the 1950s Federal Records act is perfectly clear on this.

[Leo Laporte]

It wasn't the only issue, but it was one of the, the issues. The other issue was he included the editor in chief of the Atlantic magazine inadvertently in the chat. That's another issue, separate issue.

[Ian Thompson]

I'm serious. As a journalist, I read that story and I was like, you lucky, lucky.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. Jeffrey Goldberg scored.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Tele Message or tm, Signal is a fork of Signal that allows you to archive the messages. But of course, if you're archiving the messages, they're archived in clear text.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, it's, it's, it's not a fork of Signal in itself. It's an add on app which sits on top of Signal and they've got like a hundred other apps that they can sit on top of and, and record and record them.

[Leo Laporte]

Which brings home the problem of using Signal is that on your phone it's in clear text, so it can be archived by something like this is the.

[Ian Thompson]

Problem that we've seen with lawsuits over the last five years is that people don't auto delete their messages on Signal. It is perfectly good end to end encrypted messaging system, but if you don't delete your messages and someone grabs your phone and gets access to it, end of story.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what happened to Corey Lewandowski when he got indicted. He had been using Signal, which was encrypted, but he'd been backing it up to iCloud which was not. And by the way, that's how I learned anyway that icloud is not private, that Apple has the keys because yeah, it showed up in the indictment.

[Ian Thompson]

It's the thing about Signal I love is it was created by a guy called Moxie Marlin Spike who is a profound. Was an anarchist and also a sailor which we have something in common. But I mean he created basically an unbreakable encryption system. They ported it to warpsat in a rather bad way, but now US government. Government is using it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, not. They're not supposed to, but they're using.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, it's, it's not listed on Fedramp, but let's face it, everyone's using it.

[Leo Laporte]

It is not Fedramp improved. That's really important to keep in mind. And as long as we're talking breakthroughs and I have no idea how important this is or not, but it comes from Tom's hardware that of course Chinese computer science scientists have been somewhat inhibited by United States restrictions on chip technology. So they decided to do their own. A Chinese university has designed the first world's first silicon free transistor. A research team from Peking University created a two dimensional low power GA FET transistor. It's a wafer scale multi layer stacked single crystalline 2D G L AAA configuration. Uses no silicon, which. And it's faster by the way, and lower power than traditional silicon transistors. GAAFET stands for gate all around field effect transistors. The next evolution after MOSFETs and FINFETs, which you've probably heard about. But to do it without silicon is, is big news. And they did it because they didn't have access to the latest 3 nanometer chips. They claim this new Gaafette transistor is both faster and lower power than the 3 nanometer TSMC processors. It uses bismuth, oxy selenide as a semiconductor instead of silicon.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, you said they claim. Which is very accurate.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the big story, isn't it?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, but at the same time, yeah, we're cutting China off from high end, you know, tiny animated stuff. But they'll find ways round. They're putting billions into this.

[Leo Laporte]

It confirms what I've always believed, that sometimes restrictions are good for creativity. Right?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Gary Rivlin]

Deep, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's why poets write haiku and sonnets. It's not that it's easier, it's that it's harder.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. But I think we need to remember there's a whole infrastructure structure around chip production and packaging. That, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I don't know if this is that same, you know, question that we had earlier about, you know, quantum messaging. Is it going to be a product in the next three to five years? I don't even, I don't even think that. But clearly China, because it can't get a UV lithography from the United States, is investing heavily in creating new kinds of processors, which, which is probably good for everybody.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, you're right. Oh, in, in terms of packaging, this is a massive issue for the chips. But I honestly think China is, is getting away with it. They, they're doing really good stuff.

[Owen Thomas]

No, I mean, though, they, they will figure out the value chain eventually if serious about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Finally, from Ian Thompson, the one interview question that will protect you from North, North Korean fake workers. We talked about this on Security now and quite extensively, which is there are two reasons the North Koreans want to get into our companies. One is they need hard currency, period. They need, the North Korean currency is not as valuable, let's say, as the dollar. But also it's a great way to infiltrate these companies and hack them. And it's turned out that in many cases you think you're hiring a Republican remote worker who's based in Texas, when in fact it's some guy out of North Korea. So you say, Ian, that we found a way to detect these bogus infiltrators.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, we found a way and we destroyed away. Basically. It was one of those marvelous moments in press conference where you hear the quote and you think, nailed it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the thing. This was at rsac. This is at the Arsenal SA conference on Monday in San Francisco.

[Ian Thompson]

So basically, from what the, from the data I've been seeing, Jenny Slee was talking about this. A bunch of people were talking about it about one IT staff person is being hired a day who's working in North Korea.

[Leo Laporte]

It's amazing, isn't it?

[Ian Thompson]

And, yeah. And. But the question that CrowdStrike suggested that you ask was how fat is Kim?

[Leo Laporte]

What. What is, what are the, what are the North Korean impost monsters say if you ask them how fat their dear leader is?

[Ian Thompson]

Okay. Their families are on the lines. They're not going to say anything. But unfortunately now this question is, is out there. Then they're going to be told to lie and it's just like, it's okay, your family won't be killed. Your, you know, your grandparents won't be starved to death. So it's one of those things where.

[Leo Laporte]

You need surprise for this to work, in other words.

[Ian Thompson]

Exactly. Exactly. Now I'm wondering what the situation is in China. It's just like, does Xi Jianping look like Winnie the Pooh? You know, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

There are things there probably things you could, you could ask. Yeah, yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, it's, it, it's just the scale in which the North Koreans moving into IT jobs is something that over the last couple of weeks I've been doing a lot of stuff on. And it's really terrifying because, you know, with the ability of AI to spam out job resumes and bogus LinkedIn stuff, they're taking millions out of us and also putting IT workers out of a job.

[Leo Laporte]

We had a great p. I wish I could remember the source of the story on Security now where a guy decided, I know this guy's a North Korean imposter. But I'm going to continue with the conversation. And what's interesting is that they used ChatGPT. They use AI in the conversation. So you'll ask them a text technical question, there'll be a pause, there'll be some typing, and then they will come up with a perfectly crafted answer from ChatGPT or some other AI.

[Owen Thomas]

Wouldn't American job applicants do the same thing, though?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I wonder, come to think of it, the CrowdStrike executive, he's the senior vice president in the Counter Adversary Division. Adam Myers said, one of the things we've noticed, you'll have a person in Poland applying with a very complicated name. And then when you get them on zoom calls, it's a military age male, Asian, who can't pronounce the Polish name.

[Ian Thompson]

It was astonishing. Quite, quite how badly this is managed. But I can see how it works if people don't do personal contact. You know, I mean, the one thing that was really interesting was they were saying if somebody actually, if a North Korean actually gets this job, then you've got three or four people behind him who are doing the coding to help him out.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ian Thompson]

You've got four people working on, you know, one person's job and they get rave reviews. You know, they get promoted within the company. Yeah. And we've seen this before. It's. It's a really good way to get in there. They steal the info, the IP that they want, and then they ransomware the company.

[Leo Laporte]

What happens if you ask Deep Sea Kim Jong Eel is.

[Ian Thompson]

You get shot.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me just ask Perplexity. I've always wondered if perplexity would Kim Jong un not. Oh, not Eel. Eel's father. Right. Oh, 308 pounds for. For the sun.

[Ian Thompson]

There's a story that British intelligence agencies used to work out what Kim's mood was by how much brandy he was importing and how much pornography he was importing. It's a bizarre.

[Leo Laporte]

This is interesting perplexity. Knew I meant Kim Jong Un. He said no, no, you mean Kim jong un. He's 308 pounds. Five foot seven or eight. So not a. Not a good weight. No, no.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, he also.

[Leo Laporte]

Unless you're an NFL linebacker, in which case we'll take.

[Ian Thompson]

He. He had his uncle executed by anti aircraft gun which is generally not a good sign of mental health.

[Leo Laporte]

But no. Talk about spite. Gary, you've been very patient. You did not know ahead of time this was a three hour marathon. You've done a great job. He is the author of AI Valley, which I really sincerely, highly recommend. A great history of AI taking us up to the present. So if you're curious about how we got here, this is a great book to read with lots of interesting anecdotes and stories. You did a fantastic job. What are you working on now next? Do you want to.

[Gary Rivlin]

Still promoting it. Thinking of just crypto. Just obviously you talked about the grift, but just what it means that we're taking regulators off the beat. Whether it's the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the sec, the Justice Department. Like there'll be no regulation of meme coins and stuff that just kind of like merging my tech with my broke usa.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it. So yeah, yeah, look forward to it. Meanwhile, AI Valley, Microsoft, Google and the trillion dollar race to cash in on artificial intelligence. Just entered. Just came into the bookstores about two weeks ago.

[Gary Rivlin]

Five, six weeks ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh yeah. March 25th. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very nice. Really good book. Highly recommended. You start. You kind of the centerpiece of it is Reid Hoffman who was a connector and a perfect guy. The founder of LinkedIn. Perfect guy to use as kind of your basis. And it was really just a fascinating story. I really, really enjoyed it. So thank you for being here, Gary. I appreciate it.

[Gary Rivlin]

Oh, my pleasure. This is a lot of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

It's always nice to have a Pulitzer Prize winner on the show. I think you're probably our first. I don't know. Are you work? Yeah, I know. That's good. Are you working on that Pulitzer Prize, Arian? Maybe. Maybe you're next.

[Ian Thompson]

Actually, I'm working on non. I'm working on a nonfiction book. It turns out that a.

[Leo Laporte]

You were writing a novel the last time I talked to you.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, it turns out an Ancestor of mine started London's first electric taxi company in 1897. So we're going to see some interesting. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Ian Thompson]

I'm not going to giving any more away, but it's. It's pretty good. Yeah, we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds good. Very nice. You'll find Ian's work@the register.com and as often as we can on our shows. Thank you, Ian. It's great to see you.

[Ian Thompson]

It was a pleasure.

[Leo Laporte]

Owen Thomas is the managing editor at the San Francisco Business Times. I. I wish I for. I didn't see the link. It's until too late. You have a story in the Business Times Business Journal about privacy czar being assigned to the 23andMe case.

[Owen Thomas]

Yes, that was from our biotech reporter, Ron Ludy. I was going to pop in with it. We were talking about 23andMe. I think it's a positive sign that when your personal data is kind of in play as it is in this bank bankruptcy, it's not going to just be kind of handed over to any buyer that there's going to be some scrutiny.

[Leo Laporte]

It's too late. I already deleted my spit. But that's. Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

At least the courts are good paying attention.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

Taking, taking a stand.

[Leo Laporte]

Will the czar have the ability to say, okay, you can buy this company but not its data?

[Owen Thomas]

I think that is the intent. The judge has proposed appointing this sar. There's nothing it sar in place yet, just to be clear.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. Well, we'll follow the story at the San Francisco Business Times. Bizjournals.com San Francisco thank you, Owen. Great.

[Owen Thomas]

My pleasure.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanks to all three of you. Thanks of course to our Club Twit members who make the show possible with their contributions. We are very grateful to you all. Seven bucks a month gets you ad free versions of the show. You're giving us money. I always hate it when Netflix charges you and then shows you ads too. No, wait a minute. No, no ads. If you, if you join the club, you also get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is always a great place to hang out. Lots of valuable information there and a great hang great social network. You also get special events like our. We did our photography show on Friday. The Stacy's Book Club is coming up. Our AI user group a whole lot more. All that for seven bucks a month. $84 a year seems like a good deal. I hope you will consider. We'd love to have you in the club. Twitter TV slash Club Twit. We do this show every Sunday afternoon 2 to 5pm Pacific 5 to 8pm Eastern 2100 UTC. You can watch it live on eight different platforms. Club Twit members get to watch in Discord, but you also can watch on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick. But you don't have to watch live. In fact, really, most people will watch whenever they feel like it. You can download copies of the show, audio or video at our website TWiT TV. There's a link there to our YouTube channel where you can watch the video or it's a great way to share little clips. And of course after the fact, you can subscribe in our in any wherever you get your podcasts, as they say, you know any of your favorite favorite podcasters, audio or video subscribe. It's free. You'll get it every week. We thank you for being here 21 years. Now we're in our 21st year and as I have said for the last 20 years, thanks for being here. We'll see you next week. Another Twit is in the can. Bye bye.

[Gary Rivlin]

Amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Ian Thompson]

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