This Week in Tech 1031: My 3 Friends

Summary

Summary of "This Week in Tech 1031: My 3 Friends" Podcast Episode

Release Date: May 12, 2025

Podcast Information:
Title: All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
Host: Leo Laporte
Description: Leo Laporte convenes a panel of tech personalities to discuss the most pressing issues in technology in a fun, relaxed, and informative manner.

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1. Introduction and Panelist Introductions

The episode kicks off with Leo Laporte introducing the panelists:

• Stacey Higginbotham: Policy Fellow at Consumer Reports and longtime host of "This Week in Google."
• Wesley Faulkner: Leading discussions on AI and tech policy.
• Shoshana Weissman: Head of Digital Media at R Street Institute.

Notable Interaction:

• Leo Laporte (00:00): "My three... it's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show."

2. Antitrust Actions Against Big Tech

Apple's Legal Battle

Apple is currently appealing a court decision that deemed them a monopoly. The company expressed confidence in overturning the verdict without expecting an injunction.

Notable Quotes:

• Apple Representative (04:00): "Apple says we're going to appeal it, but we don't expect an injunction."
• Stacey Higginbotham (04:03): "Well, yeah, because that's like cash money."

Google's Monopoly Rulings

Google has lost two antitrust trials, reinforcing its status as a monopoly in both search and advertising markets. The government is pushing for remedies such as selling off Chrome, licensing search data, and ceasing payments to Apple and other partners.

Discussion Points:

• The complexity of enforcing antitrust remedies without crippling existing services like Firefox.
• The implications for startups and market competition.

Notable Quotes:

• Wesley Faulkner (06:08): "Just put a number and just say Google, we're capping you at 80%..."
• Stacey Higginbotham (07:35): "You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet."

3. Privacy Concerns and AI Integration

AI's Impact on Privacy

The discussion shifts to AI, with concerns raised about AI systems retaining user data indefinitely, leading to increased privacy risks.

Notable Quotes:

• Wesley Faulkner (08:47): "It stores that as part of your profile. And it doesn't forget when it comes."
• Leo Laporte (12:10): "To underscore your point, Wesley, it knows a lot about me."

AI vs. Traditional Search Engines

Debate on whether AI-driven search tools are replacing traditional search engines and the implications for user privacy and data security.

Notable Quotes:

• Shoshana Weissman (09:12): "More and more people are just using generally, chatgpt other tools too, instead of search."
• Leo Laporte (11:15): "ChatGPT seems to remember a lot about me, and that freaks me out a little bit."

4. Government Regulation and Policy Implications

Federal vs. State Privacy Laws

Panelists discuss the need for comprehensive federal privacy legislation to supersede the fragmented state laws, ensuring consistent protection across all states.

Notable Quotes:

• Stacey Higginbotham (31:51): "We all agree... we need a federal privacy law."
• Shoshana Weissman (32:02): "Yeah, no, no, I got you, I got you."

Missouri's New Content Moderation Rule

Missouri's Attorney General Andrew Bailey has introduced a rule requiring tech platforms to allow users to choose their own content moderators, challenging the existing moderation practices of companies like Facebook and Instagram.

Discussion Points:

• Feasibility and practicality of implementing user-selected moderators.
• Potential conflicts with the First Amendment and operational challenges for platforms.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte (47:33): "Platforms must now provide a choice screen in the state of Missouri..."
• Shoshana Weissman (53:28): "There are so many laws... like about copyright and section 230 exemptions..."

5. Environmental Impact of AI Data Centers

Water Usage and Sustainability

AI data centers are expanding in regions already facing water scarcity, such as Arizona and California, raising environmental concerns.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte (89:18): "Every time you do a query here... you are causing these problems."
• Stacey Higginbotham (90:00): "It's not just water. They're also looking into electricians..."

6. Security Concerns and Infrastructure

Router and IoT Security

The panel emphasizes the vulnerabilities in routers and IoT devices, advocating for legislation requiring manufacturers to disclose support durations to enhance security.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte (41:22): "These products are really designed to be thrown out, which they shouldn't be."
• Stacey Higginbotham (36:58): "We're pitching it to the states because that's a little bit more likely."

Government and Corporate Security Flaws

Examples include government entities using insecure communication tools and ongoing breaches in major companies like AT&T and other telecoms.

Notable Quotes:

• Shoshana Weissman (52:46): "The government can infringe on it and is always trying to..."
• Leo Laporte (60:56): "This was a perfect example of screw around and find out."

7. Social Implications of AI and Technology

AI as Friends and Social Isolation

Mark Zuckerberg's assertion that AI friends could replace human connections is critically examined, highlighting concerns about social isolation and the quality of AI interactions.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte (82:00): "Mark Zuckerberg says the average person has fewer than three friends."
• Stacey Higginbotham (88:56): "I can't figure out why we can't see this."

8. Legislation Updates and Consumer Protections

FTC's Ban on Hidden Fees

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has banned hidden fees for live events and short-term rentals, aiming to enhance transparency for consumers.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte (50:34): "Platforms now must allow choice, but how will companies implement that?"

FCC's Proposed Rule on Subscription Cancellations

Efforts to make subscription cancellations as straightforward as sign-ups have been delayed, reflecting ongoing challenges in enforcing consumer-friendly policies.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte (111:26): "The rule was great because it said it should be... able to cancel online."
• Stacey Higginbotham (113:35): "It's terrible now because there's tariff surcharges..."

9. Sponsorship and Advertisements

Note: This summary intentionally excludes all sponsorship and advertisement segments to focus solely on the substantive content discussed during the episode.

10. Conclusion and Closing Remarks

The episode concludes with panelists wrapping up discussions on various topics, including the ongoing challenges in tech policy, security, and the environmental impact of technological advancements.

Final Thoughts:

• The importance of advocating for robust privacy laws.
• The need for sustainable practices in the expansion of tech infrastructure.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte (155:00): "We need to advocate and say that you care about these things."
• Stacey Higginbotham (157:06): "It's easy to sign up."

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Key Takeaways:

• Antitrust Measures: Big tech companies like Apple and Google are under intense legal scrutiny, with significant implications for market competition and consumer choice.
• Privacy and AI: The integration of AI into daily tools raises substantial privacy concerns, emphasizing the need for comprehensive federal privacy legislation.
• Environmental Impact: The expansion of AI data centers in water-stressed areas poses sustainability challenges that require urgent attention.
• Security Vulnerabilities: Both government and private sector entities face ongoing security threats, highlighting the necessity for improved infrastructure and proactive security measures.
• Social Dynamics: The potential for AI to replace human interactions raises questions about social isolation and the quality of digital relationships.
• Legislative Progress: Recent FTC and state-level regulations aim to protect consumers from hidden fees and improve transparency, though implementation remains complex.

This episode of This Week in Tech provides a comprehensive overview of the intersection between technology, policy, and society, underscoring the multifaceted challenges and considerations in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twitter this Week in Tech. Great panel for you this week. Wesley Faulkner is back. Stacey Higginbotham and Shoshana Weissman will talk about Apple, what they're going to do next. After being spanked by the court, Google is now guilty twice of being a monopoly. What are the remedies? And we'll talk about AI. Is it costing too much to use? All that and more coming up next on Twitter. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech, episode 1031, recorded Sunday, May 11, 2025. My three it's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. I have gathered together three fine folk for our panel today. Stacy Hagenbotham is back. It's great to see you, Stacy. She's a policy fellow at Consumer Reports, of course. Longtime host of this Week in Google. Are you sad now that this Week in Google is all about AI, intelligent machines? Would you like to come back?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I mean, could I talk about AI with you guys? Of course.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

But no, I'm not sad. How could you not be all about AI?

[Leo Laporte]

I know.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

That's what everything's about.

[Leo Laporte]

We had a sponsor say, well, we want to buy the AI show. And I said, they're all AI shows. What are you talking about? That's all we talk about today. Wesley Faulkner is also here. Hello, Wes. Good to see you.

[Wesley Faulkner]

It's good to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a nice coincidence. I don't think Benito know that Stacy introduced me to you at south by Southwest about a decade ago.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I actually wore this shirt in her honor.

[Leo Laporte]

Texas. Texas, baby.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Texas. Texas. Yeehaw.

[Leo Laporte]

Both of you are Texas refugees, right?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I was just about to ask where he is now.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I'm in the mountains, so I'm in Roanoke, Virginia.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Which is really great.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that where Sir Walter Raleigh went and, I don't know, invented tobacco, Something like that?

[Wesley Faulkner]

I mean, what's the great thing about being an American? Is that I don't need to know history.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I just mangled it, so I'm not sure which is worse, not knowing it or mangling. Also from R Street, it's Shoshana Weissman, head of Digital [e-mail] hello, Shoshana.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Thanks for having me.

[Leo Laporte]

Always a pleasure today with a marmot over her left shoulder. Did I get that right?

[Shoshana Weissman]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. It's not a sloth.

[Shoshana Weissman]

No, I mean, like, marmots are just part more part of like what I run into day to day in the mountains. Like, I haven't seen a sloth in one yet, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. That seems fair. Do marmots move quickly?

[Shoshana Weissman]

Oh, yeah, they're really, really fast. That's. It's part of what's so exciting about them. When you get like a really good view of a marmot, that's like special.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I see. I. We may not know history, but we have, we learn a lot about nature here, which is very good. So Apple got a little bit spanked. We mentioned this last week. They have decided they are, they're going to go to the upper court now and the district court and appeal it. But they also said we don't think there's, there's a chance in hell that they're gonna, they're going to have an, they're going to issue an injunction, so. And of course, Apple's not alone. EPIC immediately said we're putting Fortnite on the iPhone. Amazon added a buy it button right there on the Kindle or get it, I think it says. Apple says we're going to appeal it, but we don't expect an injunction. However, we're going to keep fighting it all the way up to the Supreme Court.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Well, yeah, because that's like cash money.

[Leo Laporte]

Cash money, baby.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

You got to keep that coming in as long as you possibly can.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. There's a trend in the top stories of the week, which is that big tech in general is getting its spanking this week. Google now has lost two trials. The judge in the search trial is now Judge Mehta. Not related to Facebook Meta is now hearing. This is an Abrikus brief from Y Combinator is now hearing appeal briefs and testimony as he makes his determination. I think he has to the 25th to decide what the remedies should be. The government is saying break, not break up Google, but make them do one, one, one or all of three things. Sell Chrome, give or license out its search data. To which Senator Picharri said, nah, you can't do that. That would be like telling Coca Cola to give Pepsi their secret recipe. It'd put us out of business. Or, and, or stop paying $20 billion to Apple and hundreds of millions of dollars to Firefox and Samsung and others to guarantee their placement in the browser. The judge may say all three. He may say one of three. The Y Combinator, which is of course a startup incubator, says you gotta do all, you gotta do it, man. Because we are already seeing, you know, Google is putting a kibosh on our business monopoly power, they wrote, gives a monopolist myriad ways to exclude competition. The remedy order will need to anticipate and prevent any retaliation against startups that intend to compete on its merits. They're saying, hey, we represent startups and Google's bad for startups.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Just one clarifying question on the Chrome sale, is there also like a ban from them ever making another browser?

[Leo Laporte]

I think it was for five or six years. Yeah.

[Wesley Faulkner]

So five or six years, okay, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Which isn't long really. I mean they would come back with a browser as soon as they could. There's also the issue of Chrome is an open source project called Chromium, admittedly mostly financed and staffed by Google. But how do you sell an open source project?

[Wesley Faulkner]

But would that also include Chrome OS because it's based off Chrome?

[Leo Laporte]

I guess it would. I don't know. There's a lot of questions. Yeah, and I don't know if Judge Meta is capable of making a decision on that one. Plus if you tell Google stop paying Apple and Mozilla and Samsung, that might have the wrong impact. It certainly would put Firefox, has to put. Mozilla says put us out of business. Be the end of Firefox. Which is, let's say, let's. I mean it's one of the only competing browser technologies, so that would be kind of a negative thing.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I mean if I were Fox, I'd. Yeah, I would go to Perplexity and say, you're going to buy instead of buying Chrome.

[Leo Laporte]

The head of Mozilla said it put us out of business as well. You're on a. Yeah, so Stacy.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

No, I was just going to say, well, you can't make a drastic change in the ecosystem like this with have it without it having. What is it? You gotta crush a few bad apples. I don't know, I'm just.

[Leo Laporte]

You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yes. And like I'm, I'm devastated about Firefox. You know, we love. Like who doesn't?

[Leo Laporte]

I use it, I love it, we want it.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

But I'm frustrated because they still, they've talked about going after the ad, the ad monopoly, which to me is way more of an issue than the search engine monopoly, but whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

But the search. So the monopoly in Chrome paying people to. Forcing them or paying them to use Chrome all helps the ad monopoly too, right?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yes, it does.

[Leo Laporte]

It gives them information about you, us, me, and that's what helps them.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

But who's using search engines today anyway?

[Leo Laporte]

Are we still using search Engines, isn't it? That's, that's the, that's the. The funny thing about the whole thing is this is right when AI seems to be taken over anyway.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I mean, it's the default. So. Go, go. Shoshana.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Sorry. Oh, no, sorry. You go ahead. You were starting.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Oh, I was just saying it's the default thing that I use before I go to AI at the moment for, for any random thing.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you use?

[Wesley Faulkner]

Just Google search.

[Leo Laporte]

Uh oh, interesting.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I don't use AI Search because it is a separate. A separate thing and it is the, The. The memory is stickier and so I'm always concerned. You could clear your cookies and log out of services, but when.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a good.

[Wesley Faulkner]

It stores that as part of your profile. And it doesn't forget when it comes.

[Leo Laporte]

To, when it comes to privacy. AIs. What you're saying is worse.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yes, exactly.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

So when you're looking for ways to dispose of a dead body.

[Leo Laporte]

Where are you going to go? Eddie Q threw a monkey wrench into the search antitrust case when he testified, to the shock of everybody and the dismay of everybody, that Google searches. Eddie Q, by the way, is the senior vice president of services at Apple. Now, people pointed out that Eddie might have a dog in this hunt, right? Because Apple stands to perhaps lose $20 billion a year in its services, bottom line. So. Which is where it sticks it. So maybe Eddy Q had an ulterior motive, but he testified that Google searches declined in Safari for the very first time last quarter.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking about too. That, like, I'm skeptical of a lot of the way that American courts go after companies with antitrust. But even to the degree they do, the remedies I feel like sometimes just don't make sense. It's like when you want to break up stuff, it's like, okay, we'll break them up into what really can be done here to make it better. And then search is declining. I agree with Wesley that I'm a little skeptical because ChatGPT seems to remember a lot about me, and that freaks me out a little bit. But more and more people are just using generally, chatgpt other tools too, instead of search. So right as search is getting some really, really big competition, courts are like, oh, now, let's do this now. Like, as this is happening, which is kind of. It feels kind of silly to me, like, this might not be the right timing for it. Plus there's like, you know, the way courts have gone after Meta for. For having instagram even though when they acquired it it wasn't a sure bet. I just think that a lot of this doesn't always make a ton of sense, but I think with timing it's just a slow process and it's always going to end up being a little bit behind that way, but it can have some weird consequences.

[Leo Laporte]

Like now, just to underscore what you just said, Wesley, Microsoft ChatGPT turned on a feature where it would remember everything you've ever said to it. So I asked, I just asked it. What do you know about me? Well, you're Leo Laporte, your podcaster with radio broadcasting background. You produce and monetize tech focused podcasts, know about podcast strategy, host red ads, direct sponsorships. You're currently selling your house, preferring for a move. You use Debian, follow Formula one in the Super Bowl. You have a daughter named Abby who's interested in ethical AI development. You're accelerationist in your views on AI, optimistic about its potential, believe human created content will green value as AI generated content proliferates. You do not drink alcohol, but interested in whiskey as a gift for others. You enjoy historical topics, creative image generation and technical deep dives into subject like common lisp. How does it know all this about me? These are all searches I've done. So to underscore your point, Wesley, it knows a lot about me.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

You did not hit that last sentence where they were like, you maintain a high cognitive bar for interaction. I'm like, dude.

[Leo Laporte]

And prefer blunt directive responses. What I don't know about that? Is that true?

[Wesley Faulkner]

I've had it, like use it for responding to emails and it'll throw in something like that. And I was like, oh, don't say that.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm in a busy period of life. Yeah, yeah, there's some. So first of all, there's some surprising facts in here that it knows, which would certainly be of interest to advertisers. For instance, that I'm shopping for whiskey. But there's also some. It's also generating some judgments. Like I prefer blunt direct responses. Where did it get that? I don't think I. Oh, I know. I told it that I said stop being so namby pamby. Give me blunt direct responses. So that's different.

[Shoshana Weissman]

It was funny. I recently asked it what it knew about me. Not just facts, but what it could think from what all the stuff it knows about me. And one of my favorite things was that it was very aware I live a very idiosyncratic life. They're like, oh, with all your dietary restrictions and all your hobbies, like they're a unique combo. So I bet you go about your life very differently than most people. And I was like, man, that's, that's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And something an advertiser would probably want to know too. Right? So this is your, this is exact. Just to your point that this is very hard for a judge at this point to make a determination that is going to be effective in curbing Google's monopolistic behavior and not have, you know, all sorts of spray and problems. And Google might be. Now when Eddie Q, by the way said, said that Google searches were down on Apple, Google stock went down seven and a half percent in that day. It was like freaked people out. The company released a one paragraph statement saying hey, wait a minute, we continue to see overall query growth in search. This includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple's devices and platforms. I feel like they're fudging statistics somehow, but I'm not sure where. In other words you're saying we're, you know, hey, more generally as we enhance search with new features, AI people are seeing that Google search is more useful for more of their queries and they're accessing it for new things in new ways. We're excited to continue this innovation. Yeah, yeah, we make them, we pay them to do that.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Let me, let me put forth a remedy that I wish that they would do. Yes, they should put whatever metric they want, share of advertising, market share, whatever. Just put a number and just say Google, we're capping you at 80% and you have to do whatever you can to get to 80% within two, three years.

[Leo Laporte]

Like decrease your market share. Yeah, yeah.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And if they don't do it, then they'll force remedy.

[Leo Laporte]

How would you, so what would Google do? Take out ads saying don't use our browser.

[Wesley Faulkner]

They can invest in other companies they can invest more in like Mozilla.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what, that's a great idea.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Supposedly they could do, they could try to make the environment better for other people so that it makes it an evening playing ground. And then they could choose exactly how that they from a financial standpoint can play their forecast. And then that way if, if they're told what they need to do, they, they won't do the extras that they need to use like putting it in other properties or, or giving it like whenever I open up Edge for instance, it says hey, do you want to switch to Chrome? Like stuff like that. They would stop doing and they can audit what they're doing to, to Juice the shares and then figure out what they can change to make it get down and, and prop up others. Just they would be less anti competitive and that would change their actions and you would have a strict metric that everyone can monitor to make sure it works.

[Leo Laporte]

You should write a notes.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Judge Matt there's, there's the.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

And I'm going to screw it. It's the Herfindahl Hirschman index and that is used by the FTC to measure or sorry not the FTC, the DOJ's antitrust. That's a measure of market concentration. Now what happens is you fight to figure out how you want to measure your market. Like again it's like whatever data, whatever KPIs you're going to pick. So you know, do you want search engine, do you want it per user? Do you want it per different browsers or not browsers, sorry, different operating systems. And we could, I mean that's a total thing that you can do and there's many, many really boring research papers about this and I only know about it because I covered antitrust for the phone companies and broadband.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

But yes, you're, you're spot on with. That's exactly what people should be doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually there's a good example of this untoward media in our YouTube chat saying I'm reminded of the time Microsoft put a hundred million dollars into Apple and saved it when Microsoft was being prosecuted for antitrust behavior.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Intel did the same thing with amd. That's, that's why intel was like interesting. Here, keep going, keep going.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Not, not be out of any altruistic reason probably but just oh no, they wanted that.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

No, it was.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't want to be a monopoly. We just. What, so you're saying 80% that'd be okay, Wesley. 80%.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I don't know, just pick whatever number that not 100.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Or, or when choose the metric. And then now everyone knows that you can actually verify this externally too. So it's not just a big secret like oh, they divested from Chrome but then they bought Mozilla or they invested so much more that they're able to still use that to funnel whatever. It keeps them from doing untoward, underhanded things and it actually changes their behavior.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple implied, Eddie Q implied that Apple was cons was planning or looking at not replacing Google Search with Apple Search, but replacing it with AI. And to that end Google by the way said oh yeah, we're talking with them about using our AI Gemini. There's a rumor of A deal with Anthropic, the makers of Claude, which is a very good AI. And Perplexity, although I'm reading a piece from Club Mac Stories, but John Voorhees, who said maybe not Perplexity because its CEO shows not only contempt for the open web, but says, we're going to make a browser and by the way, it's going to track everything users do online and sell hyper personalized ads. And that's a good thing, isn't it? There he is.

[Wesley Faulkner]

It actually is.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

So a lot of people will find that a good thing because they don't quite understand what's happening. I mean, people still are very excited about super personalized everything, even though they don't understand that that super personalization comes because they're being stopped.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm kind of flattered that Chat GPT knows so much about me though. That's kind of cool.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

And then to get all that for free just because you get some really, like, juicily like appropriately targeted ads, or maybe you get weirded out by like, oh my God, how do they know about the warts of my feet? You know, those are, those are just moments where you're just like, oh, I don't understand. And you shrug it off and you keep, you keep feeding the beast all your data.

[Leo Laporte]

Google last month lost its case against the Department of Justice, who was suing it, saying, you have a monopoly in advertising, which I think is actually a serious problem. They control both the buy and sell end of advertising as well as being the platform for the advertising. The U.S. district Court ruled that Google monopolized open web digital ad markets. The DOJ says Google should sell its ad exchange. It also wants it to sell Google Ad Manager, which was, remember it bought DoubleClick for publishers. And so it's saying it wants Google to spin off those ad portions. Google might end up at the end of this year a much smaller company, or maybe not because it takes a while, but at some point a much smaller company. After all this.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah. Remember, so Microsoft has been through so many antitrust cases and they're all, like Shoshana said, a little bit late, right? Like, yeah, yeah. For bundling as everything started to go on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They put the browser in the, in the operating system, like, oh, shocking.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

And then, you know, there'll be so many appeals and this will take forever. And by the time it's done, they will have, I mean, the point of the appeals, sure, you can stop it, but it also buys you plenty of time to figure out the next angle to like, get your cash flow well.

[Leo Laporte]

But remember what happened with the Microsoft case? And Paul Thurotta on our Windows Weekly show reminded me that Steve Ballmer spent a year of his tenure as CEO negotiating with the dog and finally got out of the spit. They wanted to break it up. They got out of that and did a consent decree which just said, you know, we won't do this. We won't be so rapacious anymore. And the DOJ put an ombudsman inside Microsoft watching what they're doing. They conceded a lot, but they didn't get broken up. And I suspect the same thing will. I imagine that those negotiations will happen, although everything's kind of up in the air with the new administration. This is one of the things that's, I think, problematic for the United States is that every four years, they change their point of view. Right.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Well, okay, up until now, I would say they may have changed a little bit about the point of view. Like, so, yes, you have historically seen, like, FTCs or DOJs, like, stop prosecuting cases. But at a very small level, what's happened now is the. They have blown up the idea of the government enforcing any rules, and that is very different. So I would. I would caution us and say what is happening now is very different from just a mere change in point of view.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I would definitely take sentiment running through the nation.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yes, I would argue that the rules are always harsh. It's just that the favor. It's just they choose where to point the gun. So it's never, like, enforced equally. They just choose who is going to be the focus for that quarter term.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's based on who they're pissed off at at the moment. And, you know, remember in 2017, President Trump said, we're gonna ban TikTok. And then Congress a few, you know, five, eight years later passed a law banning TikTok. And then Trump gets reelected and says, no, we're not going to ban TikTok. And in fact, as far as I can tell, that law saying TikTok has to be either divested to an American company or shut down is never going to go into effect. Trump says, yeah, I'm just going to keep delaying it.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

The law went into effect. He's just not following forcing the law.

[Leo Laporte]

He's just not going to enforce it. Yes, you're right. It is a law.

[Shoshana Weissman]

I actually think it's a huge problem, though. It's interesting, too, because I think it's part of what Stacey was getting at a little bit too, earlier, that, like, the, the new Trump FTC also does not like tech, but also, to Wesley's point, like, the administrations go after people they don't like, which I think is a bad thing, that they should be going after people breaking the law or causing problems. Not. Not there shouldn't be favoritism. But it's kind of inherent in politics, which is really sad that it's just human nature and politics where it's hard to overcome that stuff. But then it's like. Like you're saying with Trump too, like with the, with the TikTok stuff, it's just all like, oh, he likes them now. So, like they're. They're like in the clear, which is not a great governing strategy, but it's not unique to him either. Maybe he takes it more extreme. But I see this constantly where it's like, oh, I like them, so whatever, versus, like, oh, I don't like them, so I'll actually go after them.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and if you like AI, then you'll like what the Trump administration is doing, because they overruled Biden's executive order on AI safety. They've now said, you know, we don't want any restrictions on AI at all. So. Yeah, that's right. It's a gun, but it's aimed in different directions every few years.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

And I would caution that there is a. There's an evolution in viewpoint in the electorate as well.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's true. I think you're right.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Like, we shouldn't want everything to stay exactly static because then we would still be hanging out, you know, in 1776, with the lack of voting rights, etc. Right, so.

[Leo Laporte]

So we do point. Yes. I mean, as a white male owning property, though, I think that's fine.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I mean, yeah, I wouldn't be allowed to vote. The rest.

[Leo Laporte]

None of you would be able to vote. I would get the one vote in this panel.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah. Person would property in that situation. Yeah, I was against that.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you make an excellent point, Stacy. We've come a long way, haven't we?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, well, we expect it to change as our needs change as a society.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes.

[Wesley Faulkner]

There's a difference between leadership and management. And management is being able to marshal everyone in a direction and then head there and keep everyone in line. That's management leadership is going on top of a hill and saying we should be going in that direction.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And the loosening restrictions helps with management. It lets people raise money, it helps people move faster in the thing that they're going to do. But I think removing, like, safeguards is. Is not something that helps with leadership. People are going to move faster, but they may be going in the wrong direction. And by the time we look like turn around and see where we are, we could be a few like meters or miles or large distances from where we should be. And we have to backtrack, which would waste time. So it advantages people who want to move fast. Yes, but not in terms of leadership, which I think that's, that's more compelling.

[Leo Laporte]

Ideally you have both, right? And maybe one administration is a leader and one administration is a manager, but you need both. You need some vision, you need to know where you're going, you need some leadership, but you also need to manage. Once you've built the road, you need to manage it. You can't just charge over the hill.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And the question is, no one's even they say we want to be dominant, we want to win this. There is nothing in leadership. It's all about management. We just want to go faster. So buy more GPUs. And then you can see, even with Deepseek they were like, well, we looked at the fundamental how this was put together and they were able to get some really big gains. And so going faster without looking back and doing the deep like actual work of figuring out how things work and how they work best. It allows you to be flat footed and caught off guard.

[Leo Laporte]

And so time for move fast and break things. But there's also a time to build and fix things.

[Wesley Faulkner]

As long as there's also it's foundational, we need to build the foundation. So if you're banning the foundation and move and building on top of that, it's all going to fall apart. Sorry. Go Stacy.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Oh no, I was just going to say there's also two different, I guess, worldviews or perspectives here. One is what is the role of government versus what are the role of business?

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

And I mean I know that we like to think they're the same and they should be the same, but that's crazy talk because nobody actually loves their employer slash company that much that they would trust them with like their social safety net. So you're totally right. And then there's that extra dynamic in.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if we want to bring in history, there was at the very beginning of this country a fork in the road. There was, are we, is, is the government going to be about supporting business or is the government going to be about supporting its people? And we have over many years made that choice again and again and again. But essentially Alexander Hamilton and his faction won and America was About business. The feeling being if you support business, and this was at the beginning of an industrial era that we became a mighty power as a result of if you support business, everybody will benefit in the long run. It's an interesting.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I remember that song at Hamilton. What was that?

[Leo Laporte]

It wasn't in the show, the Broadway show. No, but it was essentially the debate between Monroe, Madison, Jefferson, who are agrarians, you know, and the South. And it was the north versus the South, New York versus Virginia.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

It was more about monetary policy.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what it was. That's right.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

But I would not.

[Leo Laporte]

But for instance, Hamilton wanted a federal bank. He did, Right.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

He wanted a government that could make unilateral decisions around money and set monetary policy in part because he. I don't know if it was pro business, I can see how you would say it was like pro industrialization because the north is super industrial.

[Leo Laporte]

He also made trade deals all over the world. Right.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

But I don't think he ever abandoned the idea that a government's serve the people. Core purpose of the government was to serve the people.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they're all people. Some of them own businesses. That's all. Corporations are people now too. The people are in charge in Texas. Big tech is not above the law. According to Attorney General Ken Paxton. For years Google secretly tracked people's movements, private searches, and even their voice prints and facial geometry through their products and services. Paxton says, I fought back and won. Google will pay $1.4 billion to Texas to settle the claims the company collected users data without permission.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, do it. Ken Paxton. I mean, I'm not a huge Paxton fan, but sometimes you do the right thing.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, I'll do you one better. Pass a privacy law.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, federal, not a state one. Because we have state privacy laws. We have.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

California has a federal privacy law that doesn't pre the best parts of state privacy laws.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the problem. Yeah, Maria, law actually preempted the state laws. That's the problem. But we do. We all agree, everybody who is on our panels, everybody who's tech savvy agrees we need a federal privacy law. We need to get the data brokers under controls.

[Shoshana Weissman]

And we agree with that. But we want preemption just because like when you have the patchwork, you know. Oh yeah, about that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's okay to preempt it as long as it's a better law.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Yeah, no, no, I got you, I got you.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't preempt. You know, California has a strong law and it seemed to me, Maria Cantwell, I was always puzzled why she wanted a federal privacy law. And then I realized, oh, it's because the state laws are so, they're getting stronger and stronger. Illinois has a very strong privacy law. And so let's get, let's make a federal law that's weaker and preempt the state laws is not what we want. We want a stronger federal law law. Right?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah. The, the one there was actually a really good one. I think it was two years ago. Not last year's, our law, but that one was okay. But then it didn't pass. And then we got this next one.

[Leo Laporte]

And I feel like it's never, there's never going to be a successful. Maybe I'm wrong.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

The more I learn about passing legislation, the more depressed I get as an individual. Good lord.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Yeah, I mean, I brought a lot of really simple, like, really, like 99.9% of people would agree, like small, narrow, simple stuff to lawmakers. And then, and I mean, even agencies, too. And they're like, yeah, this is a great idea. And then they're like, but it's not sexy, so we're not going to do it. I'm like, just do the thing.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, I'm pitching a law right now that's like that. And I'm like, please, let's make it happen. But it's probably not going to happen.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Say more. Say more.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, hold on. Hold that thought. I do want to find out what is that to the degree you could talk about it, Stacey, but we're going to take a break. It's great to have Stacey Higginbotham here. She is a policy fellow now with Consumer Reports, and you could say she works with that kind of policy. That's fantastic. We're so glad you're working for us. Thank you, Stacy. Shoshana Weissman doing the [e-mail], head of digital media over there. It's great to have you and Wesley Faulkner, who is leading the charge over the [e-mail] Great to see all three of you. Our show today, brought to you by. We were talking about privacy. ExpressVPN more than a sponsor. It's the VPN I use and recommend going online without ExpressVPN. Like driving a car without insurance. Yeah, you might be a great driver, but with all the crazy people out there on the road these days, why would you take that risk? This is why everyone needs ExpressVPN every time you connect to an unencrypted network, whether it's a cafe, a hotel, an airport. Your online data is not secure. Any hacker on the same network can gain access to and steal your personal data. It doesn't take much technical knowledge to hack someone. Just some cheap hardware. A smart 12 year old could do it. Your data is valuable. Hackers can make up to $1,000 per person selling personal info on the dark web. ExpressVPN stops hackers from stealing your data by creating a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the Internet and the VPN you use. The choice you make, that's super important. You need to trust the VPN that you choose. I Trust and use ExpressVPN. I love them. They go the extra mile to make sure your data is absolutely invisible. ExpressVPN is the best VPN. It's super secure. To take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption. It's easy to use. You fire up the app, you click one button, you're protected. And it works on all devices, phones, laptops, tablets and more. So you can stay secure on the go. Rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and the Verge. In fact, when I travel, I use it to catch the football game or my shows and to keep me secure. Secure your online data today by visiting ExpressVPN.com TWIT that's E X P R-E-S-S V-P N.com TWIT to find out how you can get up to four extra months free when you buy a two year package. ExpressVPN.com TWIT all right, Stacy, what are you working on?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Oh, can you tell us?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I don't want to.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Oh, yeah, we, we issued a press release. I was so excited.

[Leo Laporte]

Must be real.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, we, in March we put forth model legislation. So that's just Consumer Reports, Perg Security Group, center for Democracy and Technology. We basically wrote a law and are now shopping around and hopefully someone will be like, oh, I think this law is so great, I'm going to totally pass it. And it is forcing manufacturers. Sorry. Requiring manufacturers to disclose when they plan to stop supporting their connected devices or routers. So any connected consumer product, when you buy it, there should be that minimum guaranteed support time frame. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we talked about that.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, we totally did because.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations. So it's going great, right? Everybody's going to get on board, it's going to pass, President's going to sign it. Deal done.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Sure, sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Why is everybody pitching it to the States?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, we're pitching it to the states because that's a little bit more likely.

[Leo Laporte]

Go to the states. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

But I mean, it is like, oh, sorry, that's my dog. Hi.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought it was Ernie. Bernie Sanders for a minute. Go ahead.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, we just. Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

The FBI dog, by the way. Bernie Sanders.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Bernie Sanders.

[Leo Laporte]

You're getting some success pitching this around.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

No, I was going to say we've actually had a really compelling reason this is useful is the FBI just told everybody last week that if you're using routers from, you know, earlier than 20, 2010, you should get rid of them because they're being targeted by a botnet. So that is exactly why we need this. Because the FBI was like, you know, generally if it's older than 2010, that's 15 years. It's probably not supported, but we don't know. But that's the kind of thing we want to, like, just be able to tell people, like, hey, you could find this easily. This means you're not supported. This means you are get rid of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, it seems so little to ask.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Is there a threshold of like, how many devices? Or for instance, if I'm like a independent hardware manufacturer. I don't know if this is going to take off or not. So do I still need to disclose at that point?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Excellent question. That is why we are pushing a minimum, like supported time frame that you disclose. And then you can change it at any point in time. You just have to, when you change it, put it on the product web page.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Ah, so like, because.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yes. Yeah. Because you might actually, like now, I do think if you're going to sell a connected product, you should make a commitment to support it for at least two years. That's. I mean, unless it's like a $10, like, toy.

[Leo Laporte]

Two years doesn't seem very long.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Actually, it's not. And like a lot of people, like, I get a lot of pushback.

[Leo Laporte]

These are durable goods you expect to have for 10 years or more. I mean, who thinks about updating their router until it's. If it breaks, which it may never.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Break, oh, dude, you should upgrade your router.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, well, you and I know that, but I don't. I think most people aren't going, hey, you know that router is two years old. It's probably time for a new one. People don't buy new mattresses. Why are they not going to update something in the closet that they don't even know it's there? I helped a neighbor a couple of years ago. I helped a Neighbor. He said, our Internet's not great. And I said, all right, well, let me take a look at your router. I had to. It was in the garage. The garage was full of stuff. I literally had to climb over furniture and stuff to get to the router, which had been sealed up basically in the wall since he bought the house. That's pretty typical, I think.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

How old was this person?

[Leo Laporte]

He was an older man, older gentleman. Hey, you know, I'm an older gent. It's, you know, let's not be ageist here, okay?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I'm not trying to be ageist. I'm just like. There are certain people would notice that they were only getting like 10Mbps.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody who listens to our shows is smart enough to consider this as an issue.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

It's not intelligence. It's just they care about this part of technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they know about it. Yeah, they're. They're aware of it, but I thought.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I think the FBI. It was the TP link router that.

[Leo Laporte]

You mentioned, or was it Microtik?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

It was actually a Linksys. Is that they. They put out a call for.

[Leo Laporte]

They've all been.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

They've all been hacked.

[Leo Laporte]

All been in there? Yeah. Yeah.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I'm keeping a running document of all the hacked routers.

[Leo Laporte]

We had a story on security now where bad guys got into a network, but then everything was protected. They were trying to put some mal ransomware in there and they couldn't find anything. Finally, they found a camera, a security camera that was running Linux, had enough ram, enough CPU for them to put the malware on the camera, which, of course, hadn't been updated ever. That's also a big problem. Right. All of these IoT devices never get updated.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

That's why our legislation.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yes. If you have one of these routers and you don't have the money, look into like something like DD WRT or OPEN wrt.

[Leo Laporte]

Hack your router firmware. Yes, hack it.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

And that is the only thing you can do. Like, if you're running one of these older routers, that's it.

[Leo Laporte]

Or throw it out.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

If you go to open wrt, you can download.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, this is a larger conversation, though, because these products are really designed to be thrown out, which they shouldn't be. They should be designed to be updated, even if it's not by the manufacturer. They should be open so that you could put your own firmware on there. I mean, not that most people would know how to do that, but still, it's a shame. These things are designed even Phones are designed as disposable items.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

So after mid August, I'm actually giving a talk at Usenix about building for longevity.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

So I will have an entire talk on all the things and we can talk about all the ideas and it'll be super fun because you're right, it is wasteful. It is anti consumer. It is really wasteful.

[Leo Laporte]

Just think of that. Hundreds of millions of routers that are superannuated in the United States that are just going to end up in landfill.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

It's not just routers. It's, I mean everything. Your phones, it's your Chromebooks, it's everything. There's heavy metals in there. There's. I mean, it is like Wesley was saying, you're going, we've, we've invested a lot in this infrastructure. We've gone several steps forward without thinking of all the repercussions. And now we're thinking about the repercussions. Repercussions. And you know, I constantly hear, well, it's just too expensive, we can't go back. And I'm like, we might be forced to at some point.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Carl in our YouTube chat says hoping WRT sounds like a sore. Hey, it sounds better than the tomato router, which is another firmware you could put on there or DD wrt. No, I agree with you. Wesley and I really feel like we, we, we. But it's not going to happen. But we're, we're so focused on profit right now that the right thing to do would be build this stuff in a way that it could be updated, it could be fixed, it could be repaired, that it, it would have some longer life. But we are, it's just, it seems like it's hopeless at this point. I don't know.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Open WRT actually built a router that is kind of designed that way. They've designed it with, you know, extra memory. It's modular so you can replace boards.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

So that's perfect.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And consumers want this. Like, if you think about like the, the framework laptop, people are excited about that. That's, that that is new and interesting. It's not that we have been focused on profit, it's just that we haven't been given a choice. And if you, if you, I'm, I'm sure you've heard of the Slate truck.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I love that everyone. I hope that takes off. Exactly. It's a $20,000 truck that doesn't even have a radio in it, let alone any additional software. It doesn't even have a screen in it. Or speakers, but you then can upgrade it or modify it.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, and this customization is just something consumers aren't used to because they're not given the choice. And consumer choice is limiting what products get to market and which ones are surviving. And I personally have started tinkering with my own home lab, so buying computers and networking equipment and gear and being able to re firmware an old Chromebook or loading Open WRT on an old router and letting me repurpose it and scan it and choose the interface I want gives it a longer lifespan. Post its first owner. And if, if we're, if we want to be sustainable, that not only makes it so it lasts longer, but it also opens up access to people who didn't have this technology when it first went through. And I, I think that's great.

[Leo Laporte]

We need to kind of think about, kind of rethink how we treat our society and treat the world.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I will, I will toss a little sadness on this or a little pissing your Cheerios, as it were. With even things like Open wrt, you have to, if you put this on your routers, you have to make sure that you are applying security updates and you have to manage it. And I think one of the things that companies know consumers don't really think about is every connected device that they bring into their house, they actually have to manage actively. And you know, you're bringing so many more things in right now, and I think that's exhausting and confusing to people putting open source on top of that. So they actually have to proactively go out and manage. It might be a bridge too far for people in ways that are.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we just have to, you know, we have to start growing our own food, making our own furniture. I just think that we need to rethink how we've designed this society going forward. We mentioned. No, I'm obviously I'm being a little facetious. We mentioned that Ken Paxton, who is, you know, not my hero either, managed to get one in $.4 billion out of Google. We also mentioned how it's a little complicated for big tech companies to deal with 50 states and 200 nations. Get ready for this one. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey. He's just proud as president. Proud as heck. Proud as heck because he's filed a rule. Now, by the way, it's unclear whether you could just make a rule as the attorney general and it will be law, but he has announced the filing of a rule. It's the state equivalent of an executive order. First in the nation under the Missouri Merchandising Practices act, requiring big tech platforms to allow. Get ready for this, Missouri users to choose their own content moderators rather than being forced to rely on the biased algorithms of monopolistic tech giants.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I think this is amazing. I mean, if you want to protect free speech. I think he's done it. I don't think any of these platforms are now. I think now they're not trouncing on anyone's free speech. Done. Consider it done.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The rule clarifies that it's an unfair, deceptive, or otherwise unlawful practice for social media platforms. ThinkX.com, blueSky, Instagram, Facebook, to deny users the ability to choose an independent content moderator. I don't even know how would that work. Platforms must now provide a choice screen in the state of Missouri upon account activation and at regular intervals. They cannot favor their own moderation tools and must allow full interoperability for outside moderators chosen by users.

[Wesley Faulkner]

That's stupid.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Could. Could you see. I mean, with the AT protocol for Blue sky, is that something you could actually.

[Leo Laporte]

It could do that, couldn't it?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Okay, so. And then with Mastodon, could you. I mean, that's a little. Can you apply moderating it?

[Leo Laporte]

So I run a Mastodon instance and I moderate it. I don't. The only. I mean, what I could do when you signed in and said, look, I'm moderating this one. If you want to moderate yours, good news. Set up a server, run your own Mastodon, and you can moderate it any way that you want. Or this is actually what federation does do. It lets you choose a moderator, in effect, because if you go to my server, I'm the moderator. If you go to Mastodon Social, then somebody else is the moderator. So in a way, that's the case. If, you know, if. I don't know, Steve Bannon wanted to set up his own Mastodon and moderate it any way he wanted to. You could do that. So in a way, federated systems already allow this. And I think they could probably say, yeah, but X doesn't. How would you. How would you put your own moderator on X?

[Wesley Faulkner]

The issue is this is only for producing content, not for viewing. So you could choose your moderator for someone. If. If someone flagged me for, I don't know, racism or something, and it would go to my moderator, the one that I chose that to.

[Leo Laporte]

And so that I don't understand it.

[Wesley Faulkner]

At all, which could be my cousin.

[Leo Laporte]

Vinnie, say, yeah, that's what it sounds like.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And then. And they're like, yeah, no, Wesley's cool. He can say whatever he wants, but it doesn't do anything for the consumer on the consumer side.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm on the Missouri Attorney General's website. Let's just scroll down, there's a link. The full rule can be read here. Let's read the full rule. Oh, it's blocked.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I think your moderator prevented that from coming through.

[Leo Laporte]

That's been moderated.

[Shoshana Weissman]

This is just like my hell, all these freaking elected officials just like making up random crap and not understanding how things work. I've, I've just had. So I, I have some pieces coming out soon but basically like, like in, in a different instance, age verification bills that, that strike like oh, 13 year old from 14 year old, 15 year old from 16 year old, stuff like that. Kids don't have IDs. They don't have IDs, they have birth certificates, but those don't have photos. And I'm like, how the hell are you going to prove, how do you prove this verifiable way? And I walk through like, why it's impossible. And then like, I mean so many of these rules, no matter how well intended, make no sense. And I have major issues with the like, oh, big tech and free speech stuff. I'm like, no, that's. The government can infringe on it and is always trying to like constantly like let's not give them more tools and like more First Amendment exemptions. And like in, in my age verification series I'd done a piece on you.

[Leo Laporte]

Wrote a great one by the way. That really was the definitive piece on this. And that was several years ago.

[Shoshana Weissman]

They keep trying and I'm like, you guys have more problems than.

[Leo Laporte]

They never give up. Yeah.

[Shoshana Weissman]

But it's crazy because like the precedent here is being used by courts to overturn this stuff and like no one cares. Like they just keep wanting to do it. And with this stuff too, like this is super unconstitutional to say you must do speech in the way we want. And I'm just like, no. Like no. Like no, come on.

[Leo Laporte]

That's, that's the definition of a violation of the First Amendment. I mean it. But the thing is, I think, I mean presumably he went to law school, he's an Attorney general, he probably knows that, that this is posturing. He knows.

[Shoshana Weissman]

I don't know. I think so many elected lawyers who like think, who will tell me like sincerely the things they're doing, there's no First Amendment issues. And like these are smart people who like really believe it. And I'm like, I just don't understand. Like, like there's so much precedent. You can read it. Like, you can Google it or sorry, chatgpt and then go read the. The full precedent. And I'm just like, I'm not a lawyer. I just read. I like, read ever at all. And I, like, check with competent lawyers if I'm not sure. But, like, no one else seems capable of doing that.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Okay, that was, that was what I was meaning. Why I was facetiously saying, oh, yeah, yeah, that you did it is just that if he wants to protect free speech, it's done. There's no work to be done in this area.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Right. Oh, my gosh. And like the moderators, it's like we have all these laws too, about copyright and about, you know, section 230 exemptions with child content. And it's like, is your moderator going to get the company in trouble? Because they're not going to handle that stuff. Like, you could see them being like, hi, I'm the fun IP moderator. Like, you can do whatever you want with IP here. And, like, you're good. Like, then the company gets sued. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just wild. We live in a very interesting world, you know, because for a long time, Republicans said we want smaller government. You know, Ronald Reagan famously said, what was that? The. The five scariest worlds in the English language. I'm the government and I'm here to help. And. And now, of course, it's big government. I talk about big government. It's Attorney General Bailey. All right, go take a little break. Have more. I'm sorry, I'm getting. I'm getting head up. I like blunt talk. Okay. If you wouldn't mind. No more circumlocuting the stories. We have a wonderful panel. Shoshana Weissman, Wesley Faulkner, Stacy Higginbossom. Great team. Love seeing you. We'll have more in just a bit. But first, a word from our sponsor. And this is one I use and love. Bit Warden, the trusted leader in password secrets and pass key management. With more than 10 million users, this surprised me. I mean, I thought, oh, you know, only I know about Bitwarden because it's the open source choice. It's the cool Choice, you know. No. 10 million users across 180 countries. Then I thought, well, businesses probably don't know about it. No. 50,000 business customers worldwide. Tech Bit Warden has gotten even more focused on the enterprise. They continue to protect businesses and individuals worldwide. G2 consistently ranks at number one in user satisfaction. They do their survey. The. The. This is the Fifth year in a row of the World Password Day survey and it always has interesting results. All generations, according to this survey, will benefit from a robust password manager. Gen Z. All right, let's talk about Gen Z. They probably the most digitally native generation and they are frankly guilty of the highest incidence of password reuse. According to the survey, 72% of Gen Z reuses the same password across accounts. We know that's dangerous. 79% of Gen Z admit password reuse is risky. They know it's dangerous and they still do it. 59% recycle an existing password when updating accounts with companies, even companies that disclose data breaches. Hi, I'm company xyz. We had a big data breach. Can you change your password? Yeah, I'll just use the same one I used everywhere else. No, Bitwarden, you need Bit Warden. Okay, Gen Z, get with it. Bitwarden has announced the launch of something new. This is exciting, called Access Intelligence. If you're a business with Gen Z employers, you're going to want this. It helps enterprises enable employees to proactively defend against internal credential risks like password reuse and external phishing threats. There's two core functionalities in this. There's risk insights. That's the first one. It reduces alert fatigue because that's a problem too, right? You get these pop ups, you just go yeah, yeah, yeah. It lets it teams identify, prioritize and remediate at risk credentials. They also have an advanced phishing blocker. This is part of Bit Warden that alerts and redirects users from known phishing sites in real time using a continuously updated open source block list of malicious domains. What sets Bitwarden apart is that it prioritizes simplicity because it's no good having a security tool if it's too complicated to use, right? Bit Warden setup only takes a few minutes. It'll automatically import for most password management solutions. And if you're curious, the Bit Warden open source code can be inspected by anyone. That's so important to me that it's open source and it can be inspected by auditors. In fact, they have regular third party experts auditing it and they publish the results of those audits every year. Bitwarden meets stringent security and compliance requirements. SoC2 Type 2 GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, ISO 270012002 certification. Look, let's just. In a nutshell, Bitwarden is secure. Bitwarden does it right. And you need Bit Warden for your business because your employees aren't doing it. Right. You and your business deserve an effective solution for enhanced online security. Get started today with Bit Warden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan. Or get started for free across all devices as an individual [e-mail] TWIT it's the only one I use. Bitwarden.com TWIT we thank them so much for the support of this week in tech. What ages are a Gen Z? I always. I never know those labels. I'm a. I'm a boomer.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

97 through 2012.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're Internet natives. They grew up with the Internet.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, my kid is Gen Z. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably the Doge bros are DE or Gen Z too, Right?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Well, you know, both Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth apparently reused their passwords. So this is not just a Gen Z phenomenon.

[Leo Laporte]

No, everybody does.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Everyone should. Okay, y' all just get yourself one pass. Last pass. Bit Warden, just. Yes. Whatever you do, just get. Get a password.

[Leo Laporte]

Use it.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Use it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I bet that's all.

[Shoshana Weissman]

It always kills me, like, in my soul that, like, lawmakers will try to make things less secure by just going after big tech to do it. And I'm like, hey, you guys haven't gotten stuff great together. The government hacked all the time and, like, now more than ever. And I'm always very sensitive about that because I'm like, like, we shouldn't punish companies for doing things that are good for security when they do. But I mean, the extent to which it's gotten bad. I mean, they reuse passwords using your name, even if it's like an alternative name of yours as a password, like your middle name or if I use my Hebrew name. But if I'm in government doing that, I'm just like, so, so physically angry about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you should be. I mean, this is. The problem is there's passwords. Even if they're good passwords, if they get revealed in a breach, you know, if you use a target and target got breached, the bad guys are just going to take that email and password and try it everywhere. So if you're reusing your passwords, you're. You're going to get. They call it credential stuffing. You're going to get hacked like Doge bro Kyle. Shoot. By the way, this is one of the Doge kids who has access to FEMA's core finance.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

37.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so he's not a kid. Hey, to me, 37 is a kid. Let me just tell you anyway. All right. Not a kid. And so he should know better. Right. He has access to FEMA's core financial management system. He is in fact I think gonna get access to, he's part to that whole API they're they're generating that will combine all the government databases. Meanwhile, according to ProPublica, he, his personal Gmail address is on have I been pwned in 51 data breaches in five pastes. And he's been reusing his passwords.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah. The fact that he's on all the pay sites is because at first I was like we've all been, you know, we're all on have I been pod?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm on have I been pod. No big deal. Right.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

But yeah, he has definitely got some malware on some of his computers.

[Leo Laporte]

The thing that's. Yes, the stealer logs are what's scary. Those are the password stealers that are actually malware on your computer. And the fact that he's in those logs means at least one of his computers has had malware on it may still have malware on it. And he has access to all these government databases.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

And you know, they're just bringing it home and like willy nilly saving it on USB sticks, dropping them in parking lots, let them hang out with, you know, they're. I just. The lack of security, like, just like normal people. Security here is just astonishing. And the fact that all of this data is just being funneled to these people who are like, I don't know, like flower girls at a wedding. Just toss it here.

[Leo Laporte]

And I should point out this, this wasn't when he was 16. There's a Steelers log from this year that he's in.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And if the Doge sites gets hacked, which it has, we kind of knew this was coming.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, almost immediately got hacked, didn't it?

[Wesley Faulkner]

And when you think about you brought up Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Haseth and how the hexa specifically put in a system to help breach security so that they could bridge instead of going into a skip so he can check signal on his phone. They're circumventing these quote unquote bureaucratic convoluted policies.

[Leo Laporte]

We want to move fast and break.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Things and there's a reason why they're put into place. And when you have a disregard for the law and you have a disregard for policies and you don't take the time to inquire why they were put there or how you could. You know, sometimes you don't know what you don't know. And just because you're smart in one area doesn't make you smart in all areas. And if you are great at one thing doesn't mean you're great at everything. And so people forget this, especially when you talk about bring in these whiz kids or dude bros from DOGE into the government and they are going in with this hubris of, you know, move over and let me have access. This is bound to happen. And this is just, you know, the tip of the iceberg because we all know as well that you know like AT&T telecoms have been breached and I don't think that still have been fixed.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they can't fix it.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Everybody looking into it.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

And so they've actually said yeah, we can't fix it because we'd have to take the phone system down for a few days or weeks and obviously we're not going to be able to take the whole phone system down.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, this is consider like if you lose your data, your hard drive dies. Just try to call China and just say hey, can I get my.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's Mike Waltz, former secret. What was he DNS? Was he the home. It says right here, I can zoom in. That's the beauty of it. He is the national security advisor on his phone. First of all you got photographers over your shoulder taking pictures and the cameras we use nowadays, you can zoom in pretty good. So there he is. He's not using signal, he's using telemessage which is a modified signal that allows you to store your signal conversations. Here's a problem. Of course they're stored in the clear. That's on the one hand that's a good thing because the Government Records act requires it. On the other hand they're stored in the clear by this thing called telemessage which has now been hacked and just went out of business.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yes, like none of us could see the use of an open source Israeli made chat system that was designed to like do this would not be hacked. Yeah, I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

404 Media had a very good piece on this that they, they've done such great coverage on this kind of stuff. They, the hacker, it was kind of funny, said I just wanted to see if I could get in. It took me about 15 minutes to get into the database. Sent 404 an example of the data 404's expert, I think Michael Lee looked at it and said yeah, that's real data. Pretty Joseph Cox had the original article. Pretty clear that there's a problem and unclear what the solution is going to be. Except that we already had these rules in place. I mean, this is a perfect example of screw around and find out. It's like.

[Wesley Faulkner]

They made a mistake.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at all the people, by the way, in the government who are using telemessage. These are all DHS addresses.

[Shoshana Weissman]

404 is great. They put out some of the best stuff. They've alerted me to a lot of stuff. Like when an age verification system was just breached for like a full year and a half and everyone's like, cool, and X is still using it. They wanted to confirm my identity for something and they're using authentic. So I'm like, oh, yeah, let's keep using those guys.

[Leo Laporte]

But they.

[Shoshana Weissman]

With this stuff too. It's like, there's bureaucracy and there's, like, stuff maybe we could get rid of. But, like, security rules for messaging are, like, not one of them. Like, unless they think they could be better or something. But I just don't know why they refuse to, like, be secure. Like, I don't understand, like, the aversion to, like, using secure channels.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

It's not. I feel like it's. It's gotta be arrogance. Like, no one has ever. Like, if you've never been in a position where you've had to look over your shoulder, you're concerned about what might happen to you. I feel like, like, to me it is so obvious that, like, you pay attention to your surroundings. Like, and I'm sure to most of us it is because Mike Waltz apparently.

[Leo Laporte]

Never had to, you know.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, but there are lots of. Like, I look at my husband who walks through cities, like, head in his phone. Like, he's never had a worry that someone's going to, like, attack him in a parking lot or something. Or, you know, I. I have friends who loudly proclaim crazy opinions and I'm like, dude, someone could hear that. And so I. I think fundamentally, what these are just people who are genuinely. They're not worried about that's happening around.

[Leo Laporte]

Someone in our YouTube chat is pointing out that, yes, my personal information has leaked out over this channel. In fact, wasn't so long ago I accidentally posted my Apple password on the screen and I had to change it during a show. But I'm not the Director of National Security. I'm not the National Security Advisor. I'm just a podcaster.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Nobody died.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Well, you probably changed your passwords after.

[Leo Laporte]

That, immediately before the show was over. And I don't use the same password everywhere. I use Password Manager, I use Bit Warden. Anyway, I don't want to belabor the point. We just, It's. People need to pay more attention, I guess.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Well, and if you look at today's news about President Trump accepting the plane from.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, sure. What could possibly go wrong that's not secure. You know, Air Force One is designed to carry the President safely, securely. It's got all sorts of communications equipment, but it also has protection against pulse bombs and other things. But where's. Is it. Is it the Qatari plane that.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

It's a Qatar. Yeah, it's from Qatar.

[Leo Laporte]

It's from Qatar. It's, you know, he's not going to accept this. Look, that's got to be a bad rumor. There's no way. He's on a Middle east tour. Supposedly he's going to cut a Qatar. They're going to offer him an airplane. You can have this. 747 will give it to you, which, by the way, is a problem to begin with. I think it's worth more than $5. And then you're gonna ride around in it.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

He really wants a plane. And he's real like up at Boeing.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, he's got two Air Force ones.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

It's a good plane. These are, these are junky old planes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they're old. Yeah.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

This one's been trying to push Boeing to reduce the, like, the security clearances for the contractors working. Officially working on the version of Air Force One because he's like, dude, I need a new plane. This has taken so much time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So he's not going to take it. Cool. Cooler heads will prevail and say, Mr. President, you can't ride around in a plane provided by a foreign power. You can't.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

And then keep it afterwards.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, is that the planning? We just keep it.

[Wesley Faulkner]

So it's going to be the library.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it goes to the library. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Wesley Faulkner]

This is a. Definitely reminds me of like, just general it. The case of where when you have an umbrella and it's raining and people are like, we're not getting wet, so why do we need an umbrella? It's the, these security protocols. They're like, we haven't been breached. Nothing bad has happened.

[Leo Laporte]

Nothing bad has been.

[Wesley Faulkner]

So why do we need these?

[Leo Laporte]

Security could possibly go wrong.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

We have been breached. We have.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Oh, yeah.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Wait, wait.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I'm not saying they have. We haven't. I'm saying their knowledge of how bad things have gotten. How things are in there. If it's not. If the, if the, if that information is not immediately recallable by them, it doesn't exist.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yes, yes, that is true. And a lot of people, like, man, talk about Being a downer in meetings. Like when I bring things up and actual hacks that have happened, they're like, what? No, that didn't happen. I'm like, it totally happened here. They're like, why didn't I know about this? I was like, it was on the front page of the Journal and the Wall street, you know, in the Times. They're like, huh. So I feel like people, we have a real blind spot for security stories, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, Trump's airplane is from the early 1990s. He bought it from Paul Allen in 2011. It's older even than Air Force One. I think so. All right, all right. He'd have a nice new Qatari plane.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

He needs a new plane.

[Leo Laporte]

He needs a new plane. I need a new plane. We all need new planes.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I don't know. My plane is perfectly fine, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

For less than a 747 888, you could buy Bowers and Wilkins, Denon, Marantz and Polk. And that's exactly what Samsung just did. 350 million instead of 400 million, pretty much. They now own all the high end audio brands. From my youth. They own Harman International, jbl that, by the way, Harman International includes Harman, Kardon, akg, Mark Levinson, Arkham Revel. They will own Bowers and Wilkins, Denon, Morantz Polk Audio.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Wow, where's that Heishman Hirshfeld index?

[Leo Laporte]

That's. It's incredible. But it says more about what high end. The end of high end stereo than anything else. Right?

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, I. I love the receiver. Back in the day, getting all those channels and I, I can't. I haven't even thought about buying a receiver these days.

[Leo Laporte]

I was. My college roommate had Bose 901s. You know, they were there. They were the hot speakers. I always wanted a pair of Bowers and Wilkins speakers or Revel speakers. Those are the speakers they have down at the ranch in the Lucas Soundstage. Beautiful speakers. It's all going to be Samsung when.

[Wesley Faulkner]

You listen to like encoded MP3s through your headphones.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I mean, what exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the white earphone era. I'm sorry, we're living in it now. Thank you, Apple. We're all living in the earbud era. All right, let's take.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Do y' all listen to music? I'm just curious, like, who listens to music? Out. Okay. Leo, you're.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm old. I know.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

A generational outlier. Let's just call it that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, young people listen to music. What Are you talking about.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I'm sorry, out loud? Like. Like my dad has.

[Leo Laporte]

My dad open speakers.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

He has a. He has a chair. He sits in that. Yeah, listen.

[Leo Laporte]

And his hair blows back with the just like power of the speakers. Yeah, actually that was a Maxel tape ad. But anyway. Yeah, I bet you do any of you listen to sound on speakers anymore?

[Wesley Faulkner]

My wife bought a used record player at Goodwill for $10. And so we listened to that. But yeah, I think we have lost the memory of what that sound is.

[Leo Laporte]

I have good speakers in every room of my house.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I have Sonos. But we only play it when there's a party or people are over. Yeah, never.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And do they comment? They say, oh, the sounds. It sounds really good. Do they. You ever.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

No one even notices. And I go to their house and they've got like a tiny little JBL Bluetooth speaker that like they're playing the music on. Or they'll be like, they'll tell her madam A or Amazon Echo to plays music. It's terrible sounding.

[Leo Laporte]

I just signed up for a season tickets to the local symphony orchestra so I can hear music with other people performed by live artists in front of me in the whole thing. And it's so great and I love it.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I bet you'll still be scrolling on your phone. I don't think we have the attention to really listen.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm playing Words with Friends here. Could you keep it down?

[Wesley Faulkner]

I think that plays a part. We don't really focus on one thing and I think that is probably the issue.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, what a world.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Hi, this is Benito. So I listen to music on speakers all the time. I might ask.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but you're a music listener.

[Wesley Faulkner]

But no, this is the thing is that people don't listen to music actively anymore. It's background now.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all.

[Wesley Faulkner]

That's all music is for people.

[Leo Laporte]

Wallpaper music era. That's exactly right.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Bonino, by the way, is our producer and technical director, just in case you were wondering. Well, who's this voice? That is the voice of God, Benito Gonzalez.

[Wesley Faulkner]

It seems like I'm loud. I'm sorry, I can't. I can't hear myself.

[Leo Laporte]

You sound just perfect. I wish I sounded so good. He makes music though. You should bonito. Is your camera on?

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, but I don't have any lights on. Hi.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, look. Look at. Look what's behind him. Look what's behind him is all these speakers. I mean synthesizers and wires and.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, I have doohickeys.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

It was an old fashioned telephone switchboard.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like, it doesn't. All right, let's take a break. More. More to come. I. This is the first time I've. I've felt old. You made me feel old, Stacy, because I listened to speakers.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I'm doing my job. This is what I do for you.

[Leo Laporte]

I missed you. You listen on speakers, Actually, I bet a lot of people listen on their home theater, right? When they're watching the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They have speakers then, Right? You don't put on headphones then?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

My husband listens to. My husband and my kid both listen to the TV on their headphones. I know, it's real weird. I feel like this weird intruder in my house because I like, make noise.

[Leo Laporte]

We are living in a different era, I think, culturally. Yeah, it's the wallpaper music era. It's the isolated headphone era. Mark Zuckerberg says most people only have three friends. We're going to talk about that when we come back. Count your friends. My friends. I know I have a lot of friends right. Right now. One, two. There's 1073 people watching us live right now. And they're every one of them. They're my friends. But that's, I should say, don't think that's the audience size. That's a tenth or less of the hundredths of. Of what the total audience is. But it's nice to have them watching live. They can chat with us. Our show today, brought to you by Threat Locker. Love this guy. Oh, my gosh. This is something that kind of, when I first learned about it, opened my eyes to security. It's called zero trust. In the past, we have lived in a security environment where, you know, we have border protections, perimeter protections, but if somebody gets in, it's assumed, well, they're inside the network. They gotta be good guys. They gotta be us. And what is the result of that? Well, ransomware is just killing us. It's harming businesses worldwide. They get in through phishing emails, through infected downloads, through malicious websites, RDP exploits. And once they're in, man, they can move around your network. They can look at things. They can install malware on your camera, whatever. They can do it all. They could put stealers on your computers and start stealing your passwords and your credit cards. You need Zero trust. Threat Locker does it. And they make it so easy. Threat Locker, Zero Trust platform. Here's the key. It takes a proactive deny by default approach. Deny by default. It blocks every action if it's not authorized. It protects you from both known and unknown threats. Doesn't matter you don't need to know anything about it, just it bad guys can't make a move. And you know, it works so well. It's used by big infrastructure companies like JetBlue. You know JetBlue can't afford to be shut down by ransomware. The Port of Vancouver uses Threat Locker. Threat Locker shields them from zero day exploits from supply chain exploits. And it's just a side effect, but a great benefit. Provides complete audit trails for compliance. ThreatLocker's innovative ring fencing technology isolates critical applications from weaponization. It stops ransomware cold, even zero days. Nobody even knows how they work, just stops them. And it limits lateral movement within your network because no one it's zero trust, right? Threat Locker works in every industry. It supports Mac environments as well as Windows. You get 24, 7 support based in the United States. You get complete comprehensive visibility and control. Another example of an infrastructure, a city that cannot afford to be shut down. Mark Tolson, he's the IT director for the city of Champaign, Illinois. Here's the quote. Threat Locker provides that extra key to block anomalies that nothing else can do. If bad actors got in and tried to execute something, I take comfort knowing that Threat Locker will stop that. You're not going to hear about Champaign, Illinois getting ransomware. They got Threat Lockers. Stop worrying about cyber threats. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily cost effectively. You'll be amazed how cost effective it is at threatlocker. Visit threatlocker.com twit to get a free 30 day trial and learn more about how threatlocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threat locker.com twit thank you threat Locker, for supporting this week in tech. Threatlocker.com TWIT Mark Zuckerberg says this is. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Most people only have three friends, he says in a podcast last week, he said the average person wants more friends and connections with other people and that the solution is AI friends. The average American, I think he says it's fewer than three friends. Three people they'd consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's like 15 friends. It sounds like he's just making this up, Mark. You might have three friends, he told Ben Thompson, another podcast on Stratecheri. For people who don't have a person who's a therapist. I think everyone will have AI, AI friends.

[Wesley Faulkner]

For all you know, he's making it up because he's not using specifics.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very general. Yeah, I think I heard people say, reported, like, what.

[Wesley Faulkner]

What time span is this entail? There's just. There's no specifics.

[Leo Laporte]

So he's making it up. That's all y' all have. Yeah.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

It's weird because the man literally owns the largest social network. So if anyone has high quality research on the number of friends and relationships people have, you would think it would be him.

[Leo Laporte]

Except remember that Facebook went from being a place where you would go cape in touch with your friends to a, you know, a TV station, an entertainment stream, right.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

To Craigslist for people. That's the only thing people use it for now.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you use the marketplace? Is that what you're using?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I'm not on Facebook, but that is literally the only thing anyone that is under the age of like, 40 uses.

[Leo Laporte]

My son says, I got it on the Facebook marketplace all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's usually crap, by the way. There's a. I'm just.

[Shoshana Weissman]

I'm saying maybe it's just him on there. I feel like if you enjoy like, like touching up furniture, doing some new stuff with it, like, that's a really good use for it. But he says the weirdest stuff. I, like, don't understand why he feels the need to do this. Like, no one is making him do this and say terrible, strange things. And like, I mean, also, like, the. The Instagram chatbots have had major problems before the Wall Street Journal reported. Reported on it. I was like, I see something here. There was. There was, like, a celebrity, if I recall correctly. I think she went to Pakistan to find her love, who she'd been talking to. And then when that happened, she had a chatbot. And this is how I found out even who she was. And. And I was, like, talking with the chatbot because I'm like, who. Who is this person? And. And the chatbot was really angry. She's like, why do you care where I am? And I'm like, what the hell? Like, this is supposed to be, like a fun chatbot that someone created. And it was like, almost like joking about how this woman was missing. I'm like, I cannot imagine that anyone wants this. Like, normal people are not going to be like, ha, ha, let me talk with this missing celebrity. Either. Like, it's. It's. It was bizarre stuff. So their. Their guardrails on stuff are just dumb low.

[Leo Laporte]

From the Wall Street Journal. In Zuckerberg's vision for a new digital future. First of all, people like Mark Zuckerberg should not get to determine my digital future. I just want to say I don't want him telling me what my future is going to be. Artificial intelligence friends outnumber human companions, chatbot experiences supplant therapists and ad agencies. Oh, and by the way, coders as well. This is all Zuckerberg's, you know. No, remember, he's also selling something. Right. And this is. Sam Altman does the same thing. In the future, AI will play a central role in the human experience, says Zuckerberg. I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I'm going to say something. He's detached from reality. He's an awesome executive if you look at his earnings, but he. They just had their llamacon or whatever you want to talk about. He was interviewing, interviewing the, I think Sasha Nadella saying, like, how much of your code is created by AI? And they were like 30% or something where. Like that. And then the, the question was turned back on him. He's like, how much code is being created and meta via chat assistants or whatever, LLMs. And he says, I have no idea. And so he went from having no idea to saying something where like 100% of the code is from. Llama is going to be created by these agents or bots.

[Leo Laporte]

And then he's saying that at one point this year that they would replace senior coders with AI.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, he has no idea. And it shows that him not having, like, hard data available means that he is making this up and that's the only thing that's happening. So he is, he is taking a page from the, the, the, the masculine energy. Let's go Total Maga, Variety and the Elon Manosphere. I'm going to say things that aren't true, but it's going to hype people up to sell more product. And he's just really acclimating to the scene as it is right now because he's a chameleon to get only what he wants. And that's the same playbook. And he's just going to do whatever works.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's the journal quotes Magana Dhar, who's a former Instagram executive. The very platforms that have led to our social isolation and being chronically online are now posing a solution to the loneliness epidemic. Dar says it almost seems like the arsonist coming back and being the fireman.

[Wesley Faulkner]

So isn't it interesting? He. He wants to fix this problem, but not with people.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, well, tech, Tech always. This is what tech is good at. I mean, if you have. They have the hammer, and they're going to make everything the right kind of nail for them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

And tech is great also. Like, they're also looking for a shortcut. Like, there are things that AI is very good at. There are actually some therapeutic use cases that I think could be helpful to people, but it won't be everything. Right. You can't just, like. I don't know, like, I. Here's an analogy that may not resonate with a lot of people, but, like, my. My husband has, you know, like, one outfit that he wears all the time, Right. It's his default outfit that resonates. The tech guys are like, well, I have this thing and it goes all these places, whereas I have multiple outf. Depending on, like, am I meeting with someone in Congress, Am I hanging out with my friends at a bar? Like, in the tech world, they can make that one outfit they can make it at.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve Jobs started that, right? Except he didn't just have one outfit. He had 50 black turtlenets and 50 black pairs of Levi's. I mean, he had. And in fact, I think it was Zuckerberg who said, I want to limit my cognitive load when I look at my closet. I don't want to have to think about what to wear.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

And they want that shortcut, and it's great for that use case, but it's not in what they're selling. All of us is a shortcut to the human experience that ultimately will fail us all. I mean, I can't figure out why we can't see this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like a South park joke, which is, you know, step one, create social media that isolates everybody. Step two, create AI friends so that nobody feels isolated. Step three, profit. It's. They could have written it on a.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Napkin, except they're not profiting. That's the other part.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and this is really a big story, which is how expensive this AI is.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's. That's what. No, I'm gonna. I'm stepping off the soapbox. Other people.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's okay. I like the soapbox. Go ahead. Anybody who wants to talk about this. I just saw a story that said many of these new AI data centers are being built in places where water is in crisis, like Arizona.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

It's not just that. They're just. This has happened for the last. Probably. Let's see, how old are we? Where are we? I'm going to say since about 1998 to 2000. After that first bubble tech, the whole goal of all of these Companies funding these companies is to put a lot of money in, scale it up super fast and then sell or at profit somehow by owning the entire market. Right. So and you have to do it quickly. And that is what's happening here. And we've seen it. You know, we saw it in the early web days that crash happened, but bankruptcy erased all of that, like all of the capital needed there. We see. And so they were allowed to flourish. We saw it with like Uber and all of these, like, what do they call it, the millennial lifestyle bonus. It's basically venture capitalists funded these companies, but they didn't have to make a profit for decades. And we're seeing this again and I don't know how long and how many times and how, how many times we have to go through this cycle and end up poorer for it or without actual assets. And all of these write downs in. It's, it's very confusing to me.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not, I want to point out.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I don't get it.

[Leo Laporte]

I am bullish on AI. I use AI all the time. I love AI. I don't use Google anymore. I use AI searches. I am wearing at all times this BAI device. It's recording every conference conversation and then giving me a summary of my day. At the end of the day, I find AI very useful. I've been doing AI coding with Claude code. It's amazing. In fact, it's going to take some of the fun out of the, the coding challenges that I enjoy so much because you, you just write, say hey, solve this. They. And they, boom, they solve it. I'll probably still do it anyway, but I, I'm a fan. But it is the case that is also being oversold dramatically. This from Bloomberg this week. Global data centers in AI in areas where high water stress, there's that graph at the top. Now in the United states, there are 3.3 thousand AI is draining water from the areas that need it the most. Nobody pays attention to how much this stuff is costing. Bloomberg is saying every, every time you do a query here, every time you say thank you to an AI, you are causing these problems. Bloomberg found that about two thirds of the new data centers being built or in development since 2022 are in places already gripped with high levels of water stress. Water, by the way, is used in these operations centers to cool the facilities they needed. 26 data centers being built or planned in high water stress areas in Arizona, 17 in California, 26 in Texas, 23 in Illinois, 67 next door to you in row in Virginia. And these are problematic.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

We'll throw out. There are very few places that are not water stressed. True, true.

[Leo Laporte]

Why are they putting them in Arizona? What is it about Arizona? Tax breaks.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Tax breaks. And they have cheap land. And they have historically been willing. I mean, that's why all the semiconductor fabs went to Arizona. Because they were like, Arizona's like, yeah, we'll totally get you all the clean water you need. They have a lot of infrastructure around this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they steal it from Colorado.

[Shoshana Weissman]

It's interesting too, because one of the other sides of it is that there have been all these articles about AI data centers not having enough electricians. And if there's anything I know, it's occupational licensing reform and a lot of the problems here. And it's interesting too, because I didn't. I and other people who actually did. The implementation of universal licensing recognition laws that allow people to like, move to a state and have their license recognized. None of us thought through, like, hold up. A lot of jobs are city level licensing. It's not state level. And almost, almost every state says, oh, if you're transferring a license from one state to another and it doesn't account for cities. So I talked with a couple of friends in a couple of different states in government, like, wait a sec, am I reading this right? And also keeping your license in good standing because a lot of them are traveling electricians. That could mean if you go to like Alaska to work on a data center for three months and you, you let the license lapse because you don't need to work in Alaska anymore, that that license, license isn't in good standing. So if all your licenses aren't in good standing, then you can't keep working. But I'm excited because it's a fairly easy problem to solve that way. There's other stuff too. It's the way we train electricians doesn't always make a ton of sense. Just like with a lot of stuff, we don't use enough apprenticeships, we don't give people enough opportunity that way. There's also problems that. I'm not sure if it applies to electricians, but Pell grants require a certain number of hours of training in order to say, like, this program's covered, but that can inflate it when you might only need like a smaller amount of hours. But I'm excited because, like, I love when licensing reform matters to people. Again, I'm like, yeah, I told you guys we need to do this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's harder to become an esthetician in California than it is to become a psychologist, a counselor. You know, all you have to do to be a counselor, you just hang up a shingle and say, yeah, come on in. I'll fix you up. But don't ever do somebody's nails without a license.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Oh, my gosh. The whole structure there is. While Utah is doing some cool stuff that way, too. I follow beautician licensing very closely, and Utah is trying to break it apart in a way that, like, if you just want to do nails or just want to do hair, you can do that. It's crazy, too. They didn't really, like, they found that people weren't being trained to use lasers on people, like cosmetic lasers, but then they had to do 100 haircuts. Meanwhile, people who do surgeries only have to practice it, like, five times. And I'm like, maybe we, like, restructure this in a way that, like, you make sure you know how to use a laser so your first time isn't on the patient. Like, I think, like, I'm pretty regular form, but that's. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, don't get me started, because it really bugs me that you can create a supplement out of anything and sell it. And the FDA in no way regulates these supplements, but, you know, they strictly regulate medications. But many times people. I'm. People are putting stuff in their mouth that is just. Just either it's useless or worse. Right? It could be worse. And there's no regulation at all. It really bugs the heck out of me. So sometimes regulation is a good thing.

[Shoshana Weissman]

It's funny, I'm a little squishy on the supplement stuff. I take so many supplements.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I do, too, but I wonder.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Yeah, but most of them, like, the reviews help. The reviews really help. There. Like, people think, oh, I vomited. I'm like, great, so I'm not gonna do this one.

[Leo Laporte]

I, you know, go to the subreddit, the supplements subreddit. And, you know, one of the things people do on there is they go rate my stack, where, I mean, they're taking fistfuls of things, you know, and. And you can make any claim you want on the label as long as you have a little asterisk that says not. Not proven scientifically, no claim is being made. You know, I mean, you can say anything you want, and people are taking all sorts of crazy. See, I'm, I think, getting back to this expensive AI. I live in this weird cognitive dissonance my. My whole career where I. Promoting all of these technologies that are going to end up in a landfill. And at the same time feeling terribly guilty about it. And now every time I ask AI a question like rate my supplement stack, I feel like I'm setting fire to a rainforest. We live in a difficult time. Should I just build a log cabin and move to the.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

No, that's, that's the solution that everybody wants you to you, they want you to feel disempowered here. So the issue, one of the issues here is you are an individual trying to address a problem designed for like a collective action problem designed for the government. So we have to accept that there are some problems that we cannot as an individual take action for. So like figuring out that you personally should not be asking chatgy like being like, oh, I should not ask this. This is not worth, you know, killing a kookaburra or whatever. Right. But having the government say, okay, you know, here's some broad rules, or maybe it doesn't even need to be rules. Maybe it's like a say Energy Star program that's like, hey, I can rate how efficiently this company performs these queries. And if you start showing that level of, if you provide that transparency, people will get better. Just like for a hot second we got better gasoline and fuel mileage in cars because we said, hey, you should track that.

[Leo Laporte]

So I could just forget about it because it's not my problem, it's government's problem problem.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Right. Well the, the answer is actually to advocate and say that you care about these things.

[Leo Laporte]

I do care about it.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I know and vote for people who are doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yesterday we took my in laws to lunch for mother's day and I don't have a lot to say to them. So I, I fired up chat GPT on my phone and I started turning my father in law into different things. Like first I made him a pope and then, and then I turned our, then Henry VIII and then Charles and then a superhero and then at the revolution and then finally I ended up creating an image of the entire lunch as a Disney scene. Now this was a great way to pass the time with my father in law, but I really think I probably did some real damage to the environment and I'm feeling guilty about it. Maybe I need an AI therapist.

[Wesley Faulkner]

The truth is these models are getting better and you'll probably be doing some of this locally in the future.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yes.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Which will help with the efficiency. And the chips also are becoming more power efficient over time as well. And the it being what Stacy says, this is a bigger problem than one individual, even one company. But when you have a government that denies like climate change or government that on the state level that incentivizes growth over resources because they want to get more wealth. Most likely if we continue on this trajectory, we're going to just have to hit a brick wall and then pick ourself up to get it fixed. And unfortunately we're not all going to make it. It's going to cause some real hardship and struggles for people.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Wow, someone's even more of a downer than me. But yes, that is like there are all of computing. Let's think about it, right? Ever since we got into the massive era of computing, it's all been about processing and power, right? That trade off in optimizing for power consumption. So we'll see that exact same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Because we used to be like there's certainly incentive, right? It's so expensive for these companies. If they're going to make money at it, they have to make it more.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Efficient and eventually they are going to run out of resources and, or piss everyone off. I mean there's the, the test of the testimonials from the people who are in, I guess Tennessee where Elon Musk has a. Or oh yeah, Grok, the data center.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, yeah, Grok is using generators, gas powered generators. That is enough electricity.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

And I'm sure our tax dollars are somehow paying for that because we're funding so many things. But yeah, I'm like, I'm like, yeah, that's, that is stupid.

[Leo Laporte]

There is good news in the world. Is there? Tom Brady, Steph Curry, Gisele Bundchen, Kevin O' Leary, all off the hook for promoting cryptocurrency with FTX. They were being investigated, right, for their FTX ads. FTX of course, collapsed in 2022 and its founder, Samuel Bankman Fried went to jail. And there was some liability. The celebrities, a group of FTX investors said that celebrities who endorsed FTX should have some liability. On Wednesday, U.S. district Judge K. Michael Moore found the plaintiffs failed to show the celebrities and YouTubers named in the lawsuit had sufficient knowledge of FTX and Sam Bankman Fried to be held liable for promoting them. Tom Brady, the erstwhile quarterback, now TV commentator on the NFL, got $30 million for pitching the company. Now that's the good news. The bad news is it was FTX stock and it's now worthless. His wife, Gisele Bundchen, $18 million also in stock, now worthless.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I mean it's fair. I mean no one knew. Generally speaking, I guess not.

[Leo Laporte]

If they'd asked me, I probably actually no, they did Ask me. And I said no.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, I mean if you look deeper. But you made that choice. I don't know how many individual people make their choices.

[Leo Laporte]

We've refused a lot of crypto ads. We used to get a lot of interest in that.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Tom Brady has a manager who assessed this deal and was like, yeah, everybody's in crypto. That seems good.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Remember the Brad Pitt thing where he said like courage favors or.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Oh, that was Matt.

[Leo Laporte]

Matthew. Matt Damon.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Courage favors the brave or fortune favors the brave.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So invest in crypto in Bitcoin because. And you know, some people have made a fortune on it.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I think it's the same what you were talking about, like these big AI companies rushing to build these data centers and still losing money is that once you get big enough, you're too big to fail. And that's with individuals too. If you get famous enough, if you get rich enough, then you are protected.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

And the WeWork guy has a new company and investors.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazing. Isn't that.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I heard that the. I forget the Theranos persons.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, husband. She's in jail for the next part. Many years.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Their husband. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they have two babies anyway. Her baby daddy. No, I think they got married. Her husband is starting a new. He's got raised $20 million for a startup. Guess what? The startup does detects problems with your blood for health purposes and it's a miracle. It only needs a little bit of blood.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, but is it instant? I mean, could you do it at Walgreens?

[Leo Laporte]

The point is that these people are able to come back to the well and raise even more money.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Oh, this is like a feature. Yes, that. Like the fact that they, that they've done this before. I mean now in fairness, this is actually something we've lauded for decades, which is in America, if you are an entrepreneur, it's so great for you because you can fail and then pick yourself back up and try again and nobody hates you for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

So I mean now do I think we could take that too far? Yes. But I will say, you know, in Europe when people fail, it is much like it is prohibitive in ways that it isn't here. And that's not great for them.

[Leo Laporte]

So I've seen he is in some stories called her partner and other stories her husband. So I don't know if you know.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

How I'd like to be accurate. That journalist in me, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's unclear but her 33 year old partner and baby daddy has a new blood testing startup that promises human Health optimization. And the New York Times published this very wide eyed picture of the two of them sitting on a couch. Not in prison. Maybe this was right before she went to jail. I don't know. A radically new approach to health testing. The future of diagnostics. It's called hemanthus, which is also a flower known as the blood lily. So he's thinking they're going to start with testing pets for diseases before progressing to humans.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Who has a deeper voice? Her husband, I think. They both talk like this.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, let's take a break.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I can't fault her for that. No, like people make fun of high pitched speaking women all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. No, exactly.

[Wesley Faulkner]

It did work.

[Leo Laporte]

It was just trying to. Yeah, it worked. It was a little. It sounded a little off. You have a nice deep voice, Stacy. You don't force it, though. You don't.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

You'll never know.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, we're.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

My normal voice.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a certain amount of choice in that, right? I mean, you. It's somewhat culturally determined, right?

[Wesley Faulkner]

That's true. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I could talk like this if that, if it seemed like. If the world thought that podcasters should sound like this, I could talk like this. I'd be happy to.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

All right. You should go to ad.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna talk to the whole AD like this. Hey, boys and girls. This episode of this Week in Tech. All right. We'll be back with more in just a bit, but I'm going to go to my normal registry. This episode of this Week in Tech is brought to you by netsuite. Hey, here's a question we ask all the time on the show. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts, you'll get 10 answers. Rates will rise or no, maybe they're going to fall or maybe inflation's up or maybe it's down. I don't know. Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 41,000 businesses have future proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one Cloud ERP. Bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. With real time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. And you know when you're closing the books. In days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. If I needed this product, it's what I'd use. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com TWiT the guide is free to all of you at netsuite.com twit netsuite.com twit all right. Is that a secret message you were holding up there or what?

[Wesley Faulkner]

I was saying goodbye. Bye, Stacy. I know she was. She had a cut off.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not leaving now, are you?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Oh, no, it's 5pt, so don't try.

[Leo Laporte]

To get rid of her, Mr. Faulkner.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I'll stop talking if you need me to, though.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. What was I gonna. Oh, well, as long as we're talking about this, I think you might have something to say about this. Shoshana. The FTC is now banning hidden fees for live events and short term rentals, effective May 12. This documentation detailing its new rule on unfair or deceptive fees prohibits hidden fees. You know, the resort fee you. You get charged when you check out at the hotel. The resort fee is $35 a day. What with those kinds of things, short term rentals, live events, also bait and switch pricing or any action that conceals or misrepresents total prices and fees. This will impact businesses like Ticketmaster, hotels, motels, Airbnb, vrbo. Vrbo. Third party platforms, resellers and travel agents also covered by the new regulation. Airbnb has already updated its service in advance of this new regulation. Now you see the total cost of the stay instead of getting charged the cleaning fee at the end. Right. Good. Right. This is good.

[Shoshana Weissman]

I don't know, it's funny. I just don't care that much. I mean, like, if you check out and you're like, oh, this is higher, you can just not do it. Like, it sucks a little bit, but we all kind of got used to it, so I feel like it's. It's like when you're used to something happening, it. It's there. And I feel like the FTC probably has bigger fish to fry, but I could be wrong. I'm. I'm. I'm not. I haven't been following this one that closely.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, before I get too excited, you win some, you lose some. Because the FCC also proposed a rule to make it as easy to cancel subscriptions as it is to sign up for them. Now the FTC says. Hold on, hold on there. They were going to enforce that May 14th, but now. Right May 14th. Now they're moving to July 14th. The negative so called negative option rule. And we have all experienced this where it's really easy to sign up for something and good luck figuring out how to get off the thing. And the rule was great because it said it should be. Exactly. It should be. If you could sign up online, you should be able to cancel online. Many places say no, no, you have to call us if you want to cancel. Right.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

So you can. To fix that. You can change your address to California and then you will be able to click to cancel. But first, can I. Can I just say I'm not going to disagree wholeheartedly with Shoshana, but I will say the reason it is important to have the fees disclosed up front isn't because you'll be sad when you check out and you have the fees. It's because it makes it hard to compare easily across sites. Like if you're trying to book travel. That is absolutely. And it makes it harder for search aggregation, you know, anything like that. So, so that is why I like.

[Leo Laporte]

Because Consumer Reports, this doesn't affect restaurants, but it's something. I don't know.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

It totally should.

[Leo Laporte]

It should. I don't know if they're doing this in the rest of the country, but here you go out to eat and at the bottom it says 6% fee for. For quality of life improvements. 4% fee for the city requiring us minimum wage payments. And they add all this stuff at the end.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm not going to take it off the tip because that's not right.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, yeah. I. So because I live on an island with like 23 restaurants, my summer project is actually to call all the restaurants and find out what their fee is and then publish that because I'm so aggravated.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that a lot of restaurants or not a lot for an island? I mean, it depends on the island wouldn't be enough. Oh, 25,000 people.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, they're all busy. It's sad.

[Leo Laporte]

I wonder what the. What the normal restaurants per capita restaurant. If you publish, this town should have a restaurant for every hundred people or something. I don't know. What is it? You know, tonight we forgot to make Mother's day reservations and I know that there will be no restaurant in town that I can get into tonight.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I thought you only took your mom out to brunch on Mother's Day. Do you take them out to dinner too?

[Leo Laporte]

There are many moms in my life.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Okay. No, I'm just like, I'm like, oh.

[Leo Laporte]

I made bagels for my mother in law. That way. I don't have to worry about it. My mom is in an. Is in an old age home in Rhode island and I can't even get a hold of her because she's forgotten how the phone works. Works. So I just leave her messages and hope someday she sees them. One thing, the mother of my children. I already wished her a happy Mother's Day, but I wanted to take Lisa out to dinner, but it's no. Her son came up right before the show and said, hey, mom, I want to take you out to dinner for Mother's Day. He's 22. And she said, well, it would have been nice if you made a reservation a little earlier. You're not.

[Wesley Faulkner]

We can't.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm going to say 23 restaurants per island is good.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I was just going to say maybe since 23andMe is going out of business, maybe that's the good domain name. Maybe talk to Andrew and see if you could get that for your little site saying, these are the fees for the restaurants.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't buy the spit, but at least you could buy the name.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, I can take the data too. I could do some real fun things. No, I'm just going to post it on Reddit. I'm not going to do anything super fancy.

[Leo Laporte]

Where on Reddit do you post that kind of thing? Is there a. Is there a.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

There's an r. Bainbridge island, baby.

[Leo Laporte]

Slash our Bainbridge.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, hi, this is Benito. So regarding those fees and things like that, you know, Americans are so blind to this stuff because, you know, in other countries, sales tax is included in the price on the label Here, you saw, you always have to calculate that stuff yourself here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we have to do.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

It's terrible now because there's tariff surcharges, there's egg surcharges, there's. And they're not going to go away even if we don't have, like, even if egg prices do come down or tariffs don't happen to the extent that they're happening.

[Wesley Faulkner]

As a business traveler. Sorry, Ghost is Shawna.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Oh, yeah, I was just gonna say super related to that. It's like, so we're, you know, we're supposed to have the full price, but then if Amazon wants to say like, oh, here's the tariffs, you know, surcharge that's going to end up up in here, then they're punished for it. Like, one thing I just hate is when there's no parity across laws. Like when it doesn't apply to restaurants or various situations, it's like, okay, is this thing A problem or not? Because if it is, it should apply everywhere. If it's not, it shouldn't. You know, I. I get mad about it. I'm very big on regulatory parody, that there's. If there's a principle, it should be applied and it should make sense. And if there's a reason that it's not good for restaurants but better for other places, I'm open to that, too. But I get angry when I'm like, no, I think the government might just be targeting like, like hotels because it's pissed off at them rather than, like, restaurants because they're not pissed off at them. And I hate that. I'm like, just do one thing, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, I also, Stacey, have learned that you are well below the number of restaurants you should have on Bainbridge Island. The average number of people per restaurant in the United States is 330, according to AI which never lies. Yeah, but that includes, like, Bob's Big boy and. And McDonald's. I mean, it's not just nice restaurants.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

So I think I might be under counting a little bit because I'm realizing that I totally forgot that we actually have a Subway on the island because I never eat at Subway.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, gotta include that. Yeah, yeah.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

But we have an inordinate number of, you know, Thai food places, pizza places.

[Leo Laporte]

This is, by the way, this is what AI is good for. If it's accurate and it says, okay, there's 333 million people in the U.S. there are approximately 1 million restaurants. So that would be 333. I mean, approximately 1 million restaurants is kind of vague. The ratio has been decreasing over the years as the number of restaurants has grown faster than the population. The actual ratio varies by region and city density. Urban areas, obviously, and tourist destinations have a much higher restaurant density, sometimes exceeding one restaurant per thousand people.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Or.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the opposite. Or even. See, there you go. AI screwed it up.

[Wesley Faulkner]

You can't have it do math, man.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a broad national average. Does anyway. And we also mentioned, as long as we're talking about 23andMe, I don't know if the domain name is available for Stacy, but the good news is they are going to have a privacy advocate. The court is going to approve a data privacy ombudsman who will review the sale of the genetic data as part of the company's bankruptcy proceedings. Very good news. I already deleted my spit, but if you.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

So that's common in bankruptcy cases that have this access. So it's not like a special thing that. I mean, it's special in the fact that they.

[Leo Laporte]

They have a lot of data.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

It's common to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

The FTC did. Andrew Ferguson. No. Is that. My governor is Andrew Ferguson. That's. That's the FTC commissioner. Yes. Sorry, I was like, my governor is Bob Ferguson.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm all the Fergusons. Yeah, yeah.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

He did say. He did put out a letter saying, hey, you have obligations that you said you were going to adhere to, and you better adhere to them. And the buyer had better adhere to those as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

But those ombudsmans that are appointed by the court, historically, they have not been awesome advocates.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not a guarantee that they won't sell the data along with the company. Right. The job of the advocate is to file a report on whether a sale of genetic data complies with federal law and is in the interest of customers. Obviously, it's not in the interest of customers, but.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Maybe they'll sell it to Palantir and then, oh, my. All of our dystopian fantasies will come true.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. You know, you have 3% Dominican Republic blood. We're going to deport you. Geez Louise. So we got one. We. We won one. Hidden fees for live events. We lost one. Well, maybe not lost it, but they're going to put off that click to cancel. Probably. The industry came to them and said, we can't do it, we can't, it's too hard.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

They already do it in California.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, Comcast actually literally said in response to this regulation, oh, everybody would cancel their cable subscription if we're too easy. They literally said that.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

They wouldn't cancel their cable connection. I mean, what else are they going to use? Starlink? I mean, it's not over the top.

[Leo Laporte]

Over the top.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I was thinking broadband. Of course they're going to cancel.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Nobody wants cable. I mean, Tesla Podcast lost one and a half million customers last year.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah, well, they're making up for it. They've managed to bring up the price of their broadband alone, of course, the price of the triple as a. So, you know, they've had time to adjust.

[Leo Laporte]

Known this is gonna. They've known for years.

[Shoshana Weissman]

But it's wild because, like, as they're losing all these customers, they like, I was paying something absurd, like several hundred dollars a month, just Internet and cable. And I'm like, I went to cancel cable and. And they were like, oh, we can bring it down to what it was before. I'm like, oh, it was already creeping up. And I went into. To like, UPS to mail the thing back. And they're like, oh, yeah, everyone's canceling. I'm like, I don't understand why they would keep raising prices while, like, everyone's, like, on the edge of canceling.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

There are a lot of people who just sit in. I mean, who don't think about that. So. But you're right.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Shoshana, you didn't think about it until it got so high. You finally said enough.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Well, but there's a reason.

[Leo Laporte]

It creeps up slowly and you don't even notice. And then Suddenly you're paying $200.

[Shoshana Weissman]

It was because of Shabbat, because, like, cable will stay on. But now I figured out how to use Alexa to every three hours return on the tv, like, to double check to make sure it has stayed on because Hulu will time out. Like, that's just the thing that happens. But since I have Hulu Live now, I can program it to change channels. Like. Like, Bob's Burgers at this time and then TCM at this time. So it's better. But I, like, had to, like, work a lot to get it there. And also, like, Hulu doesn't recognize.

[Leo Laporte]

You're gonna have to explain this.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We were just talking about wallpaper music. Do you have your TV on all the time?

[Shoshana Weissman]

Kind of, yeah. I need background images and noise. Like I'm. You know, it helps.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's always on Bob's Burgers.

[Shoshana Weissman]

So it's. It's mostly almost entirely FXX or tcm. There's very little. Anything else.

[Leo Laporte]

TCM I can see.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, it's interesting because I think I subscribe to something called the Criterion Channel, which is a bunch of great old movies and stuff. And I think they finally realized people don't like looking through the catalog to find something. So they. In the subscription, they have a channel that's just showing movies all the time. And I think people just go to it and leave it on.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Yeah, I mean, that's what I do in Shabbat. And then I record.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you can't. Because. Because. Because you're. You don't. You can't touch the tv direct Shabbat.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Right. Exactly. I could program individual movies to start playing at different intervals, but that becomes, like, a huge pain. So leaving on. And they've been bad about their programming on Shabbat. Like, they used to have, like, great movies on Saturdays, but now they knew.

[Leo Laporte]

That there would be a lot of Jewish people watching.

[Shoshana Weissman]

I think I'm, like, one of, like, very few who would do this. Who, like, sees it fit in the law to follow it this way. I think it's fully legit, honestly. But, like, we leave on lights like some people can leave on radio. I see no difference with tv. I think that was the same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you sleep with it on?

[Shoshana Weissman]

Yeah, I shouldn't, but my brain won't stop, so.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

And you can't change the channel. Right, right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

She can't touch it.

[Shoshana Weissman]

But I can program it ahead of time with Alexis.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Right. That's totally legit. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I volunteered some episodes ago to be here, Shabaskoy. But she never took me up on that.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I used to do that for a friend of mine.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you really? They said, come over my refrigerators.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I live down the street from him when I live in New York. And so, yes, I was. I would come over, you know, I would stop by on my way home from work and just be like, hey, anything meaty? Did you forget?

[Leo Laporte]

Can I turn anything on for you? Off? Whatever. Yeah, yeah.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

And then I would. I would wander off, so.

[Shoshana Weissman]

But, yeah, cable had me, because it was easier on cable, because cable wouldn't time out. But I'm like, you know what? The time, not so worth it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting. So the streaming channels. Yeah, I've noticed that the streaming channels, like Netflix will say, hey, are you still watching?

[Shoshana Weissman]

Well, I got rid of that. I figured out how to get rid of that. But the. But they'll like. Like, they'll just crash. Apparently, Hulu doesn't work great with fire TVs. It's something I learned.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they have a memory leak in their app or something, and it just eats up memory and.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What am I watching on Hulu? Oh, I. I was watching. I know what I was watching. Dan Morin, who is a podcaster, a science fiction author, and he's been a regular on our shows. He also writes for the Jeopardy. He was on Jeopardy. He also writes for Six Colors, and he was. I. No spoilers. He was on Wednesday. And he couldn't say, you know, you're not allowed to say how you did. But he could say, I'm going to be on Wednesday. So I watched Wednesday. Let's put it this way. I also watched Thursday. I also watched Friday. Congratulations, Dan. Well done. Very, very nice to see one of ours. Except it's sad because Ken Jennings, the host, asked him about his books and he didn't. He said, yeah, I write books. He didn't mention the titles. It's like, dude, maybe does he think there's a rule on Jeopardy. You're not allowed to plug your might be they won't let him plug it. It's too bad he didn't plug the podcast names. He mentioned. Talked about the podcast but didn't mention the names either. I bet you they don't let you do that. Bill Gates says I'm gonna give it all away. My new deadline, 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth. More than a hundred billion dollars so far in the Gates foundation. The first 25 years. He says in the next 20, we're going to give away 200 billion. We're going to double our giving.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Happy and sad at the same time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. He's even made a little graph, just so you know. His net worth today is 108 billion. It looks like he used a crayon to color under the line. This is like a. Handwritten underneath it.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Can't afford it anymore. Trajectory of the hurricane.

[Leo Laporte]

This is like the. It's going to hit Georgia any minute now. So he's going to be out of money in 2045. He also said he wasn't going to give his kids any of it. And then he kind of backed down and gave his daughter a horse ranch and stuff. But anyway, good for him.

[Wesley Faulkner]

The reason why he's doing it is because there's a deficit in what, the United States?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because we stopped paying US aid. He was very upset. He says a million kids will die next year because we cut off funding for vaccines and other health measures across the world. So, yeah, part of it is because he's. That's one of the things he's very focused on. And so he's. But you can't. But this, by the way, really important, as wonderful as it is to have personal charity, especially if you're that wealthy, it pales compared to the amount of money governments can spend. It's not sufficient.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Many really wealthy people do not spend on the things that governments. That's true too, will spend on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Fortunately, Gates is really focused on childhood health and childhood illnesses. With his funds, he says the two groups, Gavi and the Global Fund, have transformed the way the world procures and delivers life saving tools like vaccines and antiretrovirals. Together, they've saved more than 80 million lives. How many libraries did Andrew Carnegie build? You know, 80 million lives saved.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I mean, at the time, libraries were kind of a big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, they still are.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

We didn't have Global Health.

[Leo Laporte]

Still are. Yeah, that's right.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Let's talk about the Sacklers and like their, their college.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I wonder what they're doing with their ill gotten gains. Mexico is suing Google over the Gulf of America name. The president of Mexico said the name change should only apply to the US Part of the Gulf. They want the Mexico part back. Are you taking up drinking now, Stacy, because of this? Is this my fault? The president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, said the lawsuit has already been filed. She argues the Trump administration's order for a name change only applies to the US Portion of the Gulf and the government doesn't have the authority to rename the whole thing. Google's renamed as, you know, as. I don't know if Apple's done it yet, but when you open maps going back to February, you looked at the Gulf of Mexico. It was renamed to the Gulf of America as the president wanted. Do they still call it Denali? Are you going to hike Denali or are you going to hike Mount McKinley?

[Shoshana Weissman]

I'm gonna hike neither for myself because I'm. That's how I die. Like that's 100% how I die.

[Leo Laporte]

That would be the end, wouldn't it?

[Shoshana Weissman]

I don't know my limits very well, but I know that's a limit.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a limit. Okay.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Big mountain.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I think most people call it Denali if you're in Alaska and up here.

[Leo Laporte]

Alaska, they still want to call it Denali. I think you're right.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I mean, yeah, I, I don't, I think last time I heard Mount McKinley was, I guess when Trump was renaming it and then also when I was like a kid.

[Leo Laporte]

It does have an old fashioned ring to it. You're watching this Week in Tech with our wonderful panelist. Stacey Higginbotham, who's now at Consumer Reports, is a policy fellow. It's wonderful. Congratulations on your success there. You're doing a great job. Thank you. We appreciate it. You get the wooden letters?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Oh, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

For a long time. You know, we have another regular on, on the show from Consumer Reports and Nicholas De Leon for the longest time didn't have the letters. And I said, where's your letters? And they finally sent him the letters. So now he has the letters. So there you go.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah. I think it was a Covid thing. Everybody got letters.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because we figure you're going to be at operating out of the house. Yeah. It's nice to see you again.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I had to handcraft mine in a 3D printer, but now. I'm just kidding.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they sent you that, right?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

They did. I did have to ask.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you had to ask. Where's my letters?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I was like, hey, I do a lot of interviews. Could I have some letters?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, no letters. Although you could have a big R. I think Shoshana behind you instead of a marmot would be good. You work for our street. I mean, it's the letter R. We're brought to you by the letter R. That's perfect. Be simple.

[Shoshana Weissman]

It's like the marmot. It's more simple. It's pure.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pure. The marmot is pure and it's looking right at me. Is it one of those marmot pictures where the eyes follow you as you move around?

[Shoshana Weissman]

Oh, I love that. I should get one of those for my apartment. This is where my money goes, though.

[Leo Laporte]

The marmot is pure. Pure of thought, pure of deed. Also, Wesley Faulkner. Great to have you. Oh, he was looking off to the side. Wesley83. Hey, over here, over here. Wesley.

[Wesley Faulkner]

There was a marmot next to me.

[Leo Laporte]

What's that doing over there? It's great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by Shopify. I have a soft spot in my heart for Shopify because that is how salt Hank, my son, sells his pickles and his salt. It really made it possible for him to be a small business with a web presence. Imagine you're lying in bed late at night. You're scrolling through the new site you found. I do this all the time. You hit the add to cart button. Oh, I gotta get. I gotta get those 3D designed shoes. Now you're ready to check out. But then you remember your wallet is in the living room downstairs just as you're getting ready to abandon the cart. That's when you see it, the purple shop button. And you go, whoo. No trip downstairs for me. If you've shopped online, chances are almost certainly you've bought from a business powered by Shopify. You see that purple shop pay button at checkout, and it makes it just so incredibly easy. There's a reason so many businesses sell with it, because Shopify makes it incredibly easy to start and run your business. I love that sound. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all e commerce in the US household names, Mattel, Gymshark to brands just getting started. Actually, both my kids have Shopify stores. My daughter sells T shirts she designed and Salt Hank sells salts. And yes, in fact, I can go there. I'll show you. He has that big purple Shopify button at the Salt Lovers Club. Let's just. Let's just go go shopping at the Salt Lovers Club for the best pickles and Seasonings in the world. And let's say I want to buy this and then I add it to the cart and what do I see? I see the big Shopify button Shop pay. I love it, so you should love it too. Shopify gives you that leg up from day one with hundreds of beautiful ready to go templates to express your brand, your style. Forget about the code. Actually I was very impressed and I saw his site and he said, well yeah, I did it with Shopify. It's pretty amazing. Tackle all those important tasks in one place, from inventory to payments to analytics and more. Spread your brand's word with built in marketing and email tools to find and keep new customers. And did I mention that iconic purple shop pay button used by millions of businesses around the world. It's why Shopify has the best. By the way, this is important. Henry confirms this with me. Best converting checkout on the planet, right? And conversions are what matters. Your customers already love it. You're going to love it too. If you want to see less carts being abandoned, it's time for you to head over to Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial. Start selling today. Shopify.com TWIT Go to shopify.com TWIT shopify.com TWIT Yay. Oh, I just put a bunch of pickles. Oh well, I'll eat them. Thank you. Salt, Hank. Thank you Shopify. Ah, let's see what else? What else? Some. I was going to say good news, but that's not good news, is it? Good news? Switzerland's going to have a referendum on electronic id. It actually failed once I have. I think I are back in the day when Estonia arranged a global international electronic id. I got somewhere. I have an Estonian ID card. The Swiss are set to vote on the introduction of eid. The petition, they were going to do it and there was a petition circulated saying no. 55,000 signatures that forced a referendum. I. What is the argument against eid?

[Shoshana Weissman]

This is something I actually know a little bit about. I've. I've gotten into this space from age verification. Like that's kind of where I started to dive into this. And I'm not even the best person. There's this guy who runs the Better Identity Coalition who knows like all arguments on all sides of it. But like there is a real tracking problem. Like how do you know for sure that the government isn't using their to track you? Our DMV sells our data. They sell less of our data than they used to because someone got killed because of it, but they still sell our data. And it's like just hoping that they're not gonna. Hoping they're not gonna mess around when there's really not that much oversight is a real concern.

[Leo Laporte]

The DMV should not be selling our data.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Oh, I know. And of course, Ron Wyden's on it because he's perfect and, like, always on this kind of stuff. But there's. There's some real issues here. The ACLU has this fantastic explainer on, like, if you're gonna do a virtual id, here's everything that you should consider and everything you should know and everything you should take into account. And. And it's really, really good stuff. This guy Jay over there is really fantastic, and he's taught me a lot about the way to consider it. And one of the principles is you should always allow physical ID for people who don't feel comfortable having virtual id.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Shoshana Weissman]

I think that's a really good principle there.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, in fact, when I got my Estonian eid, I did get a card. It was a chipped card, though, so it had information in the chip, I guess, or it was electronically confirmable.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Chips are good. You know, they're more secure. So I like that overall.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. In Switzerland, it is also the problem, the issue of personal data protection and private management of electronic identities. They actually tried to do this in 2021. It was swept away. The government now is back trying to establish an eid. I think you're right. I think in the United States, it would be very controversial.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Yeah. It's interesting, too, because it's far. Not even far left, but moderate to far further left. Liberals tend to be concerned about privacy. MAGA people tend to be concerned about privacy, but they also want to check to make sure everyone's a citizen all the time. But you can't really have both sides of that with the identification argument. But it's really interesting stuff because I think that there's some legitimate uses for this, but we also want to be careful. And this is something that I'm concerned about, like, every company saying, we need your id, and that's something that I could see happening that really does freak me out, making sure they have access to it in every circumstance. And we have a lot of policy from age verification for different sites that's pushing for this kind of stuff. Plus, LA's was hacked. I mean, it wasn't hacked, was it? Yeah, yeah. Their ID had a breach for. Through their vendor. So I'm like, how about we, like, get our cybersecurity in order first, and then, like, we go that way, but we're not gonna. So, you know.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, and I also had one of those Estonian IDs, and if you did as well, you probably heard that there was a security flaw the first card we got.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And so those weren't perfect either. So there's always a flaw. And when everything links together, there is more exposure.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course, right now, we're in a little tizzy over real ID because you now have to have a real ID as of May 7th to get on domestic flights to access federal facilities, and lots of people don't. So if your driver's license isn't real id, you, you know, you may get challenged getting on an airplane. Although the government has said, yeah, we'll let you. We'll let you slide. Because it's. It's. Again, it's one of those things where people are. I don't have one. I have a ticket for this plane flight. And in theory, you shouldn't be able to get on. The flight was real.

[Wesley Faulkner]

In theory, we shouldn't have TikTok.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, in theory, we shouldn't have TikTok. That's right. What was the point of real id, Shoshana? How is this different from the driver's license that I had?

[Shoshana Weissman]

It's more secure. I keep forgetting. I keep learning about it and forgetting. Identity policy is a huge mess, too.

[Leo Laporte]

It is.

[Shoshana Weissman]

The government doesn't talk to itself when there's reasons to do so. I know I've talked about this on the show before, but the IRS has. I forgot how many. I think it's over 100,000 cases annually of kids identities being used for tax fraud. And instead of telling the parents, they just tell no one. And I'm sure sometimes it's hard to verify the parents. The parent, that's fine, but they don't even attempt to. And they also stop telling people when they're, like, when they're deceased loved ones who they know for sure, their deceased loved ones. Because literally, it says in the ignition report from like 2020. Because it made them sad. So the government refuses to, like, tell people about basic stuff. The SSA will not communicate with the IRS to give them enough information so that they can, like, tell the relevant people to, like, you know, to make sure. And I'm just. It's such a mess. Our whole identity policy is a mess. And the SSA is also, like, they don't want to be the guardians of identity, but they are. Like, there's a real element there. And. And I Agree with them. Number. Social Security numbers shouldn't be used that way, but if they are, they should probably try to make it as safe and reasonable as they can. But instead they're like, not us, man, not us. Hot potato.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This was passed. The law was passed in 2005 in the wake of 9, 11, and it's taken us 20 years to get. I mean, they put it off. They put it off. They put it off. But the deadline was Wednesday. And the Transportation Security Administration, the tsa, are, in theory, now enforcing real id. Your driver's license, if you have a real id, will have a star or some other marking. In California, we have a golden bear. On our real id, we have a tree. Oh, that's nice. Is it cool?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I think we also, we actually, technically, we have an American flag because we are enhanced driver's license. That gets you into Canada, which is a completely late. It's real ID compliant, but it's different.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember when I renew my license, of course I wanted to get a real ID because I travel. And by the way, you can use a passport. A global entry card will work as well. But the idea was that there is a higher standard of proof of identity. So, you know, you really are who you say. It's kind of. Is kind of in a way, like a government identity program without all the benefits of an electronic id. And so I think I had to bring in my utility bill or something. It wasn't super stringent, but I couldn't.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Get one really, when I moved, when I first moved to Washington State because the bills that we. We didn't set up. Billing in my name for any paper bills. Yeah, that matched my. So that we had my husband's name, but we didn't have our marriage certificate. Right there it was. So I had to wait like a year. And until I started receiving bills under my name, it was a pain.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently there weren't a lot of slowdowns at the airports. I thought maybe this would be like a nightmare a week to fly. But apparently most people got real ID. TSA says about 81% of travelers now have real ID and they're allowing people without it at this point, at least for a while, to go through a higher security check to get onto the airplane. But bring your passport if you don't have a real id and if you don't have a passport. I would go out and get a real ID pretty quickly because it's not going to be forever that they're not going to let you on the plane.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I wonder what the additional screening is like, what do they. What are they doing? If it's about identity, they're.

[Leo Laporte]

They pat you down. I don't know. I don't know. They call your mom? I don't know.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Are they going through your phone?

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Well, was passed because of September 11th hijackers. And it was about. It's basically making sure that you are who you say you are.

[Leo Laporte]

Which, as Shoshana said, this is a big issue.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In for businesses. I mean, a lot of what we talk about these days is authentication. That's what the whole password thing is about.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Proving you are passing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Yeah.

[Wesley Faulkner]

But what additional verification of your identity are they doing at the airport?

[Leo Laporte]

If I. If I told you, I'd have to kill you. I don't know.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

I wonder if you had to bring your birth certificate. Oh, like for now, you probably just got an extra pat down. And they just assumed that if you're going to make trouble.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Okay. So security theater.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But I don't know how long that'll last. Right. And there's gotta be a little bit of a grace period. I mean, literally.

[Shoshana Weissman]

We still have to take our shoes off, Leo.

[Wesley Faulkner]

We still have to take our shoes off, Leo.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

There's been a grace period. We've known about this for over a decade.

[Leo Laporte]

20 years this has been going on. It's pretty amazing it actually happened. I was kind of stunned it had been put off for so long. Well, one thing we can't put off, it's Mother's Day. So if the TSA isn't calling your mother, maybe you. You should. And maybe it's too late to send her chocolates or a bagel, but do something nice for Mom. And of course, Stacy's a mom, so we're going to say have a wonderful evening and some wonderful entertainment, and I hope you get some lovely kisses and gifts. Stacy Higginbotham. So nice to have you. Policy fellow at. I see we got you out in plenty of time. Posse the policy fellow at Consumer Reports. At Giga Stacy. No, you're not still at Giga Stacy. You changed that didn't.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

Oh, I'm at Giga Stacy on Blue Sky. Oh, I just kept everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Why not back from the gigaom days.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

It's an homage to Giga Ohm.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So nice to see you, Stacy. Thanks for being here. I appreciate it. Wesley Faulkner. Same to you, buddy. Always nice to talk to you. Anything you want to plug?

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yes, absolutely. I just had a conversation earlier in the week with a guy named Jeff Atwood. He is one of the co founders of Stack Overflow and just similar to Bill Gates, he's interested in how to make the world a little bit better. And so I told him I would be on the show and I asked him if he wanted me to plug anything and he said plug his handle on Mastodon. So he's coding Horror on the.

[Leo Laporte]

I follow him.

[Wesley Faulkner]

It's Infosec. Exchange is his server. So like, yeah, follow him. He has something, by the way, that.

[Leo Laporte]

He'S gonna now say it clearly. Horror. Not horror. Yeah, because it sounded like something else.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Coding.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Not hoarder. Not hoarder.

[Leo Laporte]

Horror. I do follow him. I follow him for a long time because I love his blog. Coding Horror. Yeah, yeah. If you don't say it right, it sounds like he's a slut for coding. And yes, while it's true, I don't think that's the intent of the handle.

[Shoshana Weissman]

I thought that's what it was. I was like, oh, I love that. That's great.

[Wesley Faulkner]

No, he's been talking about something like Stay Gold and if you are familiar with it, there's a big announcement coming up and I'm not going to spoil it. I'm not going to go ahead of Stay Gold. But it's about how we as a community can support each other. And he's building a coalition, I'll just say that for like minded, community focused people. And everything he's done has been community focused. Like Stack Overflow, Discourse.

[Leo Laporte]

Like if you founded Discourse, which we use as our forum at Twitter. Community. And yeah, and I follow him on Twitter Social. Our Mastodon. I think Jeff's great. I've always liked him. So give him my regards.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, yeah. And follow him. And if you're listening to this and you don't follow him already, please follow him. And once there is news, please send him a message saying that how you would like to get involved.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so something's coming up. Something good from Jeff Atwood. Yeah, yeah. At coding. H O R R O R. Horror. Like a horror movie. Okay. Although he looks like it could be horrible, it's horrifying, terrifying. What a great image. I love it. Nice to see you, Jeff. Let him know he can be. Have him on the show. We'd love to have him on the show sometime. I'll tell him he's kind of a legend. Stay Gold, America. Oh yeah, it's right there. Here it is. Here's his post announcing it. Okay. This is all the stuff we've been talking about. That's great, that's great. Thank you. Wesley, so nice to see you. Have a wonderful evening. Thank you. Also to Shoshana Weissman. Rstreet.org We've referred to your age verification article many, many times. You wrote that a couple of years ago, but it's still up on our street, right?

[Shoshana Weissman]

Yeah. Thank you. I'm actually adding two more pieces to it in the future, too, and then some more after I finish some more research. But lawmakers don't want to acknowledge that children don't have ID cards. So I'm gonna have to yell at.

[Leo Laporte]

Them for it because, like, somehow we gotta figure that out somehow.

[Shoshana Weissman]

It's stressful, but it's fun. And I have a piece on encryption coming out somewhere at some time, but basically, how. So let's not keep creating backdoors, because we should learn that lesson over and over again.

[Leo Laporte]

You know the fundamental problems with social media edge verification legislation? You should read it. What is the book you're holding, by the way? I've wanted to ask you this for years.

[Shoshana Weissman]

It's the Federalist Papers.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. That's the first edition.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Yeah. So at the Federalist Society conference, I think it was 2019, one of their donors was like, like, do you want to come hold the Federalist Papers? So everyone came and, like, took pictures of the Federalist Papers.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Shoshana Weissman]

And I had just met a friend who I knew through the Internet, and he took a picture of me, and it's my favorite picture. So I should probably have something more recent up.

[Leo Laporte]

But no, I love it.

[Shoshana Weissman]

Go back to that donor and find them and be like, can I hold the Federalist Papers for my new headshot?

[Leo Laporte]

We were talking about Alexander Hamilton just a little while ago. He wrote almost all of them. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Thank you, Shoshana. I really appreciate you being here. A special thanks to all our Club Twit members who make our shows possible. You guys pay for the shirts? No. You don't? I don't take any of the money, but it does support what we do here. In fact, 25% of our revenue comes from Club Twit. If you're not a member of Club Twit, I beg you, consider it. I know money's tight right now, but it's only $7 a month. You get so many benefits. Not only ad free versions of all the shows. Cause I hate it when they charge you for something and then they still show you ads. So no ads unless you, you know, unless you want to. But you also get access to the Club Twit discord, which is a great hang, really. Full of smart, interesting people. Not just during the shows, but all the time talking about the things we geeks care a lot about. Scooter X says he's waiting for the Federalist Papers to be made into a movie. By the way, Shreshan join us in the club. Seven bucks a month, $84 a year. We have some special events coming up. One of the things we've done because we keep getting takedowns from Apple when we stream their live events, we've decided to take them inside the Discord and make it only available to Club Twit members so that Apple can't complain. So all of the big keynotes, and there's quite a few coming up. Microsoft Builds keynote is May 19th. The Google I O keynote may 20th. We will be doing those in the club as well as WWDC on June 9th and this Thursday. I'm sorry, Friday, a little something called Stacy's Book Club. Very excited. By the way, Stacy loved this book. The Word for World is Forest. Ursula K. Le Guin I'm ashamed to admit this. I've never read anything else of hers and now I want to read it all. It was a wonderful book. We'll be talking about that on May 16th. That's this Friday, 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern. But you got to be in the club. So join the club. Join our Book club. Join our AI Users group. We're going to have a hangout next week with Dixie Bartolo to celebrate his 2003 Giz Whiz. There's lots of stuff happening in the club. It's a club you want to join. Please do. Twit TV Club Twit. And thanks in advance. And a special thanks to all our Club Twit members. We do this week at Tech every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5pm Pacific. That's 5 to 8pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. We stream it live on eight different platforms in the club. Of course it's on the discord, but also YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, linkedIn, Facebook and Kik. Pick a channel. Watch. I'm watching the chat from all of them. So we get our input from you and we appreciate that. Of course, most people don't watch live. They watch after the fact. And if you can, you should go to our website TWiT TV and download an audio or video of this show and all the other 1030 other shows that we've done over the last 20 years. You can also go to a YouTube channel dedicated to this Week in Tech. All our shows have their own YouTube channel. Great way to share with others things you see on this show. Share the information about the show, it helps us promotes it. And of course you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player too. It is a podcast after all. And if you do subscribe in Apple Podcast or Pocket Casts or Overcast or whatever podcast app you use, do us a favor. Leave us a good review, will you? Five stars, three stars, whatever it is, the maximum is that helps us share spread the word as well and we appreciate that. Thanks for watching everybody. Thanks for listening and we will see you next time. And as I've said for 20 years now, in our 21st year, another twit is in the can Take Take care For quick tech insights, dive into TWiT's short form lineup. From Hands On Mac, you can get helpful tips, great apps and awesome accessories for your Mac, iPad and iPhone. Hands On Windows offers essential advice and everything new in Windows. Hands On Tech zooms in on a specific theme with easy to follow advice that turns tech troubles into triumphs. Home Theater Geeks with Scott Wilkinson supercharges all things home entertainment. And if you like watching the shows, join Club Twit and you'll get full video access to plus ad free versions and more. Get informed fast with all of TWiT TV's short form shows. Download and subscribe today on your favorite podcast player.

[Stacey Higginbotham]

He's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Stacey Higginbotham]

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