This Week in Tech 1035: The Droids Are in the Escape Pod

Summary

All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio) – Detailed Summary of "This Week in Tech 1035: The Droids Are in the Escape Pod"

Release Date: June 9, 2025

Introduction Hosted by Leo Laporte, "This Week in Tech" brings together a panel of experts to discuss the latest in technology. In episode 1035, titled "The Droids Are in the Escape Pod," the panel delves into a range of topics, from the passing of computing legend Bill Atkinson to significant legal battles surrounding AI and privacy.

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1. Honoring the Legacy of Bill Atkinson [03:53 – 11:13]

The episode opens with a heartfelt tribute to Bill Atkinson, a pioneering figure in the tech industry known for his work at Apple. Atkinson, the 51st employee at Apple, was instrumental in creating QuickDraw, MacPaint, and HyperCard—tools that significantly influenced the development of user interfaces and the early web.

• Leo Laporte shares personal anecdotes:

  "Bill was a very creative guy... I think one day we spent five hours talking and turned it into a couple of triangulation episodes." [04:43]

• Larry Magid reminisces about Atkinson's charm and energy:

  "I remember him as just being a very, well, charming, energetic guy." [11:13]

Bill’s contributions, especially HyperCard, are highlighted as foundational to modern computing, enabling users to create interactive media long before the advent of the World Wide Web.

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2. OpenAI’s Legal Struggles and Privacy Implications [13:00 – 22:10]

The discussion shifts to the New York Times vs. OpenAI lawsuit, where a court order mandates OpenAI to preserve all ChatGPT logs, including deleted chats. This raises significant privacy concerns as OpenAI argues that retaining user data infringes on privacy rights.

• Leo Laporte expresses astonishment:

  "Frankly, I'm stunned. OpenAI argued the order really invaded the privacy." [14:48]

• Kathy Gellis, the panel's legal expert, explains the conflict:

  "There is clearly tension here. I don't know the details enough to know exactly where the specific legal pain points are..." [15:51]

The panel discusses the broader implications of such legal actions, emphasizing the challenges of balancing regulatory compliance with user privacy. They also touch upon the potential ripple effects on other AI companies and the overall landscape of data privacy.

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3. AI Regulation: Federal vs. State Jurisdiction [22:10 – 35:00]

A significant portion of the episode examines a controversial provision in a sweeping federal bill aimed at halting state-level AI regulations for ten years. This preemption attempt has sparked debate over states' rights to enact protective measures for consumers and workers.

• Leo Laporte critiques the provision:

  "...it does seem like a bit of a First... it's a long time and it does seem like the state should get to do that." [28:26]

• Kathy Gellis weighs in on federal preemption:

  "I think Section 230 is so useful because it preempts the ability of individual states to try to regulate the Internet." [29:30]

• Larry Magid suggests federal overreach:

  "...this may be an attempt for them to essentially eliminate the regulation of AI." [30:17]

The panel debates the merits and pitfalls of such federal interference, highlighting the risk of creating a regulatory vacuum and stifling innovation. They also discuss specific state initiatives, like California’s Healthcare Services Artificial Intelligence Act, which mandates disclaimers for AI use in healthcare settings.

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4. TikTok Ban Extended Amidst Legal Uncertainties [50:29 – 59:22]

The conversation turns to the ongoing saga of TikTok in the United States. The president has extended a pause and ban on TikTok acquisition, despite unresolved discussions about a potential sale.

• Kathy Gellis raises constitutional concerns:

  "...the president is out of forcing a Supreme." [50:54]

• Leo Laporte summarizes the legal conundrum:

  "The problem with these injunctions is that... the Supreme Court is upending centuries of law..." [58:54]

The panel highlights the complexities of enforcing such bans without infringing on constitutional rights and the broader implications for digital privacy and foreign influence.

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5. Impact of Tax Code Changes on Tech Employment [65:21 – 77:54]

A report from Quartz is discussed, detailing how a subtle change in the U.S. tax code (Section 174) has adversely affected research and development (R&D) investment, leading to significant layoffs in the tech sector.

• Leo Laporte explains the issue:

  "...section 174 of the US tax code has helped gut in-house software and product development teams..." [76:10]

• Kathy Gellis analyzes the legislative oversight:

  "...a secret change that doesn't manage what the fallout is..." [78:28]

The panel underscores the unintended consequences of tax legislation on technological innovation and workforce stability, emphasizing bipartisan efforts to repeal the detrimental changes.

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6. AI Usage and Reliability: Hallucinations and Overreliance [83:19 – 89:21]

The term "hallucinations" in AI is debated, focusing on the inaccuracies and unintended outputs generated by language models like ChatGPT.

• Sam Abulsamed critiques the term:

  "We end up describing it because I think it's a term that is very specific in terms of the effect..." [90:32]

• Kathy Gellis warns about sociological impacts:

  "...when people do have relationships with their bots, that is worse than dealing with a con artist..." [90:32]

• Larry Magid discusses practical implications:

  "It's very hard to regulate around emotional age. So there will be an age." [42:17]

The panel emphasizes the importance of user vigilance when interacting with AI, highlighting cases where AI-generated content has led to misinformation or legal complications.

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7. Automotive Technology: Smarter Seat Belts and ADAS [102:01 – 150:53]

The final segment features an in-depth conversation with Sam Abulsamed, VP of Research at Telemetry and host of the "Wheel Bearings" podcast, focusing on advancements in automotive safety technologies.

• Smarter Seat Belts: Volvo's new IOT-enabled seat belts adjust tension based on various factors like driver size and type of impact.

  "They're using it in a bunch of different ways... adjusting the amount of pretensioning based on your size..." [102:05]

• Adaptive Headlights: Discussion on the transition from basic headlights to adaptive systems that adjust based on real-time conditions, mirroring European advancements.

  "Volvo is taking advantage of... adaptive lighting systems to automatically lower beams when necessary." [102:56]

• Driver Monitoring Systems: Enhanced systems that assess driver attentiveness using AI and behavioral analysis to prevent accidents.

  "Volvo's driver understanding system looks for patterns... are you actually alert?" [107:00]

• Market Impact and Safety Concerns: Debates around the reliability of autonomous driving systems, comparing them to human error rates and discussing consumer trust.

  "Chachi PT is the same thing... it's gotten so good that most of the time you can rely on it, but you can't rely on it." [90:05]

The panel highlights the balance between leveraging technology for safety and avoiding overreliance that can lead to new forms of risk, such as distracted driving augmented by AI systems.

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Conclusion Episode 1035 of "This Week in Tech" offers a comprehensive exploration of pivotal issues shaping the technology landscape. From honoring the contributions of tech legends to grappling with the legal and ethical challenges of AI, the panel provides insightful discussions that are both timely and thought-provoking.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte: "Bill Atkinson, RIP and thank you for all the Quickdraw and HyperCard." [10:49]
• Kathy Gellis: "These are soulless things. This is like a sociopathic technology." [89:03]
• Sam Abulsamed: "There is no self-driving vehicle on the market." [119:46]

For those interested in the intersection of technology, law, and societal impact, this episode serves as an essential listen.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Great panel for you. My car guy, Sam Abulsamet is here. My Internet lawyer Kathy Gellis is here. And our eighth most popular guest, Larry Maggot is here. We're going to talk about the passing of a computing legend with some great stories. TikTok is still alive and good news. Freefile goes open source. All of that more coming up next on Twit. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech, episode 1035, recorded Sunday, June 8, 2025. The droids are in the Escape podcast. Foreign. It's time for TWiT this week at Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. We've got an all star panel assembled for you. As usual. Larry Maggot is here from connectsafely.org Good to see you, Larry. Welcome.

[Larry Magid]

Good to be here. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

When was the first time you were on Twitter? You've been on for a long time.

[Larry Magid]

A long time ago. And, you know, I did something kind of fun. I took your spreadsheet, which shows all of your guests for the last umpteen years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Larry Magid]

I ran it through ChatGPT, and I'm the 8th most popular person on your list listed. You know, I asked it to rank me because I'm very vain.

[Leo Laporte]

Chat will tell you how popular you are.

[Larry Magid]

Well, it'll tell me how many times I've been on relative to other guests. So. And it actually went back and looked at the entire.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, well, you. That makes sense. Yeah, we like to have you on.

[Larry Magid]

Yeah, well, it was fun to be on. I love being on the show. In fact, I have to tell you, when I, when I travel, I am more likely to get people to say I heard you on Twitter than I am to say I heard you on CBS News, which says something a lot about CBS News. I'm not sure which.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm finding this a little bit confusing. Like, I've heard that voice before, but not here. I haven't been on with you before.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Kathy Gallis. She is, of course, a contributor at Tech Dirt, and she is officially an attorney@law cgcouncil.com and we love having Kathy on all the time, but especially when the Supreme Court's been active, which has been a lot lately because she is admitted to, what do you call it, Lawyer in front of the Supreme Court.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm technically a member of the Supreme Court bar. This means I get to do stuff at the Supreme Court. Like file briefs and in theory, argue in front of them, but that's kind of hard to arrange.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, you never know if I. If I ever have a case in the Supreme Court. You're hired.

[Kathy Gellis]

Thank you. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, you would definitely. I'm not even joking. You would definitely be hired. Also here, our car guy, Sam Abulsamed. He's VP of research at Telemetry and of course hosts the wonderful Wheel Bearings podcast and is probably the number six most popular host.

[Sam Abulsamed]

I don't know about that because I. I think the first time I was on Twitter was probably about 10 years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Larry goes back to the Dvorak era. That's how long Larry's been on.

[Larry Magid]

I'm. I'm actually Chat PT because it might remember the spreadsheet I uploaded. Most popular.

[Leo Laporte]

Ask it again.

[Benito]

Sam is number 39. I have the list here.

[Sam Abulsamed]

I have it.

[Benito]

Okay. Sam is 39.

[Larry Magid]

Oh, okay.

[Sam Abulsamed]

If you counted all my appearances on the Tech guy and other stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

The tech guy. You used to be on every month on the tech guy.

[Sam Abulsamed]

So actually, it was like every week.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it every week? Oh, it was. It was every week. I was desperate to film.

[Larry Magid]

Micah Sergeant is number six according to Chat GPT.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because Martin Sargent. Oh, yeah, Micah. Yeah, of course.

[Larry Magid]

Because he's hot, tame, on top.

[Leo Laporte]

I should be number one. But you never.

[Larry Magid]

Jarvis is number two. I'm jealous.

[Sam Abulsamed]

A lot of vacation time.

[Larry Magid]

You know, you love Jeff more than you love me.

[Leo Laporte]

What can you say? No, I don't. No, I love Jeff.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm telling Jeff.

[Leo Laporte]

No, don't tell Jeff I said that.

[Sam Abulsamed]

It's the Mean Girls episode.

[Leo Laporte]

Normally I save. I don't want to. This is a lively, fun bunch, and I want to sadden everybody, but. And normally I save the. The obituaries to the end of the show, but this one is too big a deal to not mention Bill Atkinson, who was absolute pioneer in our industry. The 51st employee at Apple, he created Quick Draw, which is the Apple graphics primitives. Did it for Lisa first. Then Apple created MacPaint and HyperCard, which was in many ways a precursor to the World Wide Web. Passed away June 5th of pancreatic cancer, which sadly, also took Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson's mentor, I spent a lot of time.

[Larry Magid]

And Jeff Raskin as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Did I say who? I said.

[Larry Magid]

You mentioned Steve and then Jeff as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Larry Magid]

Jeff was kind of one of the original creator of the Macintosh, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, it was actually Raskin who brought Bill Atkinson in. He had Been a mentor of Bill's. He was in the art department at the UC San Diego. And Bill was an interesting fellow. I was very lucky to spend quite a few hours with him. I think one day we spent five hours talking and turned it into a couple of triangulation episodes. But he was a very creative guy. His original work was in brain science. And in fact, he was working on his PhD in brain science when Jeff Raskin said, you got to come to Apple. In fact, I'm going to let Bill complete the story. This is from one of our conversations back in 2018. Right.

[Bill Atkinson]

And he didn't take no for an answer. He sent me a round trip airfare with a little note saying, no strings attached, just visit for a weekend. And my dad lived in Los Gatos, not too far from Apple, so I figured, okay, I'll come down for a weekend.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple's pretty small at this time. About 30 employees. Yep.

[Bill Atkinson]

And Steve Jobs. I don't know what Jeff said to him, but Steve dedicated one entire day to recruiting me. He took me around to everybody that worked at apple. There were 30 people. They seemed like they were having fun. They were working on interesting things, and their heart was in the right place. They wanted to do something good in the world. But that wasn't enough. I had to finish. I wanted really. Consciousness is pretty amazing, frontier, and I wanted to work on that. But toward the end of the day, Steve took me aside and he said, when you read about some hot new technology that really was created two years prior, there's a lag between the time when something's created and the time when it's available to the public. If you want to affect the world, you have to get ahead of that lag and come to Apple, where we're inventing the future. You can help to invent the future and affect millions of people's lives. And then just as I was leaving, he gave me this visual. He said, think how fun it is to surf on the front edge of a wave and how not fun to dog paddle on the tail end of the same wave. I kind of stuck in my craw and I.

[Leo Laporte]

He was a good salesman, man, I tell you.

[Bill Atkinson]

Two weeks later, I had quit my neuroscience program.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Bill Atkinson]

Never finished my degree.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Bill Atkinson]

I had moved from up in Seattle down to Silicon Valley, which when I left was Santa Clara Valley.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. It was prune trees everywhere. Yeah.

[Bill Atkinson]

And I was working at Apple two weeks after his brave thing.

[Leo Laporte]

How did you Just amazing stories from Bill Atkins. He wrote Hypercard after an acid trip. A lot of Those stories are well on our page. If you search for Bill Atkinson, there's, I think, five shows that we did with Bill. Another place to go is Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org where many of the stories about the original Macintosh team are. In fact, he tells a great story about Bill and Quickdraw, which was, as I said, the graphics primitives very important to both the Lisa, the Mac's predecessor, and the Macintosh. And to this day, brilliant. He wanted to draw ovals and circles very quickly, which is hard to do on the Mac at that time because it was. Its processor didn't have floating point math. It only did integers. And circles need square roots, you know, PI r squared. Bill came up with a way to do the circle calculation with integers, just addition and subtraction, not even multiplication or division. And very proudly came in to show the team because he worked at home, he programmed at home, and he showed them drawings, showed the Lisa drawing circles. Hertzfeld writes. But something was bothering Steve Jobs. Well, circles and ovals are good, but how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners? Can we do that now, too? To which Bill replied, no, there's no way to do that. In fact, it'd be really hard to do. I don't think we really need it. Hertzfeld says, I think Bill was a little miffed that Steve wasn't raving over the fast ovals and still wanted more. Steve got more intense. Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere. Just look at this room. Sure enough, there were lots of them. The whiteboard, the desks, the tables. Then he pointed out the window. Look outside. There's even more practically everywhere you look. He even persuaded Bill to take a walk around the block with him pointing at every rectangle with rounded corners he could find. When Steve and Bill passed a no parking sign, and you know how they look with rounded corners, it did the trick. Okay, I give up. Bill pleaded. I'll see if it's as hard as I thought. He went back home to work on it. The next afternoon, he came back with a big smile on his face. The demo was now drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded corners. Blisteringly fast, almost at the speed of plain rectangles. And if you think about it, to this day, computer interfaces, if they were just square rectangles, would be ugly, they would be blocky. Rounded rectangles did transform the interface. And Bill did so many things like that. I don't know why this one hit me really hard. Maybe because I felt a real kinship with Bill, but I Think also because it is in some ways the end of an era. It's been more than 40 years since Bill did that seminal work that made the Macintosh what it is today, what computing is today. That's a long time. Feels like yesterday the first time I saw a Mac.

[Larry Magid]

Feels like it also reminds us who we're getting older.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. He was only five years older than.

[Larry Magid]

Me when he was younger than me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But what a loss.

[Kathy Gellis]

There's a rounded window. A rounded rectangle.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Everywhere you see it. Rounded rectangle.

[Kathy Gellis]

I minimized a window just to see my own.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. He became a photographer later in life.

[Larry Magid]

Beautiful, beautiful work.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazing work.

[Larry Magid]

Worth going to that website. It's just gorgeous.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, go see it. Yeah. Bill Atkinson.com. he had. He did rounded, rounded rectangles. He did thin sections of rocks and minerals and stuff. I have. He gave me some, which I treasure. A really beautiful, sweet, brilliant man. Jon Gruber said, perhaps the best programmer of all time. Certainly we're very lucky to have had him. So I thought I'd start the show just.

[Larry Magid]

I. I knew him then. I. I have not seen him in probably in 30 years, but I. I remember him as just being a very, well, charming, energetic guy.

[Leo Laporte]

You see how different he looked. He had long hair and a big, big Viva Zapata mustache and bright blue eyes. And apparently he was. I didn't know him in. In that day. I did. I did know Andy a little bit, but he didn't know Atkinson, apparently. Yeah. Very energetic, very passionate. When we were interviewing him at the beginning, his wife sue was very ill in passing and he was caring for her, and it was very hard. And then later, when I interviewed him some years later after she passed, he said he did an ayahuasca ceremony and talked with her and she gave him permission to move on. He did, in fact, find another wife who Lee loved deeply. And he was surrounded by his family when he passed after a somewhat long illness. So, Bill Atkinson, RIP and thank you for all the round wrecked and HyperCard.

[Larry Magid]

Boy, that was a breakthrough.

[Leo Laporte]

HyperCard. Amazing, amazing.

[Larry Magid]

I remember having it and I actually helped write a book about it. It was.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, did you.

[Larry Magid]

Yeah, I've got it on my shelf here. But it was just an amazing. The fact you could do that. And then. And you're absolutely right. I mean, the worldw. I mean, I give a lot of credit to Sir Bernard Lee, but I really think that Atkinson gets the real credit for it for having.

[Leo Laporte]

If at the time we'd had the Internet, it would have been the World Wide Web. But. But we didn't. And Berners Lee obviously was inspired by what HyperCard was. If you'd never used it, maybe it wouldn't come clear to you, but it was a brilliant. It was amazing. I remember I used it to plan my radio show in the mid-80s. My dad used it to do a history of Darwin sailing in the Beagle and discovering evolution and so forth. So many hypercard stacks. And this was before the Internet. This is before.

[Larry Magid]

And it also. When the CD ROM came around. I can't remember what they called it then, but CDs all had this kind of interactive clicking and moving from one spot to another. It wasn't called hypercar, but it was very similar.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think this whole hyperlinking thing really dates back, actually.

[Larry Magid]

I meant the DVD more than the cd, but point of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right. Anyway, I've been Sad the last 24 hours. It was. I got an email from John Slanina, our studio engineer, with a bunch of pictures of Bill at the studio, and I said, oh. I said, oh, that's nice. I don't know why he sent me that. Then I saw the news and I thought, oh, I'm very sad. Very, very sad. All right, now we can move on to some jolly things. Well, not really. And I'm glad you're here, Kathy. There's a lot of court news. OpenAI has been ordered to preserve all the ChatGPT logs, including deleted chats. This is in the New York Times versus OpenAI lawsuit. Frankly, I'm stunned. OpenAI argued the order really invaded the privacy. They warned. The privacy of hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users globally is at risk. And it's true, because it will by default remember your chats. But there is a button to delete them.

[Larry Magid]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently OpenAI has everything that was intentionally deleted. I don't know. That's speculation.

[Larry Magid]

Scares me because I use it for medical research and I do delete some data that I. That I give it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Larry Magid]

And I always assume that that was. It was gone.

[Kathy Gellis]

I think they start to risk issues with compliance with anybody's privacy laws if it's. If they say it is and it isn't, or if they're required to delete it and it's not. I think this is an order that. There's clearly tension here. I don't. I don't know the details enough to know exactly where the specific legal pain points are, but conceptually this is a problem because you have some regulatory pressure saying, get rid of this stuff. The user has just told you to get rid of it. And then you have another form of regulatory pressure saying you must keep it. And you can't please both masters at the same time. And I think this is the tip of the iceberg of this type of tension.

[Leo Laporte]

Now OpenAI says we are retaining all content indefinitely going forward based on speculation that the news plaintiffs might find something that supports their case. They say this is rushed. This has really nothing to do with OpenAI. New York Times, you know, claims OpenAI ingested the new York Times content illegally. And in fact, you may remember in the suit, the New York Times jumped through crazy hoops to make ChatGPT spit out actual paragraphs from the New York Times. But it only did that by providing the preceding three or four paragraphs and saying what comes next. OpenAI is going to challenge the order. They're pushing for oral arguments, hoping that user testimony will sway the court to set it aside. Maybe, Kathy, you can get involved in this. This is, this seems to be a real overreach, to be honest with you. First of all, I'm not a fan of the New York Times lawsuit in the first place, but for then the court to order this huge invasion of privacy.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I understand what the court's thinking because normally you do have to put litigation holds and not delete any evidence that's going to be relevant to a case. So there's, that's not completely out of the blue. That's the kind of thing that would.

[Leo Laporte]

Happen if it's the company's email, the company conversations.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is their user's conversation and.

[Kathy Gellis]

Who is a compromise. And first off, it's getting retained. And second off, the reason it's getting retained is because in theory somebody else is going to see it. And you know, there might be an adequate protective order about who gets to actually look at it. But the whole point is that somebody is going to be pawing through this data. In fact, it's going to be multiple. Somebody's pulling through this data because at minimum you're going to have an expert on the New York Times site and side and somebody on OpenAI side so they can do some analysis on it. So the whole point of keeping it is so somebody can look at it, but that's where the problem is.

[Larry Magid]

And don't the New York Times lawyers fight to make sure that their reporters don't have to reveal their sources? I mean, isn't this almost in a similar kind of vein that isn't that.

[Leo Laporte]

Ironic because there would be reporter sources in there potentially, among other things. A lot of reporters use Whisper and other OpenAI technologies to transcribe conversations with sources. I mean, a good reporter probably shouldn't. They should be doing something locally. But nevertheless, I think it happens.

[Sam Abulsamed]

So what would actually be in these logs? Would it be the prompts and then the responses?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, and presumably any documents provided in the prompt. Right. So if I say, here's a transcript of my interview with Top Secret, a source at. In the federal government, can you transcribe it and summarize it? I presume the. I don't know, but I presume the conversation would be saved as well as the results. That's part of the prompt. That's the. That's the rag.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. And especially because I think some of the litigation is really not just talking about what. What went into it, but what was it spitting out, because it's going to look and see were there replications of copyrightable material. But this just seems really exhaustive. It's not at the moment, it's not even a finite universe of. So actually, one of the things to bear in mind in a lot of these discovery disputes is that it's broadly construed, but you really only have to produce relevant information. And I think there's a pretty strong.

[Leo Laporte]

Argument that a lot of fishing expedition.

[Kathy Gellis]

In a way, well, fishing, but also that it's overbroad. And then, you know, some of the defenses against producing things are it's not relevant, it's unduly burdensome because this is also going to keep a massive, massive, massive amount of data. Like, physically, can it actually be archived? They may, you know, OpenAI may want stuff to get deleted so they can get space back. So there are some defenses to it, because even in our litigation system, which has very, very, very broad rules about what is producible, there are some limits. And this one seems to probably cross some of those limits. But conceptually, also for what Larry was saying, it's not exactly the same thing, because these are different little vectors of law that are causing something to either be withheld or shared. But one of the problems we have is law is kind of splintered, where you get a vector of law saying, thou shalt store, or there thou shalt save or delete or something. And we don't really have a coherent system that deals with all these different avenues. And sometimes when reporters are getting told to produce something, somebody will dig up a vector that came from, like, another area of law and said, well, given these general rules about what is shareable, you should be subject to it. So it's not exactly shooting themselves in the foot, but it's. The ethos is poor. And yeah, they could actually be making some law that will show up and hurt them later.

[Larry Magid]

Later comes up in the whole child pornography issue because prosecutors want evidence preserved. But companies often have privacy policies where they automatically delete data after a certain time. And so you have these two different legal principles, both of which have some, you know, merit essentially clashing with each other.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I don't want to belabor this any longer, but maybe people should use a different AI, which of course is exactly what Chatbot is afraid of. And probably the New York Times is.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Thrilled to hear about times, you know, won this lawsuit. Then they would be probably going after the other AI companies as well. So, you know, using, using any AI that's running in the cloud would. Oh, that's at some point, you know, leave you susceptible to the same problem, the same privacy issue.

[Larry Magid]

Plus a lot of companies are actually using the open AI models. I don't know if that would be impacted or not. If someone else is using, you know, OpenAI LLM, would that also be subject to this court order?

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah, I mean, if you're using Siri and it, you know, if you're using Siri and it sends a query. Oh yeah, or Bing, you know, or.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why Apple warns you, by the way, when you do that, you're sending data to OpenAI, your privacy is now moot. All right, we gotta take a break. There's more AI news. We got a great panel. Larry Maggot is here. Kathy Gellis. Sam Abulsamed. There's some car stories for you. Sam, we got some car stuff. I want to talk about that Slate truck too. I mean, that's not. It's old news a little bit, but I'm very curious what you think about it. But first, a word from our sponsor. And a good sponsor it is when you want to protect yourself. Bitwarden, the password manager I use and recommend. Steve Gibson uses and recommends. It's the trusted leader in passwords, secrets and passkey management. Yeah, it's great for passkeys. With more than 10 million users across 180 countries, over 50,000 businesses worldwide, Bitwarden continues to protect individuals and businesses everywhere. G2 consistently ranks at number one in user satisfaction. 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That great big ugly bill that the Senate and the House are trying to pass does have a provision in it that would force states to not regulate AI in any way for 10 years. Right now, I'm not a big fan of AI regulation, but that does seem like a bit of a First of all, it's a long time and it does seem like the state should get to do that. It is not likely that that provision will be removed in reconciliation. That's not what the sticking point is for this bill. So Ro Khanna, from whose district includes Silicon Valley, he's in the House, says what this moratorium does is prevent every state in the country from having basic regulations to protect workers and protect consumers. It could restrict state laws that attempt to regulate social media companies, prevent algorithmic rent discrimination. That's probably part of the problem is this AI is very broadly defined in this and anything algorithmic is could be considered AI prevent limit AI deep fakes that could they can't pass laws against AI deepfakes. It would basically, he says, give a free reign to corporations, develop AI in any way they wanted to develop automatic decision making without protecting consumers, workers and kids.

[Kathy Gellis]

I have mixed feelings about this. I am generally a fan of federal law preemption when it comes to particularly communicative technologies, but maybe even technology in general. This is a big issue that comes up with Internet regulation. It is a problem when each state comes up with its own rules. This is why Section 230 is so useful, because it preempts the ability of individual states to try to regulate the Internet. Because if we look at are we going to get the same regulation out of California that we're going to get out of Texas? No. And what does a company do when the two sets of regulation don't match and don't meet? You can also see things where the patchwork problem, well, that's also a, there's no way you can make them all happy, particularly for the cross border communications thing. But then we also see in terms of privacy law that every state wants to do it their way. Then it's patchwork and then you've still got an enormous compliance problem because even if the rules aren't inconsistent, there's too many rules.

[Leo Laporte]

If the feds say, well, we're going to pass a law regulating AI that preempts state law. But this is, this, this creates a vacuum.

[Larry Magid]

It's not only preempts.

[Leo Laporte]

There'S no federal AI regulation either.

[Larry Magid]

Kathy, I agree with you. And in my article, which you'll find on the right column in the front page of Connect Safely, I make the same point that generally speaking, I don't like state laws because of the patchwork and conflicting each other. And it's impossible. It's hard enough in a global environment, but you know, an American. But in this case, my theory is, and I'm not even a theory, I mean, if you look at what's going on with the Trump administration and their tech bros, this is an attempt for them to essentially eliminate the regulation of AI. And if the federal, this may be.

[Leo Laporte]

The thing, the last thing Elon did before he burned his bridges and.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right.

[Sam Abulsamed]

And this is an administration that is fundamentally opposed at every level to any kind of regulation.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Sam Abulsamed]

If they could, they would get rid of every federal regulation, which while I, again, I agree with you, Kathy, you know that a federal regulation that does preempt the state regulations would be better. Could, could be, could be better. Wouldn't necessarily be better.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, look at, look at Maria Cantlo's privacy law, which, which as part of it did in fact preempt all state privacy laws, but it didn't replace them with a better law. It effectively defanged them with that same argument. Well, you can't have a patchwork quilt of laws without providing a better alternative. Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, better also tends to be relative. I do think that is important actually, that we still do get a federal privacy bill. And I think one of the critical things that we get out of it is preemption, because I think we've got Some real problems. I think I might take it even if it wasn't necessarily a good law, because I think there are some externalities we're kind of glossing over with what happens when every state does it its own way and it gets really inconsistent. And we have some big, not insignificant, impingements on speech that can happen. And there's other collateral problems, but also just the huge compliance problem where you stifle innovation as well, because you have to have more lawyers on your staff instead of more engineers, among other problems. But in terms of this, I think one of the things that's emerging from this conversation is the sense of it's one thing to preempt prospectively when there's nothing, and it's another thing to preempt when you have something. The Congress actually is speaking in that area, and this is just kind of creating a vacuum. It's probably both under inclusive and over inclusive. The definitions are iffy. And I get the sense that this may have been proposed and promulgated by people I like who should have known better, because it kind of seems a little bit more like making a statement about a lot of the dumbness that comes up with how technology gets regulated.

[Leo Laporte]

You give a good example in your article about California's AB3030, the Healthcare Services Artificial Intelligence act, which requires healthcare providers to disclaim it when they're using AI. For instance, I just was in the doctor, he's got a little sign in his office saying, I'm using AI to record this conversation and analyze it. The conversation was deleted immediately afterwards. I use this for notes so I can pay attention to you instead of typing the whole time, which you used to do. Yeah, that would be a good law. And the fact that it's only in California. I mean, how often does California make a law that, because it's a good law, ends up changing the way AI works or some business works nationally?

[Larry Magid]

And it was overwhelmingly supported by both parties. And by the way, Marsha Blackburn, the Republican senator from Tennessee, is concerned that this bill would or this clause would preempt the Elvis law that stands, which it should.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yes, yes.

[Larry Magid]

But the point is that there is.

[Leo Laporte]

Bipartisan Elvis law, which is a law in Tennessee, the Ensuring Likeness, Voice and Image Security Act.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Protects Elvis, I guess, against AI impersonation.

[Kathy Gellis]

Is that the point? I think the reason that this law got. That this particular language managed to get promulgated and provided to somebody who was able to get it into the bills is because there's so much stupid. There's stupid in the states, there's stupid in the federal government. And the idea is I think to just kind of like press pause a little bit so that do policy making in this space, but do it sensibly from a federally perspective in favor of.

[Leo Laporte]

Light touch regulation though on the Internet.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And now on emerging technologies, because we don't know yet. Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, and like. So the bill that you're talking about from California, okay, that provision kind of sounds pretty benign and probably sufficient for even states to be able to do because you're really sort of regulating something so local. So there are some good things that can come out of the states. But we also know that the states, including California, looking at you, have a habit of taking gigantic hammers to things and producing really dumb things. So in which case you really want the federal preemption because you want the states to stop doing dumb things. So I think this was a little bit of a stunt and mostly to kind of just press pause on things so you could get more space.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a stunt that's going to be a federal law though.

[Kathy Gellis]

And I think the problem is, yeah, it's a stunt that is probably going to escape, you know, control and end up becoming law and we'll have to live with the consequences. But maybe the consequences. Let's, let's look at the silver lining. If the states can't act, maybe it does prompt the Fed to do something. Now the downside is they could do something that's terrible and now they've got more political pressure to do something, anything and are more likely to do something that's terrible. But on the other hand, we won't have 51 versions of terrible because we'll just now have the one version of terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'll give you an example of terrible. Federal Judge blocks Florida from enforcing Social Media ban for Kids. Well, Florida banned the use. Banned outright banned the use of social media for children under 14.

[Larry Magid]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I mean you, even if the parent says yes, you can't. And if you have a 14 or 15 year old, well, the parents can get permission.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That is unconstitutional, clearly.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yes, well, we hope, clearly, but. And it's good that this court saw it. But occasionally we hit courts like looking at you fifth Circuit that tend to struggle on these things.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

So there's other cases that are Free Speech Coalition versus Media Matters came out of the fifth Circuit where they did not recognize the unconstitutionality of these things. And there's a new litigation that's just hit about another one of the age gating legislation that came out of Texas.

[Larry Magid]

We actually hired a policy consultant because of this. I mean, we're an Internet safety organization, but we also believe in things like the First Amendment and the UN Convention of the rights of the child and other those silly little documents that say you don't have to be 18 years old to enjoy the right of free speech. So there's a lot of these things that we wind up having to fight, even though they're done in the name of what we advocate, which is I'll.

[Leo Laporte]

Tie on this hill. Tell me what you think of it, Larry. That it really should be not the government's job, but the parents job.

[Larry Magid]

It should be the parents job. And also we should recognize that there are young people, some of them are lgbtq, some of them have religious ideas or political ideas that differ from their parents. And they should be able to explore and express themselves even if their parents disagree. Now, I'm not saying that there should be a free rein that, you know, four year olds should get to go to porn sites, but I am suggesting that preteens and teens deserve some privacy and some free speech.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree on that. But I don't think it's practical for the government to say, oh parents, you can't block your kids from LGBTQ sites either. So I think that the reasonable compromise is parents should be given the tools they need to make these decisions for their kids. I think it's really clear that in fact Apple's already implemented this. Apple should have an API, a way for an app to query the device, saying, is this kid old enough in the parents eyes to use this?

[Larry Magid]

Right. That'll be the big controversy between Apple and Meta over that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there's a difference because Meta wants Apple to block stuff in the App Store. They want them to be the arbiter. The parent should be the arbiter. Apple gives them a tool to. You should have on Android and iOS, a tool as a parent that says my kid emotionally is 8 or I don't care what chronological date, but emotionally they're an adult and you should have that ability as a parent to set that. And then apps should have a way of querying it and would be required to adhere to it. That would give parents control over it. Now I agree with you, Larry. There are many cases where a parent shouldn't have control, but sorry, that's the way it is.

[Kathy Gellis]

I'm more on the side of legally. A proposal like that may have fewer of the problems that a lot of the age gating does, because I think you're just saying that it's a check for whether the parent has given permission as opposed to whether it's recording anybody's true identity and verified. Things like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And you don't have to give page verification of any kind as an adult or a child. And I also understand that a kid could go to his neighbor's house and use that. The. Their phone. There's no perfect solution to this. There are lots of imperfect solutions.

[Kathy Gellis]

I do think, like what Larry was starting to get at, that there is a risk vector itself if. To the rights of kids too. If, if they're, if there is somebody their parent can completely overrule and essentially cut them off from the world, that there is a problem there.

[Leo Laporte]

Although that's the way it is right now in every respect in a child's life.

[Larry Magid]

Not when it comes to reproductive health. California, I believe a minor can have an abortion without parental permission. I believe that's the case. I don't know if anybody can update me on that one.

[Leo Laporte]

But if a parent wants to have their kid get a certain kind of education, wants to keep them from leaving the house, wants them to dress like they belong in the Handmaid's Tale, a parent can do that. And there's no law against that. And there shouldn't be, I believe, because that it's overreached by the government.

[Larry Magid]

Although in Europe there are, you know, Europe, children have privacy protections vis a vis their own parents. In America, those, those laws don't exist.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they. Lisa, you know, I remember Lisa when she took her 13 year old to the doctor, the doctor said, okay, mom, bye.

[Larry Magid]

Yeah, yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Because there are.

[Leo Laporte]

And she can't get her son's medical records. I remember I couldn't get my son's medical records when he was under 18. So there are protections like that. I suppose they're good. I hate to see government tell parents what to do. I admit there are bad parents, but I don't think that. I think that's. I don't think government can fix that problem.

[Kathy Gellis]

The problem is that with this policy problem, what you're basically saying. Actually, let me make two points. One is you're basically saying that if the government can pass a law saying we should have this apparatus, you've already gotten the government evolved. And the government is placing its finger on the scale of how this is all going to get worked out. If Apple itself wants to offer this as a feature because it thinks it's a marketable feature and parents are going to want to buy. If you're going to buy your kid A phone. Buy one where you can have this ability to cut your kids off from certain and things. And fine, if it's a private, if it's a truly private choice between the consumer and the. And the company, you know, whatever. I think there may be some social externalities to study, but I don't, I'm not as bothered by it from a legal standpoint. But if you have the state saying there needs to be a law to require Apple to do it, then I think we've really sort of.

[Larry Magid]

Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

The state is starting to navigate these really fraught issues in ways that are going to cause harm, even if they might.

[Leo Laporte]

In this case. In this case we have, we have societal norms, we have moral authority. We don't need a law. Apple do the right thing. Right.

[Sam Abulsamed]

But how far is the right thing for Apple? Like should it be just that, you know, this emotional age type of threshold or, you know, should they also give parents, you know, a list of here's topics that you can block?

[Leo Laporte]

Sure.

[Sam Abulsamed]

How far, how far should they go with emotion.

[Larry Magid]

Emotional age, which I actually. Everybody who's an expert in this field agrees that 13, 18, all these numbers.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S arbitrary, arbitrary, meaningless.

[Larry Magid]

But it's pretty hard to regulate around emotional age. So there will be an age.

[Leo Laporte]

The reason you have to do that is.

[Sam Abulsamed]

I'm talking about regulation.

[Leo Laporte]

Any other system is going to require some sort of age verification. That's right out. You can't do it. There's no way to do that safely or privately. That's just a bad idea. So it has to be. The parent is the judge. It doesn't even have to say emotional age. What's your child's birth date, but the parent can set it.

[Kathy Gellis]

No. Then you're starting to get into age verification. If you're starting to specifically no, because.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't distribute the birth date. All it is is an API that says, is this child allowed to use this? You don't know what the birth date is. And there's no responsible for that. Is the parent. There is no verification. The only person responsible, that's the parent.

[Larry Magid]

I think the, the reason, the argument that Meta makes, and it's a pretty good one actually, is that when you buy a child a phone, you're handing them the phone, you're the parent. You can set their age. When they go off today and sign up for an Instagram account, they decide, they tell Instagram how old they want Instagram to think they are.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Larry Magid]

And there's really no checks on that. Now there's all sorts of technology that's being built and that's around that. It's called age assurance. But it doesn't.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand Meta wants to. Does not want to do it.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They want Apple to do it in the App Store. The. What Meta should say is, Apple, you need an API that we can query that says is it okay or not?

[Larry Magid]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's all. And we just query it. Is it okay or not? And the parent could say never okay to install Instagram. Sam, you could have a setting. This is never okay to install social media apps, whatever Apple wants to do. In that light, the only thing Meta needs to know is is it okay or not?

[Sam Abulsamed]

Not.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a binary choice.

[Kathy Gellis]

I have a concern about that though because if you have in the bad parent situation, if the parent on the phone context is able to veto that the. That that Facebook can be installed, that's going to carry over to any other avenue that the. That the kid is going to potentially need access to. Because once the parent on the phone has said, oh, you don't get it, how are they going to be able to access their Facebook account anywhere else, including if they needed to?

[Leo Laporte]

This can't be solved on the App Store level. That's why you have child protective services. That's why you have state and local means to protect children. The App Store is not going to be doing that.

[Larry Magid]

Well, it's also why it's basically what my whole career has been dedicated. You all have to educate education.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree.

[Larry Magid]

And ultimately.

[Leo Laporte]

But making these companies responsible for it is not the path.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right.

[Larry Magid]

I said 30 years ago, the best filter is the one that runs between the ears to train your children to be critical.

[Kathy Gellis]

This is a sociological problem, not a legal or a technical problem. Although I would point out the second point I was going to make is we are essentially hitting the heart of section 230 and what caused it to be passed in the first place, which was one of the features of section 230 was to make sure that filtering technologies could be developed and used where it was trying to create these space where those could exist. And, and we like innovation here. There's cool things that technology can do. I'm not necessarily averse to seeing if there's some technology that can be helpful in some context, but I think it is a mistake and I think we're agreeing on this. That this idea that technology can definitively solve it, especially if it does things in a certain way, I think that's pie in the sky and potentially damaging to some very legitimate interests.

[Larry Magid]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we're going to take a break. We'll come back with more. Got lots of conversation to do. Larry Magid, the CEO and founder of ConnectSafely.org, it's all about keeping kids safe online. Lots of good information there. ConnectSafely.org is the website.

[Larry Magid]

If you Google family guide to parental controls, you're going to get a lot of information on this, including some advice on what parents can do.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think adequate? It's at the parental controls Apple and Google offer today are adequate.

[Larry Magid]

They're moving actually closer to the meta model. I think they're good. Adequate is the problem with adequate. It depends on the child. I think it's adequate for most kids, but there's always exceptions.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's all you can hope for. Look, this is a big world. You can't be perfect. I don't think. Kathy Yellis also here. As you can see, a legal expert. And it's always good to have a legal expert when you're talking court cases here. Nice to have you, Kathy.

[Kathy Gellis]

Nice to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll get some car stuff for you. Sam at Wheel Bearings podcast and VP Research at Telemetry. Stay tuned. Lots more to come. The show brought to you today by Shopify. It's difficult when you're starting a new business. You know, I. You can ask. I know us by heart. Learning all the new hats you have to wear. It seems like your to do list is growing every day with new tasks that can easily begin to overrun everything else your entire life. Right? Finding a tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything can, can change everything for millions of businesses. That tool Shopify. I love Shopify. And, you know, so do my kids. Both my kids have online businesses using Shop Pay, Shopify's store. They're not alone. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. 10% of all E commerce in the US from the big guys like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started like Salt Hank use Shopify. It's so cool that Henry could go from being, you know, a TikTok celebrity to creating an online store where he sells his salts and his pickles and apparel. And he has, you know, I mean, I know he's my son, but he's not exactly a web designer. He was able to make a great site with the help of Shopify. My daughter same thing. In fact, I just helped her set up her website for her book that she just published and she's selling online and she said, dad, I need to connect my domain name to Shopify. I said easy to do and she did it. Get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. Again, I know this directly. You can accelerate your content creation. Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools so they can write product descriptions, page headlines, they can even enhance the product photography. Get the word out like you have a whole marketed team behind you. You do. You have Shopify easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com TWIG go to shopify.com shopify.com TWIT I am seriously a Shopify fan. I think this is empowering technology. S H-O-P-I-F Y.com TWIT Take a look at what they can do for you. Shopify. I love that sound. I don't know. Does Henry hear that Every time he sells some salt? He must be going crazy right now. Ching ching ching ching ching. Oh hey, just some good news. While we're on the subject of government, TikTok is back. It says 75 days at a time. The president has once again extended the pause and the TikTok ban. Remember Congress passed this. The president, former president signed it. President Trump immediately put it on pause. Talks supposedly for a sale underway. I haven't seen any movement there.

[Kathy Gellis]

He doesn't lawfully have the ability to put it on pause because the predicate things that needed to happen in order to put it on pause haven't actually happened. And I remember sitting in like the front row of the Supreme Court while oral argument was happening and listening to Justice Sotomayor talking about I don't even want to think about what it means for the President to not be enforcing a valid law. And yet here we are where the president is out of forcing a Supreme.

[Leo Laporte]

Court already declared him immune law. But you know, the Supreme Court already.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Said said he was immune from prosecution for any special acts she did. But the majority of the court did.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well we go by majority rule here in this country.

[Larry Magid]

Well, this is one of those cases where I agree with the President's decision but disagree with his right to make it.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yes, I think that sums it up.

[Larry Magid]

Yeah, it's kind of the opposite of free speech where you disagree with what they say and agree. But you know, he had no right.

[Leo Laporte]

There is so much other unlawful stuff going on that, that this seems de minimis compared to all the other things the corporation is.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yes, there are, and there's vastly bigger fish to fry. But when you start chipping away at like not caring about like law actually doing its law thing, then it becomes really difficult to have law be available to do the things you really needed to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Historians may look back and say it all started with TikTok.

[Kathy Gellis]

I, I think. No, they'll, they'll, they'll. The clock will start earlier.

[Larry Magid]

Garcia is going to be part of that as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, well, I don't know. When did they write the Insurrection Act? 1807.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Wasn't it like.

[Kathy Gellis]

No, it was earlier than 90, I think.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah, 1998, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

It seems odd to me that that ancient bill would still be invocable today. And where's the insurrection anyway? But anyway, that's the big issue.

[Larry Magid]

No, the Constitution was written a long time ago. But you're right. Where's the insurrection?

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh, I was thinking not the Insurrection Act. I was thinking the aea Aliens and.

[Leo Laporte]

Sedition act, another fine anti First Amendment bill they pass. It's so funny. The founders passed the First Amendment and then within years they created the Aliens Seditions act, which is exactly the antithesis of the First Amendment.

[Kathy Gellis]

One of the things that happened, if you look at that history is John Adams, I think, was big on pushing these things. And you know, he didn't have. The Supreme Court wasn't quite booted up the way it has been booted up. So it wasn't challenged, but it was politically incredibly unpopular. And it did in his political career to the point that like, some of this ended up falling off the books. So there is a cautionary tale of like, even if you can manage to squeeze these kinds of autocratic things through, you know, the people don't actually like them.

[Leo Laporte]

So Supreme Court has allowed DOGE to access Social Security data. This is a very tangled web here because you've got, got the Social Security data, the IRS data, the opm, the Office of Personnel and Management data, all of which are supposed to be siloed because they contain lots of information, personal, personal information about people. Then you have DOGE coming in saying, we want to combine it all. And now we learned that Palantir has just made a deal to apply itself. Database searching techniques to these databases. The US Supreme Court granted the Trump administration's request to access sensitive Social Security information. The protections that kept that information out of the hands of other agencies are gone.

[Kathy Gellis]

So I was talking about this case the last time I was here because there had been the injunction saying that they had to stay out of the Social Security Administration. And I was pointing out one of the other, one of the issues that was kind of percolating out of it, which is there's a Fourth Amendment problem, which is the government is collecting all this data that it doesn't have a warrant for. So it's really collecting it via consent, but the consent is sort of contingent on the Privacy act keeping it in these.

[Leo Laporte]

When I turned 65, I gave the government a lot of information, including IDs, because I had to use ID me, which I wasn't thrilled about to sign up, and all this stuff from my Social Security, but I thought I was giving it to only the Social Security Administration and it was being siloed and carefully protected. Now some 20 something named big balls has access to it.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. And what happened is not. So once again, the Supreme Court did a tiny thing that ended up huge, but they think it's tiny. And in one context it is where there was an injunction. And what they have done is stayed the injunction. So they're treating it as kind of this minor thing. They haven't overturned it, they haven't looked at the substance of the underlying case, they haven't said anything. It's just that the injunction doesn't get to function while the litigation continues. But functionally that means now there's no functioning injunction. So all the people who are just restrained are no longer restrained.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I saw that on the function injunction. I'm just a bill on Capitol Hill. I feel like that might have been one of the songs on Schoolhouse Rocks. I might be wrong, wrong.

[Larry Magid]

I thought it was a. I thought it was a 60s sub comedy about, you know, trains and there's something junction.

[Leo Laporte]

So here's the. Here's the question. This is we. No one knows the answer. This is purely philosophical. But does Doge still exist now that Elon has left town?

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah, yeah, it's still there.

[Leo Laporte]

Is Big Ball still in the. Embedded in all of these agencies?

[Sam Abulsamed]

I believe so, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, a month or two ago, there was a whistleblower at the Veterans Administration who said that when Doge got access to all the database of the Veterans Administration, they turned off all logging first thing they did, and then exfiltrated 10 gigabytes of data to some place we don't know. And then within minutes, Russian accounts were logging in using DOGE credentials into the Veterans Administration.

[Larry Magid]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

This whistleblower was assisted in. It got a lot of attention. NPR covered it. I saw he was interviewed by Rachel Maddow on msnbc. He was threatened. There was a note taped to his door with a picture of him walking his dog from a drone shot saying, you might want to shut up about this. And then, by the way, I can't remember, was it cisa, one of the federal agencies said, yeah, we're not going to investigate this. And I haven't heard a word about it since. Now, I don't know what happened. I would like to know what happened. And it is, I think, a good reason to be concerned that these DOGE guys, who some of them have very shady backgrounds, including relationships with Russian hackers, are in there and are being given access to. To our most private information, information we gave the government with the understanding that it would remain private.

[Kathy Gellis]

And one of the things about these injunctions is that, like the one for the Social Security Administration, I believe, was basically, it didn't keep them out completely. It just sort of throttled them through. You only get onboarded into these systems if you go through all the trainings a normal person would have to go through. Like, you know, if. If you're sensible, you're trained, and you're independently trustworthy, you still can come in. But they couldn't come in for necessari things that were not particular to the way the office was normally run. But they weren't even completely shut out. It was a very reasonable kind of judicially supervised arrangement of where they could still get access if they could sort of make the claim that they had some legitimate need for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Incidentally, DOGE has protected people have argued that they should be considered an agency. And then, therefore, under the federal Freedom of Information act, we should be able to. To see a wide range of their records. The Trump administration says no, no, Doge just plays an advisory role. They're exempt from foia.

[Kathy Gellis]

Right. This is.

[Sam Abulsamed]

But then why do they have access to all of this information if they're nothing but advisors? They shouldn't even be in here.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. And some of the district court judges have called them on this to say, you're only an agency when you want to be an agency, and then you're not an agency. So the inconsistencies have been noted.

[Leo Laporte]

But just like Elon is only an employee of the government when he feels like it. But this is The Supreme Court. Kathy, this is it, right? It's over. There's no.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's over. Ish. The problem with these things is they were all shadow docket issues. And the justice.

[Leo Laporte]

So there's no opinions written. They're just a vote.

[Kathy Gellis]

No opinion was written. There was a very, very little, a little bit of text that came out with, with, with, like, there was a rush to the shadow docket to petition for the stay, and the stay was granted with very little text. But Justice Jackson wrote a dissent and is basically calling on them and saying, you know, we are doing tremendous things with tremendous effects with no merits, no briefing, you know, way too early in the process while we're still learning and the record is being established. And, and she's just pointing out that we have, have. That it's ridiculous for the Supreme Court to do so much of such magnitude in its effect so carelessly and via this, you know, really shortcutted, abbreviated non. Process. So I don't know what happens in these, but I wonder if the district courts are going to start getting creative. I also think that in a lot of the litigation, the litigants are going to stop asking for injunctions and start to ask for expedited briefing on the merits, which is what we saw with the Institute for Peace, who lost the tro, which I think was an abomination. But what the judge did is said, okay, we're basically going to do briefings on summary judgment within weeks. And now there has been a decision on the merits, and that kind of puts the whole thing in it. And with summary judgment on the merits, they got their building back. Because now she doesn't have to do a preliminary injunction. She can do a real injunction. Because. Because they've been found to have acted.

[Leo Laporte]

On law that's possible with buildings. Well, it was more than a building exfiltrated. It's not possible.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, that's true, too. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And if, if they have, which they certainly have by now, copied the database, it's out. I don't care what the court says, in two weeks or two years, it's done.

[Sam Abulsamed]

And, and odds. Odds are it was copied a long time ago, long before. Yeah, right.

[Larry Magid]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. What's extra garbage about it is it's not like preliminary injunctions are a thing that only rarely exists. They are a major point of, you know, litigation. We have them because you want to be able to preserve the status quo and make sure that harm doesn't happen. And the Supreme Court is basically completely upending centuries of, I mean, literally centuries of Law because you know, injunctive relief comes from the common law in England. So like they're just completely upending all the, all the rules that ended up up governing it and we no longer have them available as a tool.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's cheer everybody up. I remember Elon tweeting that IRS Direct File was dead that day. I immediately went and tried to use it. It was before April 15th and it wasn't dead. It was fine. I created that nice ID me account and all that. Well, it's dead. This is something that Intuit, the creators of Turbotech H&R Block and other commercial tax filing software did not want the federal government to have a free filing system because that would be bad for business, wouldn't it? Well, they got their wish and the IRS Direct File system was killed. However, thanks to Jason Keebler writing in 404, direct file has now been open sourced. It was originally created by the U.S. digital Services and of course DOGE has replaced USDS and that software which was created by USDs, oh, and 18F, that's the other company that DOGE killed. Other agency doge killed apparently 300,000 people used it last year as a limited pilot program. Very positive reviews because Jason writes it's free and because it's an example of government working. Direct file and IRS's free file program more broadly been the subject of years of lobbying efforts by financial technology giants like Intuit to kill it. DOGE sought to kill Direct File again. Elon said it's dead. There is language in the great big ugly bill that would kill direct fire. But the irs, you know, kind of, I think like the ships are burning quick save the treasure have released with.

[Sam Abulsamed]

The droids in the escape pod.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the droids are in the escape pod. The source codes on GitHub.

[Larry Magid]

But what about updates? Every the, you know, TurboTax has to be updated at least once a year. Actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Every year. Yeah, yeah.

[Larry Magid]

Far more often. So who's going to make.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this will be an interesting thing. You know, the three people who worked on it at usds, Chris Given, Jen Thomas, Maricci Vinton, have left the government to join the Economic Security Project's Future of Tax Filing fellowship. They'll be joined by Gabriel Zucker, who also worked on Direct File as part of Code for America. So there is an effort to in effect create a nonprofit that will continue to support this outside of government.

[Larry Magid]

That's good, but I think the government should do it. I mean, of course the government make it easy to process it.

[Leo Laporte]

You obviously do not work for Intuit. Mr. Imagine you're not.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, one of the things that kind of excites me about this is so much has been lost that we spent money on with paying the right personnel to build good applications. So what I'm hoping is that this sort of archives it a little bit so we go through this period and then when we have a normal government again, we don't have to start from scratch because we have something that hasn't been lost forever. Because I worry about that, that to replicate all this infrastructure that's been destroyed is massively expensive and not a savings at all.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, check out the Economic Security Project. That is a group that is trying to keep this alive as an open source project. I think there's enough people who care enough about this who would that perhaps this will survive.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Also, one other nice thing, wouldn't it require some. I assume it requires some cooperation from the irs, some approval, certification.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they publish. Whenever these rules are changed, they have to be published. And that's all Intuit has. That's all, you know, H and R Block gets. They look at the rules and they incorporate into the software. I don't think you have to get the IRS they to help you.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean, I suppose you may have to plug in in terms of if you were going to file the return, you probably need some API and then pay. You need some sort of API access. So that, that I think may be true.

[Leo Laporte]

But they've got direct file. I mean there's going to be.

[Kathy Gellis]

But that may be all you need.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Larry Magid]

Let Intuit compete by being better. I mean that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Sam Abulsamed]

No, no, no, no. That's not the way capital is.

[Kathy Gellis]

Are you new around here? We don't do that.

[Leo Laporte]

It turns out that this was always a part of the plan. Open sourcing the project was required by a law called the Share IT Act. Again, one of the things that'll probably be thrown out as soon as Trump realizes it exists. But there's some good stuff.

[Kathy Gellis]

He can't just things that are statutorily mandated. I mean he's been ignoring a whole lot of statutory.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean like banning TikTok?

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, well, things that are statutorily mandated. We're having some issues with him obeying the law. But don't you know it's an emergency that Trump different thing entirely of getting rid of the law entirely so the law remains on the books. You'd have to get a whole bunch of his Republican friends in Congress to get rid of it. So.

[Leo Laporte]

A whole bunch of Republican friends?

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Not that many. Yeah, they only have a three seat majority in each house.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, well, sometimes when it comes to tech, they get some Democrat people who don't know what they're doing and they opt for the bad things too. But there was one other DOGE thing. Before we move on from it, there was another decision that I think is worth keeping an eye on, which is most of the lawsuits have been attacking DOGE either in terms of Musk and Doge and also the agency that, that is at issue with that particular case. But there were a couple that were suing DOGE in general as saying, you are not an entity that has any business running around doing any of the things that you're doing. And one of the big cases was brought by a bunch of states led by New Mexico. And that was an early case where the judge there kind of had a sense of this does not seem like something you should be able to do. But it was dicta at the time. There was no injunction. But now they've survived the case has survived a motion to dismiss where there's at least enough. Where now a judge has said, you know, I have a finding that at least in terms of what we evaluate at this stage of the case, it looks like you have no business doing the things that you were doing. So that's an interesting benchmark that we've just gone through and that case will proceed and we'll see where that goes. But that was. If you are not a fan of the Dojing, this was a good ruling to be aware of.

[Leo Laporte]

You're just trying to cheer me up.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Well, you know, I mean this whole, this whole DOGE thing has been such a sham from the beginning. You know, they've, they've already acknowledged that they're not going to save very much money of any at all. And there was an NPR interview this.

[Leo Laporte]

Week, clear what the point of DOGE.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Was with, with a former staffer that was working in, in the va Doge staff. And you know, he acknowledged that, you know, they found that federal waste, fraud and abuse that the agency was, that they were supposed to uncover was relatively non existent. I quote, I was, I personally was pretty surprised actually at how efficient the government was. And you know, I mean this is true of a lot of agents like Medicare. The Medicare system is way more efficient than any of the private health care health insurance companies. You know, they pay in the US Medicare system pays about 3%, spends about 3% on administrative costs compared to about 17 to 18% for most private health insurers.

[Larry Magid]

We know the irony about the Doge savings is that on the day that Elon and Trump got into their little pissing match, Tesla lost almost as much market value as he claims to have saved in Doge claimed to have saved about 180 billion. Tesla went down 140 billion that same day. So it's up a little bit, but. And even that 180 billion is subject to a great deal of skepticism.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I have an interesting story we're going to take a break and come back and talk about that may explain this is from Quartz, why there have been so many layoffs in the tech sector over the last two years. Because you look at, for instance, the most recent example, Microsoft laying off off 6,000 programmers the day after they announced record profits. And it really makes you wonder, you know, what's going on? Why are these companies, is it just to appease the stock market or do they really have too many employees? What's going on? Why are so many people being put out on the streets? Well, it could have to do with the tax code. We will get to that in just a moment. Larry Maggot is here Year Kathy Gellis Samo Bull Salmon we're glad you're here too. We do twit every Sunday afternoon. You can always watch us live if you're around around 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. We stream it on eight different platforms, including our discord for our club members, but also on YouTube, Twitch, X.com hi X.com how's Elon doing, huh? TikTok Kick, Facebook, how's mark doing? And LinkedIn on all the platforms. So watch live if you want after the fact though. On demand versions of the show available at our website, Twitter, TV and wherever you get your podcasts. We're glad you listen. Whether it's live or after the fact, we appreciate you being here. Our show today, brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Oh man, summer's here. Seasonal businesses are hiring everything from from mule packers to drama camp leaders. That means people with, you know, pretty specific skills are in high demand and probably not that easy to find whether you're hiring for one of those roles or any other role. How about you find the top talent before the competition gets to them? And how do we do it? ZipRecruiter. Right now you could try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com TWIT ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology does a deep dive to identify top talent for your roles immediately after you post to your job, ZipRecruiter smart technology starts showing you qualified people for it. Gear up for summer with ZipRecruiter's high speed hiring tools. See why 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to this exclusive web address right now to try ZipRecruiter for free. Ziprecruiter.com TWIT Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com TWIT ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire you know this is from Katherine Bob writing at Quartz. It sounds credible to me, but I am not sure. But I thought maybe I'd run it by you all, not just our panel but our listeners. She writes between 2022, three years ago and today, a little notice tweaked to the US Tax code has quietly rewired the financial logic of how American companies invest in research and development. Outside of CFO and accounting circles, almost no one knew it existed. So this was buried deep in the 2017 tax law under Trump, right? The delayed change to a decades old tax provision has contributed to the loss of hundreds of thousands of high paying white colleges jobs half a more since the start of 2023 started last year or a year and a half ago, more than half a million tech workers have been laid off. According to industry tallies. 500,000 people. What's known as section 174174 of the US tax code has helped gut in house software and product development teams everywhere from Microsoft to Meta to much smaller direct to consumer other Internet first companies. There's a bipartisan effort to repeal the 174 change. It's moving through Congress right now. So it's a little complicated, but I think it's simple to understand. For the last 70 years, companies could deduct 100% of the qualified research and development spending spending in the same year they incurred the costs. So in the same year that they paid programmers contractors, they could deduct that fully 100% comes off the top of your income. The deduction was guaranteed by the tax code section 174 of the Tax Code of 1954 and since then R and D has flourished in the U.S. it's been very good for tech companies companies. It was repealed. Congress packs the Tax and Cuts job act in 2017 slashing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% in order to make it compl this is the interesting thing. In order to make that comply with the Senate budget rules, they had to offset the cost. So they added future tax hikes that wouldn't kick in right away so the businesses wouldn't go, hey, that could in theory be repealed later. So they made a change to 174 saying you had to amortize your RD expenses over five or even 15 years. That's a big change from deducting it the year you spent it. But it wouldn't kick in until 2022. When did the firings kick kick in?

[Sam Abulsamed]

2022.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Now there are people who are trying to fix that change, but right now it's the law. R and D is not an immediate write off. The tax benefits of salaries for engineers, product managers, project managers, data scientists, even some UX and marketing staff have to. The cost has to be spread out over 5 or 15 year period periods. That's a big deal. Any thoughts on this? I've never heard of this.

[Sam Abulsamed]

This is not unique to the tech industry either. Over the last couple of years there have been thousands of engineers laid off from the auto industry as well. GM last year, last summer laid off a thousand software engineers. You know this in an era when they are supposed to be transitioning to software defined vehicles.

[Leo Laporte]

Vehicles.

[Sam Abulsamed]

We've had similar layoffs and buyouts of engineers from most of the automakers over the last couple of years. So I wouldn't be surprised if the same logic is applying in other industries as well.

[Leo Laporte]

In the 2023 annual report, Meta described salaries as its single biggest R and D expense between the first and second years that the 174 change began. Medda cut its total workforce by 25%. Microsoft 7%. Twilio 22%. Shopify cut almost 30% of its staff. Coinbase 36%. This makes sense. This is because you can't deduct them anymore. Now we could argue about whether you should have been able to deduct it or not, but that seems to me a very credible and if you're going.

[Kathy Gellis]

To change it, you need to change it carefully to absorb. Absorb whatever, you know, all the energy in the system. Yeah, yeah. Well, a secret change, but a secret change that doesn't manage what the fallout is because now it's really disadvantaged labor. So even if you were to say, you know, on balance, maybe this would be a better long term way to do it. You probably need to like soften the landing in some way. And since nobody was aware of it, really, it didn't soften the landing at all. And now you're losing hundreds of thousands of people from, from the labor economy and that's going to catch up with us in a really bad way.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd love to hear from CFOs or somebody about what all this. If this is a sensible story, it kind of makes sense to me. Anyway, how about this? The AI startup, it was an A. So we've been talking a lot about Vibe coding. In fact, we did a whole episode in our club on Friday of we have a AI user group that meets every first Friday of the month on Vibe coding. It was so much fun. We're gonna do more of that. I. After that I started Vibe coding a twit app. I was able to get Claude code to understand our API, connect with it, start downloading information. It's kind of amazing without writing any code myself. There was a startup in India that claimed to be a kind of a vibe coding builder AI. Turns out there was no AI in builder AI. They actually had hundreds of human workers in India pretending to be chat bots. The London based company was valued at one and a half billion dollars. They were overstating their income by significant as much as 300%. The company claimed 220 million in revenue. They just made 50. And it wasn't an AI company at all. It was just 200 programmers in India.

[Sam Abulsamed]

It's probably the vibe coding equivalent of Let me Google that for you. Instead of googling, they're going in.

[Leo Laporte]

They might have done all right if they'd said, hey look, we've got 200 great programmers in India you can use. I don't know, there are people who probably would have preferred that to an AI. I'm a little worried as a podcaster, Google's Notebook LM now has gone public. It lets you. So this was actually. I know, we played with it on the shows and talked about it. You could upload documents and then it would analyze those documents. You could ask a question of it. But even more popular in the public eye, you could create a podcast with two, two AI voices talking back and forth about the content. Well, now you can actually share those publicly and I think we're in deep trouble.

[Larry Magid]

Oh, have you, have you loaded in your bio, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

What do you mean?

[Larry Magid]

Well, I loaded in my bio. You know, the bio. I am so impressed with me myself. I had no idea. I was a spectacular.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, this Larry Maggot guy is amazing. It is a little sycophantic. Yeah, yeah.

[Larry Magid]

And then just to make sure that I didn't, you know, I wasn't going too much, too egotist. I found on the web a bio of some random plumber somewhere. You know, a good plumber, no question about it, put his bio into that. And he was amazing too. So, you know, everybody's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll give you a little example. I uploaded to Notebook LM. I uploaded was. It was only like 10 shows the transcripts from Security now and I. And then it actually takes a little while to load the conversation. Let's see if I can load it in. And then I made a little podcast out of it. And it kind of. I mean, I could. I could see. Listening to this here, listen. See if you would listen to this show.

[Kathy Gellis]

Welcome to the Deep Dive. We're here to unpack the latest in security and tech, pulling out the key insights for you, the learner.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, lots to cover today. We've got sources touch on everything from. From browser security pitfalls to how your car might be spying on you, and.

[Kathy Gellis]

Encryption battles, hardware security failures. It's quite a mix. Our goal is to make sense of.

[Leo Laporte]

It all without getting bogged down in jargon. So that's. Those are AI voices, AI podcasters, doing content directly from the Security now transcripts. It's only a matter of time. You know, there was an article in Vanity Fair about the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella. He said, oh, I love podcasts. And then he asked him, well, which ones do you listen to? So, well, I don't know. I just. I load them all into Copilot, have it, analyze it, and then I play the analysis back in my car and have interactions with it. So he doesn't listen to podcasts.

[Larry Magid]

The problem is, you know, there's this term garbage in, garbage out. But what I discovered today is you can actually put in, you know, really fine cuisine and get garbage out. You can upload document. I was telling you this off the air. I upload. I was concerned about my hearing, so I took. And I have some minor hearing deficits. So I loaded in a bunch of audiograms into ChatGPT, one of which was created by Apple AirPods today, and it told me I had severe hearing loss at a certain frequency. And I said, wow, that's kind of scary. So then I went and looked at the audiogram and it just got it wrong. There was not.

[Leo Laporte]

It just misinterpreted it.

[Larry Magid]

It misinterpreted the data that I gave it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Larry Magid]

And I know it hallucinates, but I figure if I'm going to feed to the doctor document, it ought to get that right.

[Leo Laporte]

You think so?

[Larry Magid]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeffrey Fowler at The Washington Post. I guess he's done this before. He took all the main LLMs and he did a couple of things. He fed it a novel and asked it to summarize the. The main points. And then as a judge, he brought in the author of the novel. He said, okay, I'm doing this under protest. He got permission from the publishers to do this. And he said some of them were good, some of them weren't good. He said they really got the epilogue downright. They got all the emotion out of it, but one thing. And then Fowler did it with illegal documents. You'd probably be interested in that, Kathy. The only AI of all of them that did not hallucinate at all was Claude's. Anthropic's Claude. Everything else hallucinated would make up characters in one case in this novel, it's a Civil War novel, a guy who just a soldier just got his leg amputated, showed up on somebody's doorstep, completely made up, completely fantasy. So, but maybe, I don't know, try it with Claude and see, because I.

[Larry Magid]

Don'T understand it because I understand how if I ask it a question, it's going to go off on the web and get all sorts of extraneous and.

[Leo Laporte]

You'Re going to get weird.

[Larry Magid]

If I feed it data you shouldn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Make it shouldn't make that mistake, should.

[Larry Magid]

Just reinterpret that data. I don't know.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, there was, I forget if we talked on it about the last time I was here, but there was an incident where a lawyer got in trouble for a hallucinated citation, but it wasn't in this case really the lawyer's fault because they didn't do legal research where the, the AI made up cases that didn't exist. The lawyer already knew this, knew the material that they needed to be cited, and they just fed it through. And I think it might have been Claude, but I'm not positive that they fed it through the AI for citation formatting, which should be like fruit for, you know, you do it with a script. So like, why should a bot be any worse? And it didn't do it in any sort of true way. It invented and hallucinated a new source. And so the lawyer filed the thing and got in trouble for it because when the sites were checked, it produced a bad result. It was a hallucinated thing. But because the AI substituted the hallucinated thing, it made up and deleted the actual source that the lawyer was trying to get into the filing. So if you can't trust the AI to do basic tasks without just wandering and frolicking and detouring, as lawyers say, and coming up with all sorts of garbage. The lawyer should have supervised it. There should have been a side check and stuff to find the problem before it went through the courthouse door. But that should not have been a thing that went wrong. Was supposed to make the lawyer's job easier, and it made the lawyer's job now terrible.

[Larry Magid]

I saw that, Ross, in the Health and Human Services report, which was.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it was a formatting error.

[Larry Magid]

Formatting error. Well, maybe, maybe that's what they did. I don't know.

[Sam Abulsamed]

I think one of the one thing we should probably stop doing is using the word hallucination.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree. Because that's anthropomorphizing it. I agree.

[Sam Abulsamed]

And I, I, I read a good paper a couple of months ago called Chat. GPT is where.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, good paper.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah. You know, the, and the, the context there is, they're, they're put, they're analyzing LLMs in the context of Harry Frankfurt's on, you know, where the definition of bull is not, you know, that it's trying to mislead you. It's just that it's a complete disregard for the truth. It doesn't care. And, and that's what the way, fundamentally the way LLMs work. They just don't care. Care.

[Leo Laporte]

So they actually don't even. Care is not even a word you should use.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not intended to be factual.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Period.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah. It's just a probability engine of what should the next word in this sequence be?

[Leo Laporte]

There's no intent based on. Yeah, there's no thinking.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Right. And that's why it fits with that Frankfurt definition of.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about this. I tend to like using hallucination to describe it is that we end up describing about it because I think it's a term that is very specific in terms of the effect of what it's doing. But I otherwise agree with the larger point, which is that, you know, these are soulless things. This is like a sociopathic technology. And I worry about in context where people do have relationships with their bots, that this is worse than dealing with a con artist where somebody who's just feeding you a line to kind of manipulate you and you're sort of like, we're human beings, we tend to presume there's a soul and a conscience on the other side, and there's not. And this is where people really get hurt when the, when a soulless sociopath, you know, tells them what they want to hear and doesn't care how they're misleading them. And this is. In that sense, I think your caution is correct because I think we really need to break those human relations, these social relationships that are coming up between people and their AI. So I agree very much there, but I do kind of like hallucination in terms of. Of really describing what the effect is that of what's getting produced by it.

[Larry Magid]

As a child of the 60s, I consider that cultural appropriation hallucinations aren't necessarily bad in the real world.

[Leo Laporte]

As also a child of the 60s, if you can remember it, you weren't there.

[Larry Magid]

No, really, I was there.

[Leo Laporte]

I was there. I remember it too.

[Larry Magid]

I was there to the extent that anybody was there there.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We weren't completely there.

[Larry Magid]

Floating over it occasionally.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Most.

[Sam Abulsamed]

You experienced it firsthand.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree with you, Kathy. Actually, it's a good point, because I don't. In general, I try to discourage anthropomorphizing AIs because it kind of leads to a misunderstanding of what's going on. But you're right, from the point of view of the user, it is kind of like that. It is a hallucination.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah. It focuses on the harm. Yeah.

[Larry Magid]

The problem with it is it often it always sounds very reasonable because it is, you know, work. And so it's very believable. And as I've always said, if it's an important decision, you need to vet it. But on the other hand, you know, it's a great way to start a research project.

[Leo Laporte]

I use it all the time. Complexity, just added a deep research thing which takes 10 minutes. Before I went to the doctor, I gave it all my medical information and questions and it really gave me a great research paper that I was able to. To go into the doctor kind of prepared. And I think there are. I mean, look, I use the New York Times.

[Larry Magid]

Know that your entire medical history.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know. Well, I use AI all the time for everything. You just have to be judicious in it, that's all.

[Kathy Gellis]

I think to Sam's point, you know, maybe the. I don't know, what would we say instead? Because this is the technological equivalent to pulled out of its technological ass and like. But that's too many words and you still have sort of a personification thing. It's like something random has been invented. It's incorrect, but it's incorrect in a way that I think we have to convey why it is incorrect. It's invented as well.

[Larry Magid]

It's a little bit like full self driving and the reason I say that is that when full self driving first came out, it was a joke and I just paid no attention to it.

[Leo Laporte]

You have a Tesla. You drive Tesla now.

[Larry Magid]

It's very good. It's far from perfect. It's only going to get you killed one out of a few hundred times.

[Leo Laporte]

But you do keep your hands on.

[Larry Magid]

The wheel or at least your eyes on the, the road. But my point is that Chachi PT is the same thing. It's gotten so good that most of the time you can rely on it, but you can't rely on it. And that's the part. And that's in some ways the most dangerous.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah, you're getting into that uncanny valley where if you, if you, if you get to the point where you're relying on it, you are very likely going to miss the times when you shouldn't be relying.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Right, right.

[Larry Magid]

And that's the problem with full self driving. If you're not paying attention, it can kill you. It's the problem with GPS driver assistant.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know how to drive anymore because if the GPS doesn't tell me to turn left, I'm just going to. And so we've all become more or less dependent on these automated tools and that is something to be aware of.

[Larry Magid]

In other words, instead of robots taking over the world, they're turning us into robots is what you're saying.

[Leo Laporte]

They're turning us. We're going to be driving around slurping our Slurpees in our little hover cars, watching, watching Days of our Lives and.

[Larry Magid]

Used to have a Tesla. And of course FSD wasn't as good as it is now, but I have no, I have the time. I'm kind of watching to make sure nobody. I'm not going to crash in anything, but I actually have no idea where I'm going.

[Leo Laporte]

I use, I have a BMW i5. They have a similar ADAP system or ADAS system that I think is very good. It's highways only, right, Sam? I do like that, like Blue Cruise and these other technologies, they don't try to do it on city streets. That's really challenging for folks Festy. But it does just fine on the highway. It has a feature that's a little creepy. It will pop up things saying, you know, you could be going faster if you check your side mirrors. I will change lanes for you.

[Larry Magid]

Tesla doesn't even ask you to. It just doesn't.

[Leo Laporte]

It just does.

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't even like a number of.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Systems do that now.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I drove A car with, like, lane policing. And it made me really uncomfortable.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I like that. I live with that. That now. You're right. Because we, We. I think as humans, we tend to drive perhaps a little closer to one of the lines than the other. It's going right down the middle and that often, especially if there's a truck on. On the left. I want to go a little bit to the right. I don't want to go.

[Kathy Gellis]

Actually, that's what my reasons for being over here. There were reported reasons. Stop yelling at me.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Actually, a lot of these systems now do that. Like Ford Blue Cruise, Super Cruise. You know, when it detects that it's a truck, you're passing a large truck, it'll go. It will. It will nudge you over. It'll stay within the lane, but it'll nudge you over towards the opposite side of the lane.

[Larry Magid]

Yeah.

[Sam Abulsamed]

And that. That is helpful.

[Kathy Gellis]

I didn't. I didn't even like being yelled at, but I definitely don't want to lose control of the car where I'm fighting with the car over it. Oh, you don't want something breaking for me. I don't want something searing for me.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah, The. The Tesla systems sometimes do fight back against.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah. Against driver intervention.

[Leo Laporte]

Not my BMW. I can grab the wh.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Other systems. Yeah, yeah, the other systems generally, you know, if you give it any force at all on the steering wheel or.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, if you hit the brake.

[Larry Magid]

I've never had Tesla prevent me from taking control. I mean, either by hitting the brake, touching.

[Sam Abulsamed]

The problem is it's, It's. The system is very inconsistent. Most of the time it doesn't. But sometimes, every once in a while, as you said, every once in a while, it will do something very, very, very wrong.

[Larry Magid]

Oh, yeah.

[Sam Abulsamed]

And. And it. And it's not. It. It. You know, again, partly because it's so overwhelmingly controlled by AI. Is that it. It doesn't behave the same. You know, if it was a deterministic system, then it would tend to behave the same way under the same circumstances all the time. But it doesn't. And you can be in the same circumstances. There's been a lot of testing. That's independent testing that's been done. Done. That shows going down the same road on same time of day, same conditions. You know, it will do totally different things, which is not what you want.

[Larry Magid]

But so do human beings, right?

[Sam Abulsamed]

But, yeah, but, you know, yes, human beings do it, but if you're going to replace the human with the technology, the technology should be better.

[Leo Laporte]

Better In a related.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Otherwise there's no point.

[Larry Magid]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The courts in California have decided that it is illegal for you to hold your cell phone while driving, even if you're looking at the map.

[Sam Abulsamed]

And that's probably a good thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd agree with it.

[Sam Abulsamed]

I mean, wasn't it already illegal to.

[Leo Laporte]

Hold your phone texting or talking on a cell phone? We're driving.

[Sam Abulsamed]

I thought you're not even allowed to hold the phone while you're driving.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's also. Let's see the court. Yeah, I think the court upheld the law basically. Yeah. It's illegal to hold a phone. Yes. As I remember when they passed the law that everybody said don't even touch the. The phone because the CHP will give you a ticket if you touch the phone.

[Larry Magid]

You have to touch it sometime through gps. Unless you get three.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a good question. Like if it's in a. If it's in a holder, you're not holding it. Legislatures the legislator adopted the current state law prohibiting drivers from quote, operating a cell phone while driving. Whatever operating means operating.

[Larry Magid]

What if you do hand three? That's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What is operating? And that's.

[Kathy Gellis]

There's probably some case law that establishes what operating means.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, that's because that's going to come up with. I would look in like DUI litigation, somebody's probably sued for what does it mean to operate?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this is what happened. A guy was ticketed after looking at a mapping application while holding his phone in his left hand and driving. He contested the ticket, lost his initial court appearance, ordered to pay a $158 fine. But he said I'm right. So he went to the appellate division of the Santa Clara County Superior Court. The decision was reversed. The Superior Court said operating a cell phone required active use or manipulation of the device. Merely observing GPS directions does not infract. But California Court of appeal for the 6th Appellate District disagreed and on Tuesday reversed the decision. So you're right, Kathy, there's.

[Larry Magid]

That's because Android and iOS are both built in Santa Clara County. We want people to use our phones all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I have gps. Look, every car now has GPS screens.

[Larry Magid]

Right. Which can also be distracting.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm looking. Yeah, definitely. I'm looking at it sometimes I have a. This is another thing I like about that BMW. It has a heads up display that will show me the instructions so I don't have to look away from that. Yeah.

[Sam Abulsamed]

The, the new Cadillac Vistic has an augmented reality heads up display. So it's A, it's a multi plane display display. So normally, normally your hud, if you, if you look at your, your heads up display, it's projecting the, the data to be roughly about, about, about six or seven feet away from you, but roughly around where the front bumper is.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Sam Abulsamed]

This new one projects information in, in multiple planes. So when you're using navigation, for example, it'll, as you're approaching a turn, it'll show a big arrow float hovering over the intersection where you're supposed to be going. Yeah. And as you get closer, it appears.

[Larry Magid]

To get closer to you of the intersection though.

[Sam Abulsamed]

No, it's, it's, it's translucent so you can see through, you can see through and around it.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's not the new Apple UI they're going to announce tomorrow. Yeah. All right, I'm going to take a break. We will talk about that. We will talk about Volvo's Iot seat belts. I don't know what that means, but Sam will explain it. And of course, the fastest selling, selling game device in its first day ever. All of that's still to come. You're watching this week in Tech as we talk about the week's tech news. Our show today brought to you by Threat Locker. Man. You don't have to listen to security now to know the ransomware is killing businesses worldwide. They get in all sorts of ways. Phishing emails, infected downloads, malicious websites, RDP exploits. Look, this is the last thing you want to have happen to your business. That's why you need Threat Lockers. Zero trust platform and zero trust is the key. It takes a proactive. Listen to these three words. Deny. By default approach. Every action is blocked unless it's explicitly authorized. Protects you from known and unknown threats because they, they just, it's like hitting a brick wall to them. It is exactly the kind of protection a city government, a school district needs. Big businesses, infrastructure companies like JetBlue. JetBlue uses threat locker because they just, they can't, you know, they, they can't let their business get shut down. The Port of Vancouver talk about infrastructure. They use Threat Locker to shield themselves from zero day exploits and supply chain attacks. And very nice. Providing complete audit trails for compliance. You know exactly what you've approved, what you haven't approved, who used what, when, where. ThreatLocker's innovative ring fencing technology isolates those critical applications from weaponization. It stops ransomware cold. It also limits lateral movement within your network. See, that's part of the problem. Bad guys get into your network. On average it takes 91 days for a company to realize they've been breached. So the bad guys at that time can wander around at will, go and look at anything, run applications. We had a story on security now about a ransomware team that got in to a company's network. The company had, you know, some sort of protection software so they couldn't do everything they wanted. But then they were able to move around. That's what you want to stop that lateral movement. And they found a camera, camera, a security camera that was running as many do Linux and had a little bit of memory and a little bit of a processor. But it was enough to inject their malware into it and to ransomware the entire operation using the camera. You need Threat Locker to stop that lateral movement within your network. Threat Locker works across all industries. It supports Mac environments as well as Windows, provides 247 good quality US based support and enables comprehensive visibility and control. I'll give you another example. City governments are bombarded by ransomware all the time. Mark Tolson is the IT director for the city of Champaign, Illinois. He said enough is enough. He installed Threat Locker. This is what he says about Threat Locker and I'm quoting, 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 Threat Lock Locker will stop that. Stop worrying about cyber threats. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily and cost effectively with Threat Locker. Visit threatlocker.com TWIT get a free 30 day trial. Learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's nice. Threatlocker.com TWIT you will be amazed at how affordable it is. You can really protect yourself with Threat Locker. Thank you Threat Lucker for supporting Twit. What are IOT seat belts? Sam?

[Sam Abulsamed]

So IOT is probably a bit of a misnomer here. Basically they're smarter seat belts. So what, what Volvo is doing here with these new seat belts that are coming next year on the new EX60 is they're taking advantage of the sensor, the various sensors they have on the car and, and trying to better judge the situation both outside the vehicle and inside the vehicle for, for some time now. Most seat belts in modern cars have already, they've already had some smarts built into them so that they adjust, you know, depending on the, the impact force.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's almost mechanical though, right? Like if it's leaned forward, forward or.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Well it, originally it was, but now it's not. Oh, so, so seat belts, modern seat Belts in cars for the last 20 ish years have all had pretensioners on them. So when there's an impact, the original, the first ones actually used a pyrotechnic device to retract the seatbelt explosive. Yeah. To pull you back tight, you know, so you didn't hit the seat steering wheel.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Sam Abulsamed]

And you know, that was a good thing, you know, but it was some.

[Leo Laporte]

Bones, but at least you're alive.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah, I mean it wasn't that, it wasn't that powerful or at least it wasn't intended to be. Some, you know, sometimes it could, but it was better than the alternative. But it was, you know, kind of a one shot thing. And you know, there was, there was no adjustment for different body sizes the where you were sitting relative to the steering wheel. So you know, depending on how tall you were, you are, you might be, if you're shorter, you're going to be sitting closer to the steering wheel. It didn't have adjustments for that. So what they're doing now with these new, these new systems is they're taking advantage of looking at, you know, where's your seat positioned, you know, looking at, using the driver monitor system. You know, because a lot of modern cars now have a, an infrared camera like your BMW W does that is looking at you to make, you know, to check that you're watching the road and you know, hands on the steering wheel, various other things, but also looking outside, looking at what is the direction of the impact, for example, you know what, you know, you know, it knows. Okay, I'm gonna have, you know what, what's called a small offset impact, you know, if somebody crosses the center line and you have a glancing blow, that's a different impact than a direct head on impact. And so it responds differently based on all of these different factors and it adjusts the amount of pretensioning, you know, based on, on your, your, your, your size, your body type and the type of impact that's going on.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that's kind of cool.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And you know this video from Volvo.

[Sam Abulsamed]

And a variety of people. Volvo invented the three point seat belt back in the 1950s.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh really?

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah, they were the first ones.

[Leo Laporte]

The shoulder plus lap belt.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Didn't it just involve a physical mechanism involving some pendulum type action that when.

[Sam Abulsamed]

The money, that was the early thing. Yeah, it was a pendulum type action but now and then they went to a pyrotechnic system and now they're going to an electromechanical system that can adjust the amount of, amount of tensioning Force on the seat belt automatically. Based on all these other factors.

[Leo Laporte]

This is, this is an example of how everything now, you know, there's cameras, there's sensors, there's radar. There's so much information now.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It makes sense for the auto to use it. I mean it's expensive though, doesn't it add greatly to the cost?

[Sam Abulsamed]

It, it does. I mean we're putting these sensors on the car anyway. So what, what we're seeing here, it's just using the sensor, you know, we're finding new ways to use the sensors.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Sam Abulsamed]

You know. Okay, so we've got, we put these sensors on the car. What else can we do with them to enhance safety? And so they're using it in a bunch of different ways. Another example for, for Volvo is what they call their driver understanding system. So Leo, you Remember back in 2017, I think when I first took you for a ride in the Cadillac CT6 with Super Cruise.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Sam Abulsamed]

You know, and it has that infrared camera on the steering column was looking at my eyes.

[Leo Laporte]

I had to cover my eyes to get it to warn me.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah. And that was a fairly simple system that all it did was look at your, your eye gaze and head position.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Just to make sure, you know, are you watching the road?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sam Abulsamed]

And if you were looking, if you look away from the road for more than a few seconds, it would alert you and it would start to, if you didn't respond, it would start to disengage. Super Cruise. Well what, it also shook the seat. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Tension, the seat belt. It was like it was shaking you to wake up.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah. You know what, what Volvo is doing now is what they call driver understanding system. So they've done a lot of research, you know, because one of the things that happens when you use these systems like Super Cruise or fsd, you know, where you're supposed to be watching the road. If you're on a long road trip, what sometimes what can often happen is your eyes might be on the road but you're not actually attentive, your brain's not. And this is, this is one of the problems is, you know, you start to get that thousand yard stare so your, your eyes are pointed towards the road but you're not ready to take control if you need to. And so what, what Volvo, you know, they've got some anthropologists that have been, and behavioral scientists that have been looking, looking at this and trying to model human behavior to under, better understand not just on where your eyes are looking at any moment in time, but also looking for patterns of, you know, are you occasionally glancing over at the mirrors, at the screen, you know, you know, are there other signs that you are actually alert rather than just completely zoned out? Your eyes may be open but you're not, you're, you're not.

[Leo Laporte]

How would it know your pupils are dilated or.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah, it's looking for a variety of factors. You know, like I said, it's looking for imotion as well, isn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

This is AI.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Part of it is AI that can.

[Larry Magid]

Happen even without driver assistance. I remember, you know, passing an exit on the highway because I was just sort of spaced out, listening, thinking about.

[Leo Laporte]

Other things all the time.

[Larry Magid]

Yeah.

[Sam Abulsamed]

And there's, you know, an increasing number of vehicles that, like a lot of Toyotas, a lot of Hyundai and Kia vehicles now, you know, they have, even though they don't have a hands free system like Super Cruise or Blue Cruise or fsd, they, they do have that driver monitor camera that's just looking for distraction. Yeah, just is trying to, you know, make sure that you are paying attention to the road. And if you're, if you're not, then it will, you know, it'll start to provide some alerts and try to get your attention.

[Larry Magid]

My 2016 Prius yells @ me if it thinks that I'm not paying attention attention but it gets it wrong. Like if I'm on a certain road in Yosemite that's highly curvy. Yell at.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah, systems were very crude.

[Leo Laporte]

My BMW yells at me if I pick my nose. I swear to God it.

[Sam Abulsamed]

And I. I didn't happen, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. It was a scratch. It was a scratch. It yells at me because I guess it, I don't know, it's really interesting.

[Larry Magid]

My wife yells at me if I do this.

[Sam Abulsamed]

I've seen some recent research. Picking your nose can lead to dementia.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know. Don't go too far up there. That's basically the. So, okay, so our cars. Safer. They're safer. We know they're safer.

[Sam Abulsamed]

They're absolutely, they are absolutely safer for occupants than they ever have been.

[Leo Laporte]

Are there. Oh, not so good for pedestrians.

[Kathy Gellis]

They're huge. They run down all the people outside them.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

If you look at the data trucks all the time where the hood is higher than my head.

[Sam Abulsamed]

If you look at the data from the last decade, you know, since the 1960s, we've been on a steady downward trend for traffic fatality rates except until the last decade. And what's happened is in the last decade the occupant fatalities have continued to decline. But pedestrian and cyclist fatalities have increased because everybody's getting into these giant trucks and SUVs, and they can't see people, and you've got worse visibility. And it's really.

[Kathy Gellis]

The cars are bigger and heavier, too. So if there's contact, the contact is more likely to be destructive. Saw a headline the other day of, I don't remember where. Some girl got hit by a car on her bike and she died. And that hit me, like, emotionally, because I got hit by a car on my bike when I was 14 years old, but it was one of those big 1980s Buicks. So when I couldn't avoid the car, I went on its hood and I rolled off on the other side and didn't get run over or bounced too hard or something. So, I mean, I didn't see the car in the car, didn't see me. But now I wouldn't. I would just end up under the car, and then I would have no chance.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah, now you get, you know, people getting hit by cybertrucks and Raptors and, you know, I know people who are.

[Larry Magid]

Buying SUVs just for defensive reasons because they just. Everybody.

[Sam Abulsamed]

It's protecting the people on the inside, but it's killing people on the outside.

[Larry Magid]

What do you make of the, you know, the kind of fighting over whether Tesla is safer than other cars or. Less. Less safe. I've seen data suggesting it gets into more accidents. And why is that?

[Sam Abulsamed]

You know, the problem is.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll tell you why, Larry. It's people like you. It's Tesla drivers I'm actually listening to.

[Larry Magid]

That's what I want him to think.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I was embarrassed to drive a BMW for a long time because BMW, don't get me.

[Larry Magid]

Don't get into the political part about.

[Kathy Gellis]

It, but I've noticed that issue with, like, you know, driving with Teslas on the road. And with all due respect to my friends who drive Teslas, I always noticed there was something kind of absent about the way it was getting driven. It almost seemed like the drivers had, like, just turned over a little bit to the. To the. To the car and just sort of expected the car will make it fine. It's like, there's other people on the road. We're busy trying to, like, merge with you. We need, you know. You know, we need you to be on the ball.

[Larry Magid]

And Sam knows why it is that the. The, you know, what. What's behind this, these reports.

[Sam Abulsamed]

So. So we've, you know, the problem is trying to get valid data to get, you know, apples to Apples data. Because one, you know, one of the things, you know, Tesla has often put out reports saying, oh, our cars get into, you know, one quarter as many crashes as, as other cars. But what they don't tell you is there, you know, it's the classic thing of, you know, tell me which side of the argument you're on and I'll give you the statistics to prove you're right. In this case, you know, Tesla, we think, we don't know for sure because they don't actually provide any context. They just give a headline number and nothing else. But most likely what they're doing is they are comparing the rate of crashes of their vehicles to the entire vehicle population. And there's 290 million registered vehicles in the United States with an average age of almost 13 years now. Okay. And most of those don't have advanced ADAS systems and other safety features. You know, if you compared Teslas, you know, which, you know, 90% of all the Teslas have been built since 2017, so the last eight years, years or actually probably more than 90%. And they all have these ADAS features. If you compared them only to the population of vehicles built in the same time period, and especially more expensive premium vehicles that tend to have these types of features, the numbers would be very, very different. Interesting, because, you know, most, a lot of the crashes are happening with older vehicles and you know, when, when and studies have been done trying to make those comparisons, like, for like comparisons, they have found that Teslas tend to get into more crashes. And while it's hard to determine the exact causation, there is certainly a correlation with use of features like Autopilot and fsd, where the drivers are not as attentive. And Tesla drivers in general, because they tend to be more tech forward, tend to be more trusting of the technology, so they're more likely to utilize it, perhaps beyond what its true capabilities would justify.

[Kathy Gellis]

I just always felt like it was an abdication like they, it's not necessarily that they were using the active features, but that they were so convinced about the car being the better driver and that the car will take care of them, that they stop being as involved with what their role was with the car's operation.

[Larry Magid]

True, about 98% of the time, but it doesn't take much to kill you.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Well, and the thing is, the vast majority of driving, we don't have crashes. Right. One of the problems around automotive safety has been the way that it's been talked about for so long. Everybody likes to TROT out this 94% of crashes are caused by human error, which is true up to a point. 94% of crashes. Human error is the last in a chain of events that led to that crash. What you don't hear is that we drive 3.2, 3.3 trillion miles a year in the United States alone. That's trillion with a T. And we have about one fatal crash for every 100 million miles of driving. For all crashes, it's about six and a half million crashes a year, which works out to roughly about one crash every half a million miles. For average drivers driving 15,000 miles a.

[Leo Laporte]

Year, that's pretty good.

[Sam Abulsamed]

That's one crash every 30 years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Sam Abulsamed]

On average. So we, as much as we, you know, humans, are often the last in a chain of events that lead to a crash, we actually are really good at this incredibly complex task. Driving is very hard, but we are actually much better at it than we give ourselves credit for.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it harder than hitting a baseball?

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah, I would say it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Sam Abulsamed]

You know, because. Because there's so many more variables.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a. That's a silly.

[Larry Magid]

By the way, my. My homemade bumper sticker says, I knew he was crazy. I didn't know he was dangerous. Oh, I've known he was crazy for a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Larry Magid]

I think I'm going to send that to Donald Trump. He could put it on the back of his Tesla.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Well, he's getting rid of that, though.

[Larry Magid]

Yeah. Apparently he thought, yeah, he's going to sell it.

[Leo Laporte]

Is he selling his Tesla?

[Sam Abulsamed]

Apparently he's going to sell it.

[Larry Magid]

Yeah. I'd love to own that Tesla. I think that'd be a great collector's on this.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a great. First of all, I doubt very much Donald Trump has ever driven a car in his life. Right.

[Kathy Gellis]

Or walked in the grass with bare feet. I've decided that that would explain a lot.

[Benito]

Hi, this is Benito. Before we move on from cars, I want to ask Sam something about modern cars right now. Why are the headlights getting brighter and brighter?

[Sam Abulsamed]

To try to better illuminate the scene around you.

[Benito]

Not to blind me everywhere I go.

[Kathy Gellis]

All the better to see you with mighty.

[Benito]

The ones that see me from behind, they're blinding me into my mirror. Ones that are coming towards me are blinding me ahead of me. It's like, it's. I feel like it's more dangerous.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah. I mean, well, lighting. Lighting technology has changed a lot. You know, we've gone from incandescents to Hallogens, you know, and now we're using LED lights, headlights, and they are much brighter. One of the problems that has happened particularly in the US is our lighting regulations did not keep up with it. You know, for a long time in Europe they've allowed adaptive lighting systems. So they, you know, the, the lights used on a lot of European cars. If you, if you're familiar with like DLP projectors, they work a lot like that. You know, where you've got the, the, the lighting elements and there's basically mirrors that create the lighting pattern and it can adjust, adjust in real time, you know, using the cameras and other sensors on the vehicle, it can adjust the lighting pattern. So as you're driving, as a car's coming up towards you or you're coming up behind another car, it will automatically lower the beams, you know, so that you're not blinding other cars. They only recently changed that regulation in the US and so far the first manufacturer to actually install, implement adaptive headlights like that in the US market is Rivian. They have, they have the mechanism, they, they have not. I don't believe they've actually left.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's a funny thing because I think my BMW also has it, but it's not a lot, it's not on.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah. And a lot of European cars have the hardware, but they haven't enabled it in software yet. Like the last time I was driving to Rivian a few, few months back, you know, I was driving at night and as a car was approaching me, you know, I could see the, you know, like the high beams were on, you know, illuminating the entire scene in front of me. And all of a sudden it was basically a notch in the upper left hand corner.

[Leo Laporte]

So cool.

[Sam Abulsamed]

You could see the lights go down where that car was. So I wasn't, so it wasn't.

[Leo Laporte]

So you wouldn't blind the driver, but you could still see everything going on. We got, we have to take a break. I have lots more stuff. We'll do a speed round because we're almost, almost done. But there's so many big stories this week. Great to have you, Sam. Abouble Samit car guy. What's the best self driving vehicle on the market today?

[Sam Abulsamed]

There is no self driving vehicle on the market.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, thank you.

[Sam Abulsamed]

You cannot buy an actual car that will drive itself without human supervision.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the best, next best thing?

[Sam Abulsamed]

GM Super Cruise System.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, there you have the answer. See that's. I like a definitive answer like that. That's. Thank you, Sam. Kathy Gallis is also here. She talks about the law. So obviously there's no definitive answer after that.

[Kathy Gellis]

Are you going to ask me what is the best law?

[Leo Laporte]

What's the best law in the world?

[Kathy Gellis]

Section 230. It's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree, I agree. Section 230. By the way, we're trying to get Mike Masdick on. You write for Tech Dirt and I love Mike and love your writing. He has Vibe coded his own to do list app and he's like three. So I want to get him on a little bit to talk about it. I think we have to schedule him at a time because he's a busy, busy guy, but very cool what he's done. Anyway, it's great to talk to you, Kathy and of course Larry maggot from connect safely.org this week's show brought to you by NetSuite. Hello, NetSuite. It's an interesting time for business. Tariffs and trade policies are dynamic. How about that? Supply chains are squeezed and cash flow. Yeah, tighter than ever. If your business cannot adapt in real time, you are in a world of hurt. Now more than ever, you need total visibility, from global shipments to tariff impacts to real time cash flow. How do you get it? Net Suite by Oracle, your AI powered business management suite. Trusted by over 41,000 businesses. NetSuite is the number one Cloud ERP and for a lot of reasons. It brings accounting, financial management, inventory and HR all into one suite. That means you have one source of truth, giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. With real time forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. And with AI embedded throughout, you can automate a lot of these everyday tasks, letting your teams stay strategic. NetSuite helps you know what's stuck, what it's costing you and how to pivot fast. Don't you need that? It's one system, full control. Tame the chaos with NetSuite. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, download the free ebook Navigating Global Trade 3 Insights for Leaders at netsuite.com Twitter TWiT that's netsuite.com TWiT N-E T-S-U-I-T-E.com TWiT we thank NetSuite so much for supporting our network. We thank you especially for supporting our network as well, you Club Twit listeners. We have raised the price of Club Twit. First time in four years. We felt we kind of had to, what with tariffs and all. No, tariffs don't impact us yet, but they impact a lot of our advertisers. And so we, we thought, you know, 10 bucks is still a pretty good deal. You get all the shows plus all the content we do in the club, all of it ad free. You get access to the club. Twit, Discord. The keynotes are all in the club. Now tomorrow we're gonna do the WWDC keynote. Micah Sargent and I will start 10am Pacific in the club. So you have to be in the club to watch our coverage and in the club to a discord. The good news is that means the discord can also participate in our coverage. So we'll have your thoughts and your chat and your takes on all this as well. We go. And because we're doing it in the club, we're also going to bring our lunch, have a, have a roundtable conversation in the break, and then cover the other keynote, which we never covered before, the State of the Union keynote that follows at 1 o' clock Pacific tomorrow afternoon. So a full day of Apple coverage for club members.

[Larry Magid]

If you're not, you're not importing podcasts from China. I just want to be clear about that.

[Leo Laporte]

No, we are not. No tariffs.

[Larry Magid]

Save some money.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I, hey, you know, how would you, I don't know how you would do tariffs on intellectual property.

[Larry Magid]

That's a really good question. Actually. That's a major issue that Trump is not thinking about and should be.

[Leo Laporte]

Twit. TV Club twit. We will not charge you a tariff.

[Kathy Gellis]

Actually, I think the bigger issue is, I think he did try to do something along those lines.

[Leo Laporte]

With movies, right?

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, with movies. And there is text that says, no, you don't get to do it with that type of material. But it was trying.

[Leo Laporte]

You notice that got dropped like a hot potato.

[Kathy Gellis]

He was going. And I think it had to be. I mean, there's degrees of illegality, various things that are attempted, but some of them are running.

[Leo Laporte]

How would you.

[Kathy Gellis]

Into some very explicit language saying, no, you can't do that to this.

[Leo Laporte]

And how would you even logistically could you tariff movies?

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, and it was also a really bad idea that would have really hurt Hollywood in a very direct way where like China would have been like, okay, we'll not use your stuff. And it was just, it was sure deal. There were a lot of issues.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So far no tariffs on podcasts. Although I have to say it is very confusing that, that Oracle ad, it really underscores it. Lisa wants to order some jewelry from France. She said, well, what's the tariff on France? I said, I think it's 25%. I actually had to go look it up. It was 25%, but it's temporarily paused until later in July. So it's 10% right now. But it's.

[Larry Magid]

They query a database or Trump's brain or how do they.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know how they. I asked. You know, I'll be honest, I. I asked. Perplexity. I hope it was right. Perplexity. AI. Hey, here's one area of confusion that might be cleared up thanks to Microsoft USB C cables, for crying out loud. You never know what that cable is capable of, what that port is for. Microsoft at least is trying to do their bit. They have something called the Windows hardware whcp. I can't remember what it's stands for, but if you're a PC manufacturer, you want to be WHCP approved. And Microsoft said, okay, if you want that, you're going to have to label your ports, they're going to have to work in a certain way and. And you will have to advertise it in a certain way. Here is the USB C WH CP requirements. This chart itself is confusing, but at least you'll know you're going to get this as a minimum. Okay. And it's amazing that this is the Windows hardware compatibility program. There it is. It's amazing that we haven't had anything like this until now. There's no consistency at all. It's been driving people crazy. It's nuts. Continuing the speed round, Walmart is going to expand its drone delivery to 100 storage stores. Get ready. You will see Walmart drones making deliveries in Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, Tampa. They're already doing it in Dallas and Bentonville, Ark, Arkansas, the home, the hometown of Walmart.

[Larry Magid]

What are they in your backyard or what do they.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they drop it via a cable. They're working with the drone startup zipline line. That kind of tells you what they're going to do. This Amazon is really only doing in two sites. And in fact they paused drone deliveries for two months, citing safety issues.

[Larry Magid]

And Balinsky is doing it as well, but not with Prevance. With.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's being used to good effect in disaster areas to get medicines to people. That makes a lot of sense. I don't know Walmart deliveries, I don't know. We'll see. Get ready. Look up in the sky.

[Larry Magid]

I live near an airport, so I don't. I don't even think they can legally fly in my neighborhood.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you might not be able to. You might have to actually get in the car and drive down to your local Walmart. If you do, would you pick Up a Nintendo Switch for me.

[Larry Magid]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

It is hard to find them. Walmart has them targeted. Has them. The Switch 2 has reportedly beaten the record for the most sold out console within 24 hours. It came out on Thursday. It's on track to shatter the two month record. 3 million units on launch day. The most successful hardware. One of the most successful hardware releases of all times.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Has Microsoft sold 3 million Xbox ones yet?

[Leo Laporte]

Don't. You're being mean. Now you're just being mean. Buzzy. The buzzy launch according to Barron's or no Bloomberg drew long lines at retailers like Walmart, Target, Best Buy and GameStop. Here. USA Today has some pictures of people sitting. This is like the iPhone when the iPhone came out. These are people outside a Best Buy store waiting for midnight so they could buy the Switch 2.

[Benito]

Yeah, there are actually a lot of people on my feeds this weekend and being like, wow, it feels like 2010 again. They were like excited to wait out in line for a midnight launch. It was weird.

[Leo Laporte]

Benito, did you wait? Did you wait to get.

[Benito]

I did not. I did not know.

[Sam Abulsamed]

I really enjoyed podcast this week. Devendra was talking about he went to midnight launch at local Best Buy, I think or somewhere good for Devindra. Yeah, he couldn't get a pre order so he went and went to the midnight line.

[Leo Laporte]

This reminds me so much of 2007 when people would come out of the store. I got it. I got one.

[Larry Magid]

I was covering that and it was phenomenal.

[Benito]

There was also the Nintendo store had just opened downtown recently. So there was stuff happening down there too.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, look, he's got one. Musicians playing at a FNAC Darty store. I don't know what FNAK Darty is.

[Kathy Gellis]

During the launch store.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Kathy Gellis]

I didn't realize it was the same store. They must have merged. But those are two big stores in France.

[Leo Laporte]

Narty, here are Mario and Luigi dancing. That's in Paris also.

[Larry Magid]

Paris, France.

[Leo Laporte]

France, not Texas.

[Larry Magid]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Does anybody in our chat have.

[Benito]

Anthony says he got one. Anthony got one.

[Leo Laporte]

He says his brother got one. Oh, and Anthony got one too. Anthony, I'm very jelly. You're gonna have to come over. He got it with a pre order on Walmart. Nintendo in order to avoid scalpers actually did I think a pretty good thing. They may have also created this frenzy by saying you can't pre order it unless you've had a Nintendo account prior to the end of last year and more than 50 hours using your Switch.

[Benito]

Wow, that's a good question. I wonder how did the scalpers get any That's a good question.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Well, I'm sure they did, but it.

[Benito]

Doesn'T seem like a big thing. Thing. I don't see an algorithm right now.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah, no, it sounds like.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's go to ebay.

[Larry Magid]

Like a loyalty program. You know, if you're a loyal heavy to youth or you get rewarded.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it makes sense, right? Let me just.

[Sam Abulsamed]

It's like buying a Ferrari, you know, Ferrari won't sell you a Ferrari unless you've previously bought a couple of.

[Larry Magid]

The only reason I didn't buy one last week. That's the only reason.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me see if I can get. Okay, here's a Nintendo Switch 2 on eBay, brand new, sealed in hand, ready to ship. It's only $200 over retail. Here's one actually only a hundred dollars over retail.

[Kathy Gellis]

I mean maybe some of it is people who are like woohoo, I can get one. Did some private speculation as opposed to. Or I bought one for all the kids. Oh, they bought their own.

[Leo Laporte]

So they are on ebay. But you're going to pay 100 to $200 more.

[Sam Abulsamed]

It's not like pre orders. It's not the double.

[Larry Magid]

Stores buy them for below retail.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, Bonita, what'd you say?

[Benito]

It's not the double that scalpers usually charge when they get a hold of all the stock.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, and I, I, I, you know, I tried to sign up and I guess I didn't have the 50. The requisite 50 hours. So my old switch. But I would. I signed up for the Mario Kart World bundle and all that too. It would have been, would have been fun. Maybe someday I'll get one. Anthony, you'll have to tell us how you like it. Have you played with it? But yeah, tariff worries might have been an issue. Nintendo prepared for that by raising the cost up front. So.

[Sam Abulsamed]

I.

[Leo Laporte]

This kind of merges Kathy's interests and Sam's. You cannot name your car Eleanor.

[Kathy Gellis]

No, no, no. Eleanor, the car is, is. Let me not say the character.

[Sam Abulsamed]

It's from the movie Gone in 60 Seconds.

[Kathy Gellis]

In the movie Gone in 60 Seconds, in that whole franchise there is a recurrence of a car referred to as Eleanor. Yes, of course. In all these movies, Eleanor looks quite different. Like sometimes it's yellow, sometimes it's silver, and sometimes it's new and shiny and sometimes it's old and dirty and broken. Anyway, in, in this is a. I wrote a post on Techtor about a court case from last week or the week before where the 9th Circuit said Eleanor is not a Copyrightable character. You can't like, stop other people from copy from using a car and calling it Eleanor.

[Leo Laporte]

Why not? You could copyright one of the cars in the cars movie.

[Kathy Gellis]

Well, so the why not goes back to. So character copyright is really, really weird and pretty stupid area of copyright. Because normally copyright is. You can copyright the expression of something, but you can't copyright the idea of something. If you could do the latter, you would be able to like, oh, I had this idea that inspired this. And you could cut off everybody else from being able to express something with the same inspiration. But the problem with characters is you kind of have that thing where if a character emerges in a copyrighted work, not only is the work copyrightable, but potentially the character as well. So, for instance, like Sherlock Holmes, when the Sherlock Holmes stories were copyrighted, were still under copyright, Nobody could use Sherlock Holmes because Sherlock Holmes was a character that also had its own copyright. Roughly speaking, there's a little bit around the edges, but. So that was what was happening. But then there had been a case In, I think 2008 where somebody had sued over whether Eleanor the Car could qualify as a copyrightable character. Now, unlike the characters in the movie cars, which were personified and had personalities and did things and stuff like that, yeah, they function. They were personified and they functioned like personified characters. They just happened to have had automotive form. Eleanor the car never really had a personality. It just sort of had characteristics. And a court then said, you know, that's enough. You get your copyright in Eleanor the car. Then years later, there was another case where somebody sued for copyright infringe. Well, DC Comics sued for copyright infringement in the back Batmobile because there was a guy who was making life size models of the Batmobile and DC Comics managed to sue. And there's a lot wrong with that particular lawsuit. But one of the problems was this idea that the Batmobile was a copyrightable character. Given that it looks different in every movie and every comic that it shows up, is it. There's no consistency to the Batmobile. It has no personality. It just sort of is a stylized prop that keeps showing up in a vaguely reminiscent and stylized way. But there was a case called DC Comics versus, I don't know how to pronounce it to wle which said, you know, if Eleanor the Car was copyrighted or copyrightable, then there's really no reason that the Batmobile shouldn't have been copyrightable as well. But now the people who were suing each other over the Eleanor the car, they had a settlement agreement and the settlement agreement went out the window. So they sued each other again and now it's led to the 9th Circuit saying that's nuts. There's no way this is copyrightable. So they have this decision using a test that the dc, that the DC Comics case had actually come up with and said it fails all three prongs of this test. It's not distinctive enough, it's not persistent enough.

[Leo Laporte]

There were four different eleanors, four different colors and four different gone in 60 second films. Carol Shelby licensing was super suing Denise Halicki, saying that Halicki's copyright claims over the Eleanor Ford Mustangs were invalid. Halicki countersued, saying Shelby's GT500CR mustangs infringed her copyright in Eleanor. I don't know who won.

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't know who won is the people who want to be able to use another Mustang and call it element.

[Leo Laporte]

Of the car, any Mustang, and name it Eleanor.

[Kathy Gellis]

There is not enough in Eleanor, Eleanor the car, that would qualify for copyright in Eleanor the Car, even if the movies that it appeared in are still under copyright. So it's a good decision. It dials back copyrightability and characters, particularly for these inanimate objects that are really nothing but props. But meanwhile, the Batmobile case is still on the books. And arguably that was a huge injustice and it was predicated a little bit on the. Or actually in pretty significant amount on this earlier case that's now been completely undone.

[Leo Laporte]

If you copyrighted the Batmobile, you would be just copyrighted hearing the name because what. Which Batmobile would you copy?

[Kathy Gellis]

Don't. Don't bring logic into it. The court there didn't. And you're talking about if you're copyrighting just the name, that's really a trademark, so maybe there would be some issues with trademark infringement. But no, the Batmobile case was a copyright case where a guy. You modeled it off of two of the Batmobiles that appeared in movies that DC Comics had only licensed to the movie makers. So they didn't even make design those particular cars for those movies. It was really. It's a screwed up case. A lot of it was.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Was that from the. The Tim Burton movies or the 60s Batmobile?

[Kathy Gellis]

I think it was the Tim Burton ones.

[Larry Magid]

A reasonable presumption of confusion. For example, I always thought it was interesting that Madonna.

[Kathy Gellis]

No, that matters for Tradmark. It doesn't matter for copyright.

[Larry Magid]

Yeah, because Madonna protected her name. But the Catholic Church had it a long time before.

[Leo Laporte]

There was one Madonna before you that really maybe even arguably.

[Kathy Gellis]

Was better known, that is trademark. And although I recently had to do a project where I was reading a lot about character copyright, and trademark is supposed to be distinctive from copyright and operate on a different axis with a different rationale. But it does appear that if there is consumer confusion, that does seem to end up informing the copyright analysis, even though it's not supposed to.

[Larry Magid]

Wasn't that the whole Apple. Apple music versus Apple computer dispute?

[Kathy Gellis]

Because that was trademark, though.

[Leo Laporte]

They made a deal, though. Yeah, they made a deal.

[Larry Magid]

Got upset.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I learned a little bit about this, about something called reverse confusion, which is apparently something you can really get some damages for. We got a little tussle with Twitter over the name Twit, and we proceeded. Twit came first. Then there was Twitter. And the problem is reverse confusion, which is that people would assume we copied Twitter, which is more damaging to us than even the fact that our name was, you know, copied. So, you know, apparently, that's the one you got to really watch out for. You know what else we want to watch out for in the skies over Sonoma? Not Walmart. Drones. The county. Drones in our county. The apparently. And by the way, I have to say I have a little connection to this, because the guy who's doing it is a buddy of mine, J.T. wick. He's the director of Permit Service Sonoma, the county's land use and planning department. He's being sued right now. They sent drones in the sky to look for pot farms, which apparently is okay. But then they started to find, like, little, you know, violations of code at residential properties.

[Kathy Gellis]

There's a word that is really important for this analysis, for the. This is a Fourth Amendment issue.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Kathy Gellis]

Case law has gotten kind of weak on this point, but the key word is a word called curtilage, which has to do with what part of the property is visible from overhead.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, apparently, they have issued citations to people for having illegal horse operations. There's a woman who says that. She says she noticed a drone hovering over her farm. She's deaf, so she didn't hear it. Somebody else said, what's that drone doing up there? At which point she ran inside her bedroom, where she could see the drone photographing the property through her blind. She was looking out. They weren't looking in. She said she feared that the drone may have photographed her earlier while nude, after bathing. So she's also a part of the lawsuit. I'm afraid to open my blinds or go outside because she's deaf. She wouldn't even know there's A drone overhead. Who knows if the county drone could be spying on me. A second plaintiff said the county used the drone program to photograph her horse stable and issue code vibe violations. The only way she found out the county employee mentioned they had photos of her property. She filed a public records request. This is why these are so important, by the way. Which left her stunned, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, after seeing the county employees were monitoring her private property, including photographing her outdoor bathtub and shower.

[Benito]

Hey, Kathy, how legal is it to shoot these out of the sky?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, is it?

[Kathy Gellis]

Probably not legal at all. But in terms of pure constitutional theory about what is okay and what is not okay, yeah, don't do it because somebody's going to get you with some sort of code.

[Larry Magid]

Can I.

[Benito]

Can I train crows to attack it? How about that?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Yes, I could definitely do that.

[Sam Abulsamed]

What about radio drones?

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't know. If the drone is in your yard.

[Leo Laporte]

That incessantly, then radio jamming. How about that?

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah, what about radio jamming?

[Kathy Gellis]

Okay. I am a lawyer. I'm not your lawyer. None of this is legal advice. But this is all very dystopian. And one of the things that is an issue is that Fourth Amendment law and other related laws were sort of developing, and then as technology hit them, sometimes they kind of veered off and started to develop in ways that were not necessarily protective of individual rights. They tended to defer a little bit more to the state action. I wonder if those are existing, going to get rethought in some way. But in the meantime, I don't pick that fight with the state, I don't think. But.

[Larry Magid]

Sounds like mission creep. And if I were a resident of Sonoma. Is it Sonoma County?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Larry Magid]

I would go to my board of Supervisors. Hey, wait a minute.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, I mean, I think. I think to some extent. I think to some extent that is the way to do it, because right now it's a political solution will take care of this. But for the people who've got citations, they could potentially challenge them and challenge them on a Fourth Amendment basis. The case law. I'm not enough of a Fourth Amendment expert. I know that, like, I took some, you know, some classes in law school there. Curtilage is a word that will be relevant to the. To the dispute. But the. But is that when.

[Leo Laporte]

When you have like a. A gallon of milk for a little too long and it curtilages. Is that. Is that what you're talking about?

[Kathy Gellis]

You know, I don't think you should.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't make cheese.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's not going to help anything here.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Larry Magid]

But it'll impress people that, you know, know the term.

[Kathy Gellis]

That's why I'm basically offering it to everybody. I can't give you the Fourth Amendment analysis, but here's a nice fancy word.

[Larry Magid]

I think it is informing one enclosure with it. That's according to some dictionary online.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Just, just, just consult with your own attorney and, you know, mention the word curtilage and say, here, you know, I heard this word.

[Kathy Gellis]

All right, so the word with curtilage is. I remember being taught a case where curtilage mattered when I was in law school. So damn it, it needs to matter now. But, but it's a lot of stuff in terms of the surveillance you can do with technology. We already had the development of a Fourth amendment law and then we added technology to it. And sometimes you would end up with some case law that would be very protective of the liberty interest. Like Justice Scalia wrote a case called Killo or Kylo. I think that's what it was. Which involved like, could you use like a heat gun on a house to like surveil what was going on in the house? And he had said no, but that was sort of like the opening volley. And then there's been a lot of creep where the courts increasingly have said yes and yes and yes to more technological surveillance. And maybe we need to start seeing a snap back to. Hang on a second. The liberty interests here were pretty important, and this is going to be a problem if we keep saying yes to.

[Larry Magid]

It, Especially with cameras literally everywhere today. I mean.

[Kathy Gellis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I want to thank you all for allowing me to learn a lot, a little bit of law here today. It's been a great time. Thank you. Larry Magid. Everybody should go to connectsafely.org we didn't get to your story about AI PCs, but I think that would be well worth reading if people go to Larrysworld.com, a laptop built for AI. But how long? Oh, this was from the Merc.

[Larry Magid]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice. All right, thank you, Larry. Appreciate it. What would you like to plug? Anything.

[Larry Magid]

Well, I was going to say I'd ask my attorney about curtilage, but it would probably cost me $1,000 for him to look Guarantee. Yeah, no, I. What?

[Leo Laporte]

I just asked ChatGPT. That's what I did.

[Larry Magid]

Those of you who are worried about your kids and the apps they're using, go to Connect Safely and click on Explore by app and read about those apps. Read our parents guides because we can't solve all your problems, we can at least tell you what they offer, what controls are there. Maybe we can assage some of your fears or create new fears you haven't even thought of yet. But you, you know, it's a way to educate yourself.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice. It's great to see you, Larry. Thank you for being here. The number eight now number eighth most visited podcast guest. Or maybe you're. Maybe you're seven. Maybe you're moving up on the charts.

[Larry Magid]

I hope so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Thank you, Larry. Kathy Gellis, soon to be on the top of the charts. We love having you on. She writes for Tech Dirt and you can find her at cgcouncil c o u n s e l.com anything you want to plug?

[Kathy Gellis]

Not currently, but lots of TechDor posts and hopefully lots more soon.

[Leo Laporte]

Love what you do on techdirt. Really appreciate it. And of course Sam Able Samid, my car guy. You know, we gotta do a club event about cars. If you would like to do that sometime, we'll schedule it.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I think a lot of people miss you on the radio show and we don't get to talk cars as much as I'd like to. For instance, I wanted to ask you about that $20,000 thousand dollars truck that doesn't have a radio or anything else in it. Maybe that'd be a good subject. And there are plenty of others. Car people love to talk about cars. So let's get that on the books.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Okay, sounds good.

[Leo Laporte]

His podcast, Wheel Bearings Media with Nicole and Robbie. And it's a great show. You must listen if you love cars. And he is a VP of research at Telemetry. I want to thank all.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Another podcast now too. A short daily 2 minute hit every day called the Telemetry Transportation Daily.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's cool.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that for people in the biz or would every. Anybody be interested.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Anybody who's interested in the auto industry or vehicles. I mean it's only two minutes. You know, give it a listen. You might find it interesting, might get some useful insights out of it.

[Leo Laporte]

What a good idea. So it's just like a quick update on. On what's happening in. In. I'm gonna have to listen.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Can. Is it. Is it available everywhere?

[Sam Abulsamed]

Everywhere. And ignore that that. Yeah, I used a. One of the. I think I used Gemini or. Or chat GPT or something to generate. To write your feed some JavaScript code to put an embed an embedded player in there and it was working for a while but I think maybe the. The proxy that it was using to generate the. The Player feed wasn't working, but you can find it in. And you know Apple, all the podcasts.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Overcast. It's everywhere. Just telemetry, transportation daily. That's out there.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations. Thank you. That's great. Thank you, Sam. Thank you, Kathy. Thank you, Larry. Thanks to all of you for joining us, especially our Club TWIT members who make this show possible every week. Don't forget tomorrow, big day for Apple fans. The Apple wwdc, the Worldwide Developers Conference conference convenes. We will have coverage in the Club TWIT discord for both keynotes, the morning keynote that's open to the public, and the State of the Union keynote following. Micah Sargent and I will be talking about what's new with Apple. It should be interesting to see how little they mention AI after getting all that egg on their face by overdoing it last year. We'll be watching with great interest. We do Twit, as I mentioned, every Sunday, 2 to 5pm Pacific. You can get the show live or get it after the fact. There's also a YouTube channel for the video. But the best way, of course to subscribe is in your favorite podcast player. Leave us a five star review if you would. Let the world know about the longest running and I think best tech podcast in the world. Thank you everybody. We'll see you next time. As I've said for the last 20 years, another twit is in the can. Bye. Bye.

[Sam Abulsamed]

This is amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Hi, Zoe Saldana. Welcome to T Mobile.

[Larry Magid]

Here's your new iPhone 16 Pro on us.

[Kathy Gellis]

Thanks. And here's my old phone to trade in.

[Larry Magid]

You don't need to trade in.

[Leo Laporte]

When you switch to T Mobile. We'll give you a new iPhone 16 Pro. Plus we'll help you pay off your old Phone up to 800 bucks and you still get to keep it.

[Kathy Gellis]

There's always a trade in.

[Larry Magid]

Not right now. @ T Mobile.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like I have to give.

[Kathy Gellis]

You something in return for karma.

[Leo Laporte]

That's okay.

[Kathy Gellis]

I don't really have much in my purse. Oh, let's see.

[Leo Laporte]

Hand sanitizer.

[Kathy Gellis]

It's lavender.

[Larry Magid]

I'm good.

[Leo Laporte]

Seriously.

[Kathy Gellis]

Let me check this pocket. Oh, mints.

[Leo Laporte]

Really, I'm fine.

[Kathy Gellis]

Oh, I have raisins. I'm a mom.

[Larry Magid]

Wait, wait one sec.

[Kathy Gellis]

I've got cupcakes in the car.

[Sam Abulsamed]

It's our best iPhone offer ever.

[Leo Laporte]

Switch to T Mobile. Get a new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple intelligence on us. No trade in needed. We'll even pay off your phone up to 800 bucks with 24 monthly bill credits new line $100 plus a month on experience beyond Finance Agreement 999.99 and.

[Sam Abulsamed]

Qualifying ported for well qualified plus tax.

[Leo Laporte]

And $10 connection charge payout via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days credits end in balance due if you pay off early or cancel. See t mobile dot com.