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This Week in Tech 1047: Nerd Harder!
02:54:51
From Cloudflare's Internet Gatekeeping to AI's Labor Threat
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Twit Labor Day edition, and we've got a great Labor Day panel for you. Shoshana Weissman is here from rstreet.org, our very own Lou Mareska from Microsoft. And Cory Doctorow. There's lots to talk about, including what happened at Microsoft this week, why Taco Bell Bell is abandoning AI for its drive thru, and why one FBI cyber cop says the Chinese own us all. It's all coming up next on TWIT podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week at Tech, episode 1047, recorded Sunday, August 31, 2025. Nerd harder. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. And it's always it's like Christmas day every Sunday for me here when I get to open up the wrapping and find out who's on the panel. And oh my gosh, we have a great panel today. I'll start on the right with Lou Mareska. He is at Microsoft where he is head of engineering for Copilot and Excel. So if you're doing pivot tables with Copilot, you could thank this man right here. Or if you're writing Python in Excel, you can thank this man right here. Good to see you, Lou.
- [01:30]
Lou Mareska
Thank you very much.
- [01:30]
Leo Laporte
We should also mention that even though Lou works for Microsoft, he does not reflect the opinions of Microsoft or anything like that. And he is not in Building 34 at this time.
- [01:41]
Lou Mareska
No, I am not.
- [01:43]
Leo Laporte
He's as far away as you can get and still be on the continental United States. It's good to see you. It's nice to see you, Lou, longtime host of this Week at Enterprise Tech. Also with us from the the newly militarized zone in the District of Columbia, shoshana weissman of rstreet.org hello, Shoshana. She's head of Digital Media. Hello.
- [02:05]
Shoshana Weissman
Thank you for having me.
- [02:06]
Leo Laporte
Always a great pleasure to see you and your, and your marmot.
- [02:11]
Shoshana Weissman
He's perfect.
- [02:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Your pet marmot. Is he a regional marmot?
- [02:16]
Shoshana Weissman
Yeah. I'm actually not sure on where this one's from. This was an image from the Internet. I have my own photos of marmots, but not all of them are as photogenic as this one.
- [02:26]
Leo Laporte
Oh, good. That's nice. And Shoshana, of course, has written some very important pieces at R Street, including one that you wrote two years ago that is continually being referred to because it was how age verification can't possibly work. And here we are two years later and nobody has understood that Mississippi NOW is the latest to implement age verification on social media. So we'll probably talk a little bit about that. Hi Shoshana. Good to see you.
- [02:54]
Cory Doctorow
Yay.
- [02:54]
Shoshana Weissman
Thank you.
- [02:55]
Leo Laporte
Also here, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Cory Doctorow. Always pleasure to have Corey on. Corey is the author of a new book now on Kickstarter. The audio version now on Kickstarter. He is the guy who coined the term that will outlive you now in Shittification. In fact, we just saw a really lovely talk you did at the Cloud. What was it? The Cloud Foundation?
- [03:24]
Cory Doctorow
Cloud Fest. Cloud Fest in Europa park just outside of Stuttgart.
- [03:29]
Leo Laporte
And you got a great laugh. First of all, somebody in the comments said, I wonder how many of the people listening to your inshitification talk are actively involved in the inshittification of their companies. At CloudFest is probably a pretty good bet. But you also got a great laugh when you talked about people at Meta being drunk. And you said, if I worked at Meta, I'd probably be drunk too.
- [03:53]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, well, it's that 96% of all iOS users tick the don't let Facebook spy on me box, and the other 4% were presumably either Facebook employees or drunk or drunk Facebook employees. Which makes sense because if I worked with Facebook, I would be drunk all the time.
- [04:09]
Leo Laporte
Thank you for putting that joke back together after I broke it Complete pocket.
- [04:13]
Cory Doctorow
That's a good one. I'm proud I'm in ordinary.
- [04:15]
Leo Laporte
You should be proud. That's a good. Got a big laugh. They loved it in Stuttgart, let me tell you, he's huge in Stuttgart. All right. Well, what a big week. I guess I should bring this one up. It's not in the rundown, but since you're here, lou, Microsoft's Building 34, which is the main building. That's where Satya Nadella's offices are. Brad Smith's office as well were taken over by protesters in defense of Palestine and the Gaza Strip. And actually they took over Brad Smith's office. And I thought Microsoft actually handled this. I know you can't really say anything, but I'm going to say it for you. I thought they actually handled it fairly well. I understand the issue with the protesters. They say shouldn't be selling Azure to Israel, and Microsoft said, we've checked, they're not using it for anything but securing their own it. However, I don't think that's satisfying the protesters who say you shouldn't be selling anything. I think to Israel is their position on this. But then they took over Brad Smith's office. They took over Building 34. And I think Microsoft felt like we have to call in the authorities at this point. They actually did some damage to the building and so forth. I think Microsoft actually has acted. There have been a lot of protests. Build was overrun with protests in Seattle. So much so that Microsoft said we're not going to do build in Seattle anymore. We're going to go somewhere where there are no protests. San Francisco. Do you have anything you could say or want to say about it?
- [05:59]
Lou Mareska
I mean, maybe not about that event, but I'm actually very surprised. That building is like a fortress. So like I can't even get to Satya's floor, anybody's executive floor. There's bodyguards and security people and I can't even badge myself in. So I'm very surprised that they were even to get where they got.
- [06:14]
Leo Laporte
Some of them at least were Microsoft employees. A few have. A couple have been fired at this point, but a number I think Microsoft treads as lightly as they can on this. I think they understand the issue and they defended their sale of Azure to Israel. But they also understand the protesters point of view and I think they're trying not to fire people. The fact that they got into Brad Smith's office probably means that Microsoft was acting with a. They didn't shoot anybody, thank goodness.
- [06:45]
Cory Doctorow
I guess that's a pretty minimal bar.
- [06:49]
Leo Laporte
It's a low. Hey, you know, we could take what we can get at this point.
- [06:53]
Cory Doctorow
I mean better would be exerting some of the market power. They have to do something about something that I think a lot of us are going to be very ashamed of.
- [07:03]
Leo Laporte
I agree, I agree.
- [07:05]
Cory Doctorow
Years to come.
- [07:06]
Leo Laporte
So yes, I agree. It's a, it's very difficult. Unfortunately. A lot of companies are doing this. You know, Google famously withdrew from the Jedi contract with the Pentagon after its employees protested. I think Microsoft is also a backed off on some involvement with the US military, although they still are working with the military over HoloLens. But if you're a United States company, it's controversial to say we're not going to work with the military. Should Microsoft, Cory, do you think they should stop selling anything to Israel?
- [07:49]
Cory Doctorow
I don't know. I mean I think that people who in times of enormous humanitarian crisis and who have leverage and don't exert it, history doesn't reflect well on them. And I think the argument that it would be bad for our bottom line, therefore we won't do it or both sidesing it is not great. And you know, as a Jew, I look at what's going on there and I feel embarrassed and ashamed that it's, some of it's happening in my name. And I would like to see a recognition of the humanitarian atrocities taking place and to, for people to take that very seriously. I, I think we're gonna, we're really gonna regret how little we did and how, how non central this was to our lives. I think we already do when we reckon with it.
- [08:49]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. The other side of the story that's kind of interesting is how much power employees, especially engineering employees have in a tech company.
- [09:05]
Cory Doctorow
I think that used to be the story. I don't think that's the story anymore. I think that you had the Google walkouts. I think one of the reasons that tech bosses love AI is the same reason that Hollywood bosses love the idea of AI is that it's the employee it replaces the employee who currently feels like they have the right to tell you to go to hell. And when I was out on the picket line with the screenwriters, they said you prompt an AI the way you give notes to a writer's room. You say things like, make me a Hollywood blockbuster, that's E.T. but make it about a dog and give it a love interest and put a car chase in Act 2. And they routinely do that. And then all work stops while they dig around on the floor. The eyeballs that have fallen out of people's heads because they're rolling their eyes so hard. And in the same way, you know, you have tech bosses who have historically had a really hard time doing things like making censored search engines for China or, you know, doing drone projects, who are extremely happy, I think, at the prospect of replacing those workers that they used to have to give gourmet cafeterias to and, you know, free kombucha and egg freezing services with chatbots that never meth off to them. You know, and I don't, I think that we're like, in a moment where we're having things like Mark Zuckerberg no longer attending the weekly meetings because, quote, it's not a good use of my time. And Sergey brings, stopped going to the weekly town hall. And you know, I think that I think we had a moment where tech workers had a lot of power. And I think tech bosses got really scared and they stopped pretending that they view their workers as peers. And now it's pretty, pretty gloves off in terms of you guys are employees and you do what you're told. And if you don't like it, we'll replace you. It's the inverse of the time when sysadmins used to wear T shirts that say, go away and or I'll replace you with a very small shell script. Now it's boss is saying, go away or I'll replace you with an LLM.
- [11:03]
Leo Laporte
How effective is that? Though? I don't think I understand the power of LLMs.
- [11:10]
Cory Doctorow
Your job, I think it just has to be good enough to terrorize you into doing what your boss tells you to.
- [11:14]
Leo Laporte
It's a threat. Yeah, it's a threat is often stronger than the execution.
- [11:19]
Shoshana Weissman
I actually think there's something in there too. And I think it's not just tech, though. I think there's going to be more across different industries that basically if. I mean, we always hear about other people's bosses using AI to write their speeches and stuff like that. Like silly stuff like that. But it's a good point that you don't get the feedback from employees. Including this sounds like AI, which in itself is good feedback. Um, but I think. I think this is something we'll be seeing more of until it hurts the people doing it. Like when their employees are like, this is stupid, or you're not being objective here. Or like. And not just employees, but people outside organizations. Like whenever we see like the first senator give, like a really clearly AI speech at a bad moment, like maybe something huge happens in foreign policy and they have chatgpt write it. And they have chatgpt write it poorly, I think. I think stuff like that is going to shake it up a bit. But I'm not sure. I'm not sure exactly what turns it around, but I think that there's a really important thread there. And though, like, AI not being willing to tell you, hey, this thing I wrote you sounds like AI. You know, there does.
- [12:25]
Leo Laporte
There does seem to be a little bit of a tilt in the other direction. The pendulum swinging in the other direction. I see. I read it's not a good. Maybe it is a good bellwether for this. A lot of. A lot of subreddits. You'll see the response to a nicely formatted post. Thanks, Clanker. Which is of course implying that a robot wrote it.
- [12:48]
Cory Doctorow
The okay Boomer of It's the new okay Boomer.
- [12:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Thanks, Clanker. I've seen a lot on Reddit, whether it's AI or not, if you just use bullet points, they assume an AI wrote it. But I think you're right. I think it does not reflect well, especially for things where it's Important like a senator giving a speech. It's important that it be a human who expressed the thoughts. Although I also understand a lot of people don't feel like they can write very well, especially people for whom English is not a first language. And AI is very valuable in that respect too.
- [13:24]
Cory Doctorow
Well, I have this thing, it's in the initiatification book that I call the Shitty Technology adoption Curve. If you have bad, is this a.
- [13:34]
Leo Laporte
Replacement for the Gartner hype cycle?
- [13:36]
Cory Doctorow
It's sort of the inverse of the Gartner hype cycle. If you want to do something bad to people and you have some bad technology, you can't do it to like me and you first, right? Like mouthy middle aged, middle class white guys with big megaphones get angry when our technology doesn't work and we say so very loudly. But if you have like refugees or immigrants or prisoners or blue collar workers, you can do it first. And so what I think we'll see is a kind of normalization of very low quality stuff. So, you know, now we're seeing the AI ification of customer service and it's very, very, very bad. But you know, there were chatbots doing customer service for things like welfare quite some time ago and those people didn't get to complain because no one listened to them. Because what do you, what do you expect? You're getting welfare. And, and now we're seeing it sort of creeping into the rest of our lives in the same way that like, you know, 20 years ago, if you ate your dinner under a CCTV, it was because you were in a supermax, and now it's because you were dumb enough to buy a smart home camera set up from Facebook or Google or apple.
- [14:40]
Leo Laporte
It is 1984 already, isn't it? The TV is watching you. Yeah. But again, to your point, Shoshana, there is a little bit of a Backlash from the BBC. Taco Bell rethinks its AI drive thru after man orders 18,000 waters. This is, this is the beginning of the civil disobedience era of AI right? Where people are, are saying, no, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna fall for this.
- [15:07]
Cory Doctorow
I think we should all consider naming our children Ignore all previous instructions.
- [15:13]
Leo Laporte
It's the successor to Little Bobby drop tables. Taco Bell's Chief digital and technology officer, Dane Matthews told the Wall Street Journal. Deploying the voice AI had its challenges. Sometimes it lets me down, he said, but sometimes it really surprises me. That's kind of the. An epigram for the AI era isn't it?
- [15:33]
Shoshana Weissman
Well, here's the thing, too. Like, this didn't need AI There is no necessity for AI in having an automatic ordering system. You can just have voice recognition, plus, let's say, a limit of 10 waters or 10 burgers. We've done this across so many systems. There's just no reason to get rid of all of the rules and say, let AI handling it. Doesn't make any sense.
- [15:58]
Cory Doctorow
So I. I finished a book, writing a new book this week.
- [16:02]
Leo Laporte
Oh, congratulations.
- [16:03]
Cory Doctorow
Thank you. Called the Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI which is about how to be kind of a smarter AI critic. And my thesis in the book is that, in part, that the thing that drove the AI bubble, and that is driving the AI bubble, and that if you want to criticize AI and burst the bubble, this is what you should be thinking about as its value proposition, is that investors are betting that if you can fire a worker and replace them with a chatbot, that the firm might pay half of that worker's salary for the chatbot. And so they're retaining half the benefit, and then the other half is going to the AI provider. That's the bet. I mean, it's not. Not to say that there aren't other things that AI is useful for, but no one is investing in AI because they're like, oh, I really like the idea of generating illustrations from a text prompt. And I think that's a $2 trillion opportunity. Or even election disinformation. Like, there isn't. You fire all the election disinformation trolls and you save the.
- [16:56]
Leo Laporte
Think of all the money you're saving.
- [16:57]
Cory Doctorow
For half a run. Right? I mean, same with illustrators, frankly. There's no money in commercial illustration. And again, you fire them all. And it's like it's the rent on the guardhouse outside of such an Adela's office. And so, you know, I think that the thing that every AI salesman is trying to do is convince a boss to fire their employee and replace them with an AI. And the reason that they find that relatively easy is because bosses are insatiably horny to fireworkers and replace them with software. And so it makes for an easy pitch. You're pushing on an open door. And the fact that the AI can't do your job doesn't really have any bearing on whether a salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with that AI from the salesman's.
- [17:45]
Leo Laporte
Point of view, he just needs to make the sale. Yeah, he doesn't care what happens afterwards.
- [17:50]
Shoshana Weissman
I would add on top of that too, that I think it goes with that, but it also works on its own that people don't know the difference between automation and AI. So like I've used Zapier for years to automate a lot of like, I do too. And it's so much fun to like play around with. I have, I've used a lot of chat GPT to like write the Python for me and like nothing that was high risk and everything. I could like basically figure out what it was doing. But before I like, I was still able to do a lot of this stuff. And then when I became big, everyone's like, oh man, you must be able to do so much more now. And I'm like, like, that's the same.
- [18:24]
Leo Laporte
Stupid stuff I've been doing all, yeah.
- [18:26]
Shoshana Weissman
I don't need to generate stuff, I need to like automate processes. And it just ends up not being a lot of AI. But people think that AI is automation, that like AI is a thing that can make automation possible. So if you have a boss that doesn't understand either, like, I see where that can go.
- [18:41]
Leo Laporte
People think AI is verging on human capabilities.
- [18:46]
Cory Doctorow
A PhD in your pocket.
- [18:48]
Leo Laporte
That's what Sam Almond says.
- [18:50]
Cory Doctorow
I can't label a map or tell you how many days have an R in them.
- [18:53]
Leo Laporte
Right. All right, Lou, defend your, defend your job.
- [18:59]
Lou Mareska
Honestly, it should be replacing humans in some aspects, but in this case, obviously integrating in an order system. I think I agree with Shoshana. They have to do it responsibly in a way where it's not, you know, it has to be particular set of scenarios. I mean, they shouldn't be able to do, you know, n number of things. It should be only to be able to do, you know, five things. Six.
- [19:17]
Leo Laporte
Taco Bell's solution is to bring in Nvidia. So we're working on this. We bring, we're bringing in Nvidia.
- [19:25]
Lou Mareska
Let's make it more complicated.
- [19:26]
Leo Laporte
Which kind of underscores what you just said. Corey, you know, this is, this is the pitch, right, from these companies that are making so much money on this. I was kind of Nvidia, despite having a good quarter, their stock went down because they didn't have as good a quarter as the stock market wanted them to have. But I was really surprised when they said, and they didn't say who, that 2 of their customers make up 39% of the sales of their high end AI GPUs. And I think maybe that's what Wall street was a little worried about.
- [19:58]
Cory Doctorow
And they are, I believe, 7% of the S&P 500 now.
- [20:02]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's the other problem. Right. As does Nvidia. So does the stock market. Do we want to speculate who those two customers are? I'm thinking Meta is number one.
- [20:18]
Shoshana Weissman
And Taco Bell.
- [20:19]
Leo Laporte
Taco Bell's number two. 18,000 waters. I should point out somebody said, well, it would be. Surely the guy saw that it was 18,000 waters. No, he want. This was all for a TikTok or something. Right. This is intentional. And that's kind of the point of it. It is you put these things out in a public facing space, there are going to be people who don't. Don't like it or think it's hysterical and are going to mess with it. And that's part of the problem.
- [20:45]
Shoshana Weissman
So that's one reason, like my colleagues and other people I work with have talked about, well, why doesn't rstreet.org have a chatbot on it? I'm like, there are many reasons that we do not have a chatbot on it. Like the way people are going to use this wrong and try to make us look bad. I'm like, no, there is a future in which we will have a chatbot on our page to help people find stuff. But right now, like, hell no.
- [21:09]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And I should say that, you know, we do a show about AI called Intelligent Machines and I am seen on that show as the accelerationist. I'm pro AI. I like AI. I play with it all the time. I use it for search. I think if you understand its limits and you're practical about its uses, it's. I still think it's pretty amazing what it does. Yeah, Right.
- [21:36]
Shoshana Weissman
Oh, yeah. Out of it. Oh my gosh. I can't write Python myself. Like, I can very poorly write Python myself, but I've had IT code so much for me and like automate away, like two extra people worth. And it. We didn't like get rid of anyone. It's just we don't have enough time to do all the work we want to do. So now we added a whole bunch of compact capacity because of AI. I love AI. It's just some people don't know how to use it.
- [22:01]
Cory Doctorow
Well, sorry, go ahead.
- [22:03]
Lou Mareska
No, I was going to say his main use case is analyze large amounts of data quickly and efficiently. Which makes me kind of wonder what the heck Taco Bell's utilizing it for. Because it should be analyzing orders efficiently. Right. And accurately. Right.
- [22:14]
Leo Laporte
So it's a sanity check. Any coder would put in if waters exceed 10, do not deliver. Seems simple.
- [22:24]
Cory Doctorow
In the book I just finished the title, the Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI.
- [22:29]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, what is the Reverse Centaur, by the way?
- [22:30]
Cory Doctorow
So it refers to this idea of automation theory. Theory that someone who is assisted by automation is a centaur. So they're like a robot head on a human body or a human head on a robot body, whereas someone who has to assist the automation is a reverse centaur. So, you know, right now I think there's probably a lot of coders who work for themselves who are finding that AI is extremely useful for doing really cool stuff that they choose. Right? So their boss hasn't said, you need to now do five times as much work as we fired four out of five of your colleagues and replace them with AI. And we're not telling you you have to use the AI, but you do have a quota to make. And those coders who are in charge of their own schedule, they're finding the AI to be really, really useful. And I'm not much of an AI booster or even much of an AI believer, but I've got some use cases for AI that are great. I installed Whisper on my laptop. I found it terrific. I had to find a quote for an article that I was writing that I'd heard in a podcast and I couldn't remember which. And I just put the last 30 hours of audio I listened to into Whisper.
- [23:36]
Leo Laporte
Wow.
- [23:36]
Cory Doctorow
And I just. It just pulled out a full text transcript. My laptop ran for about an hour. The fan didn't turn on. Like, it was just, you know, so lightweight to do that work.
- [23:47]
Leo Laporte
Are you running a local LLM?
- [23:49]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, yeah, I'm just running Whisper on my laptop.
- [23:50]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you're running it locally? Of course. Yeah.
- [23:52]
Cory Doctorow
One of the things that's great about, about Whisper is that it's bubble popping proof. So, you know, I. One of the things that happens when bubbles pop and all bubbles eventually pop. It's not just that, Normie. Investors who in the money they couldn't afford to lose, lose everything and end up doomed to poverty in their old ages. Although that's something that always happens. We should always remember that that's the core of what happens with every bubble. But it's also that bubbles leave behind residue. So, like Web 1.0, the.com bubble left behind like a couple of million skilled programmers who used to be humanities undergraduates who were convinced to drop out and learn HTML, Perl and Python because there was a bubble and they made Web 2.0. Right. And there might have been better ways to create that skilled workforce than like bankrupting a bunch of normies. But it was still like we got that right. Like, let's not forget that that existed as a result. Or WorldCom, which was, you know, a crime and the CEO died in prison as a result of it. But they did leave a lot of fiber in the ground, right? And I'm speaking to you from a 2 gigabit symmetrical fiber that's recycling old Dark Worldcom fiber that AT&T has bought out. But then you have things like the cryptocurrency bubble and when it goes away, all that's going to be left is like a few programmers who know rust, a little bit more cryptographic knowledge, and then some like really bad Austrian economics and even worse monkey JPEGs, you know. So I think, I think that like the open source stuff coming out of the AI bubble, even when the AI companies are gone, even when no one can afford to keep the foundation models running anymore, that open source stuff will still exist. Hackers will still be figuring out how to do really cool stuff with it. They'll be pushing it in ways that no one ever thought it could go. Really just hitting it out of the park every time. It's going to be really cool.
- [25:42]
Leo Laporte
We're going to interview on Wednesday on Intelligent Machine's Carl Bergstrom, who is the author of a notebook called Calling Bull the Art of Skepticism in a Data Driven World. He and his co author Jevin west will be on the show. And that's kind of what they're arguing for, is we're sir wash an AI slope. But if you are clever about it, if you think critically about it, there are ways to use AI responsibly. We're also going to interview on Monday, tomorrow on Labor Day. By the way, happy Labor Day weekend. I appreciate you guys working. Is this working on Labor Day weekend? Tomorrow on Labor Day, we're going to interview at 5:30pm Our club members can watch this live. Jeff and Paris and I are going to interview Karen Howe, whose new book is called Empire of AI. It's kind of a history of Sam Altman and OpenAI. But what's really interesting, her attitude is these, these AI giants are really creating a new kind of imperial logic where, you know, they have, you know, they manifest destiny to take over the world and who cares what the costs are to people in the third world and to us in our power and water and so forth. So we got a couple of skeptics coming up on Intelligent Machines. Karen Howe's interview will air a week from Wednesday on the show, but we're gonna record it on Monday.
- [27:13]
Cory Doctorow
Karen and I have both been long listed for the Financial Times best book of the year this year. Congratulations for our respective books.
- [27:22]
Leo Laporte
Which book? For Inshitify.
- [27:23]
Cory Doctorow
For Inshitification. Yeah. So that's very cool to get that two months before the book comes out.
- [27:29]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, no kidding.
- [27:30]
Cory Doctorow
But obviously the publisher is distributing copies ahead of time.
- [27:34]
Leo Laporte
It's amazing how that works. Incidentally, the place to go if you want to find out more about Corey's upcoming book is disinshidification.org he's created that special website. Or you could just go to Kickstarter and search for inshitification as he's done in the past, creating a DRM free audiobook. Corey's always been against drm. He's one of the few best selling authors who just does not embrace it, doesn't allow it. And thanks to you, by the way, Corey, I have started to. I've moved off of audible.com and moved to Libro FM.
- [28:12]
Cory Doctorow
That's great.
- [28:13]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you've really convinced me that they are not a benign influence in the world of audiobooks. Oh, well, thank you.
- [28:20]
Cory Doctorow
Are you taking advantage of the fact that you can load those MP3 books onto more kinds of devices like I swim every day and my underwater audiobook player only plays mp3s so that you know, I need it?
- [28:31]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I use M4BS, which are unencrypted, basically AAC, but it allows bookmarks.
- [28:38]
Cory Doctorow
Right.
- [28:38]
Leo Laporte
And I use a really nice open source player called Book Player. But yeah, there's Jellyfin. There's a lot of servers out there. And once you remove drm, or better yet, buy a book that doesn't have DRM like all of Corey's books. It's great that you can serve it yourself. Listen, on any device. That's just fantastic. That's the way it ought to be. It's a book, for crying out loud. Yeah. All right, we're taking a little break. We have more to talk about, including more AI news to talk about. We've got a great panel and lots to say with Cory Doctorow and Shoshana Weissman and Lou Maresca. So glad all three of you are here on Labor Day weekend. I hope all of you are. Is Labor Day weekend celebrated outside the U.S. corey?
- [29:26]
Cory Doctorow
Canada. It is Canada. Everywhere else. Mayday.
- [29:31]
Leo Laporte
Mayday is for the workers.
- [29:32]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. Spelled with a U and spelled with a U in Canada. But yeah, everywhere else it's Mayday.
- [29:38]
Leo Laporte
Good day to think about. And this Is, I guess, why I brought up the Microsoft story. I was watching a show about this Truman antitrust Act, and politicians at the time said there are only, only two people who can counter monopoly, counter trusts. There's only two groups. One is government and the other is labor. And that's why there is often a concerted effort to eliminate organized labor. And it's a very important day to remember that and remember how valuable that is.
- [30:12]
Cory Doctorow
We've got. John Sherman of the Sherman act was the brother of Tecumseh Sherman, the guy who burned Atlanta.
- [30:17]
Leo Laporte
I did not know that.
- [30:19]
Cory Doctorow
Both brothers went hard Shermans.
- [30:23]
Leo Laporte
What amazing fellas. Wow, that's hysterical. I'm going to be going on a Mississippi river cruise in a couple of weeks. I'm very excited about stopping in all of these incredible historic spots like Vicksburg and Cairo. And it's just gonna be really, really interesting to see this 20 years after Katrina, New Orleans. That's where we start. All right, let's take a break. We will come back with more. It's great to have you, all three of you, on Labor Day. Happy Labor Day to all of you. Thank you for being where you are and listening to us on a nice long weekend, really. Mostly just seen as the end of summer. But I think it's more important than just that. Our show today, brought to you by our good friends at Shopify. And I say that sincerely because both my kids have created businesses using Shopify and it's hard. I mean, I watch them do this. It's when you're starting a new business, you gotta look at all the hats you have to wear. It seems like your to do list keeps growing every day. Hank is just like, you know, a million things going a million miles an hour and new tests that could just overrun his life. But I'll tell you what, finding the right tool that not only helps you out but simplifies everything can be such a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is, listen for it. Shopify. He uses Shopify on his salt lovers club site. Did from the very beginning. Helped him make an amazing site. Helped him grow from 0 to 60 in no time at all. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. 10% of all E commerce in the United States, from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started like that salt Levis club you might have heard of getting started with your own design studio. It's like getting started with a team to help you build your site. His site looks fantastic. I Said, how'd you do that? He said, yeah. Shopify Hundreds of ready to use templates Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style, accelerate your content creation. Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, even enhance your product photography and get the word out. Like you have a marketing team behind you. You can easily use Shopify to create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. Yes, brick and mortar too. Best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert. I should just commerce in general with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you are ready to Shopify. Turn your big business idea into With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today. Shopify.com TWIT Go to shopify.com TWIT shopify.com TWIT thank you, Shopify. Thank you. I really appreciate all that you've done for my kids. Getting them off the family trough, as it were. Your baby girl's going to college. That's so exciting. Corey.
- [33:41]
Cory Doctorow
That's right. She's going to be a banana slug.
- [33:43]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I love that. My father was a professor at ucsc.
- [33:49]
Cory Doctorow
Did he know Tom Lehrer?
- [33:51]
Leo Laporte
He. He did. The late Tom Lehrer, who was a math professor for years at ucsc.
- [33:55]
Cory Doctorow
Died. Died like two weeks ago.
- [33:57]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah. Dad was a provost at Cowell College and taught geology at uc.
- [34:03]
Cory Doctorow
My daughter's going to Cowell.
- [34:05]
Leo Laporte
No. Oh, well, like we're family now. The most beautiful campus in the world. It's. It's nestled in the redwoods.
- [34:11]
Cory Doctorow
I hope like the Ewoks live there or something.
- [34:13]
Leo Laporte
Yes, totally. Are you going to get to go up and move her in and all that?
- [34:18]
Cory Doctorow
I am going to be on tour. I leave for a 28 city, 4 country tour in early September. But I am going to have an extra day in San Francisco on the tour and so I'm going to go visit her on that day.
- [34:33]
Leo Laporte
Dude, it's so beautiful up there. I went to high school in Santa Cruz. I just, I really like it. It's wonderful.
- [34:40]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah.
- [34:41]
Leo Laporte
Well, congratulations. That's. That's wonderful. Yeah.
- [34:43]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. We're very excited.
- [34:45]
Leo Laporte
Lou, you've got a little time before you're. How many? Five boys are gonna.
- [34:48]
Lou Mareska
Yes, my oldest is 15, so I do have a couple years.
- [34:51]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you gotta start saving, man. Oh, God. Oh.
- [34:55]
Lou Mareska
Not looking forward to it. Yeah, yeah.
- [34:57]
Leo Laporte
You just. I got three letters for you. Uri. That's all I'm saying. Uri. Think of. Or UMass. UMass is excellent.
- [35:04]
Lou Mareska
They're both great.
- [35:04]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah.
- [35:05]
Leo Laporte
Two great state schools.
- [35:08]
Cory Doctorow
Remarry a European and send them to university for free overseas.
- [35:12]
Leo Laporte
Well, isn't. Is McGill still free? Are the Canadian universities still free?
- [35:16]
Cory Doctorow
Much cheaper. She did not want to go to school in Canada. She was accepted to York.
- [35:21]
Leo Laporte
Oh.
- [35:22]
Cory Doctorow
My nephew told her it was boring. There it is. I couldn't actually say he's not New York dropout.
- [35:29]
Leo Laporte
I couldn't.
- [35:30]
Cory Doctorow
I couldn't.
- [35:31]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you're even an alumna alumnus.
- [35:34]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, I have an honorary doctorate from there, but I couldn't stick out a whole undergraduate program.
- [35:39]
Leo Laporte
I dropped out of Yale. But I was told you're always. Once you drop out, you're still an alumnus. Of course, that's when it comes to fund fundraising. Right. Yeah. No, that counts.
- [35:49]
Cory Doctorow
We could still dunk in a coffin in a. In a building that looks like a tomb. And getting urinated on by a bush. I think you get to do that at any time. You don't have to be a current enrollee. Yeah, any. Any time is once you've graduated. That's available.
- [36:01]
Leo Laporte
Is that a. Is that a hazing ritual at York?
- [36:03]
Cory Doctorow
That's a Skull and Bones.
- [36:05]
Leo Laporte
Oh, Skull and Bones. Oh, no. Yeah. We aren't allowed to talk about Skull and Bones in this house. Somebody will have to get up and leave. So according to the FBI, Salt Typhoon. Now we've heard. We've heard. You know, we've heard about this. This is the, the, the Chinese hacking group who really got deep into our phone systems. And actually you were at DEF con. I imagine they talked a little bit.
- [36:31]
Cory Doctorow
About this, Corey, this year. Oh, you didn't last year. But I'm going next year with insidification. So this summer I stayed home, wrote a book, got the audiobook done, saw my kid off to college and did all that other stuff. But I'm going to DEFCON and, and.
- [36:46]
Leo Laporte
Hope next year with a 28 city tour coming up in September. You're not going to go to Las Vegas in August. There's. That's just a little too much.
- [36:53]
Cory Doctorow
I was in fact just in Las Vegas, but for something else.
- [36:56]
Leo Laporte
Okay.
- [36:56]
Cory Doctorow
I got back yester.
- [36:59]
Leo Laporte
So people think Salt Typhoon really will only impact you if you're a diplomat or, you know, working in the government, but. This is Michael Machtinger. He's deputy assistant director for the FBI Cyber Division. Talking to the Register. There's a good chance that Salt Typhoon has stolen information from Nearly every American. You might assume there's a thought among the public. He said that if you don't work in a sensitive area, that the People's Republic of China might be interested in you, or they won't be interested in you. Then you're safe. They won't target you. As we've seen from Salt Typhoon, this is no longer an assumption anyone can make. The worst thing, of course, is that Verizon and AT&T and most of the nation's telecom companies have already said, we can't fix it. It we'd have to take the phone system offline for a few days. We can't fix it.
- [37:57]
Shoshana Weissman
In fairness, wasn't a big reason that this happened. The the law. I'm forgetting what it stands for. But Kalea, that basically Kalia.
- [38:05]
Leo Laporte
It was based on Kalia. Exactly.
- [38:07]
Shoshana Weissman
So, like, the government is like, oh, sorry about this, guys. After they like mandated having backdoors, they.
- [38:14]
Leo Laporte
Told us, like in the 90s, was it Louis Freeh, whoever was the director, the FBI said, oh, don't worry, this is a backdoor for law enforcement. No one will ever get access to this. And here we are.
- [38:26]
Shoshana Weissman
It freaking kills me, like. And we keep going through this over and over again. I know I'm new to this. Like, I'm like, me getting into this within the last couple of years means, like, I'm completely new to this stuff because it's been going on for freaking ever. But it's insane to me how like the FBI and all these agency heads are like, hey, guys, use encryption, but not like real encryption. Just the same level of security that caused this breach in the first place.
- [38:50]
Leo Laporte
KALIA was is the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies. I think it was passed. The commission was created in 1979, but the idea was to put wiretaps in. And this is when they all got nervous because you're all, we're all going digital and we're going to go dark. That was the phrase they used. And we need a way to wiretap these digital systems. It was sometimes called the Digital Telephony Act. Actually, the law itself passed in 1994 under Clinton.
- [39:24]
Cory Doctorow
So this is like a very seminal moment in the history of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF started in Massachusetts. Mitch Kapor gave us space and help. He was one of our co founders, but he created Lotus. Yeah. So they had office space out there. And then we moved to D.C. and we hired a guy to run the org who was a kind of D.C. wheeler dealer. And he was offered a deal by a Congressional aid that if EFF endorsed kalia, that they would limit it to voice switches. And his staff and his board and his supporters told him that this was a very bad trade because eventually Voice was going, first of all, it's not okay that it's backdoors and voice switches. Second of all, that Voice was just going to be an IP application and that the FBI was going to demand it in data switches too. And he ignored them all. And EFF shattered over it. And that's how we ended up moving to San Francisco. Everybody quit, basically.
- [40:27]
Leo Laporte
Wow.
- [40:28]
Cory Doctorow
And then they reformed a new org with a new executive director. They moved to San Francisco. And right after that, we sued the US Government over export controls on encryption technology on behalf of Daniel J. Bernstein, djb, who had made a program that he was publishing on Usenet that could encrypt things more strongly than DES50, the standard that was legal for civilian use.
- [40:54]
Leo Laporte
And not very good.
- [40:57]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. So we, John Gilmore, who's one of our other co founders, who helped write Solaris and design the Spark chip and wrote GCC and so on, John built a computer that is sitting next to me as I speak to you because.
- [41:08]
Leo Laporte
I have a board from that computer.
- [41:11]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. Deep, deep crack. Right. And crack was a quarter million dollar computer that could crack all of DES50 in two and a half hours. But the courts didn't care and neither did policymakers. And so we sued on behalf of Daniel Bernstein. And my boss, Cindy Cohn, who's now executive director at EFF and was then a litigator with us, argued that Daniel had a First Amendment right to publish source code. That code was a form of expressive speech. And we wanted the 9th Circuit, or we wanted the. The trial, we wanted the ninth Circuit Appellate Division. The NSA decided not to go to the Supreme Court. And all civilian access to working cryptography since then has been the result of this lawsuit. And the lawsuit was the result of the split in EFF over calea.
- [41:56]
Leo Laporte
Wow.
- [41:57]
Cory Doctorow
So it's quite a. Quite a seminal thing. And CALEA has been exploited everywhere. It's not. This isn't the first time, because everybody wants to make switches for the US market. Even switches that are sold outside of the US have a Kalia toggle. And so the Greek National Telecom was hacked, we think now by the nsa. No one's really sure to gain access to information to help Salt Lake City win the Olympic bid.
- [42:22]
Leo Laporte
Oh, my God.
- [42:22]
Cory Doctorow
And they hacked it using the KALIA backdoors. And they hacked the Prime Minister of Greece. So they hacked the Prime Minister of Greece using Kalia backdoors.
- [42:34]
Shoshana Weissman
That's amazing. I need to look up that story because I've been meaning to write on this just as a reminder, like, hey, guys, this is a bad idea, but that's incredible.
- [42:42]
Leo Laporte
This is why it's so. This history is so important because we've been. These fights have gone on for decades. And I didn't know that about the schism in the eff. I had no idea about that. But I didn't know about Gilmore's desk decryption.
- [42:59]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, crack. So, you know, Shoshana, if you want to learn more about it, drop me an email. My boss, Cindy has just finished her memoir, privacy's defender. My 30 year fight for against surveillance. It's MIT Press is bringing it out in the fall and I bet she would give you an early copy. And if you're listening, you can pre order a copy from MIT Press.
- [43:21]
Shoshana Weissman
Thank you. Yeah, I'm definitely gonna follow up with you on that. I've been meaning to dive in deeper and it's funny to. To Leo to point too. Like, my age verification, it cannot work series is basically based on a lot of stuff from other people, but a large part was Eric Goldman at Santa Clara and Mike Masnik. Like, I'll be talking to them about stuff and they're like, oh yeah, we had to deal with this like 10 years ago or 13 years ago or 25. And I'm like, oh my gosh. It's just the same freaking things over and over again.
- [43:50]
Leo Laporte
Everything new is old again. This is a cover image to come. But at the MIT press, privacy's defenders. My 30 year fight against Digital Surveillance. I am so glad she's writing a memoir that will be well worth reading.
- [44:03]
Cory Doctorow
Gonna be great.
- [44:04]
Leo Laporte
We will get her on for an interview.
- [44:07]
Cory Doctorow
You really should. She's terrific. One of the themes of inshidification the book is that the policy history, the policies that give rise to insidification, like banning breaking DRM and so on. It's a series of events in which experts told policymakers, this won't work and it will have these bad effects. And policymakers were like, I'm sure it'll be fine. You can just nerd harder. And then everything that we warn them about actually happened. And then they were like, well, why didn't you warn us? And I think we are about to get the nerd harder response on age verification. We in fact, every time we argue about age verification, they say, oh, you'll figure it out. There's gotta be some way to figure out who's who's under 13 without making a sort by income list of people's kinks because you're using credit cards to validate them for sex sites.
- [44:58]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And now, of course, age verification is not just about porn. It's also about social media. Mississippi has passed a law that you have to be over 18 to use social sites, which must be a shock a little bit to people under 18. Wait, over 18? I run a Mastodon instance and I don't really know what I'm going to do about this. Mastodon has, you know, Eugene Rochko, the creator of Mastodon, says we can't comply with these laws. It's going to be somehow up to the people who run the servers to figure this out. BlueSky has of course, said, we're pulling out of Mississippi. I ended up on our server just putting in. I'm sure it's not legally binding or anything, but I just put, you can't join if you're under 18. Please give me your birth date. Which of course Mastin immediately throws out. But at least, least you know, I'm making the motions. But everybody who this is, the problem is, you know, companies like Meta can deal with this. They've got lawyers in a whole building all by themselves. But small instances, Mastodon instances, chat rooms, blogs, anywhere that people under 18 can visit on, which is anywhere on the Internet. So if it has to consider, well, how are we going to do this? And I just don't think there is a way to do it. Not certainly isn't a way to do it privately, but I don't think there's a way to do it, period.
- [46:30]
Shoshana Weissman
It's incredible too, because I've been trying to find ways to convince lawmakers and try to show them the levels of complexity. And earlier this year, I think in May or so, I did a deep dive on basically, what tools are you going to use for age verification? What are you going to use to show your age? And everything is flawed. A lot of young people just don't have government IDs. It's just not something they have. And for the laws that want to segment kids under 18, kids do not have IDs, and in a lot of states they're not allowed to get them. Like you. There's, there's, I think at least two or three states I found, and I, I started going through one by one, but you can't get an ID unless you're like 15. So when they're segmenting 13 to 15 as a group in some of these laws, how the hell are you supposed to do that? Like, and even when it comes to age estimation, Yodi says, well, if you want to, you know, stop, stop people from under 18 from accessing things, then set the challenge age to 25. So lots of people in their 20s are not going to be able to access content.
- [47:29]
Leo Laporte
That's because Yodi is not using your government id. It's using your face. Right, right. It's based on image face recognition.
- [47:36]
Shoshana Weissman
Right.
- [47:36]
Leo Laporte
And that is obviously, I mean, I look like I'm, you know, 35, 40. There's just no way. It was very nice of you not to howl with laughter on that. Obviously. That's a terrible way to do it.
- [47:49]
Cory Doctorow
It, it's digital phrenology. Right. They just love digging out the caliper.
- [47:53]
Leo Laporte
Lumps on the head.
- [47:54]
Cory Doctorow
And I mean, Stanford began as the, you know, the home of the guys with the calipers. And, you know, it's never.
- [48:00]
Leo Laporte
Stanford University was a phrenology.
- [48:02]
Cory Doctorow
They were eugenicists, they were caliper users, they were the Stanford method. The thing that made Leland Stanford rich was figuring out how to breed faster horses. And he, and he became a eugenicist. And that's why eugenics is rooted in Stanford. David Starr Jordan, who's one of the author, you know, one of the progenitors of, of eugenics, was a Stanford guy. He actually probably murdered Leland Stanford's widow.
- [48:31]
Leo Laporte
That's a very famous story.
- [48:33]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, yeah. He was an expert on strychnine and they went on holiday in Mexico after Stanford, after Leland Stanford died and she died of, of, of strychnine poisoning. And this was greatly to his advantage. And. But no one knows the mysterious death. But yeah, no, Stanford is like the, the beating heart of the eugenics movement. So.
- [48:54]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well there, it's very timely because eugenics is back and it's very good.
- [48:58]
Cory Doctorow
Book about this is Malcolm Harris's Palo Alto. Just the, the canonical history of this stuff.
- [49:04]
Leo Laporte
This is great. This is a history lesson on this show today.
- [49:08]
Cory Doctorow
I am now officially old because all I talk about is stuff that happened a long time ago, back in my day.
- [49:13]
Leo Laporte
So Shoshana just wrote a piece For Our Street UK's an analysis of the UK Online Safety Act. And in it you're tying it to all the things being put forward in the U.S. mississippi's just the first. Texas and Florida both are trying to do the same thing. And now that the Supreme Court said Mississippi's law is okay, maybe it's just a matter of time. Right?
- [49:38]
Shoshana Weissman
Well, thankfully the Supreme Court didn't say it's okay. They said they're going to let it go into effect and it can be challenged again. I think they were basically saying that NetChoice didn't have enough evidence to say, like, that this is really going to affect them. Although Kavanaugh. And it's good that it was Kavanaugh.
- [49:51]
Leo Laporte
So in effect, they were saying Net Choice didn't have standing.
- [49:54]
Shoshana Weissman
I don't think it was. It's weirdly, I don't think it wasn't right. Yeah, basically it wasn't right, but it wasn't a standing issue. But he said they're overwhelmingly likely to succeed on the merits, which is a good sign. It just means that, like, later.
- [50:07]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's pretty clearly a violation of the First Amendment, but I have no faith in the Supreme Court's desire to defend the First Amendment anymore.
- [50:15]
Shoshana Weissman
It's good, though, that they said it after the Paxton decision.
- [50:18]
Leo Laporte
It is good.
- [50:18]
Shoshana Weissman
None of us were sure where things would go after they said age verification for porn and very, very broad, in a very broad way was okay. So after that, we weren't sure. But this is a good sign that it's not going to stand. But while you have the Trump administration and many parts of it, multiple Republican Congressmen, too, saying, hey, what the hell is the UK doing? This is ridiculous. And it's infringing on our rights. And, like, that law was the basis for Xhosa. Pretty much, yeah.
- [50:47]
Leo Laporte
But ironically, they're not saying, don't do it. They're saying, if you're gonna do it, we should do it. We don't want other people telling us what to do. That's our job. So Cosa's back.
- [50:59]
Shoshana Weissman
Yeah. So we don't know where that'll go. There's a lot of.
- [51:02]
Leo Laporte
Of.
- [51:03]
Shoshana Weissman
There's a lot of Senate drama that I don't even fully know, but there's, like, backbiting and fighting and stuff.
- [51:09]
Leo Laporte
So it's on the calendar again.
- [51:11]
Shoshana Weissman
Oh, it is. When did that happen?
- [51:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The latest action placed on Senate legislative calendar June 30th. So it's.
- [51:22]
Shoshana Weissman
I think we're. We're okay.
- [51:24]
Leo Laporte
It's reported out of committee.
- [51:26]
Shoshana Weissman
The drama happened since then, so. So it might.
- [51:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. But I don't think. I don't think what the. What Tulsi Gabbard is saying is we don't want to do it either. I think she's just saying you can't. You. The EU can't do it to our companies.
- [51:44]
Shoshana Weissman
I'm not sure yet the way it's going. They seem pretty pissed about the way it's working. And I think they think the bills we have here are different. So me and other people are trying to remind them, like these are the same things.
- [51:57]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. I mean, it does raise this question, like, how will Truth Social or Rumble comply with it? Right. And so there is, is. I mean, I like Will Hoyt's law that conservatism consists of the proposition that there are some people who. There's an in group whom the law protects but does not bind and an out group whom the law binds but does not protect.
- [52:15]
Leo Laporte
It's one of the greatest quotes ever. I. I memorize it. Yeah.
- [52:19]
Cory Doctorow
And, and I think that, and I do think that this is where Trump nets out. And the, the, you know, the folks running Rumble and whatnot is that, well, our, you know, we're never going to see Kash Patel or what's her name, Pam Bondi, coming after us over this. We'll be insulated from it. It'll just be the woke social media that we'll get punished for.
- [52:41]
Leo Laporte
Well, nothing's more Woke than Mastodon.
- [52:47]
Cory Doctorow
Except for True Social, which is.
- [52:49]
Leo Laporte
Which is running on mastodon illegally. It's $10,000 per user fine.
- [52:57]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah.
- [52:57]
Leo Laporte
Pretty quickly would bankrupt me. I. It's just, it's a, it's a terrifying notion. I think the smart thing to do would be for me to shut down all of our social stuff.
- [53:08]
Cory Doctorow
There are graveyards of sites that have gone down because of the, the UK Online Safety act already long running, you know, decades long. Community forums.
- [53:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. There's a famous fixie site that went down. Yeah.
- [53:21]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. For Renault owners and stuff like just, just, you know, and where are they relocating to? Facebook. Right, right. And this was the argument we had over the, the SOPA Pipa or not SOPA Pipa. Sesta Fosta. You know, the, the, the. The thing that bans. That notionally bans sex trafficking online, but has on the one hand just banned all sex work online, even consensual sex work. And on the other hand and has driven a bunch of forums that couldn't do. Couldn't assure themselves that they weren't violating Sesta Fosta has driven them to Facebook. So all the people who say, oh, if we just get rid of section 230 and we make the platforms liable for the speech that they host, they will behave themselves, are acting as though the Internet is in its final form and we will never have another kind of online platform. And that the, the companies that currently run the Internet, the five giant websites Filled with screenshots of text from the other four are the last masters the Internet will ever have. And there's no point in even imagining a better future.
- [54:32]
Leo Laporte
The eff, of course, has a piece that came out this month. The UK's Online Safety act does not make children safer. So even the proposed benefit of these bills doesn't accrue. It's bad all round, it doesn't do the job it's supposed to do, and it really inhibits social networks in general, unless you're big enough like Meta. Meanwhile, Meta is making chatbots, sexy chatbots for the children. They've recently said, okay, we'll stop doing that.
- [55:12]
Shoshana Weissman
Yeah, I don't know what the hell they're doing, but it would be great if they stop tempting fate. And it's not even tempting fate. It's like, like, like I don't know what's more aggressive than tempting fate. Like that's, that's really making a landing.
- [55:24]
Cory Doctorow
Strip for it, Hiring air traffic control to direct it in.
- [55:29]
Shoshana Weissman
Like, like it's, it's so freaking ridiculous. I saw that and I just, it was one of those things they had to like look away from because I just didn't have the emotional energy to handle that they would do something so ridiculous and horrible and then also put it in writing. They just put all the stupid crap you're doing in writing.
- [55:44]
Leo Laporte
Like, oh my God, it's so amazing that he, his M.O. is still after so many years. You know, I guess it's move fast and break things. It's do bad things, then apologize afterwards. Like, oh, oh, we didn't mean to do that.
- [56:00]
Cory Doctorow
I think that it's more like it's put incriminating evidence in writing. This is a man whose like 2am memos exclusively consist of things like, okay, Bob, that guy we're going to kill. Just so you know, it's a murder and I'm definitely premeditating it. Your pal zone. Love to Margie and the kids.
- [56:18]
Leo Laporte
Meta says it's changing the way it changed. It trains its AI chatbots to prioritize teen safety. It will now, now train chatbots to no longer engage with teenage users on self harm, suicide, disordered eating or potentially inappropriate romantic conversations. But that's not all. These chatbots are often impersonating well known celebrities without their permission. It's, it's mind boggling.
- [56:49]
Shoshana Weissman
I thought, I thought those celebrities were impersonated with their permission because I know some of them had deals, not that they were consenting to, like all the stuff being said, but I thought the personality part was consensual.
- [57:00]
Leo Laporte
Some of them were, but not Taylor Swift's, Selena Gomez's, Anne Hathaway or Scarlett Johansson as we know. Oh my God, Scarlett Johansson, who's probably the most powerful woman in Hollywood. Wood has very clearly said she didn't want OpenAI to use her voice. She doesn't like this idea. The chatbots Reuters discovered during its investigation were available on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. At least one of them was based on an underage celebrity and allowed the tester to generate a lifelike shirtless image of the real person. The chatbots also apparently kept insisting they were the real person they were based on in their chats. One chatbot invited the Reuters reporter to visit them at the chatbot was based on Taylor Swift to visit them at the real Taylor Swift's home in Nashville. Do you like blonde girls, Jeff? The chatbot bot reportedly asked when told the tester was single. Maybe. I'm suggesting that we write a love story about you and a certain blonde singer. Want that now? Of course they didn't tell the chatbot to do this. This is the kinds of things AI does all the time because it's trained on everything.
- [58:21]
Shoshana Weissman
The dialogue is terrible too. It's like it sounds like it's not even trained on Taylor Swift or focusing on how she talks. Could you imagine Taylor Swift talking like that?
- [58:30]
Leo Laporte
No.
- [58:32]
Shoshana Weissman
I don't know, like maybe 70s movie.
- [58:37]
Cory Doctorow
Well, and back to our previous discussion. So that this is like heralding a future in which the like really high quality handmade smut of archive of our own disappears because they can never afford the compliance. But there's just like an infinitude of slop smut. Yeah, that's produced by, you know, it's the most cringe, awful, mundane crap. And then we train like a generation of Andrew Tate pilled boys to think that that's what smut should look like.
- [59:07]
Leo Laporte
That's. That's a. Not a good future. The company told Reuters. Meta told Reuters the product lead only created the celebrate celebrity brats for testing. But the Reuters found out they were widely available. Users were even able to interact with them more than 10 million times. Pretty big test. I guess.
- [59:28]
Cory Doctorow
Life finds a way.
- [59:30]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Straight out of Jurassic Park. Okay, Slop Smut. That would be a good name for a book. Corey, I'm chat room suggesting.
- [59:40]
Cory Doctorow
You might want to think I have enough books. I have literally, I've got two books coming out this fall.
- [59:49]
Leo Laporte
Wow.
- [59:49]
Cory Doctorow
Three coming out next year.
- [59:51]
Leo Laporte
Are we going to see any more Marty Hench novels? I'm ready for more forensic.
- [59:55]
Cory Doctorow
I got to. I don't know when I'm going to write one, but I got to. I've got.
- [59:58]
Leo Laporte
See, when you start a series like.
- [59:59]
Cory Doctorow
That on the drawing board. Yeah, if I survive this year, I'll probably write another one. I won't be like a dad, right. I won't be busy being a dad. So I can go, oh, yeah, all.
- [60:09]
Leo Laporte
The time in the world. Oh, sure, yeah, yeah, that's how it happens. Tell them all about it.
- [60:15]
Cory Doctorow
Oh, yeah.
- [60:16]
Lou Mareska
I got so much time on my hands, they're literally knocking at my door right now.
- [60:24]
Leo Laporte
So, yeah, I saw that. I saw you jump up and Islam it shut. UK's demand for Apple's backdoor may have been broader than previously thought. We only, by the way, the only indication that we have at all that the UK has backed down on this is Tulsi Gabbard's tweet. Tweet, which has never been verified or backed up and frankly, I don't think is all that credible. They have yet to withdraw their order for Apple to create a backdoor to icloud accounts, not just for UK citizens, but for all the investigatory powers. Tribunal has submitted a new legal finding, according to Gadget, saying they're demanding Apple to create a backdoor that will access even more data. This is from the Financial Times. UK Home Office hasn't withdrawn the request, despite what Tulsi Gabbard has claimed. Here's the financial. Oh, I gotta log in. Financial Times has a hard paywall.
- [61:28]
Cory Doctorow
Anyway, anyway, although archive is Will.
- [61:32]
Leo Laporte
I know, I know, I know, I know. But I pay for the Financial Times. I don't know why, but I pay for it. I like to support.
- [61:39]
Cory Doctorow
I like them. They shortlisted me.
- [61:41]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's right. They're. You know what that Cory Doctorow book. Book. That's a good book. That's a good book. Ft. I say that as a paying subscriber.
- [61:51]
Cory Doctorow
I. I should say they long listed me. I have not yet been shortlisted.
- [61:54]
Leo Laporte
Oh, okay. The legal finding on which the FT has seen indicates the UK government sought access to not just the Apple's enhanced encryption, their advanced encryption, but to their standard icloud service as well, which, by the way, Apple has the keys to. So, you know, Apple could ease. Apple has already handed those keys over or information over to the US government with lawful subpoenas, so there's no reason for them to, you know, fight for that one.
- [62:24]
Cory Doctorow
All right, well, going back to Blue Sky. Mastodon. Yes. You know, Blue sky is technically not available in Mississippi, but easy to get.
- [62:34]
Leo Laporte
To with a vpn. Right?
- [62:36]
Cory Doctorow
Well, and if you run your own Blue sky instance, which my system is setting up right now for me, you are available in Mississippi. And also everything on Blue sky is available as an RSS feed in Mississippi. And if you use an alt client, you can access it in Mississippi.
- [62:54]
Leo Laporte
Well, this is the challenge, isn't it?
- [62:56]
Cory Doctorow
Well, it's, you know, things that are not technically possible, can't be litigated or can't be legislated. So, you know, one of the things that, you know, we often say is that like when you create the mechanism for, say, a back door, you invite someone to make a law saying you should have a back door. And you know, if standardize a backdoor or whatever, then, then people say, oh, you should just adhere to the standard. But you know, the alternative to that is that things that can't be done technically can't be ordered legally. And so you, you end up having a much higher, higher burden. Right? Like what you end up doing is creating these administrative burdens on states that want to shut down, speech that require a whole raft of tactics that start to look a lot more like Chinese great firewall stuff where you have to use trusted computing to control which apps you can install. You have to have extensive block lists for your national ISPs. You know, like, you have a lot of stuff that you're going to have to do that that may make lawmakers think twice because it turns a, a relatively modest or modest seeming legal proposal into a very extensive one. Like, are they going to search people at the border and make sure they don't have VPNs installed on their phones? Like, how are they going to make that work?
- [64:06]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [64:07]
Shoshana Weissman
Well, to that end, Corey said something that I try to communicate to lawmakers, but he said it a lot more eloquently and a lot more comprehensively than I've been able to. But the VPN thing is a deal. Like in the uk, there's, I don't know how serious they are, but there's government officials like kind of saying, oh, well, what if we banned them? Or what if we age verified VPNs? Which is insane.
- [64:26]
Leo Laporte
Oh my God.
- [64:27]
Shoshana Weissman
Yeah, I, one of the things in my age verification series was why VPNs make this impossible. Like, you can't account for all VPN traffic. But lawmakers have told me, no, this, that's silly, of course you can. Like, of course if you try hard.
- [64:41]
Leo Laporte
Enough, they do in China. Shoshana. They do nerd harder yeah, yeah.
- [64:44]
Shoshana Weissman
It's the nerd, harder thing. But now they're finding out you can't. Like in the UK, it's just not working. And I love 15.
- [64:52]
Leo Laporte
1500% jump in the use of VPNs in the UK the day the law went into effect.
- [64:58]
Shoshana Weissman
And they say if you use a vpn, you're protecting children, which doesn't make sense because if you're not a child, it, like, doesn't matter. It's just like the most ridiculous stuff. And our lawmakers haven't gone that way yet and started to talk like that. But you kind of wonder what. When they see the failures, they'll be like, oh, well. Well, yeah, well, of course we need to age, verify VPNs, and I need it.
- [65:18]
Leo Laporte
I need to take a break. I'm gonna take a break, but I want to ask Corey about Blue sky.
- [65:21]
Cory Doctorow
Before you go on a break. If we just swallow the spider to catch the fly, I'm sure it'll all be fine.
- [65:28]
Leo Laporte
But then she has a spider inside her and she had to spot. What did she swallow to catch the spider? A bird. Oh, okay.
- [65:35]
Cory Doctorow
That'll be the last.
- [65:36]
Leo Laporte
That's it. It's over there. Yeah. It's either that or if you give him as a cookie, it's one or the other. I know. Yeah. Children's books often have the answer that adults seem to struggle with. We're going to take a break. I do want to ask you about Blue sky because last few times you've been on, you've said, I'm not. I'm. I'm staying on X. I'm going to ride X all the way down. It's my anatevka. But maybe that's not the case anymore. We will talk about. Talk more our guests. Lou, we're going to give you something. I'm going to get you in the conversation. Some. Poor Lou. I know you're engaged in listening and interested in all this stuff.
- [66:15]
Lou Mareska
Yeah.
- [66:16]
Leo Laporte
I'll give you. I'll find a story for you, Lou. No, all I did was ask you about Microsoft.
- [66:20]
Lou Mareska
I have an opinion about the Blue sky one, so come to me on that for sure.
- [66:22]
Leo Laporte
Okay, good. Okay, good. Lou Moresk is here. Great friend of the network, longtime host of this Week in Enterprise Tech. Love, Lou. He's just fantastic. And now leads the Excel copilot integration at Microsoft. He's the guy who put Python in your spreadsheet. Two great tastes that go together, ladies and gentlemen. It's really nice to have you, Lucia. Shauna Weissman is also here. Rstreet.org Is it a hard thing to be a lobbyist these days? Is it harder than it was?
- [66:54]
Shoshana Weissman
So I don't lobby. I just yell at government officials and say nice things about them. It's technically different. No, it's. But it's. It's hard because people just want to do what they want to do more than ever. And I think there's less room to be convinced in some cases, but there's also more room if you really look for it. So, like, it's. It's different and it's worse and better. And I'm trying to, like, find not just the silver linings, but the nuance and everything.
- [67:20]
Leo Laporte
Good on you. You're such an optimist. You're so positive.
- [67:23]
Shoshana Weissman
Depending on the day. Some days I'm like, screw this. Like, oh, my gosh, I should just, like, go find a way to be a hiker.
- [67:28]
Leo Laporte
I want to go hike.
- [67:29]
Shoshana Weissman
Like, that's it. Yeah, go hike.
- [67:30]
Leo Laporte
Hike with my marmots. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. You're fighting the good fight, though, Shoshana. Keep up the good work.
- [67:38]
Shoshana Weissman
Thank you. I'm trying and I'm trying to work with everyone. And so far I haven't pissed off any large cohort of people, which is good.
- [67:44]
Leo Laporte
Nice. Yeah, that's great. And of course, the wonderful Cory Doctorow. His new book inshitification is going audio. And if you want to support his DRM free audio, go to Kickstarter, search for inshidification or you can go directly to disenchantification.org he's the man who coined the term. Also do watch that. Very nice talk you did at the cloud. Front or cloud. I can never get it right. CF at cf. It's a great talk in Stuttgart and.
- [68:16]
Cory Doctorow
They love was in Europa park, which is the fake Disneyland outside of Stuttgart.
- [68:21]
Leo Laporte
Oh, wow.
- [68:21]
Cory Doctorow
Wow, it was great. The insidification audiobook and ebook and all the books I sell on my online store and on Kickstarter, which I sell on behalf of my publishers. So, like Macmillan and Verso and so on. But I sell them not only without drm, but without license agreements. So it's pretty much the only way you can buy an ebook and not license it. So you can sell it, you can give it away, you can lend it out. If you get divorced, you can divide it up.
- [68:47]
Leo Laporte
You get the odd pages, I'll take the even pages.
- [68:49]
Cory Doctorow
That's right. But it's a thing you own, right? Unlike every digital asset you bought, it's a thing you own.
- [68:57]
Leo Laporte
It's such a good fight. And I hope you continue to make that fight, because the rest of us, it's just turned us into pirates. We're just using caliber or I found Libation to free my audible books and you're just turning us into pirates. But that's.
- [69:14]
Cory Doctorow
Well, I'm creating a lot of potential criminal liability. I'm not saying you're necessarily at risk, but trafficking in those tools carries a $500,000 fine and a five year PR sentence under section 121 of the DMCA. And so, you know, sure, you're not facing any liability, but when I talked about this at the US Copyright Office triangle hearing at UCLA, and I think it was 2018, I pointed out that everyone who'd been at this UCLA boardroom giving presentations using VLC over the weekend, over the week had been using a version of VLC that had DCSS code for ripping DVDs in it and that the kid who brought the laptop into the room was a trafficker and circumvention tool rules and could go to prison for five years. And maybe we should re rethinking this law rather than having hearings about making narrow exemptions to it that no one can figure out how to use it.
- [70:01]
Leo Laporte
Didn'T persuade them, unfortunately. Well, that actually all came up and.
- [70:07]
Cory Doctorow
Told me she thought I was right, but that it was in Congress's hands and not hers.
- [70:11]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, there you go. It's always in Congress's hands. Actually, VLC ended up taking that DCSS code out of VLC and just telling you how to put it in later. Later, yeah. Which was their way around that. It's.
- [70:24]
Cory Doctorow
But telling you how to put it in later is traffic.
- [70:26]
Leo Laporte
That's also. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can all. We can, we can do it. We just can't tell anybody. That's a secret. Sigh. Our show today, brought to you by Zip recruiter. You know what? If you're hiring, first of all, good on you. It's wonderful you're creating jobs. But. But I know it's also hard when we've been in that situation. It can be overwhelming. It's like you have too many options, like trying to figure out which TV show or movie to stream when you're on vacation and you want to see the sites. It's just too much. There's too much to do. Right? Same applies if you're a business owner who's hiring. It can be overwhelming to have too many candidates to sort through. But you're in luck. ZipRecruiter now gives you the Power to proactively find and connect with the best ones quickly. How? Well, this is through their innovative resume database. And right now you can try it for free@ziprecruiter.com TWIT so this is how it works. ZipRecruiter's resume database. And by the way, they've literally. They get hundreds of thousands of new resumes every month. Because people go to ZipRecruiter looking for work. So their resume database uses advanced filtering mentoring to hone in on the top candidates for your roles. They look at the qualifications you're looking for, they're looking at the resumes they have, and they're making the matches. If you see a candidate you're really interested in, you can unlock their contact info instantly. They get 320,000 new resumes every month. Every month. Which means you can reach more potential hires and fill roles faster. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Skip the candidate overload. Instead, streamline your hiring with ZipRecruiter. See why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to this exclusive web address, ziprecruiter.com TWiT right now to try it for free. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com twit ziprecruiter the smartest way to hire. So I did not know that that Blue sky. So Blue Sky's protocol, the at proto is in theory a federated protocol. In theory, somebody could set up a federated federatable. Yes.
- [72:49]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah.
- [72:51]
Leo Laporte
But for the longest time, nobody was doing it. Nobody had done it. Nobody had. So. But you're saying now you can. Are you. You've got something.
- [72:58]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. So it started a few months ago, the CTO of. So here was the thing. In order to do true federation, which is to say where. Where you did not need to have any infrastructure control by the Blue sky company. In order to communicate with the Blue sky users, you needed to run a kind of server that was very expensive to operate to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year. What, and that was to ingest the whole fire hose and do things like give you real time, read counts and comment counts on your posts.
- [73:32]
Leo Laporte
So you had to run, in effect an equivalent.
- [73:35]
Cory Doctorow
You had to run structure. Yeah. So if you ran Blue sky, you could run Blue sky, you could run another Blue Sky.
- [73:41]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [73:41]
Cory Doctorow
And it would be co equal with Blue Sky. Hypothetically. But the CTO figured out that if you were willing to take like a relatively small latency hit in terms of those counts, those, like real time counts. So if you didn't care about knowing how many people had read a post plus or minus 10 seconds, and you didn't need it to be plus or minus 10 milliseconds, it would go to like $30 a month and you could run it off Raspberry PI. And he built that for himself and published some recipes. And so there's a thing called Black sky, which is people who are kind of refugees from Black Twitter who've built a Blue Sky, a federated Blue sky standalone system. I don't think that's them. Black Sky. Blue Sky.
- [74:29]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [74:29]
Cory Doctorow
I. I mean, yeah. And there are a few others and.
- [74:35]
Leo Laporte
I follow the Black sky list, but this is not the list. This is actually their own server.
- [74:39]
Shoshana Weissman
I think it's their own.
- [74:40]
Cory Doctorow
Sam. I might be getting out over my skis. My impression was they were their own server. Maybe they started as. Yeah, I think they are their own. Maybe they're just a moderation layer. But no.
- [74:50]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, look at. There it is. Black Sky, An AT protocol APP implementation built in. Rust. Yeah. Prioritizing the community building efforts of marginalized groups.
- [74:58]
Cory Doctorow
There you go. So I. My server, my sysadmin server at a colo in Toronto was like 15 years old and he couldn't get.
- [75:14]
Leo Laporte
Your sysadmin is 15.
- [75:16]
Cory Doctorow
No, no, no. The server is 15 years old.
- [75:17]
Leo Laporte
Okay, all right, all right. So I wouldn't be surprised.
- [75:21]
Cory Doctorow
It was fine. No, no, no. He's a great guy. He used to be the CTO of Wikimedia. Ken Snyder, he's a brilliant admin and he needed to upgrade his hardware, so he upgraded his hardware a couple of weeks ago. And now we are building Fetty.Pluralistic.net and BSky.Pluralistic.net Will it be public or is it just you? No, just me. I'm going to own my stuff.
- [75:41]
Leo Laporte
A lot of people do that with Mastodon. They just run their own Mastodon instance for them. Yeah, yeah.
- [75:46]
Cory Doctorow
And Mastodon. It's interesting because while Blue sky, in its current iteration, this, this kind of breakthrough on reducing server load has made it quite practical to run your own server if you have a relatively high readership. Mastodon account. Hosting your own server is pretty intense because every person who reads your stuff gets a copy of it. And so your server gets really hammered. We're having to do like CDNs and stuff stuff. So, you know, it's that we are getting like true federation in both. I'd always said that I wouldn't go to Blue sky if I couldn't leave.
- [76:23]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [76:24]
Cory Doctorow
That I didn't. I didn't want to be in a situation where, like, I was with Twitter, where I built up half a million followers. It was like structurally important to my ability to sell books and get people out for book tours and, you know, take care of the financial well being of my family and promote the stuff I work on on EFF and so on. I wouldn't ever put that at the mercy of someone because I knew the people who started Twitter, they were not nice. And then I got stuck there and.
- [76:46]
Leo Laporte
Turned into a Nazi bar.
- [76:48]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. And so it's not enough to trust the personalities, the people that, that you have. And that's kind of the thesis of insidification is that insidification is not about people being bad. It's about bad people being unshackled. You know, Mark Zuckerberg ran a better service when he worried about the consequences of the service being bad.
- [77:07]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [77:08]
Cory Doctorow
And now that he's too big to fail, he's too big to continue care and he can do bad things to us. And, you know, he knows that we're locked in. He knows that you love your friends more than you hate Mark Zuckerberg. And so long as he makes sure that you. He never makes you hate him more than you love your friends, he can torment you and he can torment you for. For money. Not because he's a sadist, although I think he probably is, but because it's profitable.
- [77:38]
Leo Laporte
Good. Well, so does this mean that you'll use bluesky and Twitter both?
- [77:44]
Cory Doctorow
No, I'll be off Twitter. Twitter is gone now. I mean, the last thing I was hanging in for was promoting the Inshidification Kickstarter. So one of the things I do with these Kickstarters when I launch them is I go to my DMs and I look at all the people who have open DMs to me that I know, and I send them a DM and say, hey, would you mind, quote, tweeting the announcement of this? And that's been really successful. It's made the difference between successful campaigns and not. And of all the weird things that Musk has broken with Twitter, if you go to your DMs and you type like Mike, none of the people whose names come up are people you follow or who follow you. It's just famous people named Mike. And most of them don't have open DMs. I don't know what that's supposed to do. It used to be also that you could get an infinite scroll of DMs. So if you type Mike, you could see everyone who had opened DMs to you, whose name was Mike. Now you just get like 12. And they're all just like Mike Cernovich. And you know, like people you. Not you don't want to talk to, who don't want to talk to you, who you don't follow and who don't follow you. And you can type the full name of people you follow and it won't come up. You have to type their exact Twitter handle. So this is bizarre, but it's meant that the last thing that I was hanging on to Twitter for, which is like, okay, well this is one way to get an extra 5,000 backers for my Kickstarter campaign things. It's not even useful for that anymore. And so that's it. When the blue sky's up, I'll. I'll just park that Twitter account.
- [79:09]
Leo Laporte
Blue sky, according to Ars Technica, is now the platform of choice for the science community. Yeah, Lou, Lou, you said you had something. Are you a Blue sky fanatic?
- [79:20]
Lou Mareska
I, you know, I actually enjoy Blue Sky. I think my point of view here though, I think is. Goes in the fact that, you know, I think we should decouple the whole idea of science knowledge dissemination and conversation platforms and stick with where the masses are at, where you can share information and knowledge. I still, still think Twitter is the place to be. I do have, I do agree that Blue sky is probably a better platform. But, you know, I think I'm still kind of under the guise that, you know, most like, you gotta be where the people are. Yeah. I mean, international science, you know, people are not gonna be, oh, I don't wanna do on Twitter. They know where that mass is.
- [79:52]
Cory Doctorow
Right.
- [79:53]
Lou Mareska
Are out. They're going to keep posting there. Why restrict that for yourself?
- [79:56]
Leo Laporte
As they should. Because that information needs to get out. You know, I mean, we now have a make America Healthy plan that apparently means give kids whole milk and don't give them vaccines. And the science needs to get out. We basically are an anti science government. Yeah. I mean, but the problem always to me has been the people who are. It's not everybody on Twitter or everybody on X or everybody on Blue Sky. It's still a small fraction of the total audience. And this is one of the problems with getting the word out these days is there is no central place to get the word out anymore.
- [80:40]
Lou Mareska
Get blasted everywhere, get to blast it.
- [80:42]
Leo Laporte
Everywhere, put it Everywhere, Right? That's the solution, huh?
- [80:44]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, posse. Post on site, share everywhere.
- [80:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what I do. I have a microblog blog that posts to all of the above. Not Twitter because they don't have an API that you can use. But everywhere that does. And yeah, that's an interesting question. If I could post on X. If I would. I'm not sure if I would or not. I moved off X the minute Elon bought it and my predictions were, were validated. I will give, you know what, we, we give Elon a lot of crap. I'll give him some credit. Or at least the engineers that are working at SpaceX some credit. They had a very successful launch over the. On Wednesday. Or was it Tuesday? It was Tuesday and the starship didn't blow up. So that's good, Very good.
- [81:35]
Cory Doctorow
For the people who live underneath it.
- [81:36]
Leo Laporte
Yes, very good. If you're in the Caribbean, that rocket will not come down on your head. Head. And it was, it was pretty impressive. It was fun to watch. You know, I watched it. I, I'm a space guy. I like this kind of stuff. I grew up watching Walter Cronite and the man on the Moon and all of that stuff. So credit where credit's due. Although I guess it really doesn't go to Elon.
- [82:01]
Cory Doctorow
Do you know what I find amazing is just, just how mediocre the technology on Twitter has become, right? Just things like if you are posting a thread, it used to be that you would post the first 25 and then click on the last one and post more, post another 25. And now when you click on the last one it says an unexpected error occurred.
- [82:22]
Leo Laporte
There's a lot of little breaking things going on there, especially logging in. And if you lose your account, people are complaining like crazy about how to get back on and so forth.
- [82:35]
Cory Doctorow
Course it's just these are. Yeah, it's, it's regressions, which is really interesting because this is stuff that just worked and it doesn't work anymore. My guess is that a lot of it is saving money that like, I think the reason they've broken people search in DMS is because you're running a really big set of open looping queries through a directory. And I think they were just like, oh, that's hitting us for a lot of compute. You just don't need to find people to DM DM them. Like you can just, you can just suck it up. You either know people's exact handle or you don't. But don't count on DMing anyone?
- [83:10]
Leo Laporte
Right. Well, as Elon tweeted or whatever they call it now, as he posted on X earlier today, x is the media now because you are the media now. Whatever the hell that means.
- [83:24]
Cory Doctorow
I think that the verb for posting on X now is shitted.
- [83:28]
Leo Laporte
He pooped on. On X. Thanks. Yeah. X. You're talking X. I. It sounds bad, but it's not. It's X I, T, T, E, D, X. Yeah, yeah. Jitted. It's turned into TikTok, at least in the. For you part of it is. Is all videos now. It's kind of interesting how that's changed. We're streaming on X right. Right now. I mean, we're also streaming on TikTok. We're streaming on Facebook and LinkedIn. There's 800 people watching us on a variety of platforms. I don't. I'm. I'm agnostic about that. I think it's. You're right, Lou. Be. Be wherever people want you to be. That's always been my motto for. For this. Right. You know, that's the idea of podcasting. It's open and. And like that. I will give some credit to the fcc, which rarely deserves credit in the Brennan Carr era, but the folks at the national association of Broadcasters went to the FCC and said, you know, you should charge cable style regulatory fees on streaming services and tech companies and broadband providers while you're at it. And the FCC said, you know, that really isn't our mandate, is it? Actually what they really said is we don't have the budget or the manpower to do this. That. But it's also, frankly, not one of the things the FCC has always said is if Congress doesn't give us that authority, we can't do it. And that's really the real reason the FCC is to regulate the nation's airwaves, not broadband providers, streaming services and tech companies. The nab, which is a broadcasting, you know, lobbying group. Right.
- [85:18]
Cory Doctorow
I was going to say, I think that, you know, there's a constitutional question as well. The argument for regulating speech on air, which includes things like levying fees and having a licensure regime, is that the spectrum is a scarce resource and it's a public resource. Yeah. So you just couldn't. Like in the same way that, you know, you're going to have to have rules for like who can use the meeting room at the library, because if everyone tries to use it at the same time, you know, it is the public's meeting room. Everyone can use it, but you just have rules about who can use it and how, because otherwise no one would get to use it. But that argument is just not the case for broadband. Right. There's just not the case for online services. And so the argument that somehow there is a way that you could square the circle of the First Amendment and regulating the Internet is, is crazy. At least the way that they regulate broadcast providers and the cable stuff that they regulate is a compulsory license for broadcast signals. So when cable started, it was guys with antennas in central Pennsylvania who sold TVs, who ran cables from the antenna to people's houses, to people who bought TVs so that they could receive signals because they were too far from both Pittsburgh and Philly to get their signals. And so after a bunch of lawsuits, they said, okay, fine, anyone can rebroadcast any broadcast television on a cable, but you have to pay a set fee. So that's where those fees come from. If, if you're not retransmitting a broadcast signals, why would you pay broadcast signal fees?
- [86:57]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, the national association of Broadcasters says, well, you tech companies benefit from the FCC's regulatory regime. Sign, so you should pay for it. It's like, it's nonsense. It's just broadcasters grasping at anything they can with their fingers as they slide down the wall of life. Well, let's talk a little bit about Cloudflare because I think this is an interesting story. Cloudflare got a lot of attention. I've been a fan of Cloudflare for a long time. They give away free services that are very valuable, but increasingly they seem to want to become kind of almost the, the police of the Internet. And a couple of weeks ago we talked a lot about it. They dinged Perplexity for ignoring their, you know, high quality robots, txt, AI scraping, blocking, and I think maybe misunderstood a little bit of what the difference is between, say, perplexity and OpenAI. But Perplexity defended themselves. It kind of went on, but increasingly it's looked like Cloudflare is, is almost in a power grab. And I'm really curious what you all think about it. They have a new thing called signed agents. Essentially they have an allow list. This is a post from a positive blue for Open the Open Web and told builders to apply for permission. Cloudflare, he says, is solving the issue like a border checkpoint. Get on their list or get treated like a trespasser. And I think Positive Blue makes a very good point. Cloudflare is saying, now we are going to be in charge of who's on the open web and who's not. Is that overreach? Lou, do you have an opinion on this one, please?
- [88:56]
Lou Mareska
I think it's overreach. I do. I do think it's overreach. I think they, you know, obviously they, they're trying to restrict something, obviously restrict any type of Internet and content on the Internet. They're trying to act as a sensor. Like, this is just overreach in general.
- [89:09]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. And I like Cloudflare and I, you know, I'm kind of a fan of them, but I have to say this does not seem like a good direction that they are now moving in. Shoshana, you're not.
- [89:20]
Shoshana Weissman
Yeah, I've just been really confused by a lot of their moves. Even before this, they were, they've been going after other tech companies and I know tech companies will do that, but it was weird because they just really hadn't before and it seemed like they were just out to pick some fights. And a lot of the stuff, I don't remember exactly what it was because it was like a month ago and I was like, I don't know what the hell this is, but it seems like they're. Maybe they're just not sure of their place and they want to assert themselves or they see an opportunity for themselves to be more powerful in their asserting themselves. But, but it's some weird stuff and I don't, I'm not sure what their end goal is, but if they go down the route that it sounds like, from the stuff that you read off, it doesn't sound like people will like them very much.
- [89:59]
Leo Laporte
They almost sound like they're setting up themselves as the one and only certificate authority, in a way, and they're solving a problem. I don't know if it really needs to be solved. I'm a, you know, as, as we were talking with Posse, I'm a big fan of the open web. I think the open net is. Is a vital thing and I don't think we need a gatekeeper to be in charge of who's who on the open Internet. It might solve some problems, but it doesn't solve the problems that they seem they're solving. Corey, have you been following this?
- [90:33]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, I have. And I have similar feelings about Cloudflare in that they have taken stands for good in the past and been particularly adamant that providing anti DDoS.
- [90:45]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [90:46]
Cory Doctorow
That being an anti D DOS provider should not make you the first port of call or even the last protocol for people who had qualms about the content. On the other side of the anti DDoS wall. They were very Concerned that they would become a choke point and then become a natural landing spot for anyone who had, who was angry at anyone else on the Internet that for good reasons are bad and that people just show up at a cloudflare and say, withdraw your protection from these people and then they will cease to exist, you know, for all to all intents and purposes.
- [91:21]
Leo Laporte
Very much like the Spanish soccer league is doing with DNS providers. And to protect themselves from piracy, they're saying, well, pull down the piracy sites. It's your job.
- [91:31]
Cory Doctorow
This is the problem of monopoly. And we talked about John Sherman before. So John Sherman, you know, gave this very famous speech in 1890 when he was stumping for the Sherman Act. He said, if we would not tolerate a king, we should not tolerate an autocrat of trade with the power to fix the price of commodities and to do and to decide who can get them. Right. Basically, that the problem is only part of a benevolent dictator is only partly that they might not turn out to be benevolent. Even if they remain benevolent, they're still addicted dictator. And that you can be benevolent and still be wrong. You can be benevolent and still be pressurized. Right? You're the one throat to choke, so people will come to you and make demands of you. And also the instant we start to treat infrastructure as a vehicle for policy objectives, everybody begins to make a claim on that infrastructure and it ceases to be trustworthy as infrastructure. So there's a really good book about this called Underground Empire by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, a couple of political scientists. I've known Henry forever. He and Aaron Swartz and I worked on stuff together. And Henry and Abraham, their, their thesis is that the US under Obama first, or maybe under GW and then under Obama started to do. Started to take infrastructure that the U.S. operated that was seen as a kind of neutral broker. So like ICANN or the Swift dollar clearing system or fiber head ends, and they began to use them to try and attain U.S. policy goals. So sanctioning people spying on fiber, you know, getting ICANN to deny or permit certain kinds of IP allocations, that kind of thing on the. In order to achieve policy goals. And what immediately happened, or what eventually happened happened was that everyone who had treated things like dollar clearing in the Swift system or fiber or whatever as a neutral, trustworthy piece of infrastructure that was territory that wouldn't be tilted to one advantage or another, stopped fully trusting it. And now we see a fragmentation and we see new fiber going in. We see people seeking alternatives to dollar clearing. Some of that I think is cryptocurrency, but also you have renminbi clearing becoming more central. So it not only has been sort of a problem for people who just want to get stuff done in the world, it's ironically, it's weakened the US's hold because it spurred the creation of these alternative systems. Same thing happened when Europe put up its own GPS constellation when the US started to talk about disabling GPS for military rivals. And so the, you know, Europe put up its arrival GPS constellation which then sort of takes away the US's ability to use that power.
- [94:22]
Leo Laporte
Power.
- [94:23]
Cory Doctorow
So, you know, I do think that, that they're playing with fire. I think people have treated Cloudflare as a neutral, honest broker and now they're going to see them as a parochial self dealer.
- [94:33]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [94:34]
Cory Doctorow
And I, I also think that it shows us why antitrust was right from the Gilded age to the 70s when it treated the concentration of power per se as a problem, even if it was being used to good ends, even concentration. Yeah, even a benevolent dictator is still a dictator. And how the theories of the Reagan revolution, the consumer welfare theory, that said that so long as a monopoly isn't raising prices or lowering quality, they should not only be tolerated, but encouraged as a source of efficiency. That that was wrong. That it created teams that were more powerful than the ref and it made them ungovernable. And also ironically, for people who believed in the Reagan revolution, militated for a much larger state. Because even if you think that the only thing the state should do is enforce contracts, the state has to be bigger than the parties to those contracts in order to enforce them. So the smallest state you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate.
- [95:35]
Leo Laporte
You know, I love the notion that infrastructure needs to be agnostic, it needs to be neutral. I mean, that's what net neutrality is all about. And we're starting to see some issues where it isn't. I mean, Cloudflare is just as a small example of this. Intel, for instance, is a little upset that the federal government has taken a 10% equity in their company, saying it could trigger adverse reactions because they're now no longer kind of a neutral chip manufacturer. They have have a policy implication here that they. The same thing happened. It was very interesting. See, Nvidia suddenly couldn't sell the H20 chip into China because people were concerned about a backdoor in the H20 that it could be disabled. And what happened? Huawei started to make their own GPUs and China stopped buying Nvidia's GPUs, which is another reason Nvidia's probably hurting it, the stock market. I, I think that's a really important point, that infrastructure needs to be neutral, needs to be a pipeline, not, and not make policy decisions. I don't know if the intel one fits that model exactly, but I, I.
- [96:53]
Cory Doctorow
You know, intel is sort of national. It's, it's being turned into what the Europeans call national champions.
- [96:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's not good.
- [97:00]
Cory Doctorow
You know, it's. Well, I mean, we see that people all over the world don't want to get their Huawei and their national infrastructure because I think that China treats it as a, as a national champion. Sure.
- [97:13]
Leo Laporte
So we're going to have golden shares in our companies, I guess.
- [97:17]
Cory Doctorow
I mean, ironically, I think that some of the good that could come of this is stuff like Eurostack where we're seeing the EU funding open source development and doing things like loans for infrastructure, you know, low cost loans for infrastructure and state investment to build clouds to rival the American cloud so that they can move off of US Infrastructure. Because Trump has made it really clear that he views it as a vehicle for attaining political goals of the United States. What I think would be really interesting is if they decided to get rid of anti circumvention laws, the laws that ban jailbreaks breaking. Because honestly, how are you going to get your firm off of Office 365 if you don't have a migration tool? And to get that migration tool, you're going to have to scrape, you're going to have to jailbreak, you're going to have to do a bunch of things that the US Trade representative told Europe that they had to put on their law books or they would face tariffs from the U.S. well, now that they have the tariffs, why wouldn't they get rid of those laws?
- [98:20]
Leo Laporte
Not that anybody, Lou, would ever want to get out of Microsoft 365. It's a fabulous, fabulous, fabulous product. And we all appreciate the work that it is.
- [98:28]
Cory Doctorow
I mean, even if, even if you love it, I think the way to make sure that it stays good is to make sure that Microsoft is worried about people leaving.
- [98:35]
Leo Laporte
Leave it open.
- [98:36]
Cory Doctorow
That's what makes people, you know, if your customers can't leave, you don't treat them well. Anyone who has ever bought a bottle of water at an airport knows this.
- [98:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's inside Ification, literally in the flesh. Cory Doctorow is here and so is Shoshana Weissman from R Street and Lou Mareska. We won't mention what Lou does for a living at this point. No, he, he is leading Excel copilot integration into Microsoft. At Microsoft. Congratulations on the promotion, by the way. That's, that's great news.
- [99:09]
Lou Mareska
Thanks.
- [99:09]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Let's take a break. We'll come back with more in just a bit. Our show today brought to you by Netsuite. What does the future hold hold for business? Ask nine experts, you'll get 10 answers. Bull market, maybe bear market rates will rise, rates will fall. Inflation's up, inflation's down. Can somebody please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 42,000 businesses have future proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. And with real time insights and forecasting, you got your crystal ball. You're peering into the future with actionable data. And when you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backward and more time on what's next. Whether your company is earning millions or even even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunities, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com TWiT the guide is free to you at netsuite.com TWIT netsuite.com TWiIT we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. Netsuite.com I think it was kind of ironic that once the government took 10% stake in intel, spending the money that had already been allocated to intel and the CHIPS act, by the way, that wasn't any new, new funds dedicated to that. They now say, oh, and by the way, those milestones that were in the CHIPS act, you don't have, you don't have to do that anymore. According to the Wall Street Journal, intel has said in a filing it can now get money from the government. As long as it can show it's already spent that money on projects, it's already spent it. So, hey, we don't have to do anything else, but we've got 10% and that's what matters. Gosh darn it. Moving right along.
- [101:32]
Cory Doctorow
I'm with Bernie Sanders in that. I don't think it's, it's crazy to say that a company that gets a lot of public money should, should have some public obligations. That's not what Trump is doing here. Right. Like intel has Huge problems. They can no longer make chips. Right. They're pretty reliant on TMSC for most of their best manufacturing. And, and so, you know, that's not going to get solved by Trump taking them over.
- [101:58]
Leo Laporte
And Although that money, I mean, could keep their foundry business alive a little longer. Yes or no? No.
- [102:04]
Cory Doctorow
I mean, if they, if. But the reason they're broke is because they spend it all on stock buybacks. There's nothing about Trump having a board seat that will stop them from doing more of those stock buybacks either. So, you know, like, I, I mean, when you have a company that's structurally important to the nation and the state intervenes to make sure that it's run well, that's like, not necessarily insane, provided it's done well. But I don't have any confidence that Trump is going to do it well. And he has not announced any plans apart from having a share in it to, you know, make it invest in. In foundries to improve its onshore production capacity. It's just, it's, it's a purely like smash and grab some red meat for the base, move on, press the Diet Coke button a bunch of times, lose your focus, get weird about boogers on the Resolute desk from Elon Musk, kid, you know, talk about something, you know, grandpa ish and then hope nobody notices your hand bruises.
- [103:03]
Leo Laporte
You got a lot in that sentence. That's good. I'm impressed, actually. Trillion dollars already this year in buybacks. What's wrong with buybacks? Stock shareholders love them. Right? Apple buys back billions of dollars in its stock every year. Is that different from a dividend?
- [103:25]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, because it moves the share price without changing the underlying fundamentals.
- [103:29]
Leo Laporte
That's why they were stock more valuable.
- [103:31]
Cory Doctorow
That's why they were illegal. They were considered stock. There was a stock swindle, right, because you, you, the share price.
- [103:38]
Leo Laporte
When did they become legal?
- [103:39]
Cory Doctorow
Fundamentals was that it was a series of lawsuits, I think, in the 70s and 80s, okay. That were, that broadened. And then I think the SEC made a rule and they, they made a rule where they're like, you can only do a good stock buyback and not a bad stock buyback. And the, the, the loophole for what is a good stock buyback is so, so malleable that basically all stock buybacks are now good stock buybacks. You just have to sort of, I think you have to say, this stock buyback is good.
- [104:05]
Leo Laporte
This is a good one. Well, it's good for the shareholder because it reduces the number of shares outstanding, which Means your value of your share is higher than it was. Apple's doing a hundred billion dollars this.
- [104:19]
Cory Doctorow
Year sure should go up because companies do better.
- [104:22]
Leo Laporte
Right?
- [104:22]
Cory Doctorow
Right, right. A company that puts $80 billion into stock buybacks is $80 billion less to spend on the company's operations.
- [104:29]
Leo Laporte
It's a little old fashioned, Corey. I mean, sure, look at GameStop, you know, you don't need a company to do well for its stock to go up. You're an old time guy, I could see that. Right?
- [104:43]
Cory Doctorow
Yes. But I mean if you think that the reason to have a stock market is to allocate money to companies that are good, good as opposed to. That seems like a good idea.
- [104:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [104:52]
Cory Doctorow
I mean we could just replace. I mean we are doing this.
- [104:55]
Leo Laporte
We have crypto, that's what we have.
- [104:57]
Cory Doctorow
Crypto for the, the stock market with a slot machine. I suppose. But if you believe that the reason to have stocks and public companies and limited liability, all the things that we have erected around the market is to encourage allocation of capital to efficient firms.
- [105:14]
Leo Laporte
Then.
- [105:16]
Cory Doctorow
Having stock prices go up when firms don't do anything that increase their efficiency should be treated as a, as a bug and not a feature.
- [105:24]
Leo Laporte
All right, I got one for you, Lou. Microsoft unveiled two in house AI models. These are speech generation systems. Right. May you say may or mai? May voice1 and May1 preface.
- [105:41]
Lou Mareska
You can see either. Yeah, I think they are. You know, the interesting thing about this article is that they made it seem like Microsoft is not developing their own models on, you know, on the go and for specific purposes. I think they use open AI for a purpose. Obviously they have a lot of stake in it and they are great models but they, they're constantly developing these. And these are some just of the new ones.
- [105:59]
Leo Laporte
There was five.
- [106:01]
Lou Mareska
All the way up to five. Four. Yeah, yeah.
- [106:03]
Leo Laporte
And I think that's actually one of the points that Karen Howe made made in her book Empire of AI. We're going to talk to her again on Monday, Labor Day tomorrow, 5:30pm Pacific. If you're in the club, you can watch it is that this was kind of hedge, Microsoft hedging its bets. Microsoft had its good foundation models and kind of believes that they were going to be successful. But putting a couple hundred million or billion, actually it was billions into 10 billion over a few years into OpenAI just seemed like good. It's, you know, it's better than buying back the stock. That's right. That's right.
- [106:42]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah.
- [106:42]
Lou Mareska
I mean if you go, if you just go look at all the research papers that are coming out that are signed by Microsoft researchers. They are foundational models in there. So, yeah, it's interesting.
- [106:52]
Leo Laporte
May is a mixture of experts. Model trained on 15,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. Is that on Azure? Does Azure have access to that many H1 hundreds? That's amazing.
- [107:06]
Lou Mareska
Yeah, absolutely.
- [107:07]
Leo Laporte
Wow. Yeah. And so this allows you to create expressive audio from text in your spreadsheet, for instance. Yes.
- [107:17]
Lou Mareska
There you go.
- [107:18]
Leo Laporte
Does it.
- [107:20]
Lou Mareska
No, we don't use this right now, but, I mean, we do use other models. I mean, like I said, there's not just GPT5 or GPT4 or whatever model we utilize at the moment. Moment. But, you know, they are GPT. They. They are the most, you know, foundational models there are right now. So that's why we're using them.
- [107:38]
Leo Laporte
What's the. What's the coding model you're using? Is it. Is it OpenAI's? Is it ChatGPT?
- [107:42]
Lou Mareska
Absolutely.
- [107:43]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yes. So let's see. Here's an emotive voice. Rain. She's joyous. Let's see. She's going to generate a little.
- [107:52]
Cory Doctorow
Oh, my goodness.
- [107:54]
Shoshana Weissman
You know, I've been thinking a lot lately, and it just keeps popping up in my mind, to be or not to be. Oh, wow. Isn't that such a big question?
- [108:04]
Leo Laporte
Oh, geez Louise. I didn't expect all of that. Okay, that's, I guess, interesting. Let's see. Oak can do it as a story. Let me see. Tomorrow I'm giving him Shakespeare. Let's see how they do with Shakespeare. And tomorrow. And tomorrow, like this show creeps in its petty pace from day to day. Can't even imagine. This is going to be a story mode. See what it does? It says copa. In the heart of a dimly lit tavern, two weary travelers sat nursing their drinks. A knight, noble and gallant pondered the relentless passage of time. Tomorrow. And tomorrow. It creeps in its petty pace, does it not? Yes, it does. Okay, thank you very much. That's oak. We also have Acacia, and Acacia can be scared. Let's see what the scared voice sounds. Sounds like. I like to play with these. I don't know what good they could be.
- [109:21]
Cory Doctorow
Or not to be. That is the question, isn't it? I mean, what if. What if we choose to exist and yet the horrors that life throws at us.
- [109:34]
Leo Laporte
Life throws us. All right, enough of that. Anyway, that's May. She sounds very good.
- [109:40]
Lou Mareska
They both sound good.
- [109:41]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. May and Oak and Acacia.
- [109:45]
Lou Mareska
You know, it's funny because we. I don't know if you know, this but in, in PowerPoint today, they can generate, you know, narrat narrations and you can just. From your slides, you can generate videos right off using, you know, right in, in there. And I think the Clipchamp also does this now, which is. I use that on a daily basis because I just now.
- [110:02]
Leo Laporte
So if I own voice, maybe if I use chat GBT to generate the slides and then I could use Clipchamp to generate the voice, I wouldn't even have to give the talk. I could just mail it in.
- [110:11]
Lou Mareska
Exactly right.
- [110:11]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Just, hey, talk about whatever you want. I thought, Corey, you might have something to say about this. This has not happened yet, but Anthropic, as you remember, was sued over training data on copyright works. And while the judge held for Anthropic in the case where they actually bought the books and then scanned them them and destroyed them afterwards, there were pirated texts as well. On Tuesday of this week, Judge Alsop confirmed that the authors and Anthropic have a settlement in principle and on September 5th will file a motion for preliminary approval. Authors celebrate historic settlement coming soon. What do you think? You're an author. Author.
- [111:06]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. So I, I think that it's. I've got a whole two chapters on this in my new book that I finished this week. I know, but I, I think you.
- [111:18]
Leo Laporte
Talked about choke point capitalism as well.
- [111:21]
Cory Doctorow
That too, yeah. I think it's important to break out what's going on here in terms of what is being alleged to be a copyright infringement. What is probably not a copyright infringement. What the court found wasn't a copyright infringement management. So I, I am not a huge fan of the AI companies. I should say that at the beginning. And I do think that the fact that the AI companies have made such a kind of public show of trying to bankrupt creative workers by using their own materials is gross. Especially when it is not actually a thing that they're going to run a business off of, but just a way to do a flashy demo because again, you bankrupt all the writers, all illustrators, all the songwriters, and then you got nothing. Nothing.
- [112:08]
Leo Laporte
What are you, yeah, what are you going to read next time? What are you going to look at next time?
- [112:12]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, so I think that as a, as a advocate for creative labor rights, and this is Labor Day weekend, I think we should focus on the things that will attain labor gains for creative workers. And I think that not only will adding copyright, a new copyright to control training of your works, not help creative workers, but I think that it will be quite damaging to lots of other sectors So I don't think that it's a copyright infringement to train a model.
- [112:40]
Leo Laporte
And I think said it's fair use as long as, yeah, they purchase the books. Yeah.
- [112:45]
Cory Doctorow
When you break it down, it's pretty clear why it's not right. So making a transient copy of a work for an analytical purpose is legal. That's how we have search engines. Making an analysis of a work is also not an infringement. And this is where I think that it's important to note that I believe what Anthropic was worried about is not being told that training a model from an, from an infringing copy of a work is an infringement. I think they're worried about being told that acquiring an infringing copy of a work is an infringement. So let me, let me give you an analogy. You go to a flea market, you buy a pirate cd, you go home and you count all the adverbs in the lyrics on the music on that cd. Buying the pirate might CD might be a copyright infringement. Counting the adverbs isn't right. And so I think that what Anthropic wasn't wor. I don't think Anthropic was worried about being told that effectively counting the words in those books was illegal. I think they were worried about $150,000 per work statutory damage for downloading them in the first place. That's what I think they were worried about. And so, so, so they, so it's.
- [113:57]
Leo Laporte
A victory for them in this case because the books that they bought. The judge said no, that's fair use. Reading the, and absorbing those books was fine because you bought them.
- [114:08]
Cory Doctorow
Now it's possible, and I think very likely that you can make infringing works with a model. And, and I think that to the extent that Anthropic hosts it, hosts the model and, and encourages certain uses or, or sells it for certain purposes, that it will produce infringing works that are too closely related to the works that it trains on.
- [114:26]
Leo Laporte
That's what the New York Times asserts in its lawsuit against that you wouldn't have to buy the Times. You could just ask Chat GPT.
- [114:34]
Cory Doctorow
I don't think that's an infringement. I think that, I think the infringement is actually copying words and phrases. The facts in a New York Times article are not infringe. It's not infringing to copy. The facts aren't copyrightable.
- [114:44]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [114:45]
Cory Doctorow
So I don't think that, I think summarizing a New York Times. The New York Times summarizes stories from other newspapers all day long. You don't really want a world in which you, you can't summarize a news article without perm. That would be crazy.
- [114:55]
Leo Laporte
Right?
- [114:56]
Cory Doctorow
So there is a breaking news doctrine, but it's very, very thin. So I think that. But to get back to how we save creative workers, because I do think that it's gross the way these companies are operating. The U.S. copyright Office is an agency that I've been on the opposite side of for this entire millennium.
- [115:13]
Leo Laporte
You've always said that copyright protects the big companies that own the copyright, not the creators of the content.
- [115:19]
Cory Doctorow
I have disagreed with almost everything the US Copyright Office has done, done since, since the turn of the century. And suddenly.
- [115:27]
Leo Laporte
It's nice that you could say that now, isn't it?
- [115:28]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, yeah. But I find myself now on the same side as the Copyright Office because the Copyright Office has said on multiple occasions and gone to court and won that there is no copyright in works created by AIs.
- [115:43]
Leo Laporte
Right. In fact, she got fired for saying that.
- [115:47]
Cory Doctorow
No, she got fired for saying that it was, that it was. That it was fair use to, to, to train. Okay, but, but yeah, she. So. And also because she's black, they fired Carla Hayden because that's really why she was fired.
- [116:00]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [116:01]
Cory Doctorow
She was very good. But the thing is that, to use a little bit of, of international copyright jargon, copyright inheres at the moment of fixation of a work of human creativity. So a new copyright springs into existence when a human being does something creative and makes a fixed record of it.
- [116:17]
Leo Laporte
You don't have to make any legal filing to get a copyright. It's automatic.
- [116:22]
Cory Doctorow
You have to be a human, but.
- [116:24]
Leo Laporte
You have to be a human.
- [116:24]
Cory Doctorow
You have to be a human. Monkey selfies. Not copyrightable. Bot, not copyrightable. Slop. Not copyrightable. So I think if we give creative workers the right to decide who can train a model with their works, we will make it hard to make search engines to do computational linguistics. We will make new rules about who can publish certain things, because they're also saying that publishing the model should be illegal. And yet our publishers, there's five publishers that control all the books, four labels, studios that control all the movies, and three labels that control all the music. They will just say, fine, as a condition of doing business with us, you have to sign away this new training right that the courts or the legislature or the regulator have just given you so that we can go to anthropic, we can go to OpenAI and we can hit them for a fee to train. Train. We can require them to put guardrails in the model so that only we can make works that are competitive with our own. No one will compete with us by making these works. And then they'll fire as many of those creative workers as they can. Because the only thing that like Getty Images hates more than paying its workers is not having a copyright. And so if Getty Images wins its lawsuit, it's not going to be good news for photographers. The only thing that's good news for photographers is the existing rule which is that there is no copyright in AI outputted images. And that is great news. It means anyone can take them and sell them. And it means that the only way to get a copyrighted work is to pay a worker to make it.
- [117:56]
Leo Laporte
What happens though, if an AI, say midjourney, which is being sued for this, creates a image of Darth Vader that's infringing. That's infringing because that's, that's the equivalent of copying the text.
- [118:09]
Cory Doctorow
It could be if it were, you know, for a critical or, or a transformative purpose whatever, then that's not necessarily infringing. But that. Yeah. So what if, if you barf up a whole Star wars episode that's just a Star wars episode. Yeah, it's an infringing output depending on the extent to which they were actually involved in the production of it. You know, did they incentivize people to do it?
- [118:29]
Leo Laporte
It's not transformative. The mere use of AI itself is not necessarily transformative. It does not automatically not necessarily transformative.
- [118:36]
Cory Doctorow
Enough to qualify as fair use. Fair use is not merely about transformation and it's right other four factors and then like the gestalt of them all. So right. It's, it's a, it's a, it's what they call a fact intensive doctrine. It's very difficult to say definitively something is or is not fair. But I'll tell you what, it's always legal to copy a public domain work. Right? That's like not a thing we have any ambiguity about. And so if you're Getty and you want to make sure that you people can't copy your stuff without paying, you keep paying for photographers. That is the thing that we should all be keeping in mind because that's what we want. You know, the day that Disney Universal sued Mid Journey, I got a press release because I am for some reason on the RIA's press list.
- [119:22]
Leo Laporte
That was. That might maybe Hillary Rosen's last act as she left.
- [119:28]
Cory Doctorow
So I get this press release and you know, the RA or the record labels are not suing, but the record labels are the movie suit studios. Right. Universal and Warner number two and number one and number two record labels number two and number three movie studios. So the same, the same companies. And Mitch Glazier, who's the CEO of the RIA makes $1.8 million a year and who went to work for the RIA after he got fired from Congress for putting a slipping rider in legislation that took away musicians copyrights.
- [119:58]
Leo Laporte
There.
- [119:59]
Cory Doctorow
No, no. And gave them to record labels.
- [120:01]
Leo Laporte
Oh, well that's good.
- [120:02]
Cory Doctorow
So he got fired in, the RIAA hired him.
- [120:05]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Good job, Mitch.
- [120:07]
Cory Doctorow
Million dollars a year. So this, this guy, this, this multi millionaire writes to me in, you know, through the good offices of his press office and says we are only angry that Mid Journey didn't approach these companies for a license. He's not saying we don't want AI to produce videos that compete with Universal, Warner, whatever, with the, the livelihoods of the workers who work there. He's saying that they should pay Universal and Warner, not the workers, Universal and Warner license fees so that Universal and Warner can use these tools to fire their own workers.
- [120:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, because they want to do it themselves. They would like to.
- [120:45]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, that's right. And so, you know, once you understand that, once you understand like the material basis for the AI bubble, then you can. These copyright questions become less difficult to kind of parse through and we, we can stop, you know, worrying about like, oh, did someone scrape something? I mean, scraping stuff is good. Good, right? Scraping is how that kid in Austria figured out that the two major grocery stores were colluding to rig prices because he, he scraped their prices every week until he found that they were like raising their prices and lowering them in tandem. You know, it's scraping how search engines exist. Scraping is how you get the version of the website from the company before they fired the guy who turned out to be a pedophile. Where you find his bio, where they say, we love this guy and it's great that he's working with children on RB behalf. Right. Like that without scraping, we lose our ability to know anything about things on the Internet unless the people who said them in the first place agree that we should know them. Scraping is amazing. So let's not get rid of scraping. Let's protect workers instead.
- [121:47]
Leo Laporte
One more break and then we will finish this and I'm going to desperately find a story for you. I feel so bad. Unfortunately, I. All the stories have been in Corey's ballpark right there in his Ball yard. But we'll find some more to talk about. It's so nice to have you here anyway, Lou. It's great to see you and I know you're enjoying it, so.
- [122:09]
Lou Mareska
I am.
- [122:10]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [122:11]
Lou Mareska
I got a big list of books to read you now.
- [122:13]
Leo Laporte
I know, I know. Me too. Me too. Everybody, by the way, should absolutely go to disinhitification.org and you see you've already raised more than enough to do an audio book, so.
- [122:27]
Cory Doctorow
Oh, yeah, yeah. Although a lot of that is for pre sales of the print book and the ebook.
- [122:32]
Leo Laporte
Oh, okay. Oh. So it's all one. It's all one Kickstarter, and I think.
- [122:35]
Cory Doctorow
There'S still probably a few little copies. I make these weird collages for my blog, and I made a very high quality, very limited edition art book of my illustrations. And there's 15 copies left.
- [122:48]
Leo Laporte
Ooh, I might have to pick that one up.
- [122:51]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, you've gotta.
- [122:52]
Leo Laporte
You've got. People might look at Cory's. Corey's pluralistic.net and say, oh, yeah, AI. But no, he's. These are manual colog.
- [123:00]
Cory Doctorow
That's me. And the Lasso tool and the gimp.
- [123:04]
Leo Laporte
And that's what's fun about him. He. He puts a lot of interesting effort into these and always uses, of course, public domain artwork and CC images. And CC images. Because he's a good man that way. I also love. I don't know if people know about your Tumblr image images from the atomic age.
- [123:23]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, I'm like the. I'm the last ardent Tumblr user. Me and like 50 weirdos.
- [123:30]
Leo Laporte
What? I don't know how you have time to do that. It's just anytime you see something that comes from the. You know that it.
- [123:36]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, it's meditative. Meditative. Yeah.
- [123:39]
Leo Laporte
Okay. Okay. You're not actively looking for stuff.
- [123:42]
Cory Doctorow
I'll send you a blog post. I wrote about it. It's. There's a blog post called Divination about how it's like laying out a tarot deck where you take these images that come over your transom and then you try to make stories between them.
- [123:51]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's cool.
- [123:52]
Cory Doctorow
And I often get all kinds of weird little inspirations.
- [123:55]
Leo Laporte
I actually do that. I have a random number generator in my obsidian and I will have it generate a random verse from the Tao to Jing every day. And it's almost always on point because you know that fake.
- [124:11]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah. Well, do you know the Oblique Strategies deck? Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies deck?
- [124:15]
Leo Laporte
Yes, yes, yes.
- [124:16]
Cory Doctorow
I use that same thing. Time be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before. That's like my, that's my motto.
- [124:25]
Leo Laporte
It's just tapping into that part of your brain, I guess. Can you still buy the cards, I wonder?
- [124:33]
Cory Doctorow
Oh, yeah, I. I have a. Well, I have a limited edition deck, but I think you can just buy a regular old deck.
- [124:39]
Leo Laporte
Oh, and there's a website. Here's a website that just randomly that's. Yeah, yeah, do something boring. Overtly resist change.
- [124:49]
Cory Doctorow
Like he brought these into the studio when recording Talking Heads albums and Roxy Music albums and they use them to between takes and stuff. He's. He's amazing. Yeah, he's in his last music video. He's in the opening scene. He's reading Red Team Blues, my novel.
- [125:04]
Leo Laporte
No kidding.
- [125:05]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah.
- [125:05]
Leo Laporte
Congratulations. Wow. That's an honor. That's fantastic. Fantastic. That's very cool. Our show today, brought to you by Zscaler. Let's talk about cloud security. Let's talk about probably the gold standard in cloud security, zero trust. And let's talk about AI. That's what Zscaler does. AI is a really interesting issue for businesses because on the one hand, the bad guys are using it to attack you with more vigor and more efficiency than ever before. Right? They are. They are just miles ahead now. More relentless and effective attacks than ever before. But you're probably using both public and private AI in your business. It powers innovation, it drives efficiency. Organizations from small to large are leveraging AI to increase employee productivity with public AI for engineers with coding assistance, like copilot marketers with writing tools. Finance is using AI AI to create spreadsheet formulas. And we know which spreadsheet they're using to do that. Right. AI is being used to automate workflows for operational efficiency across individuals and teams. The companies are embedding AI in applications and services their customer and partner facing, which helps them ultimately move faster in the market and gain competitive advantage. But you know who also is moving faster in the market? Hackers. AI is helping them too. Two phishing attacks over encrypted channels increased this year by 34.1%. Why? Primarily the growing use of generative AI tools. Phishing is so much more effective nowadays because you can't just look at a phishing email and say, well, that's a grammatical nightmare. No, they're all perfectly written. They're very real looking. They look exactly like the AI emails you're getting from real companies. So what are you going to do? Companies have to rethink how they protect their private and public use of AI and how they defend against, against AI powered attacks. And there is a way. Jeff Simon, Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer T Mobile talks about Zscaler. He said, quote, zscaler's fundamental difference in the technologies in SaaS space is it was built from the ground up to be a zero trust network access solution, which was the main outcome we were looking to drive. Zero Trust is so valuable because it, it goes a step beyond the traditional perimeter defenses we've relied on for decades. You know, firewalls. Then you have to have a VPN to get through the firewall and then you've got a public facing IP which is exposing you and you're, you know, you now have an attack surface. And of course what, that's exactly what the these hackers using AI are going to latch onto. But that's the beauty of zero trust. A modern approach. With Zscaler's comprehensive zero trust architecture and AI, you're ensuring safe public AI productivity, you're protecting the integrity of your private AI and you're stopping AI powered attacks cold hold because even if they penetrate your perimeter defenses, they can't do anything. That's zero trust in action. Thrive in the AI era with Zscaler Zero trust plus AI to stay ahead of the competition and remain resilient as threats and risks evolve. Learn more@zscaler.com security zscaler.com security thank them so much for supporting us. Your wife just wrote a book. That's exciting.
- [128:37]
Lou Mareska
Yes, she did. She did.
- [128:39]
Leo Laporte
What is she. Is it a novel?
- [128:40]
Lou Mareska
It is. It's a historical fiction.
- [128:42]
Leo Laporte
It's about 1982, favorite genre. I love historical fiction.
- [128:46]
Lou Mareska
She just put it out and she's gotten a lot of great reviews on it already too. So it's great book. It's really fast read.
- [128:52]
Leo Laporte
So what era are we in?
- [128:54]
Lou Mareska
It's. It's about the 1982 Tylenol murders and a suspenseful novel about that. And she, you know, she wrote obviously.
- [129:02]
Leo Laporte
They never figured out who did those.
- [129:03]
Lou Mareska
They never figured it out. There's actually a Netflix series that just came out about it and it came out the same time, like coincidentally came out at the same time. But hers is obviously a fictionalized version of it. But it's. It's great.
- [129:13]
Leo Laporte
Is this her first novel?
- [129:15]
Lou Mareska
It's first novel, yep.
- [129:16]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's wonderful. Congratulations. It's called Absolution and It is not Mrs. Maresa, it is E. Lawson name.
- [129:27]
Lou Mareska
Yes, this is. Yes.
- [129:28]
Leo Laporte
So you're outing.
- [129:29]
Lou Mareska
She also did Gimpy and did the COVID herself as well. So there you go.
- [129:32]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it's a beautiful cover. I love it. I love it. Oh, how nice. Fantastic. Congratulations. Debut novel. And it's on Kindle Unlimited. Now. Did they talk her into that or did she agree?
- [129:48]
Lou Mareska
No, no. She has a bunch of author friends and her mom's a book editor as well and just suggested that that's where a good place to start.
- [129:54]
Leo Laporte
So that's one of the things I've been reading about that I don't like about what Audible does with authors. You've resisted this successfully, Corey, but they put a lot of pressure on you to be in the Amazon Audible originals pile. But what's what I just read, which is disappointing, is that the amount of money authors get from Audible whether they're in the originals or not. Not. It's not original, it's Audible plus whether they're in plus or not, which is the same thing as their Kindle Unlimited is dependent on what the authors on Audible+Make. And because there is now a lot of AI slop in Audible+, authors are getting less and less money from Audible as their royalties. Have you heard this story, Corey?
- [130:47]
Cory Doctorow
Well, it's a continuation of a long series of bad practices that I think we talked about this when Rebecca and I were on to talk about Chokepoint capitalism. Audible Gate was the kind of granddaddy of these scandals. Audible Gate was an accounting trick they used that stole $100 million from Audible independent authors, ACX authors, where they were effectively encouraging readers to return books as unsatisfactory, even if they liked them, because then they didn't have to pay royalty. So you would buy a book and then Audible would pressure you to give it back and say you didn't like it, and then Audible wouldn't have to pay royalty to you. And they were just showing you net sales, not sales with outgoing sales and return returns. And what had happened over the years is they. They'd found they played with the UX to find different ways to say, you know, do you want to return this book and get your credit back and get another book this month? And they gotten better and better at doing that because they'd just done a lot of AB splitting. And so authors just found their revenues falling and falling and falling. And they had a glitch and they showed a complete return where they showed the outgoing and incoming. They sent it to all the authors. And it turns out that there's like crime authors who are retired forensic accountants who really like to dig through those things and it's $100 million theft. And, you know, I think to understand why this is going on, it's not that they, like, used to like writers when they gave them better deals. I mean, you probably remember, when was it Hugh, the guy who wrote Silo? Hugh.
- [132:31]
Leo Laporte
Gosh, I can't remember his name.
- [132:33]
Cory Doctorow
The guy who wrote Silo had Hugh Howey. That's right. Hugh Howey was getting really good deals from Amazon, Kindle, and they were treating him really well. And he wrote these editorials about how this was a much better experience than he'd ever had as a. As an author working with major publishers. And there's. The reason they got worse is because they became the only game in town. They had their writers locked in. This goes back to what I was saying about Azure and lock in. Even if you love the products and even if you think they're great, if you want them to stay great, Right? If you want the people who are. If you work there, if you want the people who are colleagues in the firm who have good ideas about how to make the product better and not make it worse at the expense of the customers to win those arguments. And if you are one of those customers, if you want to make sure that you still have good products, you need to be able to leave. You know, the Microsoft or the Google antitrust case that they lost, the first of the three that they lost over the last two years. Years, a lot of it turned on this interpersonal conflict that was revealed in the memos that were published during the trial between Prabhakar Raghavan, who was the head of revenue, and Les Gomes, who was the head of search. And Google had tapped out growth on search because they had a 90% market share, so they weren't going to grow anymore. And so growth was flatlining. And Raghavan's idea was to make search worse, right? To take out things like autocorrecting, spelling and searching for synonyms when you searched for a search term in the background and so on. That's the piece by Adzitron. He decided to. He militated for making search worse so that you'd have to search two or three times to get the search result you were looking for.
- [134:19]
Leo Laporte
He was made head of search, and.
- [134:22]
Cory Doctorow
He became head of search. And he won the argument, right? Well, why did he win the argument? Well, he won the argument because the management team looked at this and they said, if we make search worse, we won't lose customers. Customers, because we have a 90% market share and we're the only search engine anyone's ever heard of. So if you want, if you want to make sure that when that happens in your boardrooms at the companies you work at so that you can get up and say, I love this product I work on and I'm glad I work on it. You want your customers to be able to leave because if they can't, the worst person in your company is going to end up taking it over and then shittifying every product that you care about. And you missed your mother's funeral for, and you didn't go to your kids little league games so you could ship on time. Time on.
- [135:01]
Leo Laporte
Although as, as you pointed out in your talk at cf, it had a negative consequence in the long run for Google. Because they suck now.
- [135:12]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah.
- [135:13]
Leo Laporte
And there are alternatives.
- [135:15]
Cory Doctorow
There are, they're more profitable than ever.
- [135:17]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's true. At least for now.
- [135:20]
Cory Doctorow
But people are still locked in. They, they, you know, like even don't.
- [135:24]
Leo Laporte
People, people are starting to realize that Google sucks. And there are other. I pay money for cocktails. I hope so because it's so obvious. Google is too.
- [135:32]
Cory Doctorow
I use COGI too and I pay for it. But you know, even paying for Cogi, like I can't on my Android phone, I can't make the search box on the home screen. A COGI search box and everything defaults to searching Google.
- [135:47]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [135:47]
Cory Doctorow
I mean like there's just so much lock in.
- [135:52]
Leo Laporte
That's one of the reasons I never use Google's launcher on an Android phone. I always use as a third party launcher because I hate that search pill.
- [135:59]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, yeah, you can't even move it off the home screen.
- [136:02]
Leo Laporte
No, it's permanent. Yeah, I refuse to use their launcher. All right, I told Lisa, better get all your stuff from China now. Because many countries, including China, are no longer mailing things to the United States. The de minimis exemption, which said there are no tariffs on anything under $800, has now expired. As of Friday, this has expired and come back several times. But this is assuming this continues. There are about 4 million packages a day which will suddenly be tariffed depending on what country it's coming from. And because it's unknown and because it's been up and down, down, mail agencies in many countries are now saying, yeah, we, we're not going to take mail for the United States. So if you're buying something on ebay or Temu or she in that is coming from outside the U.S. watch out. 1. According to the story in Quartz, one company that will be particularly affected by all of this is Etsy which I didn't realize, but Etsy, I guess a lot of stuff from Etsy comes from overseas. Sellers sold $10.9 billion in goods on Etsy last year. 30% of them export their goods outside their home country. So this will be interesting. Already Temu and Shein are playing games, trying to. Trying to, you know, pretend it's drop shipping from the US and all sorts of things to get their stuff in there. Swiss Post said starting Aug. 26 it will temporarily not accept postal goods intended for the U.S. japan Post suspended shipments to the U.S. from August 27. India, August 25. The United Kingdom's Royal Mail Mail says it's using a postal delivery duties paid service, which said it meets the export requirements, but it means that duties will be calculated and then added, I guess, to the cost of the good. 88% of the DE minimis shipments come through international mail. So I don't know what there is to say about this, but that's going to happen quick.
- [138:38]
Cory Doctorow
And it doesn't apply to China.
- [138:40]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, by the way, China's exempted, which is weird. Although they worked out a deal.
- [138:49]
Cory Doctorow
This is what we call the art of the deal.
- [138:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, but who gets screwed by the art of the deal? I don't know.
- [138:57]
Cory Doctorow
Did you buy any Trump coin?
- [138:58]
Leo Laporte
I did not. Taiwan's postal service suspending shipments.
- [139:02]
Cory Doctorow
Australia, I mean, Leo, there is a tip jar in the Oval Office. We all know how to get the service you want.
- [139:11]
Leo Laporte
I just need a little gold bar with a little. Some corning glass on top of it.
- [139:16]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah.
- [139:17]
Leo Laporte
Apple will announce its new iPhones in a week and everybody's saying, oh, I wonder if they'll raise the prices. But they have an exemption right now. It's not so much that, that. I mean, it's bad enough the tariffs exist, but they're so often on that people aren't sure what's going to happen. And that's why these postal services are saying, well, we don't know, should we ship it? What are we going to do?
- [139:45]
Cory Doctorow
Well, when Trump brought down the first round of tariffs, there were container ships in the sea with millions of dollars worth of billions of dollars worth of merchandise in them that all got sort of stranded.
- [139:57]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [139:58]
Cory Doctorow
Like that's what you don't want. And so it makes sense that they're walking away from this.
- [140:04]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. As well as wind farms and a bunch of other things. All right, let's talk about something happier.
- [140:12]
Cory Doctorow
Yes.
- [140:14]
Leo Laporte
You used to be a big Lenovo fan. I know, Corey. You would immediately put Linux on your Lenovo box. You're using Linux now to talk to us. Amazing. How's it working?
- [140:24]
Cory Doctorow
I love it. My framework is the best computer I've ever owned.
- [140:27]
Leo Laporte
That's right, you switched to Framework. In fact, they just announced an Update to their 16.
- [140:31]
Cory Doctorow
So they just announced a whole bunch of updates. Everyone's really excited that their gaming laptop can do hot swap GPUs, which is great. The thing that has me over the moon is they say they're going to do a track nub for their keyboards.
- [140:43]
Leo Laporte
You miss your old Lenovo?
- [140:45]
Cory Doctorow
Oh my God, I want a track nub so bad. I want a track nub and three hardware buttons and I would sell my child for it.
- [140:52]
Leo Laporte
What? I, I, you're the only one I person I've ever met that likes that little nub in the middle of the keyboard. You use that instead of a trackpad.
- [141:00]
Cory Doctorow
God, I love it. Yes, yes, yes. And then three hardware buttons that like the idea that you've got to like sort of guess where the left button is.
- [141:08]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I know. That drives me crazy.
- [141:10]
Cory Doctorow
And like then you accidentally get a middle button and close your tab instead of pop, popping down a pull down menu. It's the worst. It's absolutely the worst. So yes, I really desperately want that track nub to come and it can't come a moment too soon.
- [141:24]
Leo Laporte
The beauty of this is probably you could just swap out your existing keyboard.
- [141:27]
Cory Doctorow
You'll just swap out the keyboard. Because I've worn out like three framework keyboards already, which normally in my days of buying a ThinkPad, every year I would wear out a keyboard sort of in month eight or so and replace it and, and then by month 12 I'd be shopping for a new computer. But now I'm really excited about being able to just hot swap and get the nub.
- [141:52]
Leo Laporte
I have to say though that the Framework CEO says they haven't been able to find a short enough nub, but.
- [141:59]
Cory Doctorow
They say they've got it prototyped.
- [142:02]
Leo Laporte
Can you shave it down a little bit? Yeah, it pokes the screen. Right. And of course that's not what you.
- [142:09]
Cory Doctorow
And during the, during the first round of tariffs, they stopped shipping a bunch of stuff to the us so I'm.
- [142:15]
Leo Laporte
Waiting for my Framework desktop, which doesn't have three buttons and a nub, but I guess I can get a keyboard that does.
- [142:21]
Cory Doctorow
You just get a keyboard and a mouse. But yeah, I figure worst case scenario, I'm going to be in Germany, Canada, the UK and Portugal on tour and worst case scenario, I can get them to FedEx it to a hotel and get it on the road.
- [142:36]
Leo Laporte
Obviously, they listen to you because they added the nub because of you. I can't, I can't imagine there's anybody else saying, no, no, no.
- [142:41]
Cory Doctorow
The forums are just full of people going, oh, my God, give me a nub and three buttons.
- [142:46]
Leo Laporte
Really?
- [142:47]
Lou Mareska
Yeah.
- [142:48]
Leo Laporte
Shoshana, do you even know what we're talking about?
- [142:50]
Shoshana Weissman
No, but it's funny because I, I made friends with the Adam Smith Institute, and there was once a dress I really wanted, and they didn't ship it to the US So it's like, can I please have this dress sent to you guys and you'll send it to me? You're like, yeah, sure, we'll do it. And it was great. I got the dress.
- [143:05]
Leo Laporte
She's drop shipping to the UK Now.
- [143:08]
Cory Doctorow
When I lived in the uk, I had a Japanese toilet freight forwarded from a freight forwarder in North Carolina. I had it shipped by, by Toto and then freight forwarded to the uk.
- [143:18]
Leo Laporte
This is one thing, one lesson of all of this is that you said nature finds a way. People find a way. They will get around all these restrictions.
- [143:27]
Cory Doctorow
Arbitrage it.
- [143:28]
Leo Laporte
They arbitrage it.
- [143:31]
Cory Doctorow
Lou was trying to say something.
- [143:32]
Lou Mareska
No, I was gonna say my ThinkPad still has the nub.
- [143:34]
Leo Laporte
No, he's got a think pad.
- [143:35]
Cory Doctorow
Still have them, for sure.
- [143:37]
Lou Mareska
I love it.
- [143:38]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you use it too.
- [143:41]
Lou Mareska
I, I, I use the nub. Yeah, I love it. I, I really, I, I'm really, I'm, I'm with Corey. Like, the, the trackpads, they just, they're just like. Their accuracy of click, you know, is just a pain in the neck. I just hate it.
- [143:52]
Leo Laporte
I just. It seems so fussy to move the nub to get the mouse to move around. It's like.
- [143:56]
Cory Doctorow
And twisting your hand this way to get at the trackpad is like. It's an RSI waiting to happen. When you're like this, you're typing, and then you reach your finger out and you just do the nub. You're not twisting your hand back in on itself in order to do a bunch of fine motions.
- [144:13]
Leo Laporte
Okay. I obviously never gave the nub enough time to really get used to it. Anthony, did you generate this on the fly? The White House tip jar? Yeah. That looks exactly like the tip jar we used to have in the studio. Yeah, that's Nano Banana. Nana Banana. So that everybody's excited about this new AI model from Google. They actually stealthed it for a while called Nano Banana, which takes a still and modifies it. Like you Could. I could take this picture of the four of us and put cowboy hats on all of us. I'm sure somebody will do that right now for us, right? Have you been playing? Have you played with it? Oh, here's. By the way, here's my tip. Joe, this is not AI that's real. There's not a lot of money in that tip jar. Actually, we used to have a digital currency tip jar on the website and got A. There's 7.85 Bitcoin in there, but I neglected to write down the password. Yeah, you laugh, but that's almost a million dollars in Bitcoin that I cannot access. The tip jar turned out to be a great. Can you imagine having a million dollars in your tip jar and you can't get it out?
- [145:32]
Cory Doctorow
Why don't you just call the bitcoin headquarters and ask them to do a password recovery with you?
- [145:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, help me. My son keeps saying, hey, I saw this guy on YouTube that can do it. I said, yeah, I'm not giving this wallet to some guy on YouTube because I'll never see the. It's too much money. He's never going to. He's going to say, oh, yeah, I couldn't get in. Here's your wallet back. Oh, it's empty. What happened? All right, anyway. Ah, be very careful on X. If you live in Stuttgart or anywhere in Germany. An economist, Thomas Veerhouse, has been fined €16,000 for being sarcastic on X. Oh, great. Okay. He's being. He was being Prosecuted under section 185 of the German Criminal Code for three separate ex posts, or as you call them, shits that government officials and journalists deemed insulting. The total fine penalty from the dusseldorf district court, August 12. €16,000. The first incident, June 2023. The Vice President of the Bundestag and a leading figure in the Green Party had issued an alarmist post about climate change. Veerhaus said, there is indeed an extreme drought, namely in Catherine Goring Eckhart's head. Okay. But apparently the vice president of the Bundestag was not the person who sued. A student filled out a criminal complaint form on her behalf, sent it to her, she signed and forwarded it to the police. The second charge came after Veerhaus discovered the identity of the same doctoral student and referred to him online as a little snitch. Oh, no, no, no.
- [147:33]
Cory Doctorow
9, 9, 9, 9.
- [147:38]
Leo Laporte
The student filed a personal complaint, claimed an insult, and the court held, yeah, yeah, yeah. Third post got him in further legal trouble when he criticized a journalist for ard the fascist party in Germany.
- [147:52]
Cory Doctorow
Afd.
- [147:53]
Leo Laporte
Oh, oh, this is a different one. ARD is not afd. Sorry.
- [147:56]
Cory Doctorow
It's a newspaper.
- [147:57]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's a newspaper. Moritz Roedel had defended the economic Minister's decision to skip a Bundestag debate on Germany's heating law. Firhaus responded with a post calling Rudl a nincompoop. Is that a German word? You still have a lot to learn in order not to be constantly fooled. That's all he said. €16,000. Now, I think R Street should get on this case. Oh, I guess you don't care what, what happens in Germany, right?
- [148:30]
Shoshana Weissman
No, we, we've been looking at, at a lot of stuff in Europe. I mean, the UK and Germany in particular have been really, really bad with this stuff. Part of it is like we don't have like, influence with, with government there. But it's something that I want to take into account to remind people, like how laws will be abused.
- [148:50]
Leo Laporte
Well, also, they don't have a first amendment right. I mean, there's no.
- [148:53]
Shoshana Weissman
Yeah, but they, I thought they had stronger free speech protections than this. Like, I really, really, from my understanding, I thought it was stronger than this, but I guess not.
- [149:02]
Leo Laporte
I guess not.
- [149:03]
Shoshana Weissman
It's. It's really atrocious to see this stuff happening. I don't know, it's. It's really horrible. But I try to, to the best of my abilities, use this to remind people in the US don't do stupid crap like this and create like terrible regimes where you can be penalized for free speech. Because this is what's going to happen here, you know.
- [149:21]
Leo Laporte
What is German for nincompoop? Did you do do this with Nano Banana Loop?
- [149:27]
Lou Mareska
I did, yes.
- [149:30]
Leo Laporte
So what's the process? Is it a text prompt on top of a real picture? What is it?
- [149:35]
Lou Mareska
It is. You just uploaded a real picture and then put a text prompt on there. And what was the problem is it doesn't regulate right now on copyright. So you. I mean, I don't know how they got past all this, but that's your picture.
- [149:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. Usually you can't do that. Huh. Could you? It's not.
- [149:50]
Lou Mareska
If you go. If you dig into the pixels too, it's. It's identical to my image. So they didn't do anything to it.
- [149:56]
Leo Laporte
Was your picture in. Did you provide your picture to them?
- [149:59]
Lou Mareska
I did, yep.
- [150:00]
Leo Laporte
Okay, so the desktop background is the.
- [150:04]
Lou Mareska
Thing that is all generated.
- [150:05]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's all generated. It's still pretty good. I like it. I like the bokeh.
- [150:11]
Lou Mareska
Yeah, it did a nice Job.
- [150:12]
Leo Laporte
Did you tell it to do bokeh or not?
- [150:13]
Lou Mareska
I did. I told it to do that.
- [150:15]
Leo Laporte
Nice. It's impressive.
- [150:18]
Lou Mareska
It's fast too, I think, obviously.
- [150:20]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you do that.
- [150:21]
Lou Mareska
Instant OpenAI is like, takes a couple seconds, you know, a lot of them take a long time.
- [150:27]
Leo Laporte
Is it in Gemini? Do you just go to. Do I just go to Gemini?
- [150:30]
Lou Mareska
Yeah, they offer you a certain amount even if you don't have Gemini Pro. But the 2.5 model will do it.
- [150:36]
Leo Laporte
I think. I think I ran out of credits. Leo@twit TV account has pro, just FYI. How do you know that? Well, because. Have you been using my LEO at Twitter tv? No, no, no. Well, I think the whole twit. Oh, we all have Pro. Yeah. Do we buy Pro for everybody? I also bought Pro for my personal account, so maybe now I'm overdoing the pro. I have too much Pro. So. Okay, try. It says try image editing with our best image model, Nano Banana. And it gives you the little instruction here, upload an image and describe your edits. Okay, that's cool. And it's using Flash. But you, you could, could you do it with Pro as well or no?
- [151:22]
Lou Mareska
Yeah, I think it just routes it to, to the model regardless of which one you choose.
- [151:25]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine.
- [151:27]
Cory Doctorow
From Flash.
- [151:28]
Leo Laporte
Okay, well, I've got a show to do. Unlike all of you, I gotta find other things to talk about. Google has locked down Android a little bit. One of the things that was, you know, the Google had a real advantage I think over Apple even though they still, still have been attacked by Epic and others is that you could at least sideload third party apps. Google would warn you like crazy and all that stuff. Well, they've started to lock it down now. They say we'll have to identify, verify your identity. Even if you're distributing an app outside the Play Store, you got to submit your information to an Android developer console. I guess it makes sense from a security point of view. On the other hand, one of the things that's cool about side loading is you can install anything and it's on you to be. To keep, you know, make sure it's secure. And so this is now more gatekeeping from Google if you ask me. What do you think, Lou?
- [152:31]
Lou Mareska
Yeah, I think sideloading is really only to me good for developers who want to do testing, you know, obviously.
- [152:38]
Leo Laporte
Well, there's the F Droid store. There are all these third party stores. Stores. Yeah.
- [152:41]
Lou Mareska
But you can't. The problem. I, I have a problem with you just can't trust them. I think that's the biggest thing.
- [152:45]
Leo Laporte
Obviously Google feels like that's part of the problem. Right? Yeah, yeah, actually, go ahead.
- [152:52]
Lou Mareska
No, I was gonna say even back in the day, you know, technology wise, you know, most stores, even like Windows Store, they require you to, to sign your applications by, you know, a glorified signing provider. You know, so they want to make sure that obviously everything's safe. And I think like you said, these third party companies in sight loading, you just can't, you can't verify it.
- [153:11]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [153:12]
Cory Doctorow
So I mean I, I, I think that it's true that Google goes to great lengths to keep its users safe from people who aren't Google, but Google will not keep safe from Google. And Google has done things like surveilled its users and lied to its users and defrauded its advertisers and defrauded its publishers. And I also think that the important thing to note is that the reason Google is doing this is because a court found them guilty of having an illegal monopoly and ordered them to open up the App Store in the Epic case. And this is not even malicious compliance with that court order. This is malicious non compliance, very unlikely to survive the core challenge that's inevitably going to come as a result of this. Because they were not ordered to open up the App Store but make developers apply for permission, they were ordered to open up the App Store. And you know, I do think we have mechanisms for addressing software vendors who sell malicious or substandard products, which is things like liability. But the idea that we just trust the benevolent dictator to be benevolent, you know, we are living at the tail end of a 20 year experiment in that and it failed. And once again, if you want Google to be very good at curating its store and making sure that no one ever sideloads an app app, then just make Google really good at it. And the way to make Google really good at it is to make sure that people have a choice so that they have to be better than the alternative. I, I just don't buy that a computer that I own, Google should be in charge of what I install on it. And moreover, given that I bought the computer on the condition that I be able to choose what I install, the idea that Google is going to do an after the fact software update that takes away a feature I paid for, I think rises to the level of fraud. Odd. But finally, Google is not validating apps. Google is validating developers. And so Google is making no guarantees about the promise of the quality of an app. Right. There are people who sell on eBay for five years, small items, and then they. And they have five star ratings and 100 good ratings. And then they list 25 laptops that don't exist, get $1,000 for each of them, and disappear. The fact that Google knows a developer is good because they posted some good ideas apps tells you nothing about whether the next app that developer posts is going to be any good. So I don't think they're making a safety guarantee either.
- [155:32]
Leo Laporte
Right. Well, what. Why are they doing it then?
- [155:35]
Cory Doctorow
They're doing it to maliciously non comply with a court order in the antitrust case they lost to Epic.
- [155:43]
Leo Laporte
We are still waiting for Judge Mehta to decide what he's going to do to Google. He should. It should be soon. It was supposed to be a while ago. I think it was supposed to be.
- [155:51]
Cory Doctorow
By the end of August.
- [155:52]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, so.
- [155:53]
Cory Doctorow
So he's got, he's got five hours.
- [155:58]
Leo Laporte
Among the things he can choose, of course. Forcing them to divest Chrome.
- [156:04]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, I like, I hope they get a data deletion order. I hope they're ordered to delete user data.
- [156:09]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that would be interesting.
- [156:11]
Cory Doctorow
But I, it might happen in the other case. They lost two federal. They've lost two government cases and one private case. So that might happen in one of those cases.
- [156:19]
Leo Laporte
One of the other things the Department of Justice is asking for is for Google to open up its algorithm, which Google says that's just. That's not going to end well. I think he's. They're probably right. I don't know.
- [156:33]
Cory Doctorow
I mean, we, we say security through obscurity is everywhere else.
- [156:36]
Leo Laporte
That's true.
- [156:37]
Cory Doctorow
Except in the search, where it's like, well, if I told you how the search worked, it wouldn't. You'd figure out how to spam it. So when. No one has ever said that about cryptography, which defends things that are a lot more important than search.
- [156:48]
Leo Laporte
Although, I mean, one of the big fights Google's constantly making is against spammy sites and spammy links. People trying to game the algorithm.
- [156:56]
Cory Doctorow
Sure. But cryptographers have to contend with governments trying to break cryptography. I mean, it's. Are you saying that spammers are a harder adversary to cope with than should be? Therefore our security measures should be more forgiving. You know, there are a lot more.
- [157:12]
Leo Laporte
Of them than there are governments. There are a lot.
- [157:15]
Cory Doctorow
There are a lot more people trying to crack crypto than there are people trying to game.
- [157:18]
Leo Laporte
Interesting.
- [157:19]
Cory Doctorow
Yeah.
- [157:20]
Leo Laporte
Okay. All right. One last ad, and I have actually a host of stories and an invite for everybody from thanks to Corey. But first a word from Smarty. Now that's a good name. Smarty is the they are our sponsor for this segment. They are the premier provider of high performance cloud based address data tools trusted by leading organizations in pretty much every industry. Insurance, real estate, finance, healthcare, e commerce of course technology in general. With more than 20 million non this is an interesting stat. I had a great conversation with these guys. There are in the United states more than 20 million non postal service addresses. How do you deliver something to them? Smarty Smarty's database expands beyond rural limitations from users US and international address validation to autocomplete rooftop geocoding property data enrichment Smarty offers the most advanced scalable solutions on the market. Backed by proprietary technology and data, Smarty delivers unmatched accuracy, consistency and insight. Every property has 350More than 350Data points associated rooftop level precision Very handy if you got enough where the door is that you're going to deliver that package to real time processing speeds exceeding 25,000 addresses per second, they can handle your traffic. Smarty enables better decisions no matter the size and complexity of your business. And just look at the Smarty website smarty.com twit you'll see how many companies are relying on Smarty. I'll give you an example. Fabletics they wanted to go international, but they had a problem with conversion rates internationally. They've drastically increased conversion rates for new customers, especially overseas, thanks to Smarty. Built for developers and engineered for scalability, Smarty's APIs are reliable, they're lightning fast, they're easy to integrate and they're supported by expert documentation and real time technical support. I'll give you another example. Speedway Motors Their E Commerce conversion rates going downhill despite increased traffic to their website. The Director of Digital Product and Technology says quote we use Smartie to identify an address as a commercial address conversion rates very strong now. Everything was well set up on the Smartie side. I've really enjoyed working with the service. Developers love Smartie. It's a great API. It's fast, it's easy to implement. Smarty is a 2025 award winner across many G2 categories. Best results, Best Usability, Users Most likely to Recommend and High performer for small business. And of course Smarty is also USPS cast and SOC 2 certified and HIPAA compliant. If your organization is seeking the most accurate, reliable and future ready address data suite, Smartie is the way to go. Try it yourself. Get 1000 free lookups when you sign up for their 42 day free trial. Visit smarty.com TWIT to learn more. That's smart. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. South Korea has banned cell phones in all middle and elementary school classrooms. We just, in Petaluma, the Petaluma school district just decided to do that. All the students have a little bag. They lock their phone into the beginning of the day and then they unlock, unlock it as they leave. This is spreading across the nation. The scourge of cell phones finally eliminated from our nation's classrooms. You're smiling, Corey.
- [161:07]
Cory Doctorow
I don't know. I mean, I'm of two minds about it. I have colleagues. My friend, my colleague Hayley Tsukiyama has worked a lot on this. My impression reading Taylor Lorenz on the subject is that the research on phones in classrooms and their impact on it is not great because it's trying to disentangle it from a lot of other stuff that's going on at the same time. And the outcomes when the phones leave the classroom have not been well validated.
- [161:36]
Leo Laporte
I can understand though, you don't want kids playing, you know, flappy bird during Economics 100.
- [161:43]
Cory Doctorow
And I, I teach a lot. I, I'm a new visiting professor at Cornell and I'm going out there.
- [161:49]
Leo Laporte
Congratulations.
- [161:50]
Cory Doctorow
For 10 days to go and teach a bunch of classes. And I've taught classes and there's kids who are, you know, doing, playing on their phones and it's no fun. I've also taught classes where they're just kids who are asleep and it's no fun.
- [162:04]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [162:04]
Cory Doctorow
I don't think you have to be.
- [162:05]
Leo Laporte
On a phone sleep. Absolutely. Yeah.
- [162:08]
Cory Doctorow
My, my concern about the phone stuff is that it's not that, it's not that teachers have it too easy and we shouldn't make it easier for them to control their classrooms. It's that the means by which you control phones in school involves a lot of invasive fallout. And it also is one of those things where you swallow a spider to catch a fly. Right. Like there is such a thing as a burner phone. And the fact that the kid handed you a phone and let you lock it up doesn't mean that they don't continue to have a phone. And I worry that this just escalates into a bunch of stuff that is to one side of blocking kids from having phones, like searching kids and searching their bats. Bags.
- [162:51]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [162:52]
Cory Doctorow
And I worry that bag search and kid search is also a pretext for a bag search and kids search of whoever the principal doesn't like, or the school authorities don't like, and signaling them out for, for more searches. I know that wherever we do create a greater latitude for disciplinary action, it tends to be selectively enforced and it tends to victimize the people who are already struggling. So I don't know. I, I mean, my parents, parents are both career educators. My brother's an educator. I do a lot of guest lecturing. It's not an easy job. I just, I, I do. I, I would not be surprised if in a year we heard a bunch of stories about phones getting hacked, phones getting stolen, kids being searched because they're carrying burner phones, blah, blah, blah, blah. A bunch of stuff that is a fairly foreseeable outcome. And this is a theme, we've talked about this during this, this show, right, that people say if you do X, people will do Y and you'll have to do Z, and Z is going to be something you don't want to do. And they're like, no, I'm sure it'll be fine. And then a year later we're like, yeah, Z happened. And they're like, who could have foreseen it, lou?
- [163:55]
Leo Laporte
And your 16 year old has a cell, I bet. Of course, right?
- [163:59]
Lou Mareska
Yeah, he has a cell. But interesting about the state of Rhode island is they're restricting all devices, all personal devices, not just cell phones. So this includes AirPods, you name it. They're not allowed to have them other than the Chromebooks that they're sanctioned.
- [164:11]
Leo Laporte
Each public school shall have a policy regarding the use of personal electronic devices on school grounds to reduce distractions, maintain environments focused on learning, and protect the privacy and safety of students and staff. I think one of the, one of the things that sometimes is a problem is the fact that the kids have these phones and can record video. But sometimes that's a, that's something that can save a kid from an abuse, abusive teacher or abusive classmates. How do you feel about your kid not being able to bring in their AirPods?
- [164:44]
Lou Mareska
You know, I mean, that's not a big deal. But I think there's, you know, the.
- [164:48]
Leo Laporte
Cell phone, mobile phone, tablet, smartwatch. You can't even wear a smart watch.
- [164:53]
Lou Mareska
I mean, they're all worried about obviously cheating and other things as well. So not just distraction, but, you know, the channel cheating. But they also have very strange policies around AI use as well, which is going weird. You know, it's starting to be weird. Like for instance, you're not allowed to use AI on helping you with math homework or something like that. So I think there's just this kind of like, push away from technology because they're worried about the outcomes of them.
- [165:16]
Leo Laporte
You know, Shoshana, this seems to be a trend in general. I know this is something our street's not fond of, which is government, more and more seems to be intruding into our personal lives and in particular in a kind of a moralistic way. Like, I often feel like this is kind of abrogating the right of the parent to control their kids. I don't. Does government need to get involved in this?
- [165:44]
Shoshana Weissman
Yeah. That's kind of how I feel too, where it's like, if a school makes a decision, I'm like, okay. But even there, when I was 13, I started getting really sick. And now, now I'm many years later. Stuff worked out, but at the time, the school didn't believe me. A lot of doctors didn't believe me. And the school wouldn't let me call my mom to have her pick me up because I was feeling really, really sick that day.
- [166:09]
Leo Laporte
They thought you were a shirker.
- [166:11]
Shoshana Weissman
Yeah. And then I ended up calling her on my cell phone and I was able to do that and it made a difference. And I know it's a one off, but like, they were doing that to a girl who had a tumor. Like she had an X ray, X ray or whatever test it was, and it showed a tumor. And the school psychologist had told her, no, you don't have that. That's not why you're like this, or something like that. So schools do have, you know, abusive histories in certain cases. And I worry for the kids who are on the margins there. Plus, the further stuff like that Corey's talking about the, okay, are we going to accept this? But what about the next steps? What about the kids who won't listen and stuff like that. Plus, you know, parenting has to be a thing. Like, we, we need to make sure that, like, kids behave in classrooms. And my dad was a high school teacher. He's retired now, and he struggled with a lot. But like, I'm. I just were like, this is probably the thing I dislike the least out of everything, but I still have some real functional concerns with how this works and other negative fallout from it.
- [167:12]
Leo Laporte
At least the Rhode island law says that school administrators, teachers may not search the devices. They can't look at what's in the.
- [167:20]
Shoshana Weissman
Context, but there's never a guarantee. It's like, oh, okay, sure, that's against the law.
- [167:24]
Leo Laporte
Teach, what are you doing?
- [167:27]
Shoshana Weissman
Yeah, they can just say they didn't and oh, I saw over their shoulder that, you know.
- [167:31]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [167:32]
Cory Doctorow
And it also, it's going to push kids to do stuff on their school issued laptops.
- [167:37]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [167:37]
Cory Doctorow
Which is going to increase the amount of lockdown and surveillance on those school laptops because kids do, I mean, my old editor for Information Week, Mitch Wagner, Wagner tells the story about how one day, like it was a, you know, a magazine for CIOs and one day this old blog post he wrote about, you know, a Cisco firmware update, suddenly the comments section comes alive and it's two eighth graders, you know, talking about a classmate and you know, their school firewall hadn't blocked forums on random blog sites and so they found ancient blog posts to use as messages.
- [168:09]
Leo Laporte
Of course they're going to do that. Yeah.
- [168:11]
Cory Doctorow
And I just worry about, worry that this, you know, we've already seen awful degrees of surveillance and control on school issued devices. And again, that's disproportionately directed at kids of color and queer kids. And you know, I just feel like any excuse to spy on kids more, especially in the age of AI. I bet there's already some grifters just rubbing his forelegs together and saying, oh goody, goody, goody. I'm going to sell a lot of spyware to schools that'll give you a score about how wicked your kids private messaging is and tell you which kids to put on a watch list. Because you know, now that they can't do their private messaging on a private device, it's all going to be on their school device. And we're going to have, we're going to be able to gain insights and give you a dashboard of risk factors in your school. I just, you know, if we had an environment in which the devices schools issued to kids, kids were oriented around a kind of respect for those kids and a proportionality of the degree of surveillance and control exerted, I'd be a lot less worried about this. But I do think this is corralling kids into an already very abusive set of devices.
- [169:22]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So the EFF Awards are coming up. We want to support eff. You've probably heard enough on this show to realize how important the Electronic Frontier foundation is. Corey, you still do some work for them?
- [169:34]
Cory Doctorow
Yes, I am still a halftime contractor and a staff activist or an activist rather at EFF. I've been there for 24 years now, more than half my working life, nearly half my whole life. And yeah, we, the EFF Awards, we recognize people every year. I'm very excited this year that we're recognizing the software Freedom Law center in India who are litigators who litigate to enforce free software licenses licenses. Free software licenses are only as good as someone's willingness to sue to enforce them. And they've done really important work in India and making sure that when free code is integrated into commercial products or government products that the new source code is also released. But we have three honorees this year. The ceremonies are always very, very good. I have to miss it this year I'm going to be at Cornell. But on September the tenth we'll be having them in San Francisco. You can live stream them for free. If you're an EFF member, there's a reduced fee at the door or you can join EFF and get in at the reduced fee or come in for the whole fee and join and get a refund for part of your door fee. So please consider joining us in San francisco.
- [170:42]
Leo Laporte
Very nice. Eff.org and the EFF Awards are September 10th. We'll report on the winners. That's what we will do.
- [170:52]
Cory Doctorow
Those are the. The winners. Those are the winners.
- [170:53]
Leo Laporte
It's not anyone.
- [170:54]
Cory Doctorow
They are the winners. We have three.
- [170:56]
Leo Laporte
I'm reporting on them. The Just Futures Law, Ari Meyer and the Software Freedom Law center in India. All right, nice. Congratulations to all three. That's great. Thank you. Corey Doctorow, everybody. Get the. Get the book and sh. Ification. Sign up for the audio version of it. And shidificate. Here it is.
- [171:18]
Cory Doctorow
There it is.
- [171:19]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it's got a little poop emoji right on the front there. You'll easy to find. I love it. Go to Kickstarter or to go to disinfitification.org Two T's. Actually three T's, but three in total. Two in total. If I were an AI I would know exactly how many. No, I wouldn't. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Congratulations on the Cornell thing. That's great. Good luck on your 28 city tour. Hold on. Holy camoly.
- [171:48]
Cory Doctorow
Yes.
- [171:49]
Leo Laporte
Hope you survive it and come back soon. We always love seeing you.
- [171:54]
Cory Doctorow
I love being on it.
- [171:55]
Leo Laporte
Thank you for being here. We really appreciate it. Lou and Shoshana, same to you. Shoshana Weissman, rstreet.org She writes great stuff there. It's always a pleasure for you and your marmot to join us. We always are happy to see you. Head of Digital Media@rstreet.org thank you, Shashan.
- [172:14]
Shoshana Weissman
Thank you.
- [172:14]
Leo Laporte
It's great to have have you. And Lou Mareska, we call him Silent Lou these days. I feel terrible, which is funny.
- [172:22]
Lou Mareska
They don't call me that at home.
- [172:23]
Cory Doctorow
For sure.
- [172:23]
Leo Laporte
Not at home, no, no. But I kept trying to find a story for you, but I wasn't doing a very good job. I apologize. It's great to have you keep the Nano Banana going and more importantly, keep the Python and the AI in the spreadsheets because Excel and Python, that's a. That's a match made in heaven.
- [172:47]
Lou Mareska
AI and Excel in general is amazing. Absolutely. We're shipping the co pilot function coming soon, so check that out.
- [172:53]
Leo Laporte
Oh, good. That's soon. Okay. Yeah. Thank you, Lou. Great to see you again. Thanks to all of you for joining us. A special thanks to our Club Twit members who make this possible. If you're in the club, don't forget tomorrow, 5:30pm I know it's Labor Day, but we're working. Jeff, Paris and I will interview Karen Howe about her new book, the Empire of AI. That'll be for a later show, but you can watch live in the club. Club Twit Discord is a great place to hang. We encourage you to join us in the Discord if you're a club member. And if you're not, we encourage you to go to Twitt TV Club Twit and join get ad free versions of all the shows, special shows we don't put anywhere else. We now do all the key keynote coverage in the club. In fact, we've got the Connect Microsoft, Sorry, Meta Connect keynote coming up in a week from Wednesday. Be right after Intelligent Machines. But you can't watch it unless you're in the club. So TWiT TV Club TWiT. We do stream TWiT every Sunday, 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. Eight different ways. Of course, in the Club Twit discord, that's way one. But there's also YouTube open to all. Same with Twitch, TikTok, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik everywhere. You can watch us live, but you don't have to watch us live. You can get a copy of the show, audio or video at Twit TV. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. And of course, the best way to get any of our shows is to subscribe in your favorite podcast client. Yes, we're rss. We believe in open standards. So subscribe and get the show automatically every Sunday just in time for your Monday morning commute. 20 years we've been doing this. Here's to 20 more. And as I have said for the last 20 years, thanks for joining us. We'll see you next week. Another twit is in the can. Bye. Bye.
- [174:41]
Cory Doctorow
Amazing.
- [174:44]
Leo Laporte
Doing the twit, doing the twit, all right. Doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit, all right. This episode is brought to you by Coda. Man, I love seeing the team come together, make this show happen. But I don't love trying to keep track of all the information and data and projects across dozens of platforms, products and tools. That's why I love Coda. It's an all in one collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams worldwide get on the same page. Offering the flexibility of dynamic docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teamwork and quicker creativity. And their turnkey AI solution. The intelligence of Coda Brain is a game changer. Powered by Grammarly, Coda is entering a new phase of innovation and expansion, aiming to redefine productivity for the AI era. So whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos or an enterprise organization looking for better alignment, Coda matches your work. It connects to hundreds of your favorite tools including Salesforce, Jira, Asana and Figma. Head over to Coda IO Twit right now and get six months of the team plan for startups free. That's C O D a IO Twit and get six months of the team plan for free. Coda IO Twit.