Leo Laporte (2:20)

Okay. He's a reporter at the Register. Don't pay any attention to his accent. He is.

Ian Thompson (2:26)

I still say petrol instead of gas. I'm not. I haven't gotten quite that Bad yet.

Leo Laporte (2:30)

Oh, and I like what's happening to the blur is for some reason. Do you see that in the gap between your head and the headphones? We're seeing what's behind you.

Ian Thompson (2:41)

Oh, really? Oh, how marvelous.

Leo Laporte (2:44)

Okay, so I'll leave that to people to deduce what you're reading. That's hysterical. Well, thank you, Zoom. Thank you. Also here now, he's actually from France. He's in France right now. In fact, he's going to be going down in Nice to compete in the Street Fighter competition. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you. What's your. What's your Street Fighter handle, Patrick? Baja.

Patrick Beja (3:04)

Oh, it's. It's not Patrick. I'm not Patrick everywhere. If you want to find me, I'm.

Leo Laporte (3:08)

Not totally confusing it.

Patrick Beja (3:11)

Well, you know, Patrick was taken on Twitter like right. 15 years ago, was it?

Leo Laporte (3:15)

Instead of being the real Patrick. You're not Patrick.

Patrick Beja (3:19)

Yeah. And no one can ever forget it. Like, not Patrick is etched into your brain the first time you hear it.

Leo Laporte (3:27)

It's great to have you, Patrick. Beja. It's staying up late for us. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Patrick Beja (3:32)

My pleasure.

Leo Laporte (3:32)

We'll try to get this done before three in the morning. And from Canada, she's up there in Montreal, it's Georgia Dow. Hello, Georgia.

Patrick Beja (3:41)

Good to see you.

Georgia Dow (3:42)

Hello.

Leo Laporte (3:44)

It's been a long time. YouTube.com georgiadao Last time you were here, what were we. What were you talking about? You were doing. Because you do the a therapist reacts videos and things like that.

Georgia Dow (3:58)

I don't know what show I was doing.

Leo Laporte (4:00)

Like, maybe because you're always doing the latest thing. Now you're doing.

Georgia Dow (4:04)

Now I'm doing. I did Peacemaker was the last one.

Leo Laporte (4:06)

Peacemaker.

Georgia Dow (4:07)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (4:08)

Strong or broken? I love it. Yeah, I love it. And she always. What I love about Georgia, she has many costumes to go along usually.

Georgia Dow (4:19)

Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (4:20)

This is. This is. This is going the extra mile. Well done. Bravo.

Georgia Dow (4:25)

It's just a reason for me to dress up. Let's just be honest.

Leo Laporte (4:28)

Oh, let's be. This is the real reason you have a YouTube channel.

Ian Thompson (4:32)

Exactly.

Leo Laporte (4:33)

I love it. It's great to see you, Georgia. Thank you.

Georgia Dow (4:35)

Just fun.

Leo Laporte (4:36)

Thank you for joining us. So we've got Canada, England and France in the house. That's nice. We'll get a nice international perspective on the news. The hot story this week is the number one app on the iPhone App Store, Sora 2. Now, a couple of weeks ago, I think OpenAI announced their new video generation platform. It competes with VO3 from Google. Both of which are able to create video with audio from a text prompt. But I think OpenAI has upped the ante here because they have released a tick, basically. AI TikTok. That's what they're calling it, with these. With these videos. And it's somewhat addictive, even though. And I don't know how it got to be number one. You have to have an invite to do it. Ijustine literally has posted about 100 videos every. Every few minutes with a pig. One of the things that you'd have. It happens when you. When you sign up for this. And I was able to get an invite. Thank you, Anthony Nielsen, is you. You create what they call your cameo, which is your image of yourself. You pose for the camera, you recite three random numbers, which I think is their scheme to keep you from digitizing, you know, other people besides yourself because the numbers are random. So you have to do it live. And then you're able to create videos like this. The latest advance in portable telephone. The entire transmitter and receiver are contained in this single case. And it weighs a shade under five. I don't know. I don't know where the. I don't know where the other audio is coming from, but it's leaking through. I think that's pretty good. It literally takes 10 seconds to create this cameo. And I can see why people are going crazy. Invites are being traded on Reddit and Discord and people are getting in. When you get in, you get your own invites. I think I have four. Don't ask me for them because I'm going to give them to. Mike is in here. Anthony Nielsen. I did a little video of me and Anthony doing a tick tock dance, but almost immediately people started creating videos from copyright material. There's. There was quite a bit of it. So almost immediately OpenAI had to back down and say, oh, we're going to put some guardrails up because people are doing too much stuff. Now you can still do South Park. Here's a South park meets Jesus video. I. I have to. I have to figure out where my other tab is open. I've got another. There we go. I've got two Torah Tech SORA tabs open, I think. Actually, I don't. I don't know where it's coming from. That's all right. We don't really want to hear it. It is the AI Slop generator par excellence. What do you think?

Ian Thompson (7:39)

Well, I suspect they got a lot of calls from lawyers pretty soon after release.

Leo Laporte (7:43)

They SORA update number one. Sam Altman. Says we've been hearing, learning quickly how people are using Sora, taking feedback from users, rights holders and other interested groups. We're going to give rights holders more granular control of the generation of characters. Now, one of the things you can do after you make your cameo is you can say, only I can make videos of myself or only my friends or it's open to the public. And I thought, well, what I thought actually, defensively, better make it open to the public, because then I have plausible deniability no matter what videos are posted of me. Right?

Georgia Dow (8:20)

Oh, the smarts.

Leo Laporte (8:21)

It's Sora. I didn't do it.

Georgia Dow (8:24)

That's you.

Leo Laporte (8:25)

Whereas if I had held on tightly.

Georgia Dow (8:26)

You're looking like a criminal. I like it.

Leo Laporte (8:32)

So. And by the way, Sam says we're hearing from a lot of rights holders who are excited about this new kind of interactive fan fiction.

Patrick Beja (8:39)

How many of those are excited about being George Lucas?

Leo Laporte (8:43)

I'm just about women.

Georgia Dow (8:45)

I'm just saying I think that it's women being like, oh, I can't wait to see what people post of me.

Leo Laporte (8:51)

Well, Ijustine, to her credit, made hers public. And so there's a lot of stuff. People have been using my avatar in kind of fun ways. I'm. I'm somewhat flattered by it. There's some stuff that I find offensive. For instance, Martin Luther King is frequently. I have a dream that one day.

Patrick Beja (9:14)

Across this great nation, Chick Fil A will be open on Sundays.

Leo Laporte (9:17)

No line too long, no crazy. Now, I find that offensive, to be honest with you. But I guess the estate of Martin Luther King has not been consulted, and the use of that video, or maybe that video is public domain now. I don't know. So what do you all think of this? This is. This is really, in my mind, the launch of AI video.

Patrick Beja (9:42)

I think there are two. Two aspects to this. The first one is, as you've pointed out, the. The rights holder and the copyright issues, which are, you know, just like with everything AI related, very difficult to figure out. And I think that OpenAI is smart enough. You know, they have smart people. They realized when they launched this, they were like, this is going to be an S show. And the other thing is, of course, the fact that now between VO3 and a couple of others, and this one, AI gener. Generative AI video is. Has arrived. It's here. It's good enough.

Leo Laporte (10:20)

You cannot trust anything you see anymore. Right?

Patrick Beja (10:23)

And it's been the case for a while. But you browse Sora and everything looks somewhat believable. Everything.

Leo Laporte (10:33)

You still a little AI but only if you really look closely, right? You have to really be looking for it. And maybe I'm flattering myself that I.

Patrick Beja (10:42)

Can tell it's not quite exactly right, but it's good enough. Just like images were, I guess, a year ago, know, a year and a half, 18 months. And so, you know, that's. That's the world we live in now. It's. Things have arrived. It's. I don't know if it's good or bad, probably a bit of both and a lot of one. But yeah, that's. It's here. Video. Generative AI Video is believable. So that is going to change things.

Leo Laporte (11:12)

There's a group of people who I think are viscerally upset with AI generated content in general. Like, it's like, it's really upsetting to them, right? And those people, like, like, it's a witch. Burn it. They want. I mean, they want a silver cross, they want a silver bullet, they want a stake through its heart, which I understand. I understand completely. But it feels to me, it's. It's a. Georgia, you're a psychologist. It feels to me like a disgust reaction, like an involuntary reaction to AI.

Georgia Dow (11:45)

Well, I think that it goes into that feeling of uncanny valley of what can you believe, of people having, you know, all of these different artists and people that are usually that would create things and their jobs and what are they going to do it. It's such a quick shift, it's such a fast shift that our society hasn't really kind of, you know, gotten to the place where they can understand it and feel really comfortable with it. And so I think that it also kind of deflates that feeling of trust. And can you actually see what you want to see or just believe whatever you want to? I think that a lot of ways this will be the justification for I didn't do it. You can't believe it, right? What might be happening. And so I think that there's a lot of shifts of whenever a technology changes and our culture hasn't changed with it, a lot of people can have this adverse reaction. And for some of it, you can understand. And for some of it, it's just. Change is hard for people, right?

Patrick Beja (12:42)

I think in France, I don't know if it's exactly the same in the U.S. but in France, it's very much the artists and creators who are outraged, probably at least partially, rightfully so, and disillusioned and angry at Big Tech, which didn't ask for their consent in using all of that content to train their models. Whether or not they should have, I think is morally and legally still to be determined. But the reaction is very much that. And it's a general like, well, there you go. Big tech is screwing up everything again. It's burning the planet. Because obviously, you know people who post 100 videos. I don't. I have nothing against Ijustine, but when you said, oh, she posts one every 10 minutes, I'm like, how many trees did that burn?

Leo Laporte (13:40)

Well, that's the next question is how much is this costing? OpenAI. And it's got to be significant fortune.

Ian Thompson (13:47)

Sure.

Leo Laporte (13:48)

Yeah. I mean, somebody was saying before the show began. I can't remember who it was. Was it you, Benito, that. That he'd heard it was $5 a video.

Ian Thompson (13:56)

I've seen the. That's what I heard. Same figure.

Patrick Beja (13:59)

Yeah, that seems.

Leo Laporte (14:00)

That's my. Because I got to tell you, right now there's thousands of videos a second being generated. I mean, they have a lot of vc, but they. So the other thing that Sam talking about in this post after saying, sorry, rights holders, is we're going to have to somehow make money for video generation. People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences. We're going to try sharing some of this revenue with rights holders who wants, who want their characters generated by users. So they're going to try to figure out, first of all, there's no ads in it. So they've got to. Obviously there's going to be ads. Right. And then B, they've got to figure out some sort of micropayment system for rights holders. Hoping that. He says our hope is the new. This new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share. But of course, we want both to be valuable. I, I admire. I have to say, I admire Chat GPT's gumption.

Ian Thompson (14:57)

Well, right. The bank balance helps as well. I mean, there's a. There's kind of an Uber like, feel to this where, you know, it's like, we'll give it away free. Yeah, we'll build market share.

Leo Laporte (15:05)

We'll lose money for decades.

Ian Thompson (15:07)

Yeah. We'll lose money for years because there's always more coming in. And then once people are hooked, then we start charging for it.

Leo Laporte (15:13)

It's bold, is it not?

Patrick Beja (15:16)

They, they can't. I don't think they can charge significantly for it, but they can develop some kind of business model.

Leo Laporte (15:23)

There's going to be an ad. There's got to be an Ad model.

Patrick Beja (15:25)

Yeah, yeah. Ads or. But even ads. Like how go? Well, data maybe, but how much can they make with ads? I don't know, but it's. It feels like big tech in general. It's not just, you know, or whoever.

Leo Laporte (15:37)

The users and then worry about revenue later. Sorry, Georgia, what were you saying?

Georgia Dow (15:43)

And just all of the information that you're giving to them every single time and all of that that they can then use later for something else. I think that, you know, the, if you take a look at the privacy policies, like they're really scary. Like if you actually read them.

Leo Laporte (15:56)

Well, I have given them my image, haven't I now? Yeah, yep. But. But then I got out of that. I got me. And you have the right to bouncing on trampoline together, which is adorable by.

Georgia Dow (16:06)

The way, but you have the right to be forgotten because you're not in the eu.

Leo Laporte (16:14)

Yeah. By the way, this is not available in the eu, is it, Patrick?

Patrick Beja (16:18)

Well, no, but, but I think, you know, I'm not sure it's about anything.

Leo Laporte (16:24)

Legislation related, DMA or anything.

Patrick Beja (16:27)

Yeah, DMA or DSA maybe, but I don't think so. I think this is about controlling the amount of money they're burning.

Leo Laporte (16:34)

I understand creatives are hurt that their stuff's being taken, but what about creatives using this to create?

Patrick Beja (16:40)

I mean, here's a picture of a.

Leo Laporte (16:41)

Kit that comes alive. I mean, you could really make. This is. You can make movies with this. I mean, it's fascinating. I mean it's really powerful technology.

Patrick Beja (16:50)

I think what we're seeing now is a lot of experimentation, which is just kind of hokey. But there is already interesting stuff being done with AI. I don't know if you go on TikTok or Instagram or these platforms a lot, but there's a lot of AI. Not slop, but AI videos. Like Moses Live blog vlogging, Moses the influencer or Jesus. Exactly. And those are wild and it is entertaining, it's fun. There are aliens discussing their contempt for humanity in a like YouTube podcast format. Like it is, it is cute. And I think it's going to be open a lot of possibilities. The question is, what is being not taken away? But I certainly don't subscribe to the idea that, oh, this kills creativity. It takes the soul of creation away from humans. And you know, I think this is a little bit overblown. But a lot of those people who are so anti AI, I don't think they're the people who are considering this for the long term. People who are trying to negotiate rights and all of that. They know that you can't put the cat back into the bag now it's here and you have to deal with it and you have to defend your ground as much as you can. But I don't think the people who are like, oh, I've posted once a four panel comic that I tried when Chad GPT released one of their updates and I was like, I just prompted and it spit out this four panel comic. It was kind of okay.

Ian Thompson (18:38)

I got yelled at.

Leo Laporte (18:40)

Yeah. As I said, there are some people who are really viscerally offended by it and I want to respect that point of view. I think that those are people who are consider themselves humanists and consider this kind of machine generated imagery to be offensive and deeply offensive.

Patrick Beja (18:59)

There are so many issues, so many issues.

Leo Laporte (19:02)

Like there's the environmental issue, there's the environmental rights holders issues. Yeah. There's also the issue of slop itself. Here's a Fast Company article. We need to stop the slop of OpenAI Sora and Meta Vibes AI video apps before it's too late. We risk drowning in a sea of Vibes based garbage.

Ian Thompson (19:22)

Well, it's happening at work as well. I mean, I don't know if you saw the Stanford study on workslop.

Patrick Beja (19:26)

Yes, workslop.

Ian Thompson (19:27)

Yeah, exactly.

Patrick Beja (19:28)

Incredible study.

Ian Thompson (19:29)

It's just like the amount of stuff that you can. It's kind of like Microsoft in the days of word processing. It's good enough. But with this you've got entire swathes of business material being created by AI. And the study found in particular that I found interesting was if you were on the receiving end of this, you trust the other person so much less and you dislike them more. So I think the long term effects of that are going to be really interesting on corporate culture.

Patrick Beja (19:59)

Yeah, I think we're seeing this happen and the specifics of this shoddy work has always existed, but this pushes your.

Leo Laporte (20:09)

Shoddy work in the hands of everyone.

Patrick Beja (20:12)

Well, it pushes your workload because it looks good enough. Like it looks like it kind of makes sense. And the people who receive it have to work extra hard to figure out what the heck this is about. Sorry, I don't know how much we can what the heck this is about. And they have to spend a lot of, a lot more time and they don't want to go back to the person who sent it like asking what did you want to say in this thing? Like it's a really interesting study.

Leo Laporte (20:38)

What are the treasure. What are the psychological risks of this? Are There any is, is it, does it loosen our grip on reality?

Georgia Dow (20:46)

Well, it makes, it makes for us to be able to believe our own unconscious or conscious bias much more so because when you have a bias to whatever that might be, this makes it all is like truthiness, like it confirms.

Leo Laporte (21:00)

It confirms what you believe.

Georgia Dow (21:01)

So yeah, you can see a video and you, if you already are inclined to believe something, you can now dismiss whole swaths of arguments just by maybe this isn't true or I've seen this video that did X, Y and Z and because of that it blurs that line between what is real and what is fake so that we can just become even more in our own biases. And because of that we can then kind of just stay inside of our bubbles. And what unfortunately happens is that we become even more extreme the more that you're fed things. Even if it's a lie, even if it's a lie, you're just telling yourself you hear it enough times, it becomes true to you. Even if it's bold face, even if it's our feeling for confirmation, bias and cognitive dissonance can work together to make us even more ardent, even more fanatical into radical beliefs. And that especially when they're unfortunately with social medias, they're all trying to vie for our attention. And we've already found out that one of the strongest emotions that can keep us on. So if we're happy, we go outside and we do other stuff. If we're upset or angry, we stay there and we try to shout into the void or feed off of it. And so they know that they can use that to actually keep us there. And so unfortunately, even though like any tool can be used for good and ill, social media companies are vying for our attention and want us to keep us there. And so it already inclines us to feed us into these really negative headspaces, which can cause a lot of anger, depression and radicalized views, which can be really damaging.

Ian Thompson (22:40)

Absolutely. I mean it is remarkable in that we've moved in the space of 40 years from you got your information from like five or six television stations, maybe a dozen newspapers, the radio maybe, or just the local news. And now you can basically build an information bubble around yourself of just stuff that you want to read.

Leo Laporte (23:01)

That's scary. You could do that with social media in general already now it's just a lot more content.

Georgia Dow (23:08)

It's that we naturally do now there's certain personality types or if you're already media savvy or you're already like Taught how to be able to filter through and question things and know what should be questioned. But for a lot of times people are not given that already as a mindset. And so for that, for people that are already vulnerable populations or already angry and we're not good at processing information, we get spoon fed kind of crap. We just believe crap.

Leo Laporte (23:38)

Speaking of angry populations, there's now a whole industry of pundits, anti AI pundits. Financial Times just had a profile of Ed Zittran, Gary Marcus. There are people who are making good livings decrying this and yelling at it and saying it's ruining, you know, for a variety of reasons. All the reasons we just talked about. I just want to, I do want to point out on the other side, let's not. This is pretty amazing stuff, right? Does this in a way kind of prove the concept that there is something happening in AI? It's not, it's not snake oil, right? I mean, this is not.

Patrick Beja (24:18)

It's Amazing there, there's 100% a bubble because we don't know where the reality is going to settle on what these things can do, what they're good for. But the fact that there's a bubble doesn't mean it's pointless and useless. Like what? Just on the technology side, what it can do is incredible. It's unbelievable that you can do these things with a computer. But, you know, the reason these valuations are going so high is that the promise is very, very lofty and we don't know if we're going to get to AGI. I don't think that LLMs are going to get us there, but it doesn't matter. Even if everything stops today, even if progress stops today, there's still a lot of optimization that can be done. But what we can do with those things, with those tools is it's magic. It's unbelievable. So I do agree, Leo, that it's a very complicated technology, as most of those impactful technologies are and there's a lot of negative stuff about it. I don't want to discount that. But yeah, on the technology side, there's no doubt it's going to be useful to something. To what extent is the big question. And no one knows that. No one knows yet. So it's difficult to ascertain how good or how useful it's going to be.

Leo Laporte (25:43)

There is a clip from Friday of Jeff Bezos at the Italian Technology Summit that I thought was really good. I don't know, I probably shouldn't play it, but I will summarize it for you. He says there's two kinds of bubbles that we've seen in the past. There's industrial bubbles and there's financial bubbles. We have many examples of industrial bubbles. The, the dot com bust of, of 2000 or going back even farther, the, the bubble around railroads in the United States. Most of the early railroad companies went bankrupt. Yeah. But in both those cases of an industrial bubble, what you got was infrastructure. You got fiber.

Patrick Beja (26:27)

Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (26:27)

Of the dot com. You got the transcontinental railroad in the United States as a result of the railway bubble. And, and so there is a benefit in the long run to these financial bubbles. He said yes. And these industrial bubbles. He said, yes, indeed. Many of these companies will fail. They are not viable, but we will get some benefit. He can contrast that to a financial bubble like the 2008 financial crash in the United States, which nobody benefits from. It is, it is, it is a bubble that people get sucked into and then lose fortunes on. And I think that that's kind of reassuring. And I don't know if I still think Jeff Bezos is a smart guy, but a very good monopolist, but a smart guy. But I think, I think that that's a kind of a good description of what, what's happening. Oh, I, yeah, this is from.

Ian Thompson (27:18)

Yeah, I mean I spoke to an entrepreneur about this and I was, you know, we both agreed there is a bubble. You know, it's going to pop at some point.

Leo Laporte (27:25)

It's not necessarily a bad thing as well.

Ian Thompson (27:27)

He made the interesting point which was if you look, go back to the dot com bus, for example. Yes, a lot of people, a lot of companies went down. A lot of money got lost initially, but within five to six years the industry had grown way past anything that had exactly lost in the past.

Leo Laporte (27:42)

And now you can sell kitty litter online.

Ian Thompson (27:45)

Right?

Leo Laporte (27:46)

So.

Patrick Beja (27:46)

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Leo Laporte (27:47)

Yeah.

Patrick Beja (27:48)

I think it's, I think it's very clear that this is not the kind of bubble that you. That a lot of people think of when they think bubble, which is like tulips and NFPs. It's, it's the, the, A lot of people go back to the dot com bubble, but it's like gave us the Internet people.

Leo Laporte (28:06)

Right.

Patrick Beja (28:06)

It wasn't that bad. Okay.

Leo Laporte (28:08)

Yeah. All right. I want to take a break. I'm not going to make this an all AI show. I just wanted to talk a little bit about that because it's taken the world by storm right now.

Georgia Dow (28:18)

Wait till you tell them that we're actually all AI, all of this was fake.

Leo Laporte (28:23)

And now I'm going to take you to the real panel. We're just available in Canada. Georgia. I don't know if it is.

Georgia Dow (28:32)

I'm not really sure. I'm not really sure.

Leo Laporte (28:34)

Would you be tempted? I think it'd be great. I would love to have it.

Georgia Dow (28:36)

I would love to have fun with it. Like, the thing is that I would really enjoy getting to see what I could do with it and what I could create in that really cool, eerie feeling like I'm all into testing it out. But then it's like the, like, I would definitely not be wanting to, like, put out my, like, image for, like, anyone to be able to have or use.

Leo Laporte (28:54)

But then again, just remember, plausible deniability.

Georgia Dow (29:00)

I know, I know. When I start my life of crime, I'll be switching that.

Leo Laporte (29:04)

There's so much video. There's hundreds of thousands of hours of video of me, and there's quite a few hours of videos of you out there already.

Georgia Dow (29:12)

I know.

Leo Laporte (29:12)

Which can easily be manipulated. So better to embrace that.

Georgia Dow (29:16)

Exactly, exactly. Just jump into the storm, is what you're saying.

Leo Laporte (29:20)

Yes, of course. I'm old at the end of my career, so I can afford to say that you're young and still have a long way to go. Let's take a little break. We'll come back with more. Georgia, Dow is here. It's wonderful. I have all three of you. Ian Thompson, Patrick Beja. We're getting a little bit of an international perspective on the news this week. You might be amazed at the Italian company that's about to buy aol. We'll talk about that in just a little bit.

Ian Thompson (29:46)

Oh, bless.

Leo Laporte (29:48)

But first, a word from our sponsor, ZipRecruiter. We love ZipRecruiter. We use ZipRecruiter for hiring. You know, the holidays are just around the corner, I guess if you include Halloween. They're right here. Right? Businesses are hiring for seasonal roles. Yeah, this is when seasonal hiring starts. Everything from haunted corn maze workers and Thanksgiving caterers to lead elves and real bearded Santas to snowplow drivers. And I know in Montreal you need those snowplow drivers. This means that people with certain skills, certain experience, maybe even a special license are in high demand, which also means they're not easy to find. So whether you're hiring for one of those roles or any other role, the best way to find the perfect match for your role is on ZipRecruiter. And right now you can try it for free@ziprecruiter.com TWIT ZipRecruiter's matching technology works fast to find top talent, so you don't waste time or money. You can find out right away how many job seekers in your area are qualified for your role. With ZipRecruiter's advanced resume database, you can instantly unlock top candidates contact info. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And right now you can try it for free@ziprecruiter.com TWIT Again, that's ziprecruiter.com TWIT ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire. Back to the show we go. I was a little stunned. This is a Reuters exclusive. You ever hear of bending spoons? Yeah, they're, they're an Italian unicorn that has bought a lot of stuff apparently. According to Reuters, they're in advanced talks to buy AOL. The AOL's got, I know for, well, get this, for $1.4 billion.

Ian Thompson (31:56)

Ah, it's just mad. I mean AOL just, just shut down their dial in service. So I don't know quite exactly what they're expecting to get from this.

Leo Laporte (32:04)

So AOL's been through a lot, right? They were bought by Yahoo, which was then bought by Verizon, which then sold 90% of it to Apollo Ventures, which is a private equity fund. And of course the first thing a private equity fund does is strip away all the value and then hope to sell it on because they incur a lot of debt to buy this. I didn't realize this, but according to Reuters, AOL owns a lot of other companies like McAfee and LastPass and others. And I think that's because maybe Apollo, which owned those, bundled them into this thing. Benning Spoons is known for developing apps. Just shows you how valuable it is. No comment from Bening Spoons or Apollo. Reuters Sundays we have four different sources who are saying this is, this is going on. I just find this amazing. I, I had never heard of bending spoons until they acquired what was. It was something I used and I went, they just got sold. To who? It's a very strange name. I don't know if it's, it's based on Yuri Geller or, or what they, they have Evernote, they have Meetup, they have Streamyard and 300 million active users. But apparently if they get AOL, they'll get hundreds, millions more. Many people still use AOL?

Ian Thompson (33:34)

Yeah, I mean, I think it's the private equity play, which is basically you've got a corporate body made up of lots of different parts and over time you can spin out the most profitable ones and sell them off and get your money back that way. But an over billion dollar valuation seems incredibly high.

Leo Laporte (33:51)

$1.4 billion. Yeah. Well, all right. I guess there's still users out there for aol. I just, I saw, when I was researching this, I did see one article that said AOL use has jumped in the 25 to 54 age group. I thought it was all old people like me who 20. What 25 year old is using AOL?

Patrick Beja (34:17)

What happens if you go to aol.com like what is it now?

Leo Laporte (34:21)

It's like a, it's like a news site, right? It's like my, like, see, here it is. This is AOL.com. so, you know, these legacy sites often have just a lot of people still visiting them. Yahoo still has billions of monthly active.

Patrick Beja (34:37)

Users, I believe recognition data. Like what can they get?

Ian Thompson (34:42)

I think force of, force of habit, primarily. I mean, it's just like that's where I've always gone there. That's where I'm always going to go.

Leo Laporte (34:48)

That's what it is. Yeah. But that's why it surprises me that young people are turning to aol. Like maybe it's a nostalgia thing, I don't know. Or maybe they want to play Kino Safari. I, I don't know what it is.

Ian Thompson (35:00)

Maybe they want to understand what that film you've Got Mail was all about.

Leo Laporte (35:03)

You've Got Mail. Yeah, that's right. Talk about a film that does not age well.

Ian Thompson (35:08)

No.

Leo Laporte (35:11)

Nobody will know what that means. Maybe they will. Maybe bending spoons will bring it back. All right, well, I thought that was.

Ian Thompson (35:16)

It's aged about as well as Axl Rose, but yes.

Leo Laporte (35:19)

Oh my God. He is not aged well at all. No, I, I would be remiss if I did not mention. Oh, let me do this before I do that, one out of five Americans now gets their news from Tick Tock. Tick Tock, as you know, is, is about to be. I don't know what, how should we say this? Bifurcated. There's. Because there will be a new aol, or rather Tick Tock America app. Oracle and a bunch of venture partners will be primary owners of Tick Tock.

Patrick Beja (35:56)

Is it confirmed?

Leo Laporte (35:59)

Well, okay, that's a good question. Our president said it was.

Patrick Beja (36:03)

Yeah, well, you know he says a lot of things.

Leo Laporte (36:06)

That's a really good question. China has not confirmed. No.

Patrick Beja (36:09)

Biden's has said nothing. Xi Jinping or one of his underlings. Underlings have said nothing. Sounds.

Leo Laporte (36:17)

Do you think, you think it might not be. Larry Ellison will be the big winner. The founder of Oracle and his son David Ellison, who's going to acquire, you know, basically the right to propagandize young people. I know, it makes me, it makes me very nervous.

Ian Thompson (36:38)

Well, I mean I've seen reports that in fact, yeah, they get the right for editorial control. But who gets the money? That's the important thing, you know, is it's ByteDance originally still gets to keep most of the cash.

Leo Laporte (36:50)

Yes, as a matter of fact. Yeah, so that's a little strange. Here's the. The press release from the White House saving TikTok while protecting national security. But again, we have no confirmation of what the deal structure looks like. We were told that the ByteDance would license the algorithm to the US partners, which is odd.

Patrick Beja (37:16)

Well, no, I mean I think, I think that that could make sense. Honestly, the, the. To me the only concern here is that you're. If it had happened under any other administration, it would be. Okay, fine, whatever the concern. One of the concerns was how the Chinese government could direct the algorithm to influence the.

Leo Laporte (37:43)

So now it'll be our government directing the algorithm. Right, right.

Patrick Beja (37:47)

That's the problem.

Leo Laporte (37:49)

Bring it home, baby. Bring it home.

Patrick Beja (37:52)

It's everything you were worried about. If the Chinese government had influence on the algorithm. It is now. And you know, I'm sure some people would say, oh well, it would be the same with any government, but it wouldn't. And maybe we can talk about this.

Leo Laporte (38:07)

Yeah, well, I'm a little concerned because Ellison's son, David Ellison has already acquired Paramount, which means cnn, they're about. And cbs. By the way, they are also buying Barry Weiss's journal and she's going to be the editor in chief of cbs. She definitely has a right leaning bias. They're about to buy, or apparently interested in buying Warner Discovery, which would then, I mean basically they would have access to almost all the news delivery in the United States. I mean a huge amount of it.

Patrick Beja (38:45)

They have, they're linked to Skydance, they're linked to Annapurna. Like Larry Ellison, I think the Verge wrote, wrote an article on this. He's, he's getting into a lot of media and when you see the. You know, I didn't worry so much when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post.

Leo Laporte (39:11)

I think maybe you should have. Because he maybe seems to have slanted it considerably.

Patrick Beja (39:16)

Yeah, but you know, it was so like you could worry about it and think, okay, maybe some things will happen. Maybe some things like, I think now the model is what Elon Musk did with X kind of.

Leo Laporte (39:33)

Right.

Patrick Beja (39:33)

And it's not even subtle. It's the. Well, it's the Donald Trump model.

Leo Laporte (39:41)

And it feels right out of succession. They're building a media empire. Larry Ellison's 81, but his son David is young, runs Skydance. It's. It feels like. So they're going to have tick control of Tick Tock, control of cbs, control of Paramount control of Facebook.

Patrick Beja (40:01)

They have control, apparently YouTube.

Leo Laporte (40:05)

If there were, if there were an interest in, and I imagine there is, using those platforms to influence American opinion, they would have an incredibly powerful tool.

Ian Thompson (40:20)

Well, the FTC has also already said this week that they're thinking about relaxing the rules on me, on media ownership. Right now we've already got, what is it, four or five companies controlling about 90% of the media in the U.S. and that could shrink down even further. And then as you point out, that opens a real possibility of just like, okay, we've got all the media channels, we can say what we want.

Leo Laporte (40:43)

It's going to be very. It's going to be interesting, which works.

Georgia Dow (40:46)

Really effectively, especially if you find someone to scapegoat or something to make you angry about or something that makes people feel frightened. The fastest way that people will give up their rights, their feelings of fighting is if they feel like there is a greater threat.

Leo Laporte (41:01)

If they're scared.

Georgia Dow (41:02)

Yeah, yeah, it works effectively. It has a very strong, lasting power. And then everyone kind of settles into the new norm of what they're around. And we often want to be on the large majority of the team of whatever is the sway of public. It's just kind of that us and them psychology of we don't want to be in the smaller pool or the losing pool. And so then people will slowly, even those that might be a very differing opinion, their opinion will slowly sway. And so it can actually change the entire zeitgeist of a culture. And it really only takes like a generation and a bit to be able to do that.

Leo Laporte (41:43)

Yeah, well, just be aware. It's something that seems to be going on right now. It is why I make my pitch every show we do for independent media that is not controlled either by the federal government, through the FCC or by big corporations. Thank goodness we have a pretty vibrant culture of independent media through podcasting and YouTube that may be Our saving grace. Maybe not. I don't know.

Ian Thompson (42:13)

I will always remind you to my history teacher at school who taught me something very important, which has been part of my journalism career ever since. When you read or see or listen to anything, think about who is saying it, why they're saying it, and who paid for them to say it. And those three in conjunction can be a very good guide to how seriously you should take something.

Leo Laporte (42:34)

Yeah.

Georgia Dow (42:34)

Which is lovely if that was taught in schools today. But, yeah, we're not taught. We're more and more taught to just follow and do and be obedient. Like the entire school system is made to enforce compliance. More than free thinkers. If you're. You're lucky if you're in a school system that teaches you to think freely, to be able to be rebellious, to be able to say no. But often sitting in a classroom for eight hours listening to someone prattle on, depending on what they can say and what they can't say, that's now also being legislated, unfortunately, often does the opposite. Sorry, am I just the downer? I think that I'm.

Leo Laporte (43:13)

No, no, no, You're.

Georgia Dow (43:15)

I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte (43:16)

No, no, no, you're not. You're not. If you could turn your mic up a little bit, though, so you're a little bit low for us. So they're complaining. Pappy Cappy can't hear. I can't hear you. He says, Georgia. So we're gonna take a little break. I do want to talk about Apple removing some apps. Google did the same at the behest of the federal government, which didn't. Wasn't this a big deal when the Biden administration asked? Apparently. Asked. Actually, they denied that they asked, but were accused of being asked of taking down tweets. This. This seems like the same thing in the other direction. Anyway, we'll talk about that in just a little bit. Apple capitulating once again, if you ask me. But we'll ask you. That's what matters. We're also going to talk. Oh, I meant to talk about the TikTok deal. Well, we'll get to that. Apparently, it was J.D. vance's doing. And a federal agency that is not running under the shutdown. That could be bad news for all of us. All of that coming up in just a little bit. You're watching this Week in Tech with George Dow, who's not a downer. Cheers us up, you cheer us up. But you're. You're. You. You speak truth, and that's important. Ian Thompson, who is, of course The. The king of Snark from the register, which is the. The record of snark, I believe.

Ian Thompson (44:45)

And fully independent media as well.

Leo Laporte (44:47)

Yeah, exactly. So you're not owned by any. Any private equity company or anything like that?

Ian Thompson (44:53)

No, we're still owned by the founders.

Leo Laporte (44:55)

That's kind of amazing. I mean, I think you're one of the few.

Ian Thompson (44:59)

I'm 25 years old and we're not selling out yet.

Leo Laporte (45:01)

Good. Don't sell out. Don't sell out. And Patrick Beja, Always a pleasure to have him. NotPatrick.com. he runs a few independent podcasts himself.

Patrick Beja (45:11)

I do.

Leo Laporte (45:12)

How is it. What is the political climate in France like these days? A few years ago, we were talking about the. The. The yellow vests, right, that everybody was pulling out of their. Their car.

Patrick Beja (45:25)

Yeah. Well, so in a nutshell, the. It's too long to describe, but I.

Leo Laporte (45:33)

Will tell my friend. Sarkozy went to jail. I was so disappointed.

Patrick Beja (45:37)

Exactly.

Leo Laporte (45:37)

The only French president I've ever met.

Patrick Beja (45:40)

Did you beat him?

Leo Laporte (45:41)

Okay, yeah. Introduced us to him. We were at the Elyse palace, and, wow, Mr. Sarkozy, he's only yay high, but I had no idea that he would have a future in prison.

Patrick Beja (45:56)

He was. Yes, he was judged and condemned. He should do hard time in jail. He's a bit old, so maybe he won't go for basically not embezzling. How's it called? He got money from Gaddafi to run his campaign, apparently.

Leo Laporte (46:12)

What?

Patrick Beja (46:13)

He's been judged. What, guilty of? Yes, it's pretty crazy. But the. The crazier thing. You're talking about media, like, I actually voted for the guy back in the day. And regardless of your political opinions, the thing that is crazy is how much the media and his political camp is shooting the justice system in the head. And journalists, like, decredibilizing everyone because they don't want him to go to jail. And they're, like, saying that he didn't do it, that the judge. Judges are corrupt and, like. And they're destroying the credibility of the justice system and the journalists profession in this scandal, which is. I thought, like, they're the right wing who are supposed to be law and order. This is the law. This is what happened. You trust in the justice system. That's what you're supposed to do. Anyway, sorry, I don't.

Leo Laporte (47:14)

I'm glad it's not just us. That's all I'm saying. I just want to.

Ian Thompson (47:18)

I was going to say it did make me think about the current situation over here.

Leo Laporte (47:22)

We weren't alone in all of this.

Patrick Beja (47:24)

It'S not as bad, obviously, but my biggest concern is how traditional media is, how it's turning out to be. Now, it's owned in large part by a very wealthy person who is turning everything into controversial right wing issues.

Leo Laporte (47:42)

Everything.

Patrick Beja (47:44)

And I didn't.

Leo Laporte (47:45)

Money ruins it, doesn't it? Money just ruins everything. I swear.

Ian Thompson (47:48)

It's happened in the UK as well, unfortunately, with Brexit. And my apologies, Patrick, it was. If I could have voted, I would have voted against it. But, you know, it's one of those things.

Leo Laporte (47:58)

It has not worked out that well, I think.

Ian Thompson (48:01)

No, no, not at all.

Leo Laporte (48:03)

Yeah. All right, well, we've got two folks from the Commonwealth, one from the eu, and I'm just sitting here trying to figure out who I belong to, so.

Ian Thompson (48:10)

Oh, you rebellious colonial.

Leo Laporte (48:12)

I'm a colonial. I am. We take a break, come back with more. You're watching this Week in Tech. Our show today, brought to you by the Thinkst Canary. Love this thing. Thinkst canaries are, you know, in a word, honey pots that can be deployed in minutes. Now, normally, creating a honey pot is a real chore. In fact, I remember talking to Bill Cheswick, who wrote the very first honey pot, and he said how difficult and tricky it is and nobody should do this. Well, you don't have to anymore. It's an appliance that can impersonate almost anything. The mind's a synology. Nas. Some days it's a Windows server. I think the last thing I turned it into, and it's so easy, there's just a dropdown box was a SharePoint server from 2009, which seems like something the bad guy might look at and go, that looks interesting. I might want to play with that. But here's the thing. It's not really that it impersonates it. It's a perfect honeypot. It has it even down to the Mac address. You know, it's got a Microsoft Mac address. It's. It's got the exact login. Everything looks real to the bad guy. But here's the thing. The minute the bad guy accesses your Thinks Canary honeypot attempts to, let's say, brute force your fake internal SSH server, you're going to get an alert. Your Thinks Canary will tell you, you've got a problem. There's somebody inside the network. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter. You can also use your Thinks Canary to create lore files that you could put anywhere, even on in the cloud. I have some, you know, looks like password vaults and Firewall configurations sitting on my Google Drive. Those are also very tempting to bad guys. And again, the minute they hit it, I'm going to know. And you get the alert any way you want. Email, text, Slack. It supports webhooks, Syslog, of course, sms, whatever you want, or all of the above. So you just choose a profile for your ThinksCanary device, you register it with a hosted console for monitoring and notifications, and then you just sit back and relax. Attackers who've breached your network, or malicious insiders. Any adversary who's inside the network cannot help but make themselves known by accessing your thinkst Canary. Visit Canary Tools Twit. I'll give you an example. You know, if you're a big bank, you might have hundreds of them. You know, you want to put them on every network segment in all of the nooks and crannies. If you're a small operation like ours, five's plenty. Go to Canary Tools Twit. For just $7,500 a year, you're going to get five things to Canaries. You also get your own hosted console. You get upgrades, support and maintenance. And if you use the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us? Box, you're also going to get 10% off the price. And not just for the first year, but for life, for as long as you have Things Canaries. Oh, and here's another good thing. You can always return your thinks Canary. They've got a two month 60 day money back guarantee for a full refund. I should mention that we've been talking about things Canary for nearly a decade now. And in all that time, that refund guarantee has never been claimed. Because once you have one of these, you're going to say, I don't know how I lived without it. Visit Canary Tools Twit Enter the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us? Box. 10% off. And that 60 day money back guarantee at Canary Tools. Slash Twit. The offer code is Twit back. We come to the tech news. YouTube bends the knee. Charlie Wartsel writing in the Atlantic. Welcome to the era of big tech capitulation. Google paid the Trump administration 24 and a half million dollars to settle a lawsuit. Trump brought the lawsuit after they suspended his channel after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. YouTube said at the time it was, quote, concerned about the ongoing potential for violence. They did reinstate the account in March of 2023, but they settled. 24 and a half million dollars. 22 million goes to the trust for the National Mall that is the nonprofit group raising money to finance in addition to the White House. I don't know, is that the ballroom or something else?

Ian Thompson (52:31)

That's the ballroom, yeah.

Leo Laporte (52:32)

Yeah.

Ian Thompson (52:33)

Tackiest thing I've ever seen.

Leo Laporte (52:35)

You get a plaque or something. The Atlantic says most creators are lucky if they get a gold plaque from YouTube. Trump's getting a new ballroom. And it's just, it's just everybody in Silicon Valley and I don't know if they're getting the deal they think they are because it seems to be, you know, as soon as you give him some money, he wants more. Meta and X settled similar lawsuits, paying 25 and $10 million respectively. Trump and associates have been paid now 59 and a half million dollars.

Ian Thompson (53:11)

For.

Leo Laporte (53:11)

These private companies enforcing their own rules. Amazon apparently gave Melania Trump 40 million for a documentary that nobody's gonna watch.

Ian Thompson (53:21)

Say, I mean, really, what, what is it going to be? I, I swung around in a big hat. I mean, when she went over to the UK, all we saw was the.

Leo Laporte (53:28)

Hat, the hat, spy versus spy hat. And then of course, all the tech CEOs who donated a million dollar to the inaugural fund. YouTube can afford it. It's not a question of whether they can afford it, but it's capitulation. But here's real capitulation. Apple has agreed to remove at least one, maybe more apps, ICE tracking apps, after pressure from the Department of Justice, the doj, and by the way, Google's done the same thing, saying they're protecting vulnerable communities. Ice. Really? Okay. Pam Bondi said, we reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICE Block app from their app Store. And Apple did so. Ice Block, as you know, did a kind of mediocre job. The idea was you would contribute if you saw ICE in action, you would contribute that information to a social network so other people could avoid it. Bondi said it's designed to put ICE agents at risk for doing their jobs, I guess, you know, I guess. Does it put law enforcement at risk? Ice Block's owner told 404 Media, we're determined to fight this. Is this capitulating to an authoritarian regime or protecting law enforcement?

Ian Thompson (54:51)

Well, I mean, this is very much, you know, what Apple does. I mean, it was hilarious when they started advertising themselves in the, in the US as the privacy focused phone company, because try that in China. They roll over the Chinese government whenever they want. Same thing in Russia. Try to get a VPN app on the App Store. They've deleted tens of dozens of them. So, I mean, Apple does what's best for Apple, and they always have, and I suspect they always will.

Leo Laporte (55:18)

They are, I guess, obligated to follow the laws of countries they operate in. But this is not against the law. This is a request from the Department of Justice. I'm honestly a little disappointed in Google and Apple capitulating on this one.

Patrick Beja (55:33)

I think there's an argument to be made that they, you know, they're justified in removing it. I think it's an accumulation of so many things that makes it very clear that Apple and all of the big tech are. I'll try to be measured. They are fighting the demands of the government a lot less than one might have expected. And given the nature of that government, I think it is concerning. You're. You're talking about China, Ian. And that is. I don't know. Have you guys read Apple in China?

Leo Laporte (56:20)

Yeah. Wonderful book.

Ian Thompson (56:21)

No, no, I haven't. That's. That sounds worth a read.

Leo Laporte (56:24)

Oh, yeah, it's very, very good.

Patrick Beja (56:25)

Incredible. Really good.

Leo Laporte (56:28)

It really. It talks about how Apple, in a sense, was manipulated by the Chinese government to transfer so much technology to China that they are now, in fact, unable.

Patrick Beja (56:37)

To leave China and paid for training.

Leo Laporte (56:42)

And they sent billions, billions of dollars to China and lots of experts. Yeah.

Patrick Beja (56:48)

And it's really like. Anyway, the book is really good, but I mean, things changed when Xi Jinping arrived and China really did take a turn before that. You could argue this is the usual playbook. Like you pour money into a country and open commerce and then they turn to democracy. And then Xi Jinping arrived and then things didn't happen that way. But. But yeah, China is capitulating to. I'm sorry, Apple is capitulating to China. You can argue they do it in every country. Like, they respect the law. They do it in Europe. Actually, they've protested a lot more about Europeans trying to enforce their vision of the Internet than they have for all of the other ones. All of these other ones, you know, China, Russia and the US and the fact, even though I'm not saying the US Is, China is like China or Russia, the fact that they are kind of in the same neighborhood in the conversation and the fact that those big companies are not saying anything. They're going along, like, they're not even saying, actually, we're not sure about this. And like, it is.

Leo Laporte (58:09)

Yeah.

Patrick Beja (58:10)

Bending the knee at every level, like the COVID influencers being allowed back on YouTube, for example, was another example of it. And again, the argument could be made that it's been five Years and you don't ban them forever. But the letter they sent with this decision putting it all on the Biden administration saying oh, they forced us to do it. We really didn't want to. We thought it was freedom of like it was anyway. We don't want to really litigate that part. But all of these things put together paint a picture that people won't look favorably on in you know, 20 years or 30 years.

Leo Laporte (58:57)

Apple is fighting for us in the UK.

Ian Thompson (59:02)

Yeah. Okay, bring up my government.

Leo Laporte (59:06)

As you know the, the UK government was asking, demanding that Apple create a backdoor into its advanced data protection which is end to end encrypted. Apple's response was to withdraw ADP from the uk apparently it's not over. The UK Home Office is now asking that Apple create a backdoor into users cloud storage service but stipulated that that applies only to British citizens this time. Last time it was to all people who used Apple products. So this was.

Ian Thompson (59:45)

Yes, you can think of it as a Brexit bonus if you like. They wouldn't try this with the EU but Brits are, you know, they can stomp down on those. It's, it's yet another. But for some reason the UK government, for obvious reasons the UK government really, really wants a backdoor and end to end encryption and they are going to carry, you know, they are pushing and pushing and they have done since the 1990s. Even though the intelligence services are selling them. It's not the best of ideas because if you create a back door someone else can find it as well.

Leo Laporte (60:15)

Yeah. Apple said on Wednesday. This is from the Financial Times. Apple is still unable to offer advanced data protection in the United Kingdom to new users. Were gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP are not available to our customers in the UK given continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy. As we've said many times before, we will have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will. The Home Office says we do not comment on operational matters.

Ian Thompson (60:45)

It's just so pointless. I mean you can already get companies like Cellebrite who for a commercial service to law enforcement will break people's phones open and get the data anyway.

Leo Laporte (60:54)

Right.

Ian Thompson (60:55)

You don't need to make everyone, treat everyone, tire everyone with the same brush when you can actually do this in perfectly legitimate ways. But it's just a teensy bit harder.

Leo Laporte (61:06)

Now we should point out that only adp this advanced data protection is end to end encrypted. If you Store something in Apple's cloud. Apple has the key to icloud, and Apple has given that key to law enforcement when asked by a subpoena. It's happened in the United States, we know, and I presume it would happen in England too. So I guess the Home Office is asking for more than just that. They're asking for a backdoor in advanced data protection.

Ian Thompson (61:34)

Exactly. I mean, you know, it's the same with any kind of service. Proton, which is, you know, one of the gold standards of secure email, will hand over data to the police if there's a good and judicially approved reason. With this, it just seems like massive overreach. I mean, I've. We've seen this with the Ripper powers 20 years ago. We've, you know, at one point they were offering to allow parish councillors, you know, which had elected by about four or five hundred people in a small town, access to anyone's Internet traffic history. It was, you know, it's a question of. It's a constant battle and you've got to keep fighting to try and get something suitable through.

Leo Laporte (62:13)

The Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, tweeted that in August that the UK had agreed to drop its demand. And, and partly because she said, we have treaties with the UK that they won't spy on our citizens and we won't spy on theirs. So I think this new request is to satisfy that, oh, we don't want American information, we just want British citizens information.

Ian Thompson (62:41)

Yeah, it's, it's, Then you've got, it's. How many steps down the line do you go? Because, yes, you can backdoor someone's phone, as you've got with the Patriot act over here, you can surveil someone and you can surveil the last two or three people that actually spoke to that becomes international and very, very quickly.

Leo Laporte (62:59)

Right. So just be aware it's back on the table and yeah, even if it's only UK citizens, if I'm talking to, you're still technically a UK citizen. If I'm talking to you and they crack it, they're going to get my end of the conversation too. Right?

Ian Thompson (63:13)

Oh, yes, I'm a UK citizen for life. You can't give it up. What if you're born in the territory?

Leo Laporte (63:19)

Okay, well, I wouldn't rush to do so. Anyway, we talked about funding. The federal government, of course, has shut down one. And, you know, if you're going to a national park. I'm sorry, I was going on vacation this week and I'm Glad I decided not to. However, you might be interested to know that the Cybersecurity Information Sharing act, signed into law in 2015, which allowed organizations to share cyber intelligence with the federal government and each other, is also shut down during the lapse. Without it, according to Politico, the private sector is less likely to swap vital information for being exposed to legal risks. They're no longer protected. Senator Gary Peters, who's a ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, said, we are without this critical line of defense. Every hour we delay. Oh, it needs to be reauthorized. I guess that's it. And, of course, Congress is not sitting right now. Every hour we delay is an open invitation to cyber criminals and hostile actors to attack our economy and critical infrastructure. Now, fortunately, they do not listen to this show, so I can talk about this. Maybe I shouldn't be talking about this at all.

Ian Thompson (64:38)

Well, as we saw with the kerfuffle over the CVE and MITRE rankings, I mean, it does seem like this is way down on the. On the. On the administration's priority list.

Leo Laporte (64:47)

Well, they've also fired a lot of people from sisa, so, yeah, I feel like we're more vulnerable.

Ian Thompson (64:54)

That was really noticeable at Black Hat and DEFCON this year.

Leo Laporte (64:56)

Was it?

Ian Thompson (64:57)

I was talking to a lot of the CESA people, and they're like, look, there's still a lot of really dedicated, skilled people there. But at the same time, they've also lost a lot of the older generation who have either been laid off or just decided, I'm just going to retire, I'm too tired for all this, and we're losing some definite skills. It's. It's. That's deeply concerning.

Leo Laporte (65:18)

We are six days off from the vote on. What is it? The chat. What is it they call it.

Ian Thompson (65:24)

Oh, chat control.

Leo Laporte (65:25)

Chat control. I want to ask you about that when we come back. All right, we're gonna take a little break. Another fine law out of the. Our mother. Our mother nation, the uk we'll talk.

Ian Thompson (65:36)

Oh, no, no, no. This isn't you.

Leo Laporte (65:38)

That's right, it's eu. All right.

Ian Thompson (65:40)

Yep. No, we're not guilty on that.

Leo Laporte (65:42)

All right, that's right. I forgot. This is an EU proposal. All right, we will talk about that in just a little bit. You're watching this Week in Tech, Georgia. Dow is here. So nice to see you. Also, Ian Thompson from the Register, and our good friend Patrick Beja. Not Patrick.com. you don't work in the game industry anymore.

Patrick Beja (66:04)

No, I cover the game industry with my podcasts. But no, I don't work.

Leo Laporte (66:09)

Did you bring the English language one's back yet?

Patrick Beja (66:12)

The Phileas Club is back actually with a new format where we get letters from different people around the world every show and they address the letters to Filius and they tell Phileas about what's been happening in their countries.

Leo Laporte (66:29)

I love that idea. Do you use AI to write those letters?

Patrick Beja (66:34)

I use meet people and their microphones who very kindly contribute.

Leo Laporte (66:42)

Very nice, Very nice. Is that also at. Not. It's linked@nonpatrick.com.

Patrick Beja (66:46)

Yeah. NotPatrick.com will get you everything, my socials and my shows.

Leo Laporte (66:49)

It's currently down for maintenance, it says. Is that true?

Patrick Beja (66:52)

What? No, it isn't. What?

Leo Laporte (66:55)

Oh, there it is. There. It was just temporary. Okay, good. All right.

Patrick Beja (66:58)

So it's a wonderful feat of engineering, of web engineering. If you go to the little arrow, see you have for each show. Because when you do a podcast. Well, when you do multiple podcasts, how do you link people to all of that? Nice, isn't it?

Leo Laporte (67:16)

Oh, we should steal that.

Patrick Beja (67:17)

And get. And get. We have the main links.

Leo Laporte (67:21)

Yes.

Patrick Beja (67:22)

Kevin, the web developer who did it.

Leo Laporte (67:25)

Is a little bit of Ajax or CSS or something going on there? That's nice. Yeah, I love it.

Patrick Beja (67:31)

Yep.

Leo Laporte (67:32)

We will be back in just a moment. Our show today, brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. I didn't know that. The potential rewards of AI are obviously too great to ignore, but so are the risks. Loss of sensitive data attacks against enterprise managed AI. Generative AI is increasing opportunities for your business, but also for threat actors. It helps them rapidly create phishing lures, write malicious code, automate data extraction. There were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked through AI applications. ChatGPT and Microsoft. Copilot saw nearly 3.2 million data violations. And it's all inadvertent, right? But maybe it's time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private AI. Jeff Simon is a senior Vice president and Chief Security officer at T Mobile. He said, quote, zscaler's fundamental difference in the technologies and SaaS space is that 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 with Zscaler. Zero Trust plus AI. You can safely adopt Genai and private AI to boost productivity across the business. Their Zero trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Find out more@Zscaler.com security that's Zscaler.com security We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. You asked about who gets the money from the TikTok advertising and according to the information. Oh, I have to sign in. I have a new, new, new browser, doesn't know who I am yet. Let me just sign in real quickly. The bulk of the money goes back to China. ByteDance control over the commercial operations of TikTok's US business. It continues, in fact, it raises money. It's not about the money, it's about the propaganda, according to the information, could raise questions about whether the deal is compliant with the federal law. Law that was passed and widely ignored last year that requires ByteDance to divest from TikTok. In other words, there are still operational ties and in particular the. They'll maintain operations of the advertising e commerce in China, which doesn't satisfy some members of Congress who voted to force the sale or ban Tick tock. You asked about that. I thought I'd throw that in.

Ian Thompson (70:30)

Yeah. No, I mean it's, it's about control at the end of the day. It's, it's, you know, you have control over the, the strategy of Tick Tock in the US and the money, well, China can keep that. You know, there's plenty of it floating around.

Leo Laporte (70:41)

So let's talk about chat control and I don't really understand the ins and outs of EU legislation. So maybe that's the first place chat control is this a, a, a bill, a law?

Ian Thompson (70:56)

It's EU legislation which, okay. Which would require client side scanning of devices. So basically before you send an end to end encrypted message, your message gets scanned to make sure it doesn't have abusive material on it. And I apologize for the cat sounds in the background, but I've just been jumped on. But yeah, I mean it's been talked about since 2022. I think the Swedish. Because countries have rotating presidencies of the union. It's up to them what they bring up and the Dan has done at this time. And if they get.

Leo Laporte (71:28)

Denmark supports it, Austria opposes it. Belgium's undecided. Bulgaria supports it. Croatia, Cyprus supports it. Czech Republic opposes. It's not unanimous. Estonia and Finland oppose it. France supports it. Germany goes. I don't know, Greece goes, Hungary and Ireland support.

Ian Thompson (71:48)

So I mean Germany's the big player in this because if they, if Germany gets behind it, it's probably going to.

Leo Laporte (71:53)

Get through because they have 21 members of the European Parliament. Y that's based on population or I'm sorry, not 21. That's Greece. They have, holy cow, 98 members of the European Parliament and 624 MPs.

Ian Thompson (72:08)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (72:08)

So that's a big block.

Ian Thompson (72:11)

Well, it has been a fascinating third act twist that Germany is increasingly the haven of democracy and freedom of speech in Europe. But you know, I, I don't know, Patrick. I think, I suspect we may, we might disagree on, on this, on this based on our earlier conversations, but personally I, I don't know it Software on your device which scans your messages that I feel very uncomfortable with.

Patrick Beja (72:34)

So just to be clear, this is what Apple wanted to do. I believe the same kind of infrastructure. It's not. Well, it's scanning in the sense that when you send pictures. I believe it's only pictures. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Leo Laporte (72:51)

It says private messages as well.

Patrick Beja (72:53)

Right. But it hashes them and compares them to a database of existing.

Leo Laporte (72:59)

This is what Apple was proposing, this comparison of hashes, not actual images.

Patrick Beja (73:05)

That is what I think they're proposing. The fight chat control site says including messages and photos, which I've been a little bit like I've been bitten. So I'm shy about these kinds of sites where with their kind of fudging the exact nature of the proposed legislation. If it's just scanning, hashing and scanning against, you know, and comparing to an existing database for child porn, essentially I think it's defendable. The issue is not about the process because the process itself is, I think, safe. The issue is once the system is in place, then the government can say, well, you know, child porn is all good, but how about these photos that we don't like? Like some, you know, some other types of, you know, Apple was going to.

Leo Laporte (74:09)

Use a database of photos from the national center for Missing Exploited Children, which is considered kind of nonpartisan and reliable in that respect. I'm not sure what the, where the EU would get the hashes from.

Patrick Beja (74:22)

I'm guessing this similar thing. Yeah, but so, so that's the issue. The issue is not that the, the proposal itself is, you know, cataclysmic. The issue is once you open that door, then anything goes. Kind of the next government could decide, you know, this is the kind of, you know, controversial topic we don't like and we want you to scan it and send us the notice once you find it on someone's phone or sending it to someone. So I understand the concern, but I don't think it's in, in its proposed implementation as bad as some people make.

Georgia Dow (74:58)

It sound, it's that it makes it, we get comfortable, more and more comfortable with an encroachment of government onto our private devices. And what is privacy for that? And I think that very similar to what you were saying, Patrick, is that once we get comfortable with a certain amount of our privacy being sold away for a good cause, it makes us also much more complacent to say yes to one other good cause. And we get more and more comfortable with giving up our rights to, for a greater good. And unfortunately, governments don't ever want to give up power. And so it's always going to be one more piece that they're stepping one little tiny bit closer. And if you look at it in, in, in each step, it seems very, very small. But slowly, in the aggregate, it can become really large until we don't have any feelings of privacy. And so I think it's also that change of the entire way that a culture feels about what is private and what isn't and that comfort level of having something on your phone that is taking a look at, even if it's just in a hash, to be able to see what is there and how far that might go.

Leo Laporte (76:09)

So this is from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I don't know if you trust them a little bit more, Patrick.

Patrick Beja (76:14)

Yes.

Leo Laporte (76:15)

Than the advocacy site. Their headline is Chat Control is back on the menu in the eu. It still must be stopped. Chat Control is, they write, is a dangerous legislative proposal that would make it mandatory for service providers, including end to end encrypted communication and storage services like Signal, to scan all communications and files to detect abusive material. This would happen through a method called client side scanning. That's what you said, which scans for specific content on a device before it's sent. I mean, the fact it's not just images, it sounds like. In other words, it is also the text. In a memo, the Danish presidency claimed this does not break end to end encryption. EFF says that's absurd. Part of the issue is these phones are a kind of a new beast for all of us. There is so much of us and information about us stored in these devices that I think they're of a greater concern than, you know, breaking into your house and looking through your, you know, your file cabinet or your desk. Right.

Ian Thompson (77:23)

Well, I mean, the irony is that we pay a thousand dollars a piece.

Leo Laporte (77:26)

For these things as well to steal all of our.

Georgia Dow (77:30)

The funny part is that actually the, the phone is a more like there's more information about me on my phone than There is in my own mind, like the amount of stuff that I've forgotten in comparison to how much my phone has remembered. It's completely different. And so having access to that would be, you know, it is like Minority Report, but like on Supercharged.

Leo Laporte (77:48)

Meredith Whitaker, the CEO of Signal, says it will pull out of the EU if chat control is passed. Instead of complying with the law, they would stop offering Signal, just as Apple has stopped offering ADP in the uk.

Patrick Beja (78:03)

It's a significant threat, I think, because Signal is the one app that, that you can trust absolutely. I, you know, I don't want to, to play too much devil's advocate on this, but I do feel like there is a form of absolute absolutism in the defense of privacy that can be a bit counterproductive. Because if down, you know, if that is the. If your argument is we can give nothing and nothing can be done, then you say out. You say no to some things that might be reasonable as well. Like this version, yes, it might scan for text, but this version, the problem is in what you ask it to scan. Right.

Leo Laporte (78:54)

If we, and who, who is deciding that?

Patrick Beja (78:57)

Yes, exactly. Let's say, for the sake of argument, let's say we can guarantee that forever. I understand that's not how it works, but we can guarantee that forever. The only thing that it will scan for would be, you know, csam.

Leo Laporte (79:11)

Right. That'd be okay. I'd be okay with that. Yeah, right. I actually thought the Apple proposal was not the way Apple wanted to do it was from privacy protecting and they, they pulled back on it because they got so much pushback from their users.

Ian Thompson (79:27)

Well, I mean, but as Georgia has pointed out, it depends on how the rules change in the future. So, for example, going after seas, I'm with you on that because, you know, not only are the images themselves disgusting, but that's, that's a kid getting, you know, seriously hurt. But at the same time, then if the government says, well, we are now also going to scan for this, we're now going to scan for that. And you know, the White House just this week was talking about, about, you know, antifa, as though that's an actual organization, you know, being the equivalent of terrorists. So do you scan for antifa messages now based on the same principle? Once you.

Leo Laporte (80:00)

Certainly our government would want to do that and would feel justified in doing that. This is exactly right. This is the last paragraph in the EFF article. Phones and laptops must work for the users who own them, not act as bugs in our pockets. In the service of governments, foreign or domestic. The mass scanning of everything on our devices is invasive, untenable and must be rejected. Go ahead, Georgia.

Georgia Dow (80:25)

Yeah, we, we could play the if if game and if that was the case, but unfortunately it is not. And we can already tell. You can tell what someone's behavior is going to be not by what they say, but what are their actions. And the best way to define what someone's actions will be were what will their. Were their actions in the past. And we already know that when someone that this is this kind of creeping vine and it is just a creeping vine that governments will change the way it is, privacy policies will change it. And you don't have to re sign the privacy policy. They send you a whole bunch of like kerfuffle and then you know, if you're going to use the app, it's kind of suddenly there. And so unfortunately that is the beast that we are dealing with. I would love to be able to say just trust this seems reasonable. We should say okay and they will never ask for anything else. The rules will not change and people will not become complacent. But unfortunately people often can't be bothered to constantly find fight. We're inundated with so much information that it can be overwhelming and we become addicted to the technology that we use. And so all of it is a. I wish that, that I'm not always the dark horse in this podcast to be able to say like this might not. We might not be able to trust at face value. I wish that we could, but unfortunately that is not often the case and definitely not in the case of the way the governments use use the information they have. They can actually go through the court system to be able to unlock, take a look at and sneak through. And I think that we should always be wary when we're giving up our rights and our privacy for something.

Leo Laporte (81:59)

Yeah. To be clear, nobody likes or nobody I know supports child sexual abuse material. This is a horrific.

Ian Thompson (82:08)

It's one of the. It's one of the four horsemen of the inf apocalypse which gets rolled out. You know, it's terrorists, it's organized crime, child abusers and it's drug dealers. Anything on those?

Georgia Dow (82:18)

Because it makes you seem like a horrible person if you say no against it. A very inflammatory argument. And so I think that that makes people want to be on the good guy side and that anyone that's saying no against it would must be like a horrible person. How could you say no, let's protect the kids?

Patrick Beja (82:41)

Yeah, but that's not what we're doing here now. Like you also can't say, oh well, you're saying, saying it's to protect the kids. So you must be doing something nefarious and you can't do it.

Georgia Dow (82:52)

Oh no, I'm not saying that.

Patrick Beja (82:53)

Right. So. But to, you know, yield a little bit, I will say that what's happening in the US right now in the past few months is the best reminder that, yes, things that are put in place can be stretched and then used to do things that are not.

Ian Thompson (83:14)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (83:14)

I mean, let me ask then the legitimate logistic question. So the vote is October 13th or 14th. This was proposed. Proposed by the Danish government. The entire European Parliament votes on it. First of all, do you think it'll pass? It looks like they have enough support to pass yes or no.

Ian Thompson (83:35)

From what I'm hearing. It all comes down to Germany at this point.

Leo Laporte (83:38)

They have such a big block and they've got such a big undecided right now.

Ian Thompson (83:42)

Yeah. I mean the Chaos Computing Club, who one of the groups. Yeah. I would actually trust with security, have come out against it. But honestly, no one knows which way it's going to go. I suspect there'll be an awful lot of backroom deals.

Leo Laporte (83:54)

And then if it happens, then what happens? Does each country enforce their own version of it or is it a. Because you don't have a EU wide law system. Right.

Patrick Beja (84:07)

Or do you know, but every country has to implement it into their law their own way.

Leo Laporte (84:13)

Yeah.

Patrick Beja (84:13)

And it usually takes a couple of years for it to have to be implemented.

Leo Laporte (84:17)

And could it be implemented differently in each country?

Patrick Beja (84:20)

Well, it would be the same effect. It would be the same thing.

Leo Laporte (84:24)

Okay. Okay.

Ian Thompson (84:25)

I mean, it's also a question of possibilities. We've seen in the UK because they recently passed a law saying yes, you have to be able to backdoor end to end encrypted messages. But then there was a cop out and they said once it becomes technologically feasible to do so.

Patrick Beja (84:38)

Right.

Ian Thompson (84:39)

Because no one's actually find a way to do this which doesn't break encryption.

Leo Laporte (84:42)

Right.

Ian Thompson (84:43)

So yeah, I mean, and Patrick, you know this as well as I do in the eu when company countries can implement these laws in so many different ways that, you know, it depends very much on a state to state basis.

Leo Laporte (84:56)

Well, there's a lot of opposition to it. I'll be very interested to see what happens. It's six days away.

Patrick Beja (85:04)

Maybe I'd be interested to see if it passes. I think all hell will break loose. I think all tech companies will. You Know, this kind of creeped up on everyone. It was first proposed a couple of years ago, I think, and it went away pretty quickly and all of a sudden now it's back and it's like, oh, we're going to vote now. And it's like, wait, what? So if it does pass, I think a lot of, you know, Apple and Google and Proton. Well, maybe not Proton. They're Swiss, although they have their own trouble.

Leo Laporte (85:33)

Well, Switzerland, yeah. Has also been proposed imposing changes in their traditionally very strong privacy protections. Yes.

Ian Thompson (85:42)

Yeah, huge changes. I mean, it's as, as, I mean, as Patrick has said, Proton, you know, a very good, you know, commercial private email company are saying they might now have to move out of Switzerland. And that was one of their big selling points. I mean, I remember when we had the black phone. Do you remember that? From the, the noughties, which was a totally secure handset and they were building and hosting in Switzerland for just that reason. Because, because they have very strong data privacy laws.

Leo Laporte (86:06)

It said they were, they were in a mountain in Switzerland, as I remember. Yeah. Which made it extra, extra private. So what are the laws that they're proposing in, in Switzerland? Proton says we're considering leaving. Proton was started, by the way, by some CERN physicists and I think is a, is the equivalent of a public benefit company. It's not, it's not a for profit, profit organization. They've been doing so much stuff, not just encrypted email, but file storage, password protection. They have Chat Lumo, which is a. I'm sorry, they have AI Lumo, which is their Chat GBT competitor. I don't know if they have chat. So it's interesting how many things they have going on. There are some VPNs also in Switzerland who are there for the same reason, who are considering moving. NIM VPN says you cannot invest in privacy in Switzerland right now.

Ian Thompson (87:07)

Yeah, I mean, it's a digital ID system is very similar to the one that's just been promoted in the uk.

Leo Laporte (87:15)

Yeah, they just, they just voted to, to back that in the, in Switzerland, by the way. 50.4%.

Ian Thompson (87:22)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (87:23)

This is funny because this is something traditionally people in the United States have really, it's been anathema, especially to the Conservatives, to have a national identity card. We have state identity cards, driver's licenses and IDs, but to have a national one has always been anathema. But I feel like we're moving in that direction, to be honest.

Patrick Beja (87:46)

I mean, to be clear, the one that's pushing Proton to Threaten to leave is not, not the ID card. ID card they have, they have an insane, and you know, I've been defending this chat control thing for the past 15 minutes. So they have an insane proposal about surveillance, mass surveillance. They, they want every company that has 5,000 users or more to essentially retain all the data that goes through their service. They want the ID everyone to provide a piece of id, a form of id to use the service, and they want that information to be made available to police services without a court order. Border.

Leo Laporte (88:46)

Yeah. Wow. It is.

Patrick Beja (88:50)

Like I've never seen any law go that far. And for it to come from Switzerland that has been so protective of private data and privacy in the past, at a time when the entirety of the European Union is looking for alternatives from big American tech and it's turning towards Proton and other Swiss services, is on every level mind boggling. So I don't understand what is happening with that law. I don't know if it's still being discussed or still being pushed, but it's insane and we've talked about a bunch of insane things today. This is probably on the top of that list.

Leo Laporte (89:31)

Andy Yen, the founder and the CEO of Proton, says the only other country with similar laws is Russia. They've decided, they announced in July that they are moving out of Switzerland. Most of its physical infrastructure will be moved. Well, maybe this is a mistake to the EU. They are, they say, investing more than $100 million in the European Union and plan to help develop a sovereign euro stack for the future of our home continent.

Ian Thompson (90:00)

Well, this is why it's such a great business opportunity for Europe to actually have strong data protection laws. Because if you can't go to America and you can't go to Russia and you can't go to China, can't go anywhere. EU is, you know, could actually make bank from this if it played a car. It's. It's cards. Right.

Leo Laporte (90:15)

Is there any. Is. I'm curious if there's any country that offers kind of strong data protection that could become a, a haven for companies like this.

Patrick Beja (90:24)

Traditionally Switzerland so far.

Leo Laporte (90:26)

Yeah. Not anymore. I mean that is, that is. They're considering it. That is not yet the law. Yeah, no, I mean it would come from the government. They have to get, they have to get a public response, but apparently does not need. Need parliamentary approval.

Patrick Beja (90:42)

Switzerland has a weird legal system and judicial. No, I'm sorry, legal system. They do what's called in French votation, which is for most laws. I think for most laws they get the whole country to vote like literally, for big important laws, everyone gets their ballot and votes yes or no on those laws, not just on elections, on law. So I believe that's what needs to happen for this one.

Leo Laporte (91:09)

Okay. Okay. Well, that will watch that with interest, I guess. Proton's taking it seriously enough that they're already starting to move. Although now with Jack control, maybe they're going to regret that decision. I don't know.

Patrick Beja (91:22)

Chat controlled compared to this. Where do you go?

Leo Laporte (91:25)

Yeah, where do you go? I don't know.

Ian Thompson (91:30)

I was going to say Iceland's traditionally been a good place, but that's part of the EU now as well.

Leo Laporte (91:34)

So I remember when I was visiting the Bahamas some ago, they said, yeah, we have plans to become a data haven, but I think it was more like a smuggler's paradise than it was a place or Proton would. Might want to move. I don't know. I think that's a great economic opportunity for some nation that's willing to take on the rest of the world, because obviously the world is going in that direction. All right, let's pause for station identification. This is twit. And I am so glad that I love the international perspective here. It's really nice to get that variety. Most of the time we have Americans on talking about American issues. But I'm really glad we came. Patrick Beja here from representing France. Ian Thompson, who lives in the US is soon to be a US citizen, but maybe, maybe don't know what will happen.

Ian Thompson (92:23)

Depends if they let me in or not. And I, for one, welcome our new glorious leader.

Leo Laporte (92:27)

Yes. Do you feel like you have to moderate your social media postings because you're applying for citizenship? No, no, I always will look at them, right? They do look at them at it. Yeah.

Ian Thompson (92:37)

Oh, no, they look at it. But I mean, I've always been fairly moderate on that because I'm a guest in this country and I don't think it's particularly fair for me to actually go and start slagging off a country that's hosting me as a guest. But that's say I. I don't hold back about British politics, but, hey, you know, it's. I'm a British voter now, so.

Leo Laporte (92:54)

Yeah, yeah, it's nice to have Ian from the Register and of course from Canada, from Montreal, which is really not Canada. It's Quebec. She's from Quebec. Right. Is that separatist movement still happening? Is that there's still people?

Georgia Dow (93:08)

Yes. No, for sure. There's definitely a resurgence.

Leo Laporte (93:10)

I'm all for it. I'm a Quebecois by ancestry. So I'm all for it. A Francophone. It's great to have you, Georgia. And maybe if you have a little spare bedroom, Lisa and I can just come up and for sure move in. Yeah, maybe take one of those. How many VR rooms do you have now?

Georgia Dow (93:33)

We have four.

Patrick Beja (93:34)

Four.

Leo Laporte (93:34)

One for each member of the family.

Georgia Dow (93:37)

But they're used rooms for other things. You can just move everything around if you happen to want to play some VR. So I'm not doing as much VR. I'm playing more Night Rain right now.

Leo Laporte (93:50)

Night Rain. Is that the new one?

Georgia Dow (93:51)

That's an Elden Ring fast paced Elden Ring game.

Leo Laporte (93:56)

Those are hard.

Georgia Dow (93:58)

It is a little bit brutal, but there's something really salient about it because. Because it's 45 minutes, you have to speed against the clock. It's quite a lot of like fast paced fun. And the night slowly encroaches upon you and so you're squished into smaller and smaller places. Trying to fight the bosses before the night comes and sucks all of your life.

Leo Laporte (94:22)

I like the idea of it's only 45 minutes.

Georgia Dow (94:24)

It really is about that every single time.

Leo Laporte (94:27)

You can't waste your life playing it. You're going to have a 45 minute session and then it'll be over.

Georgia Dow (94:31)

It'll. And then it'll be over. You will win or you will die. At first you usually just die and then you get better. You get better at winning. But it's kind of brutal. It's really quite fun and it's nice because it's easier to pick up. It's not like a game where Elden.

Leo Laporte (94:47)

Ring was too hard for me. It was so hard.

Georgia Dow (94:49)

Elden Ring. You just have to get used to dying and not fighting everything.

Leo Laporte (94:53)

And you learn the pattern of each boss. Right. And so then you can.

Georgia Dow (94:57)

You have to learn the patterns of each boss and what they bring and what to fight. So you have to think about the strategy. But it's a microcosm of what Elden Ring is.

Leo Laporte (95:06)

Night Rain. Okay.

Georgia Dow (95:08)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (95:08)

I might have to check this out.

Georgia Dow (95:10)

You should try it out. Yeah, you should try it out.

Leo Laporte (95:12)

Yeah. I played that French one for a while.

Patrick Beja (95:16)

What was that's everybody Expedition 33.

Leo Laporte (95:19)

Expedition 33. You told me to play this. Patrick, last time you were on Expedition.

Georgia Dow (95:23)

33 for some of the video on it also.

Patrick Beja (95:26)

Did you finish it? I saw the first, first video.

Georgia Dow (95:29)

I have not yet finished it because of Night Rain. Like I'm in. Look, when I play a game, I'm very like, I'm going to go all the way into the game and did you finish it? And should I. Should I finish the game after night? Is it that it's worth it?

Patrick Beja (95:43)

You should. I'm not going to say anything. Just finish it.

Georgia Dow (95:49)

I really love the storyline. Like the storyline in the character drew me in and then crushed me, which I enjoyed as a therapist. I enjoyed that process. Okay, I'll do that.

Leo Laporte (96:01)

I was playing it and enjoying it because I had it on Game pass. And then two things happened. One, I died and I didn't reincarnate or anything. I just was gone. And I thought, well, that's sad. And then the other is they've raised the price of Game pass. So I decided, you know what? I quit. I'm done. I'm done. I'm going to play the piano. Learn to play the piano instead. But this Night Ring looks tempting. It's on Steam.

Georgia Dow (96:24)

It's, it's a. It's a fun one, but it is, it's fast paced. It's kind of brutal. It's very stressful at first. Like there's a high level of stress. So I don't want you to not go in with the thought of.

Leo Laporte (96:35)

I'm used to that. From Elden Ring. Yeah.

Georgia Dow (96:37)

Oh, then that. This is a little bit like Elden Ring on a speed drug. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (96:45)

Oh, I like it. Oh, you know, unfortunately I have to play it on Windows. I can't. I don't have a Windows machine. So it's not. Not available on Linux. Huh?

Georgia Dow (96:54)

Don't.

Leo Laporte (96:55)

Rats. Rats. I got the new Framework desktop, which I'm really loving. It's super fast and, and actually I bought it for as an AI machine because it's got that new Ryzen A AI plus Mac Max 395. Very nice processor at 128 gigs of RAM and stuff. So it's. It is, it's great. It's. In fact, we had our AI user group on Friday and everybody said, oh, you got to download the 120 gigabyte version of the Open Chat GPT&I. But I don't know if it'll run. And it is, it runs beautifully and it runs about 20 tokens per second. So I was very pleased. And it's. And it's nice to have local, but it also, because it's got a good gpu, it could be, could be good for playing, playing Night Rain. Even if they had a Linux version. Maybe I can use wine or something like that. Proton. That's right. That's what everybody does. Yeah. All right, I'll try it. I'll report back.

Georgia Dow (97:50)

Oh, okay. I want to know.

Leo Laporte (97:53)

Well, you're an inspiration to me. I'll tell you. You are. Are you excited about the Meta Glasses? That's not VR though.

Georgia Dow (97:59)

Those aren't, it isn't. But I, I, I, I will, I will be interested. I will be interested. I'm, I'm all there to look at.

Leo Laporte (98:07)

The world like there's big Apple news about VR, which we will share with you in a moment. Kind of a surprise from Mark Gurman, our Apple rumor guy. But first, a word from our sponsor. And I love this sponsor, Spaceship. I love all our sponsors. We only do sponsors. I love. That's the truth. But Spaceship really is cool. We've talked about them a few times before on the show and for good reason. It's becoming very quickly one of the fastest growing domain name registrars and hosting providers they now have. They just, they just started months ago. Four and a half million domains under management accounting, including some of mine. It's very modern, very modern. That kind of rapid growth doesn't happen by accident. You know, they're doing something right. Besides offering below market prices on domain registration, they have a very nice straightforward interface, very clean. It's funny, so many registrars look like they were this websites were designed in the 90s. This is easy to use, it's modern. They do some really innovative products and features. They have for instance, alf, which is yes, an alien, but also an AI buddy that can do a lot of the work. The stuff that, you know, busy work that you may not enjoy at domain transfers. ALPH will actually do it for you. DNS updates, you know, all those weird settings, it does it for you, you, which is nice. Although I'm one of those guys, I like to tweak my DNS all the time. I'm in there messing with it and it gives you a great interface, makes it very easy to do that. The pricing though, of course is the thing that gets people in the door. That really surprised me. We're not just talking about new purchase here. The renewal prices are also load compared to other companies. My guess, and I'm putting words in their mouth, is is because their services are so great and compelling, they want to get you in the door with the domain names. You register the domain names and then you say, oh look, and what I can do with these domains and they make their money there because I know otherwise I don't know how they're doing it. It is really a if. If all you want is somewhere to host your existing domains. This is a no brainer look at transferring your existing domains if you've got a domain stuck with another registrar. By the way way they do that, they make it not not Spaceship but the other guys, they make it hard to transfer out. It's very easy to transfer to Spaceship. Quicker, simpler than you might think. The processing is incredibly straightforward and believe it or not, you can often finish it in 30 minutes. And here's the nice thing, you don't have to wait for your current domain to expire. Once the transfer is complete, Spaceship automatically adds a year to your current registration. An additional year. Also you'll receive a complimentary one year subscription to Space Mail for a year. That's their wonderful professional business email by the way. Pro tip here. If you're still getting your email@aol.com knock it off or even Gmail or Hotmail. It could go to Gmail, go to Hotmail, but use your own domain so that you own the mail address, not some other company. And by the way, I think you're going to really like Spaceship's professional email. Space mail is great. Do take a look at their hosting and the other things they offer. The VPSs they really do a nice job. They have an incredible end to end encrypted messaging solution that's so brilliant. Instead of being based on your phone number or some handle, it can be your domain name. So I register 499 a year leos im for my instant messenger and I'm using their incredible messaging EOS im. The domain name becomes your handle on the messenger. It's brilliant. They're so innovative. To discover how much you can save compared to your current registrar, go to spaceship.com twit follow the link at the top of the page. Ready to switch and save. Transfer your domain to Spaceship today. It's very, I think you're going to be very impressed. Spaceship.com Twitch Spaceship.com TWIT highly recommended. So Mark Gurman says Apple has decided not to make the next generation of Vision Pro. He's been saying for some time they were going to make a less expensive Vision Pro. He says instead they took a look at what meta is doing with the glasses. Glasses. They're gonna go all in on glasses. Did you ever get a Vision Pro? Georgia, you are a meta. You use the meta stuff.

Georgia Dow (102:46)

Yeah, I've used like the Oculus and then like I have like the, the, some, some of the other ones like I have the PS4 PS5 one like I, I have a few of them, the HTC Vibes. But yeah, maybe.

Leo Laporte (103:03)

Huh. Do you do the idea of glasses with the heads up display attract?

Georgia Dow (103:09)

Intriguing to me. Like it's intriguing to me. But I again that thought of wearing it, like it depends how much it gives me versus how much it takes away from what I'm interacting with. I think that the distraction, like I don't wear my watch usually unless I'm like going out and it serves a purpose because I don't want my tech to constantly be annoying me. I think that that distance I think is kind of healthy for my personality type. So it would really, it would really depend, like I don't, I would already be easily distracted. So it's, it's intriguing to me. And would I try them out? Yeah, I definitely would.

Leo Laporte (103:43)

But as somebody who's all in on VR, you know, the idea of having a helmet on and you're in another world, you're not seeing what's around you, you're in another world playing a game or whatever. Are you disappointed to hear that Apple is not putting any more money in that direction? By the way, this is just a rumor Apple has not confirmed.

Georgia Dow (104:01)

Yeah, not really because I, I was not really thrilled or I didn't find it really compelling. I, I think that they did not find a really good use case to be able to make something that I would find salient. And I'm like, I'm kind of the target audience. Like I was all in with R. So AR would be something that I would be really interested in. I could do that Minority Report and be able to like kind of interact with all of the different pieces around me while I. Well, not maybe while I worked during my day job, but like while I work during my like nighttime kind of stuff, that would be really a lot of fun. And so that I found it not that compelling and enjoyable. I was, I did feel that Apple missed the mark. So.

Leo Laporte (104:45)

The company, according to Gurman, had been preparing a cheaper, lighter variant of its headset. He even had the codename N100 for release not next year, but the year after 2027. He says Apple announced internally last week that it's moving staff from that project to accelerate work on glasses.

Ian Thompson (105:06)

I mean, this has traditionally been Apple's mode of operation in that they're not necessarily pioneers of new technology, but they are superb at taking existing technology and making it an awful lot. And I think glasses is the right form factor, to be honest. I mean, yeah, if you're playing a game or if you're a, you know, a Simulation or something like that, then, yes, goggles make a certain amount of sense. But having something that you can carry around with you that, as Georgia says, isn't too intrusive could be, you know, a really good seller for them. And let's face it, they haven't produced that much new. That's new and exciting in quite a while.

Patrick Beja (105:42)

I mean, it's really a very different product, though.

Leo Laporte (105:45)

Oh, it's not the same at all, is it? Yeah, yeah.

Patrick Beja (105:47)

The Vision Pro is kind of. If you want to do an easy analogy, the Vision Pro is like a computing platform. They call it spatial computing. And these glasses would be like a watch kind of. You know, it's the same kind of horizon computing. Horizon you can look to. So I think it's pretty clear that the Vision Pro is not taking off and they're seeing this other thing that's taking off. The thing is, though, in order for glasses to work, you need very solid AI. You need extremely solid. They don't have it yet. I mean, there is this app that Gurman was talking about. What's it called?

Leo Laporte (106:28)

They're using it internally. Yeah.

Patrick Beja (106:31)

That apparently is good. So maybe they're getting there. But. But, yeah, it's very, very different product. To me, it's very interesting that they're getting. Getting into the smart glasses game. And I think it would seem to me like, what do I know? But it would seem to me like they're right to. It's more useful and exciting. But I wouldn't want them to give up on the Vision Pro paradigm either, because I think it's an interesting proposition to have this computer all around you in your space, slash, slightly VR.

Leo Laporte (107:07)

We'll talk more about this on Tuesday on MacBreak Weekly, because we have two Vision Pro owners and advocates on the show, Jason Snell and Alex Lindsey. I've been very lukewarm about the Vision Pro from day one. To be clear, Gurman says Apple is still planning to refresh the Vision Pro with its newer chip, maybe even as soon as this year.

Georgia Dow (107:30)

But.

Leo Laporte (107:31)

But the fact that they are canceling plans for a later generation sounds like they perhaps are giving up on the Vision Pro, which would be kind of a shock.

Patrick Beja (107:39)

No, I. I don't think they would be giving up. Maybe they're putting it on the back burner, but I. I wouldn't think they're giving up is. They're really just getting.

Leo Laporte (107:47)

They've always wanted to do glasses is the other thing. I mean, Tim Cook has always thought that glasses. He would be superior to a fully Enclosed headset. Headset.

Ian Thompson (107:57)

Well, the fully enclosed headset limits what you can actually do, you know, in software terms and user experience. Whereas glass. I don't know. When I first saw ar, Microsoft's Halo AR system, for example, I was kind of like, this is going to be really useful because you can function. Sorry, hololens. That's it, yes.

Leo Laporte (108:18)

Halo's a game.

Ian Thompson (108:19)

Sorry, yeah, hello. Yeah, HoloLens. And it was very clunky, but it did work.

Patrick Beja (108:24)

Work.

Ian Thompson (108:25)

And, you know, AR seems to be the way that's going forward and VR seems to be stuck in a bit of a sort of technological ghetto, as it were.

Leo Laporte (108:32)

Tim Cook said, according to German in 2016, quote, few people are going to view that it's acceptable to be enclosed in something because we're all social people at heart. He always thought glasses were the way to go. So maybe the justification for Vision Pro is it was a. It was a. I think it always was a developer project that was really, really intended to be a learning process for them on the way to something that is more appealing, like glasses. Glasses. Still, there are a lot of technologies that aren't really there yet. Battery technology, computing. You're right. AI. The way META is doing the display is not ar. It's just a little screen inside your. Your eyeglass. I feel like we want. I think I want is something that superimposes information on the world. As I walk around, instead of having.

Georgia Dow (109:22)

Something that's very heavy, you're using, you know, if you're wearing any. Anything that's that heavy on your face for such a long time, it's really kind of exhausting.

Leo Laporte (109:32)

Yeah, that's no good. So that's shown.

Georgia Dow (109:35)

Do that for a day and then you end up with neck pain. So it's not. It's something that you can use for a period of time, but then you feel kind of exhausting. Whereas glasses is something that we wear anyway, many people wear anyways, and it can superimpose information to that, to be additive instead of subtractive, like, which not for everything. Is VR like subtract, like, it adds a lot to the world. It's very, very cool. I do still enjoy it, but I find it tiresome. Like I'm tired. I'm a little bit exhausted at the end of wearing.

Leo Laporte (110:05)

Right. I was too. And slightly nauseated. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas this. It's just. These are the meta, the current generation meta Ray bans. I'm very tempted. I don't think I'll get the updated version because I think they're still all just stepping stones on the path to something I really want. I don't think we're quite technologically. I don't think we're quite there yet.

Benito (110:27)

Hey, this is Benito. I think, like, I think the problem with Apple is that they ignored the gamers. Like, they didn't. They didn't want to try to port any of the games. And that would have been really what people bought it for.

Leo Laporte (110:39)

Meta. That's why Meta succeeded with Meta Quest. Right? It was. It was a gaming platform first and foremost.

Patrick Beja (110:45)

No, no gamer would have bought an. That's. They're not.

Georgia Dow (110:52)

I mean, they would have to have some really amazing games. Like, I'm not gonna say no. Don't tell me no yet because, like, really, if I could go in there, I'm wearing a mech. I felt it. There was like, like whatever Scent of vision. I felt the air on me. There was like a platform underneath. Like, if I. I might have. I might have been in, but it really didn't see. It did a lot of everything and not very good at anything, unfortunately. And then it was. It was pretty. It was pretty.

Leo Laporte (111:20)

It was a. It was amazing technology. I mean, right. That's what it really was is Apple showing off its tech chops.

Georgia Dow (111:26)

Like, Patrick, if you could play. If you could play Street Fighter in.

Leo Laporte (111:30)

VR, think how good you'd be like, or really fit.

Georgia Dow (111:34)

At least at the end, you'd be really, really, like, really doing it.

Patrick Beja (111:39)

I can play Beat Saber for that, actually.

Leo Laporte (111:41)

Yeah. I enjoyed Beat Saber in the Meta Quest. I really thought that was fun. I like that. Yeah. Gaming is changing a little bit. Microsoft is raising the price on its Game pass Ultimate to $30 a month. It seems a little high.

Ian Thompson (111:59)

Well, they'll.

Patrick Beja (111:59)

They're raising it on everything. On every. Well, actually.

Leo Laporte (112:03)

Well, but you could justify the Xbox with tariffs, right?

Patrick Beja (112:07)

I don't think this is about tariffs.

Leo Laporte (112:09)

Okay.

Patrick Beja (112:09)

The Game Pass thing is software. I don't think there's tariffs on that.

Leo Laporte (112:13)

Well, that's what I'm saying is. Yeah, you could say, well, I understand why you added 100 bucks to the Xbox because you got tariffs, but the Game passes.

Patrick Beja (112:21)

Right?

Leo Laporte (112:22)

So it went up 10 bucks. It went up 50%.

Patrick Beja (112:25)

This is. Yeah, this. And a lot of people are very upset about this. So what happened exactly is that Microsoft announced a few days ago that they are raising the price of Game Pass, which is their subscription service. When you get Game Pass, you get access to a number of games.

Leo Laporte (112:42)

It made sense to me because I am a casual gamer. I'm not the kind of person. I'm not going to play like Georgia, that rain game hour, you know, for months. I want to try a little of this, a little of that. So Game Pass made sense. I got access to 100 games, and I could play a little bit of this set for the same price. That's how I played that weird French game. But. But serious gamers, do they do that? No, they're gonna.

Patrick Beja (113:10)

Well, they did because the. No, but they did because Game Pass was an incredibly silly level. Good deal. It was so cheap when it's launched, and it was. So there are now multiple tiers of Game Pass and different ones have different number of games. But the big. The big feature was day one inclusion in Game Pass for games that would release. So when they would release, a lot of them would be included in Game Pass.

Leo Laporte (113:37)

And that's what you want day one releases. Otherwise you're playing big feature.

Patrick Beja (113:43)

And now they've pushed it away and away and away. And it's only in the ultimate version of Game Pass now, which has just gone from 20 to 30 bucks. And a lot of people are very upset, understandably, but no one really understands why they did it. And the reason is actually quite simple. Game Pass used to be a product that they would lure people into their ecosystem with. It was a. How do you it call. Call it produde appelle in French, like subsidized product to get people to play on Xbox. The thing is, now we call them.

Leo Laporte (114:18)

Doorbuster specials in the United States.

Patrick Beja (114:20)

There you go. It was a door buster special for Microsoft. The thing is, now they don't have an Xbox anymore, so they have to price the service at the price that it's worth or closer to it. Like, it's not subsidized for. For getting people into the Xbox ecosystem. And I think a lot of people will say, oh, but what are you talking about? They still have an Xbox? No, they're not, like, very, very much not focused on Xbox hardware.

Leo Laporte (114:50)

Is it over for Xbox?

Patrick Beja (114:52)

For the hardware? Yeah, pretty much.

Leo Laporte (114:54)

They're not gonna make another one.

Patrick Beja (114:56)

Well, there was talks. Now the rumor is they might be canceling it, but they've been saying for a few years, yes, we are making another piece of hardware. It's going to be the most powerful console you've ever seen. And it's incredible. It's crazy. Things have changed since then. But even if they were to do it, I think my big theory for it is that they would run a modified version of Windows on it and that they would unify their hardware platforms. And so they wouldn't need to do it specifically as an instrument independent console. It would just be Windows in a box, essentially, which they're developing an independent, a gaming focused version of Windows for the Rog. Rog Xbox Ally, which is a port, you know, one of those little portable gaming PCs. Yeah, they call like a Switch.

Leo Laporte (115:45)

An Xbox. Yeah, portable Xbox. Yeah.

Patrick Beja (115:47)

And, and so they're developing a version of Windows that when you first load into it for the gaming version, it doesn't have a lot of the desktop components, so it's much lighter, it has more RAM, etc.

Leo Laporte (116:01)

Etc.

Patrick Beja (116:01)

It has an Xbox app like full screen that's easier to use. And my guess was they're gonna give this to a lot of different developers. They would put it on a Windows machine, call it an Xbox and say, there you go, we have a new Xbox. And so they wouldn't need to worry about a console. It seems now, at least there's a rumor saying they're not going to do it. Even if they do, it's not really the same kind of device that Sony and Nintendo are putting out and it's not the same business model. Microsoft is now very much a developer and a publisher, so they're into software and buying Activision and Bethesda and all of those was supposed to be giving games to the Xbox platform. In the end it just gave games to Microsoft and they're going to put out their games on every platform.

Leo Laporte (117:00)

Windows gaming is still totally dominant, isn't it? I mean.

Patrick Beja (117:04)

Well, I wouldn't say dominant.

Leo Laporte (117:06)

It's not bigger than console gaming.

Patrick Beja (117:08)

Well, okay, so revenue wise, PC is about comparable to all of the consoles together. So yes, in that sense it might be dominant, but mobile is both of those combined. Again, so it's PC plus, console is mobile, but mobile is. PC is a huge gaming. Mobile is. Well, so here's my definition of gaming on mobile. A lot of casual gamers, a lot of casual. What's the difference between a casual gamer and a core gamer, I ask you? Well, I have the answer. The core gamer is someone bathes less often. That might be the case, but it's a corollary, not a. So a core gamer is someone that makes time to play. A casual gamer is someone that plays when they have time. And a lot of mobile gamers are casual gamers in that sense. They just play when they have nothing else to do.

Benito (118:06)

And they want to tell my mom that when she plays Bishop jeweled, she plays that all day.

Patrick Beja (118:11)

She might not be a casual she has a lot of free time.

Georgia Dow (118:13)

There we go. She might be more of a gamer than she knows.

Leo Laporte (118:18)

I once lent. I had one of those early Windows phones that had a stylus and I once lent it to a friend who played Bejeweled so much that the screen was scored with lines.

Georgia Dow (118:33)

They are playing Bejeweled.

Leo Laporte (118:34)

Wrong. She was rather addicted to the game, I think.

Georgia Dow (118:40)

Yes.

Patrick Beja (118:40)

So there are very hardcore mobile game players.

Leo Laporte (118:44)

They exist.

Georgia Dow (118:47)

I remember I did play one game similar to that. It was a swipe game and I actually burned through some of the. I no longer had fingerprints on one part of my finger.

Leo Laporte (118:56)

There was a. That's a sign.

Ian Thompson (118:58)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (118:59)

So maybe you're dead.

Georgia Dow (119:00)

That was a warning sign.

Leo Laporte (119:01)

I know Ian and I liked the definition, Patrick, but apparently that's not good.

Georgia Dow (119:07)

Well, there could be some casual core gamers, that's all. Yeah, there might be a midpoint of people that will take time to play a mobile game. And that is. That is their.

Patrick Beja (119:16)

And their core gamers.

Benito (119:17)

But it's a. It's a.

Leo Laporte (119:19)

Most games, I mean, I mean, it's all games. I understand. I play chess on my iPhone. Is that. Am I a gamer?

Georgia Dow (119:28)

Well, I think that. I think that I like Patrick's. I like Patrick's definition. That would be, did you make time to play chess? Chess. Or do you play chess when you have time? Those are two different things. And I think that that is a definite mindset. It's almost the difference between, like, what is an addiction versus what isn't. That would be one more step. Whereas you have now taken time, what you should be using to do something else. And now your entire life is crumbling because you're doing this instead. So we could. We could actually. We could add to Patrick's theory. I like it now.

Leo Laporte (119:56)

If you forget to pee, then you're a gamer. Is that it?

Patrick Beja (120:02)

That's it. You boiled it down to its essential argument, but yeah. So Microsoft, it seems, is very much going towards just being a software company which strengthens Sony and Nintendo to do whatever the heck they want and raise prices left and right. And that's not an awesome result. But the gaming market is still very, very diverse and fragmented. Like, you have multiple players, players in many different areas. So what's the deal?

Leo Laporte (120:33)

Worried about Consolidated with EA being purchased by the Saudis for 40. What is it, $42 billion.

Patrick Beja (120:41)

55. 20 of which is debt. 20 billion of those, 55 billion to buy EA is that this is the biggest leveraged buyout in the history. Yeah, in history.

Leo Laporte (120:56)

So. So why is EA working worth so much money.

Patrick Beja (121:01)

Because they're a very big player in a very big industry.

Leo Laporte (121:06)

Sports games primarily. Right.

Patrick Beja (121:08)

They do a lot of sports game. They have EA fc, EA Sports fc, which is, which used to be FIFA and they have Madden. They have a bunch of sports games. They have the Sims as ea and they have a bunch of other things that are more like core gamery with which we can in the industry. Everyone seems to think you need to pay back those 20 billion. So there's a lot of things that are going to be stripped for parts.

Leo Laporte (121:38)

Private equity like Silver Lake typically does. This is also Saudi Arabia's public investment fund. They bought Pokemon Go and actually I want to say they improved it a little bit. It's a little bit more fun to play. Okay. And Monopoly Go. I've seen a lot more ads from Monopoly Go because of it. Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners is also participating. He's got ties to the Saudi Arabian royal family.

Benito (122:03)

So this is very much just like sports washing. It's like sports watching washing. It's the same thing.

Leo Laporte (122:07)

Is it? Is it? Or. Or the Riyadh Comedy Festival. Yes, it's all.

Benito (122:11)

It's all the same thing.

Leo Laporte (122:12)

Making the Saudi.

Patrick Beja (122:14)

Yeah, it would seem so, yeah.

Leo Laporte (122:15)

Family be okay. It's.

Patrick Beja (122:18)

It's money. I mean, I'm guessing that what's his name, mbs thinks that there is money to be made there. It's part of his. What's it called, Saudi 2030.

Leo Laporte (122:30)

Well, they're smart because they understand oil is not going to last forever. Right. They have huge amount of money now because of their oil wealth, but it's not going to be forever. I think I remember the, the leader of the United Arab Emirates saying, you know, my grandparents lived in a tent and rode camels. I'm driving a Lambo. But my grandchildren will probably be living in tents riding camels. And. And so we've got to diversify. We've got to find other ways. We take, take the capital we have now in plenitude and, and build something. And that makes a lot. It makes a lot of sense to me.

Ian Thompson (123:07)

Of course.

Leo Laporte (123:08)

Yeah. I'm not sure EA is the past.

Patrick Beja (123:13)

Maybe it is, you know. Well, FIFA makes a lot of money. I mean it's not FIFA, it's fc. And maybe they have opportunities around all of this. They actually bought snk, which is a Japanese or formerly Japanese gaming company focused on fighting games of all things. And they put football players and DJs in their later this title as like player, like fighters, which is a bit weird. It feels like Abs likes games and he's like yeah, yeah, we'll do, we'll. Let's have one. We'll do something.

Leo Laporte (123:54)

I don't get why this would be green washing or whatever washing though. I mean why is this going to improve people's point of view of Saudi Arabia?

Patrick Beja (124:04)

Depends what they do with the games.

Leo Laporte (124:05)

Yeah.

Benito (124:06)

What are they going to put in the games? Games now like there's a lot of war games. They make a lot of war games like Call of Duty, stuff like that.

Leo Laporte (124:16)

Yeah, yeah.

Georgia Dow (124:17)

I think that most people don't know who owns the games that they play. I think most people probably don't care. I think that it is one of the fastest growing addictions besides social media. So I think there is probably a lot of money that is in gaming.

Leo Laporte (124:34)

It does really make you wonder what's.

Georgia Dow (124:35)

There a set of media. It does. You know they could say don't put this or do point this in. There's a lot of unconscious bias that goes into gaming and games. So I don't know. I like, I think that they could use it but I probably it's just about. Yeah, money.

Patrick Beja (124:50)

Yeah. Maybe it's just money, but it's. It maybe. Why not both? You know there's.

Leo Laporte (124:56)

Is there data in there that they might. Might want?

Patrick Beja (125:00)

I don't think so.

Leo Laporte (125:01)

Not really, no.

Patrick Beja (125:02)

But there was just. There was an article that just came out about a study actually game time has increased dramatically in the past 10 years among 24 to 25. 20 to 34 year olds, male especially. And I can see how that's a demographic they would like to the other. They play free to play games. You know they play like four Fortnite and Call of Duty Warzone and the.

Leo Laporte (125:27)

Other thought I had is that maybe you're going to see more of this as people get more and more concerned about the stock market being a bubble and a crash coming for a variety of reasons including tariffs in the AI bubble. And they're looking for alternative ways to invest that might be out of the stock market. And if that's the case you'll see more of this kind of thing, I would imagine.

Ian Thompson (125:52)

Imagine, yeah. Although I think to be honest they might be smarter if they waited until the bubble pops and then they can buy, buy the stuff up for half of the price.

Leo Laporte (126:00)

If you're in it for the long haul, that's the time to buy, isn't it?

Ian Thompson (126:02)

Yeah, but I don't know. I agree with you. I'm not sure how much this is going to help the Saudi administration. It's not as though you're going to get a women's football team with burkers on in the game. They, they own the Formula one gaming franchise. Electronic Arts owns the Formula one gaming franchise as well. So, you know, and that's something the Saudis have been very keen on as well.

Leo Laporte (126:23)

They racing? Yeah.

Ian Thompson (126:25)

Oh, they do, yes.

Leo Laporte (126:28)

That's interesting.

Patrick Beja (126:29)

Maybe that's, maybe that's how you go about it. You don't change anything. And they're like, you're like, look, they're good people. They didn't change anything. The Sims can kiss even if they're like two women. And so there you go.

Leo Laporte (126:45)

Was that the point of the comedy festival? It might have been right to say, look, see how liberal we are?

Patrick Beja (126:50)

Pretty much, yeah. It, it would seem maybe, you know, the Saudi crown is interested in, in portraying themselves a little bit more favorably, but maybe they don't really care if, you know, American women kiss in the street as long as they don't in the streets of.

Leo Laporte (127:07)

Don't do it in Riyadh. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Ian Thompson (127:10)

So, yes, I mean, I was, I was out in Saudi Arabia for a week a while back, and it, it is a, it's, it's a system which is never going to take off over here. But as you say, Patrick, it's more about, hey, we have comedy. We're cool too, you know.

Leo Laporte (127:23)

Right.

Ian Thompson (127:23)

Yeah.

Georgia Dow (127:24)

Money. Money is a global market. So it makes sense that they want to globalize and be able to deal with that. I don't think that it's going to really change people's viewpoints upon them unless they alter the media in which they control, such as like Reddit and other places that have, you know, definitely, you know, different areas of being able to control that. So who knows?

Leo Laporte (127:47)

Let's take one more break. You are watching this week in Tech. We're talking about the week's Tech news and a little bit more with Georgia Dow, Westmount Therapy. She still gives out her email address. You did this during the COVID pandemic and I thought it was, I think people wrote to you. It's very helpful. So thank you. And of course you can watch Georgia's therapist reacts videos and she talks a little bit about psychology as well at. On YouTube @georgia dow is D O W is her. Is her YouTube channel 267,000 subscribers. Georgia, good job.

Georgia Dow (128:25)

Yeah, it's okay.

Leo Laporte (128:26)

That's good. Can you make, it's none of my business, but can you make a living on this?

Georgia Dow (128:32)

People could like My channel goes up and down depending. Like if I choose something that's really popular, it might do really well and it might not. But I just try to choose the different things.

Leo Laporte (128:41)

I think the views are going up.

Georgia Dow (128:43)

Over the last few years, up and down. I think that YouTube has like a downturn now. Like, so I do like different games that I'm involved in, and so some of those do well and some of them don't in different shows, but it can't. YouTube wants you to follow in a stream, so its stream that it wants me to follow in is kind of like in the anime area, so.

Leo Laporte (129:01)

Oh, interesting. How do they tell you that?

Georgia Dow (129:03)

Deal with that?

Leo Laporte (129:04)

Do they send you a memo or.

Georgia Dow (129:07)

It tells you really, really quick. You get rewards.

Leo Laporte (129:10)

This.

Georgia Dow (129:10)

It's a Pavlovian response. You get rewarded really nicely for doing the videos that YouTube is happy with. And if you keep on doing the same type of thing, it'll keep on promoting you. You switch the algorithm, the algorithm gets angry if you switch that up a little bit.

Leo Laporte (129:25)

Almost half a million views on yours, on your video on Invincible, being lonely. I think that's good. I think that's good.

Georgia Dow (129:34)

That was good.

Leo Laporte (129:34)

Yeah, Invincible was a good. Was actually a pretty good show. Oh, you did Severance show Irving's secret past. So you. So, yeah, my son did this with TikTok. He paid really close attention to what got the views, what got on the for you page, and he was able to leverage that by. By. By, you know, leaning in on the stuff people wanted to see.

Georgia Dow (129:55)

You definitely. Can I. I'm more rebellious about that. If I enjoy something or I think it's important, I want to be able to.

Leo Laporte (130:01)

You're. I'm. I'm the same. I said I don't chase decent audience. Just do what you love.

Georgia Dow (130:05)

But I also have like a second. Like I have a second job, so I'm. I can do that. So I have that ability to be able to do that. I think that other people are more. I'm in a very fortunate position.

Leo Laporte (130:16)

You're getting good views, though. Very solid views. I'm looking at this. It feels pretty good. That's nice. Good job. And I think the costuming is very important.

Georgia Dow (130:26)

I don't know. I don't know really if it is. It's kind of fun and silly, I.

Leo Laporte (130:30)

Think seeing you in the. In the Wolverine. Wife beater with the metal adamant.

Georgia Dow (130:35)

Okay. Those claws were pretty. I have to say, I made those claws. They were pretty sick. They flopped around a little bit. But I was pretty excited about Those cloth. I hope to get to wear them again.

Leo Laporte (130:45)

I could see why. I could see why people would, would want to watch that. It's great to have you. It's good to see you again, Georgia. Thank you for being here. Also with us, the wonderful Ian Thompson at the Register. I, I. You are on my regular daily beat, you know, beat check where I go and I look for stories to talk about.

Ian Thompson (131:04)

That's.

Leo Laporte (131:05)

And I always go to the Register. Because your coverage is so right on.

Ian Thompson (131:10)

Well, we've, you know, we've expanded out, so now we've got, you know, offices over here. Offices in the UK originally, of course, and then Australia as well. Oh, that's nice around. So, yeah, we try and maintain a global news flow, as it were.

Leo Laporte (131:24)

I also like it that you haven't fallen prey to. Every other site now has all these new redesign signs and oops, they're doing weird things. And this is just a. It's text, basically. It's a step above the Drudge Report. It's just texts and I like that.

Georgia Dow (131:41)

Clean.

Leo Laporte (131:41)

It's very, it's, it's content rich, you know, I mean.

Ian Thompson (131:46)

Yeah, I mean, basically, we didn't try and pivot to video or anything like that. You know, just like it works, it's what the readers like. If they don't like it, they tell us about it in very, very extreme terms. So we do a redesign very carefully. If it happens at all, you have.

Leo Laporte (132:00)

The best thing there is in the world, which is a devoted readership and they will let you know.

Ian Thompson (132:06)

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's one of the. Because, I mean, tech publications are, you know, the circulation is tanking since Google basically changed things around. And, you know, if you're relying on Google for clicks, then you're in trouble at the moment.

Leo Laporte (132:18)

You were smart. So you. Don't you.

Ian Thompson (132:19)

No, no.

Leo Laporte (132:21)

Have you noticed a drop in referral traffic from, from Search or some.

Ian Thompson (132:25)

But we, you see, 60% of our traffic is people coming direct to the site. So, you know, I mean, it's, it's about building a solid, quality site rather than relying on gaming Google. And they can change rules whenever they want.

Leo Laporte (132:37)

Nice. The Register.com. i like it. And of course, not Patrick. Who is Patrick? Patrick not Patrick. Dot com. It's getting a little late in, in. Are you in Paris again now you're back?

Patrick Beja (132:52)

I am in Paris at the moment. Yes.

Leo Laporte (132:53)

On your way to n. The big fight?

Patrick Beja (132:56)

For the big fight, which will last approximately 13 seconds. I checked out my opponent.

Georgia Dow (133:03)

Oh, no.

Patrick Beja (133:03)

And he is Master Rank on, like, five characters. I barely get, like, I'm two divisions below. So my goal was actually to win one round, and I don't know if I'm going to be able to achieve that.

Ian Thompson (133:21)

Who do you.

Georgia Dow (133:21)

Who do you play as if I'm in.

Patrick Beja (133:23)

Ask Manon on Street Fighter.

Benito (133:26)

A little bit of advice, Patrick. You should practice a live game and not on. Not on the Internet. You should practice side to side, because.

Patrick Beja (133:33)

I don't have friends.

Benito (133:34)

The latency is very different when you play in person.

Georgia Dow (133:36)

He probably has friends that wouldn't be as good as him, and it would just be like fighting.

Leo Laporte (133:40)

Yes, exactly.

Georgia Dow (133:41)

They would be horrible.

Ian Thompson (133:42)

And then they wouldn't be friends anymore as well.

Benito (133:45)

The latency is different.

Patrick Beja (133:47)

You can really feel the difference in the latency. Okay, maybe. So it's. It's. My game is at, like, 10, so I'll go in early if I can and try to play there. So I will have, like, an extra half hour of training. Thanks for the advice.

Leo Laporte (134:00)

So this is at Evo. Nice. It's coming up on Friday, and Patrick says. So you're. I don't know what this means, but you're. Platinum five. Sounds good. Sounds like a good level.

Patrick Beja (134:11)

Yeah, it's better than I've ever been. But there's platinum. Five subdivisions per rank. And so after platinum, there's diamond, and then you get to master. So it's not even one. Right.

Leo Laporte (134:24)

What we would call. In chess, you're an expert, not a master.

Patrick Beja (134:27)

I would. I guess that would. And that guy, because you get your.

Leo Laporte (134:33)

You know, he's a master.

Patrick Beja (134:35)

He's a master on, like, five different characters, as I said, goes to local tournaments. Tournaments all the time.

Georgia Dow (134:41)

You don't know what character he's gonna choose either.

Patrick Beja (134:44)

Well, I checked out his profile.

Georgia Dow (134:45)

Yes.

Patrick Beja (134:46)

And. And I. So he has five. I guess I'm gonna bank on one and try to learn how to counter that character. But, yeah. So my big dreams of winning one round are probably. But then, you know what? It's a double elimination tournament, so I always have the losers bracket to win one.

Leo Laporte (135:05)

Okay. Do not despair, because upsets happen. That's what makes these tournaments exciting. You could surprise everyone there.

Patrick Beja (135:14)

I did train with a, A. A listener who offered to. To. To play with me, and he is master. And I won about a fourth of the games. So we. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (135:27)

Now, General Tab has a question. He's hits. It's his opinion that you don't have a chance against anybody less than 30 years old. Old. Is your opponent less than 30 years old?

Patrick Beja (135:37)

It is very possible he could be.

Leo Laporte (135:39)

15 for all you know. You don't know.

Benito (135:42)

That's not true though. Some of the best players are in their 40s.

Georgia Dow (135:44)

Some of the best players are.

Benito (135:45)

Some of the best players, Street Fighter players are in their 40s.

Georgia Dow (135:47)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, it's that. It's that muscle memory that you end up developing to that, but it's just someone that.

Leo Laporte (135:56)

It's also the fast twitch, five different.

Georgia Dow (135:58)

Characters that you are going to have to. To be at that level for. Yeah, the fast twitch muscles. Yes.

Patrick Beja (136:04)

And actually the being there at the tournament, I have never done it, so I will be completely like I did an online tournament with my listeners. There were five of us and I freaked out completely and couldn't, you know.

Georgia Dow (136:17)

Yeah, being there. Yeah, the anxiety. But it's interesting because anxiety will add. If you have mastered a skill, anxiety will actually make you better. Like not thinking is actually a better self scope. If you haven't mastered skill, then it makes you worse. So sometimes shutting off and not knowing and just letting yourself be in the zone, really the problem is, is you can't care whether you win or lose. You don't want every loss that you have to play over in your head. You want to be able to kind of, whenever I work with people that are at high level performance kind of work, you want to always only be in the moment and not worry about every mistake that you make. Because if that plays, you're not there in the moment. Moment that you need to be to be able to.

Leo Laporte (137:00)

What she's telling you, Patrick, is use the force. Patrick.

Patrick Beja (137:06)

I will try very hard to use the force and not care about anything in that very moment.

Leo Laporte (137:11)

Put on that helmet.

Georgia Dow (137:12)

So much fun just being there.

Leo Laporte (137:14)

Yeah, yeah. You're gonna have a great time. That's the main thing. In fact, that's probably the best way to approach it. It's just, I'm gonna have fun. I'm gonna do this.

Patrick Beja (137:21)

I'm going there because since we're talking about Evo, I have to talk a little bit more. EVO is a legendary tournament that has happened in. Happens in the U.S. in Las Vegas and in Tokyo. And the best fighting game players are Japanese. And probably the best known moment of esports history is one called evil moment 37, which is an incredible move that happened at like in, I don't know, 2004, 3. And that put those things on the map for a lot of people. So going there is not about winning that one round which I promised myself and my community and my listeners that I would. It's really about being able to say, I'm an Evo competitor.

Georgia Dow (138:05)

It's true.

Leo Laporte (138:05)

Evo.

Benito (138:06)

Evo is the best esports.

Leo Laporte (138:07)

Get all the shirts.

Georgia Dow (138:08)

Get all the shirts.

Leo Laporte (138:09)

Is it Benito's vouching for this esports?

Benito (138:12)

Evo is the best one, especially because the FGC is the best esports community also.

Georgia Dow (138:17)

Now, how do you get invited to it, if I may ask? I'm sorry, how did you get invited to it?

Patrick Beja (138:22)

Well, well, funny thing. Evo is the only open.

Benito (138:27)

Yeah, that's what makes it. That's what makes it so popular. It's like any. Any old. Any old person can go in there.

Leo Laporte (138:33)

And so they're doing Street Fighter, they're doing Tekken, they're doing Guilty Gear, they.

Patrick Beja (138:40)

Have like, Fatal Fury, Dragon Ball Z. And. And the thing is, you have, especially in popular ones, maybe not in Nice, but you have thousands of competitors that there. So the first couple of days are literally, you know, rows and rows of consoles with people playing their matches. It's like one of the only esports competitions that works like that. And when it's in Las Vegas, for Street Fighter alone, I think last year was 8,000 competitors. Imagine 8,000 people. And that's for one game. Tekken is maybe 4,000. And the others are also in the hundreds and thousands of. So, yeah, it's a very iconic thing, and that's why I'm going. So I don't care if I win.

Leo Laporte (139:23)

So much fun. And you know what? You can always take a walk on the promenade in Nice and look at the ocean. And do you have this fancy controller thing that this guy has? What?

Patrick Beja (139:33)

No, I don't have that one. I have another one, which is not the standard you do need because Street Fight.

Benito (139:39)

You're a Hitbox guy.

Leo Laporte (139:40)

Are you a Hitbox guy?

Patrick Beja (139:41)

I can't talk about this for two hours.

Benito (139:43)

You're a Hitbox guy, Patrick.

Patrick Beja (139:46)

I'm sorry, what?

Benito (139:46)

You're a Hitbox guy.

Patrick Beja (139:47)

No, I do not have an A Hitbox. I'm not. You know, I really don't play that much. I started training a month ago. Half an hour a day as like. Like half an hour a day. I'm going to do it. And I. I went from Platinum 2 to Platinum 5. That's crazy. And. And you get to bring your own.

Leo Laporte (140:07)

Controller to the event.

Patrick Beja (140:08)

You do have to. Your own controller.

Georgia Dow (140:10)

They check to make sure that you don't have, like, macros programmed into your controller.

Benito (140:15)

No, they do. They do.

Leo Laporte (140:16)

They do do that. Wow. Okay.

Georgia Dow (140:19)

Okay.

Leo Laporte (140:19)

Because like, that would be.

Georgia Dow (140:21)

The thing is, you see the guy with the other controller and they're like, that move should not have been done that way.

Leo Laporte (140:25)

And will there be an audience for this giant?

Patrick Beja (140:29)

I don't think for the first, for the first couple of the final rounds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then they have, then they have an audience and you know, I'm guessing that the big players are going to come to. Nice. I've seen that one of them, Bonchan, is like in my pool, one of the best players and he's like two games away from me.

Leo Laporte (140:50)

Yeah.

Benito (140:50)

So the big players are also in the pools. So, like, yeah, they will stream some of those events, you know, so.

Leo Laporte (140:55)

Yeah.

Georgia Dow (140:56)

Oh, that's cool.

Patrick Beja (140:58)

It's a very, it's. It's a very special event amongst the esports and, you know, video game, competitive video game games. EVO has, I think it's probably the best known with League of Legends worlds. Those are the two that are the. The best known events. And this one is. Has a very special place in a lot of people's hearts. So being able to go to, you know, minor one is something I didn't want to miss.

Leo Laporte (141:27)

Well, my mom told me, never play pool with a guy who owns his own queue and never play Street Fighter without guy who brings his own controller. So I shall never be playing you. But we wish you the best, Patrick. We'll be following with interest.

Patrick Beja (141:40)

Leo, I am soon to be an evil competitor, so I think it's wise of you to not have to add.

Benito (141:48)

That to your lower third.

Leo Laporte (141:49)

You're going to have to add that.

Benito (141:50)

To your lower third, that is EVO.

Patrick Beja (141:51)

Competitor Patrick Beza, evil competitor.

Leo Laporte (141:57)

The brackets are online. You can go watch and see how Patrick does. There you go on the EVO website. We're going to take a break. Come back with some final thoughts in just a moment. You're watching this week in Tech. Our show today brought to you by Miro. Oh, I mean, I love Miro. We do a lot of our shows using Miro. Miro's great for any team that's working together. Every day you see headlines speculating how AI is coming for our jobs, how it's creating fear and anxiety in people. But Miro has a different story to tell. A recent Survey found that 76% of Miro users believe that AI can benefit their role, although 54% struggle to know when to use it. This is why Miro has created the Innovation Workspace. This is an intelligent platform that brings people and AI together in a shared space to get great work done. Miro's been empowering teams to build and transform bold ideas into the next big thing for over a decade. 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Moving along, just a few final stories. Although I'm glad to know that we can root for you Patrick in a special events. Nice to know a pro. Let's see. I think we've done a lot of the stories I put in here. Oh, I'm sorry about this. We talked last week about Jaguar. Four weeks their production line was down due to ransomware. In fact they went to the UK government and borrowed $2 billion to keep the payroll going and. Oh my God. Well, the latest is the Asahi brewery. Oh no. From the register. Ian Thompson, no suds for you.

Ian Thompson (147:32)

Yeah, it's. It's a bad one, you know, I mean it's. Thankfully it's just in Japan. Japan. So domestic market, the distribution. I mean they had interviews with restauranteurs like we're down to our last barrel.

Leo Laporte (147:44)

But I love Asahi dry. I drink it all the time.

Ian Thompson (147:48)

It's the biggest, biggest brewery in Japan and it's basically been crippled by an attack.

Leo Laporte (147:54)

Ransomware.

Ian Thompson (147:55)

Yeah, it sounds that way. They have said that data is being exfiltrated. So yeah, it's looking like ransomware and in those kind of circumstances they're not going to pay pay because they've got to strip their systems out anyway. So it's now down to manual taking, taking it of orders and deliveries.

Leo Laporte (148:12)

So such a nightmare out there, I tell you.

Ian Thompson (148:15)

Yeah, I mean the Jaguar thing was just it because it has enormous knock on effects in the rest of the industry in that, you know, a lot of Jaguar's parts are made by third party suppliers. They're now not getting paid. So the loan was basically tied. An awful lot of people over the Japanese government hasn't been that good when it comes to offering similar bailouts. So we're going to have to how this goes. Plus it's a difficult political sell to no beer drinkers must have their beer.

Leo Laporte (148:42)

Around September 29, hackers began sending emails to executives saying we know what you did last summer or last night or numerous. This is from Google. Google's head of cybercrime analysis Genevieve Stark told TechCrunch. Hackers associated with the prolific ransomware group are sending extortion email to executives at numerous large organizations claiming to have stolen their sensitive information from a suite of business software products developed by Oracle. Hundreds hundreds of compromised accounts affiliated with the Clop ransomware gang. So this is the, this is kind of the new thing. It used to be they would just encrypt your data and say if you ever want to see your data again, send US, you know, $1 million in Bitcoin. Now they're doing that and, and blackmailing people.

Ian Thompson (149:34)

Well, yes, it's a classic double attack. So basically you, you steal the data, you lock down the PCs and then you hold that data for ransom. There is in fact a new trend of tertiary stage attacks where they will steal the data and then go off to their third party suppliers and say, look, we've got all these details on your company because you dealt with a company we've just hacked. You pay us money and we'll protect your data in the data to dump. But at the end of the day you're trusting criminals. And we've seen earlier this year, for example, a school board decided to pay up to ransomware operators just to make sure their data was secure and they released it anyway. So there is no honor amongst thieves when it comes to this sort of thing.

Leo Laporte (150:17)

I know you're going to the EVO Championships, but maybe. I don't know. Ian, are you good at Excel? The Microsoft Excel champions story are coming up. I love this. I love this. Excel is, by the way, happy birthday. 40 years old as of September 30th. And the nerds are gathering for the World Excel Championships.

Ian Thompson (150:44)

We have, we have a British skin in the game as well.

Leo Laporte (150:47)

For the first time, the UK Championships are coming up. The fmwc Microsoft Excel World Championship uk. So it's hysterical what they do. Ian, do you, can you describe what this is like?

Ian Thompson (151:03)

I mean it's basically building the most functional spreadsheet you can in the shortest amount of time.

Leo Laporte (151:07)

They give them weird puzzle challenges.

Ian Thompson (151:09)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (151:11)

And here they are. Here the nerds are this. I don't, I don't want to smell this room. I just want to say that right, right now I. Players are introduced WWE style. The names echoing around the arena as they're made to march through a smoke filled, neon lit hype tunnel. Whether they like it or not, once they reach the stage, every move, every Excel spreadsheet move is beamed onto a 50 foot LED screen and broadcast worldwide on ESPN.

Ian Thompson (151:46)

I do love this. You take the most boring application on the planet and you turn it into a game. It's marketing genius. It is, yeah.

Leo Laporte (151:55)

It's pretty funny. Anyway, watch for the UK championships and then I guess ESPN will broadcast the global championships.

Ian Thompson (152:04)

I think it's December that they're doing the global one.

Leo Laporte (152:07)

Yeah.

Ian Thompson (152:08)

But yes.

Leo Laporte (152:08)

So if you win the UK Championship, you get an all expenses paid trip to Las Vegas to represent the UK at the World Championships. That's in the HyperX esports arena on the Strip. A three day Excel knockdown, drag out fight.

Ian Thompson (152:28)

I love it. You know, they're all the same enthusiasts. Yeah.

Georgia Dow (152:32)

Make it fun, make it enjoyable. I love it. I think that that's great. But it's kind of cool because you take anything that someone's really good at and you, you watch them do it and it's magical. Like it's magical and it just seems like really amazing and I don't know, I've done it in Excel. I'm not good at it at all. But like I'm not showing up but I've done an Excel sheet now and then and they're really, it's a really useful, it's so helpful. So I don't know, I think that's fun and cool and make it exciting and. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (153:01)

I think we should all go to Las Vegas to watch. You want to see the highlights from the finals in 2023 three for a live head to head competition in an e gaming arena.

Patrick Beja (153:14)

It's counting on you.

Leo Laporte (153:16)

Yeah. Oh, look. Oh. Oh, my God. He's gonna do an entire range.

Benito (153:19)

You can see his keystrokes. That's awesome.

Leo Laporte (153:22)

Look at the keystrokes on the right. Control plus Control shift. Delete this entire case. Trim. He's using the trim command. I don't know. I've never seen that done before. Oh, the entire spreadsheet's empty.

Georgia Dow (153:34)

If you hit delete at the wrong time. Soul crushing the announcers.

Leo Laporte (153:40)

That's hysterical.

Georgia Dow (153:42)

That's why he would be a professional, because he wouldn't do that. I would. He would.

Leo Laporte (153:47)

So much so.

Benito (153:48)

Is copilot allowed? Is copilot allowed?

Leo Laporte (153:51)

No. This year, maybe. I don't know. That's part a big part of Microsoft Maresca. One of our favorite hosts on our shows is in charge of AI and python in Excel.

Ian Thompson (154:03)

I would hope they don't. That seems like cheating. It's kind of like turning up to a pub quiz with a smartphone hidden in your pocket.

Georgia Dow (154:09)

If everyone was using it, that would be a different thing because then still the people that could use that better would be still better at it.

Benito (154:17)

Totally different skill.

Georgia Dow (154:18)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (154:21)

You can have a separate room for the AI nerds. Maybe. I don't know. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have come to the end of this thrilling and gripping edition. We wish you, Patrick, the very best in nice.

Ian Thompson (154:36)

Yes. Give them hell. Break a leg.

Leo Laporte (154:38)

Defend.

Patrick Beja (154:41)

I will break someone's leg.

Leo Laporte (154:45)

So hopefully, Hopefully. I'm familiar with Mortal Kombat, is this Street Fighter is kind of like that, right? You got two players, you're looking at the side and they. And they got moves and they're battling each other. Is it three rounds? Is it like boxing? What is the.

Patrick Beja (154:58)

Yeah, yeah. Two.

Leo Laporte (154:59)

Two.

Patrick Beja (155:00)

I mean, it depends how. How they set it up. But yeah, it's usually two rounds wins a game. Game. And you get two games to.

Leo Laporte (155:08)

For.

Patrick Beja (155:08)

For a match. So best of best of three is how it usually goes. And I will try to find my opponent and break their leg before the match. So they have to.

Georgia Dow (155:23)

Yeah, break his.

Leo Laporte (155:24)

Don't forget the legs.

Georgia Dow (155:26)

Yeah, he doesn't need the leg. He doesn't need the leg. That was probably.

Patrick Beja (155:30)

I was hoping to do it like half an hour before. So they have to go to the hospital, but you got to talk trash beforehand.

Georgia Dow (155:37)

You have to get into his head.

Leo Laporte (155:38)

Really get that Tanya Harding stick and whap him on the knuckles. That's what you gota. That's what you gotta do. Honestly. That's great.

Georgia Dow (155:46)

All mind games. All mind games.

Leo Laporte (155:47)

It's nice to. To know that we have some real athletes in our. In our midst. Thank you.

Patrick Beja (155:54)

Next I'll enroll in the. In the Excel championship.

Leo Laporte (155:58)

Yes. NotPatrick.com follow all the excitement. Join the Phileas Club and all his other wonderful podcasts. Thank you so much, Patrick. So great.

Patrick Beja (156:06)

Thank you, Leo.

Leo Laporte (156:07)

Thank you. Thanks to ian Thompson, the Register.com. always a pleasure going strong. I appreciate it. Thank you for being here. Anything you want to plug or.

Ian Thompson (156:17)

Oh, well, it's going to be a busy month. I mean we've got Dreamforce in town so it's going to be 50,000 people. San Francisco and Metallica are playing. But then they're not my cup of tea. But wait a minute.

Leo Laporte (156:29)

They are bringing in Metallica to play for Dreamforce?

Benito (156:33)

Well, Metallica's local. Metallica's local.

Leo Laporte (156:35)

Well, I know it's not a long trip for Metallica, but I think they probably charge a pretty penny.

Ian Thompson (156:40)

Well, I mean this is traditionally. Yeah, this is traditionally what they've done. I mean Oracle got the whole thing of trying to make tech conferences sort of more fun by getting in big bands and I've seen Lenny Kravitz and you know, various other bands there. Dreamforce got into it, but there was the shameful incident when they booked it's not Billy who wrote White Wedding. Billy Idol.

Leo Laporte (157:03)

Billy Idol, yes.

Ian Thompson (157:04)

And they brought him in to do the concert and he changed the lyrics to White Wedding. It's a nice day for CRM. I lost a lot of respect for him in that concert.

Leo Laporte (157:14)

Oh, it's by the way, not just Metallica if that's a little too heavy for you. Benson Boone is also performing.

Georgia Dow (157:20)

Yeah, little flip.

Leo Laporte (157:22)

Yeah, I like that. Little flip at the Grammys or whatever that. Wherever that was. Yeah. And his. In his jumpsuit, he was wearing his onesie. His onesie, Yeah.

Ian Thompson (157:31)

I mean it can, it can work. Some Oracle was a bit. They, they had a b. A whole thing of hiring lots and lots of bands from, you know, the 80s. And it was kind of painful when Berlin came on and we're playing in the park outside Moscone Center. But this was it, you know, in a 40 minute con concert, nobody was listening to them at all until that one song came on hit. You really felt for them because it's just like, okay, you know, let's. Let's make him wait for the last one. So yeah, it should be a good show. But it's mainly that the number of cloud people who are coming into town. So there's a whole series of interviews to get set up.

Leo Laporte (158:05)

Well, and Matthew McConaughey apparently is giving a keynote.

Ian Thompson (158:09)

Hey, the Princess of Belgium is coming over.

Leo Laporte (158:12)

Matthew McConaughey is a salesforce brand partner of all things. Wow. Maria Shriver and Mel Robbins. Wow. Wow. Oh, I love Bozema St John. She was very impressive at. Was it Microsoft event? I think it was. And Sundar Pichai. Well, okay. Have fun at Dreamforce.

Ian Thompson (158:34)

We'll see.

Leo Laporte (158:34)

That sounds exciting.

Ian Thompson (158:35)

Good.

Leo Laporte (158:36)

Yeah. And thank you so much, Georgia Dow. I appreciate it. Taking a little time off from listening to Taylor Swift's new album to join us. I appre. No, I'm teasing you. I'm teasing, teasing you. It's. Have you listened to it?

Georgia Dow (158:49)

I. I like it.

Leo Laporte (158:52)

Yeah. It sounds like all her other albums to me. But I might. I'm not in the demographic, I think is the problem.

Georgia Dow (159:00)

Music is good. Like whatever. Whatever you feel. It's. It can be really healing and soothing.

Leo Laporte (159:04)

So like, oh, there you go.

Georgia Dow (159:06)

It's a nice thing. There we go.

Leo Laporte (159:07)

That's why I listen to Metallica. It's very healing.

Georgia Dow (159:10)

Listen, sometimes you want to get the experience rationale. That works as well.

Leo Laporte (159:14)

There's nothing more soothing than Battery. Thank you, Georgia. YouTube.com georgiadao Please, everybody go there. Let's get our subscription up. We want to get to a million. So you get that special platinum button. I want you to get the special platinum button. Thank you, George. It's great to see you. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do twit every Sunday about 2 to 5 Pacific Time time PM that would be 5 to 8 Eastern Time, 2100 UTC. Middle of the night for Paris. But thank you for being here. If you want to watch live in your club, members can watch, of course, in the discord. But there's also YouTube for everybody. YouTube, Twitch, Tik Tok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick. And we're thinking about abandoning TikTok because it's very complicated for us to do. Requires Bonito to keep pushing buttons every hour and things like that. So if anybody watches a TikTok and says, no, no, please, you got to keep the Tik Tok feed, let us know. Otherwise, I think this might be the last time, last time we'll do Twitter, Tik Tok. But there's still six other places you can watch us and you don't have to watch us live. That's the beauty of it. It's a podcast. Download a copy, audio or video from our website Twit TV. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video and of course you can subscribe and to you're going favorite podcast client and get it automatically. That way you'll have it ready for your Monday morning commute. 20 years we've been doing this and for 20 years I've been saying the same thing. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next week. Another Twit is in the can. Amazing. The Twit. All right, this episode is brought to you by Coda. I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. But what I don't love trying to keep track of all the information, data and projects across dozens of platforms and products and tools. Coda is an all in one collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams like ours worldwide get on the same page. Offering the flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teams 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 working style. It connects to hundreds of your favorite tools, including Salesforce and Jira and Asana and Figma. Head over to Coda Dot I right now and get six months of the team plan for startups for free. That's C O D A IO Twit and get six months of the team plan for free. Coda IO Twit.