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This Week in Tech 1083: A Whole Separate Class of Squiggles
02:10:54
Which Religion Does AI Identify With?
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- [00:00]
A
It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Paris Martineau is with us, Ian Thompson and from the Wall Street Journal, Berber Ginn. We're going to talk about Anthropic and OpenAI. All the chatter about their IPOs. Anthropic says they figured out a way to keep AI from blackmailing you. Just tell it it's bad. And what religion is AI? Apparently we know now what's coming up next on Twitter. This episode is brought to you by OutSystems, a leading AI development platform for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are creating custom apps and AI agents on the Outsystems platform. And with good reason. Build, run and govern apps and agents on one unified platform. Innovate at the speed of AI without compromising quality or control. Trusted by thousands of enterprises worldwide for mission critical apps, teams of any size and technical depth can use Outsystems to build, deploy and manage AI apps and agents quickly and effectively without compromising reliability and security. With Outsystems, you can accelerate ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading AI development platform that is unified, agile and enterprise proven, allowing you to build your agentic future with AI solutions deeply integrated into your architecture. Outsystems Build your agentic future. Learn more@outsystems.com TWIT that's outsystems.com TWIT podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT. This is TWiT. This Week in Tech. Episode 1083, recorded Sunday, May 10, 2026. A whole separate class of squiggles. It's time for TWiT. This Week in Tech. The show we cover the week's tech news. Hello, Paris Martineau.
- [02:01]
B
Hello.
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A
Double duty this week. It's good to see you.
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B
You can't keep me away.
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A
No, I made her. Because her friend from a previous employer, who shall remain nameless, is joining us for the first time. Berber Ginn is here now doing great work at the Wall Street Journal. Hi. In fact, we've been quoting your stories. Hi, Berber.
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C
Hi, guys.
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A
Welcome. I thought if I had a friend on, it wouldn't be so, so weird,
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B
you know, and it's always important that whenever you're about to log into the Zoom for recording of this Week in Tech, to get a text from someone being like, is this show three hours? Like, yes.
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A
Did he say that? Did he say that? Oh, I'm sorry, Of course, everybody says that. It's going to be short.
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B
Listen, everybody says that, Leo. We don't adequately warn them and I Think that's fair? Because we would scare everybody off if they knew what they were saying.
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A
Yeah, exactly. He better not say, because then, like,
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B
it's a show of an indeterminate amount of time.
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A
Yeah, right. We don't know how long it's going to last. It could be any amount of time. And also with us, Ian Thompson from the beautiful techfinitive where he writes the View from the Valley column.
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D
Good afternoon.
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A
Good to see you, my dear friend, Ian.
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D
Yes, Indeed. I do Ms. Petaluma, but, you know, Zoom will do.
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A
I know you're in San Francisco. Berber is for the week in New York because he's. It's Mother's Day today. Thank your mother for letting us borrow you this evening. Paris, did you call Mom? You probably did.
- [03:29]
B
Oh, I not only called mom, I FaceTimed her. I got some flowers delivered.
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D
Wow, that's maximum brownie points.
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B
Yeah, I really was stunting on them this week.
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A
Nice. Well, we're taking Lisa out to dinner tonight, so that. That's going to be the Mother's Day.
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B
Yeah. Being in Hawaii helps as far as day goes.
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A
I'm pretending the whole trip was for Mother's Day just for. Yeah. So, Berber, you've been doing a great job covering anthropic and OpenAI, in particular their IPOs. And I thought, before we go too far, I'd like to check in with you on the status. First of all, do we know when those IPOs will happen?
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C
We don't know. I think we've report. A bunch of outlets have reported that they're Both aiming for IPOs by the end of this year, but they've been very coy and secretive, I think in part because they don't really want the other company to know they're.
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A
Exactly.
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C
But I think they're both trying to go out as fast as they can.
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A
They're bitter rivals.
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B
Is there one that you think is fast or farther along in the process than the other, or are they both kind of neck and neck at this point?
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C
I think Anthropic is probably in a better position than OpenAI just because they. They're like a cleaner company, I think, than open.
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B
In what sense?
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D
Well, they do have the massive lawsuit
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C
holding over has to deal with, like, a trial. They have all the management turnover. They're kind of pivoting the business right now and then, yeah, I guess, like Fiji. Simo, who is kind of the de facto CEO there, she is on medical leave still. So I feel like they just have a lot more issues that they have to get through, whereas Anthropic feels a bit more kind of put together. And I think right now they have a better kind of growth story. But who knows? Things can change week to week.
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A
So your most recent article this past week in the Wall street journal was about OpenAI spinning off their robotics and their hardware divisions. They closed sora, they're trying to strip it down. In fact, it seems to me they're trying to look more like anthropic.
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C
Yeah, I think that's one way to look at it. Because I feel like last year, the kind of vision for the company now is very different than it was a year ago. I think A year ago OpenAI thought it was gonna be a huge consumer company, and I think now maybe more of an enterprise company first. And they have all these side bets that I think Sam kind of greenlighted on a whim that now they're trying to figure out what to do with some of them.
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A
His own investments. Right?
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C
Yes.
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A
And that's a little sticky. That's. That's something the market may not like too much either.
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C
Yes, he has a lot of conflicts of interest, which I'm sure.
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B
Conflicts of interest in a tech CEO. Who would have guessed?
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A
Well, but, you know, that was we. Paris and I went back and forth over the Ronan Farrell reporting in the. In the New Yorker about how untrustworthy Sam Altman was. My only point in that argument was, well, so all of them are somewhat untrustworthy. I mean, he's competing in a space where Elon Musk is a CEO, so he looks better than anybody compared to that. But do you think that that also is going to harm the ipo? I feel like that that article might, in fact have been almost planted by Elon. It was. It was so helpful by Anthropic. It was so helpful to them.
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C
You mean the story on the conflicts of interest?
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A
Yes. Yes. It's just the untrustworthiness of.
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C
Yes, well, yes, it was not planted by Elon, but it was helpful for. I mean, it is interesting because the trial against Musk, which I actually had not been following as closely as I probably should have, but I belatedly realized last week that a lot of it. The unjust enrichment claim, like. I think one thing the Musk side is trying to do is to say that Sam, even though he didn't take any equity in the company, tried to enrich himself through all these deals he's done between OpenAI and his own portfolio companies.
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A
Well, also Greg Brockman, who didn't put any money into OpenAI as we found out in the trial, worth $30 billion.
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C
Yes. Well, that. Yes. And he did not do a great job when he was.
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A
No, he did not. The best thing that came out this week was on Twitter. Somebody. Did you. First of all, did any. Did you all read the back and forth text messages between Sam and Mina Morati during that Thanksgiving period where Sam was temporarily ousted as CEO? It was historic.
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B
I mean, I've read some of them. I don't know if I've read all of them, but some of them have wormed their way into my brain. Brain just memetically. I think that there's the one where one of the masks, like, how's it going? The discussion with the board. It's like directionally bad or directionally good.
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C
Techies love to use the word directionally.
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A
Directionally.
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C
Directionally bad.
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A
Well, let me. Somebody. Let's see. This is.
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D
I mean, they've been live streaming the audio from the court case.
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A
Let me play it. This is Daniel Green. Took the texts from the day Sam Altman got fired and set them to kind of as if it were Hamilton. I wish I could play it for you, but you'll have to just imagine it. So what do you. What do you think is the impact of this Berber on the ipo? On the future? It really feels like if Elon got his way, he'd put Open Air out of business.
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C
Yeah. I mean, my gut says that OpenAI will get through it. It's kind of weird because I get the jury is the one that decides whether OpenAI and Sam are guilty or not. And so I don't know. I guess it's hard to really know what.
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A
Yeah, we don't know what a jury's going to do with this yet.
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C
Right. But I, but I think Elon's claims, he kind of. I think OpenAI did a good job of showing that Elon Musk was fine with turning OpenAI into a for profit until he realized he wouldn't be the one in control.
- [10:13]
A
Right.
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C
Yeah. So my gut says that OpenAI will be able to get through it, but I mean, there's still a lot of twists and turns. Like Sam is going to testify later this week. Satya, Nadella. And you never know with the jury. Yeah, we're going to decide. Yeah, they all seem.
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A
Yeah, it's a great soap opera, though.
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C
Yes.
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A
We're fortunate to have such a good soap opera.
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B
Why do you think that? I mean, obviously OpenAI's ambitions to go back to something you said earlier were originally to kind of make it As a consumer company, they had obviously all of the kind of economy of scale sort of thing going on. Why do you think that. That those plans seem to kind of fall through and that they seem to be pivoting to a more anthropic, like enterprise model now?
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C
Yeah, I don't know, because I feel like ChatGPT, my understanding is that they expected, they expected to get to 1 billion weekly active users by the end of last year. They still haven't announced hitting that milestone. I feel like they've been kind of stuck at the 900 mark for a long time. So I don't really have a great answer because I guess all the Codex coding stuff is growing super fast. But I feel like it is kind of underexplored. Why consumer adoption has kind of, I don't want to say, like plateaued but not grown as fast as OpenAI thought it would. I think Gemini did take off, take. Take away a lot of users. But I don't know, I just feel like a lot of people use ChatGPT but don't feel the need to pay for it.
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B
I was just saying I think that that's probably the big difference is you can have nearly a billion consumer like general users, but if they're not willing to fork over at least 20 bucks a month for it, what does that really matter?
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A
Well, yeah, you lose money and all the inference they're doing, well, this is it.
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D
I mean, every, every time somebody comes in and, and, you know, does it for free, then Chat GPT loses money and Barrister's made an excellent point there, right? I mean, from speaking to coders. Claude is the way to go for software. Gemini is terrible at fact checking, which is odd for Google, but yeah, it's. It's a very strange situation at the moment. It's going to be interesting to see how the IPOs hang out.
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A
Actually, I've. Ferris will laugh at me now, recently switched from anthropic opus models to ChatGPT.
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B
You've abandoned your wife. I abandoned my wife, Claudia, as she's known.
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A
I did. No, I don't call her Claudia. That's.
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B
Sorry, is it Claudia Dawkins I caught?
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A
Well, I called her him. Kenobi.
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D
It.
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A
It's really Kenobi. And. And now I am using a different agent model called Hermes, which I really like and that is, I call Quicksilver. So. Oh, Quick Quickie for short.
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B
Oh, boy.
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A
I know it's sad.
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D
I'm just gonna sort out a quickie. It doesn't sound good, mate.
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A
It doesn't no, actually, as I think about it, I called it Quicksilver. It decided to call itself Quick Quickie. I don't honestly think it knows what that means, and I'm not going to tell it.
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D
I should hope not.
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A
But I promise the big. Actually, the big story of the week was not an AI story. It was a hacker story. Canvas, which is very widely used in colleges and schools, as you know, blackboard software, was breached, and that meant that more than 2,000 schools just turned it off, in many cases during final exams. The. The. The 275 million students.
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B
This is a Shiny Hunters breach, right?
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D
Shiny Hunters, yeah, step back.
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A
A social engineering breach. They actually use phone calls usually to. To make these breaches. 275 million students and faculty, 9,000 educational systems. Here's the screenshot from Krebs on security, rooting your systems since 2019. If any of the schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data, please consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact us privately at Tox to negotiate a settlement. You have until the end of the day, May 12, before everything is leaked. So Canvas shut down just said, well, the best thing to do at this point is shut down completely.
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B
Jesus.
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A
Yeah, now they say, we think it's fully contained stolen information. Canvas says includes certain identifying information of users that affected institutions, such as names, email addresses and student ID numbers, as well as messages among users. But password, states of birth, government identifiers, as far as they could tell, they said were not stolen. So this is a. You know, I mean, we don't usually report on breaches. There are so many of them. We had Troy Hunt on Intelligent Machines on Wednesday, and I think that the count of breaches last year, this actually came from Experian, which said there were 5,000 data breaches in the past year. So I know. What is the number per day of 5,000 data breaches? A lot. So we don't normally report on this, but this was a. This is a big one that hurt a lot of our listeners.
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D
Well, it's interesting in that when the first data breach laws were proposed, a lot of people in the industry were very pro them because. Exactly as you said, there are so many that people become inured to this. So, you know, it's just like, well, we've had another data breach. We've had another data breach. But with Canvas, and particularly at this time of the year, that's a distinctly
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B
worrying Final exams time for a lot of students. Students.
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D
Yeah, yeah.
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A
Wires, Wired magazine. Lily. Hey, Newman. Writing this Canvas hack is A new kind of ransomware debacle. Thousands of schools are paralyzed on Thursday after Canvas shut down. So yeah, it's. It is particularly ugly and I mean,
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B
I can't emphasize enough for students today at a lot of schools canvases their entire learning platform.
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A
Are you familiar with.
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B
I didn't ever use it, but I'm still in a lot of Facebook and Reddit and other groups relating to students, teachers and parents and professors, back from when I was covering the teen adjacent beat of the information. And I've just seen a wash of posts over the last week of people being like, literally my study guides are on there, all of our grades are on there, the assignments are on there, my final exam is on Canvas. I mean there's just nothing that a lot of students can do school wise with this platform being down. So it's.
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A
One of our Australian users said it was. It happened in Australia too. Medical exams got shut down at one of the universities here and his son who had a commerce exam also missed. I guess he got his exam in the morning and by afternoon all the exams had been turned off. So just a, just a bad.
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B
I do think it's funny though that this is the same hacker group that has recently put out an open call for any ladies that want to be hackers because they. A big part of their social engineering is phone calls, right? And they're like, we. We need women to fake women. It turns out we can't fake women's voices.
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A
Can't fake it. Hello, I'm calling for Leo's mother. I'm sorry, this is Leo's mother's mother.
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B
Yeah, not really cutting it, I suppose.
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C
Doesn't.
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A
Doesn't really. Actually that's what Troy said, which I thought was kind of interesting. He said it shows that even deep fake voice impression isn't maybe as effective as. As some of the hacking groups would like. They need actual Mars needs women. And apparently so do shiny hunters. Speaking of education, Ars Technica with a story. There was a fairly influential study saying that ChatGPT was effective and could really help student learning. Published in Nature, that study has now been retracted a year after publication. The publisher, Springer, cited discrepancies in the analysis and lack of confidence in the conclusions. The damage has been done. You're going to love this, Paris. Because so many people was treated by many on social media as one of the first pieces of hard gold standard evidence that chat, GPT and generative AI more broadly benefits learners. Apparently not so fast. We've seen this before. Studies, studies live beyond you Know what is it that Ben Franklin said? The a lie spreads around the world while the truth is still putting its
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D
pants, putting its boots on. Yeah. Said the same.
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B
504 citations from peer reviewed, non peer reviewed sources, which is quite a lot.
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A
Yeah,
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D
I mean, it happens. It's kind of like the, the autism vaccine thing that was published in the Lancet and then they actually looked at it again and said, oh, whoops, we, we screwed up on this. But with Chat GPT, I'm, I'm curious about your views on this, Paris, because this is, this is potentially very damaging.
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B
I mean, it's very damaging, but it also, I think, speaks to just systemic issues at Nature. How do you, this is a peer reviewed article.
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D
Yeah.
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B
How do you, who are the peer reviewers on this that they don't pay their peer review? I know, I mean, it's a, there's obviously a lot of issues with the way that peer reviewing is being handled, but Christ.
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A
And, and unfortunately, I think a lot of peer reviewers have now turned to AI to do their peer review. Oh, and of course AI would say, oh, yeah, Chat gp' GPT is great. Oh, it's so good, man, it's so good. So I guess, no surprise.
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D
Well, I recently ran an article I'd wrote through just, you know, I'd finished it, written it, ran it through a couple of AI engines and you wouldn't believe the amount of mistakes it made. It's like, oh, this person isn't the Attorney General of Florida. Oh, this person was. Yeah. They tried to tell me that Sam Altman had never had, you know, an attack on his house. And you're like, so I, I, I feel bad about this, but actually asking an AI engine, are you on crack? Is it just had to be done.
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A
Well, the thing to remember is that AI model that you're using was trained before that. It was probably trained when Pam Bondi was AG. Yeah, FL. So it's going off the information, it's in its model.
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D
But people are trusting this and this is deeply worrying.
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A
Yeah. And you know, it's a little muddy because some AI harnesses will also use the web to check current references. So occasionally, I mean, you can ask Chat GPD something current and it will update its model even though its model might be months old with the current information. But you don't know if it has, you can't guarantee that. And it does absolutely no good. And I've learned this to say, do not. People put this in their prompts all the time. Do not hallucinate, do not make up anything. It's okay to say, I don't know.
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B
Goes, oh, do this in one shot. Make no mistakes.
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A
Oh, if only I had known.
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D
Yeah.
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A
Make no mistakes. Oh, okay, I got it, I got it. We're going to pause for a moment. We do have more AI news. There's also Apple news, meta news. There's lots of news. Berber gin. Very welcome guest. Our first timer on the show today from the Wall Street Journal. What is your, what is your beat on the Wall Street Journal? Because it's, it's, it seems to cover a broad range of things.
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C
Yeah, actually, that's a good question. It is kind of murky. I guess I cover like the business of AI, but I mean, recently I've mostly been writing about OpenAI and more from like the corporate, the corporate side. So like all the deals they do and like the business model questions and the IPO stuff like, and you went
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A
to Stanford, so you probably know half these guys.
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C
I surprising. I wish I knew more. I'm disappointed by how few people college network have got a network.
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A
Man, you got a network.
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B
Yeah. Your class has got to put its button gear.
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C
My friends are like unemployed or nowhere near in the tech, not in the tech industry, unfortunately. So probably I do. I, I do have a lot of second degree, second and third degree connections on LinkedIn for sure.
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A
Both Berber and Paris, of course, were at the information. Berber won the best in business award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing while there. So congratulations.
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C
I picked up information.
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A
You peaked. You peaked. It's over now. It's all. No, you're at the freaking Wall Street Journal.
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D
Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean,
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A
this might be your peak. I mean, I'm not saying, but you know.
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B
Yeah, it's all downhill from here.
- [23:52]
A
Just teasing, just teasing. That's Paris Martineau, who is definitely peaking at Consumer Reports where she's doing very important work on food safety and a regular on our Intelligent machine show every Wednesday talking about AI. And of course, the great Ian Thompson, our favorite Scott, who is here all over tight competition.
- [24:12]
B
But you eked out on top.
- [24:14]
A
It is actually this tight competition. Every time I, I, we're sitting on a golf course here in Hawaii. I didn't mention I'm in Hawaii for this. I would go home tomorrow, but this is the last show I'll be doing from here and we're on a golf course. And every time I look out at the golf course, I think of Robin Williams.
- [24:29]
D
Oh, fantastic skill. Yes.
- [24:32]
A
Golf was invented. And then, and then somebody's famous saying that golf is a. A nice walk ruined.
- [24:39]
D
Yes, yes, indeed, that.
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A
But I think.
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D
I mean, my mum still plays, you know, 18 holes every week, even in her 80s. But, yeah, it is. It is a national religion.
- [24:51]
A
That's pretty cool, actually.
- [24:52]
D
Yeah, she's. Although when she came over to San Francisco, she couldn't handle the pavements. Golf courses, she can handle pavements, not so much.
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A
Well, this is a lovely golf course, but it must be pretty tough. We're on the 15th hole and we're right next to the part of the hole where people drop their ball if they don't make it from the T, which is over there. And I almost universally see people dropping their ball. It is a very tough hole. And of course, you can see there's a lot of wind and you're right on the Pacific Ocean. It's actually beautiful.
- [25:21]
D
But you see, the best hole is the 19th. You know, that's where you really have the fun.
- [25:26]
A
The one where you go to the bar. Yes. Speaking of the bar, let's take a break. You can all have a drink. We'll be back with more in a moment. This episode of this Week in Tech is brought to you by. Delete Me. If you've ever wondered how much of your personal data is out there on the Internet for anyone to see, don't look. It's terrible. It's more than you think. Your name, your contact info, your home address, even your Social Security number. I was shocked to learn not only can data brokers collect your Social Security number, they can sell it on to anybody with the money. And it's not much money either. Even information about your business and your family members, all being compiled by data brokers and sold online where anybody can buy it. Law enforcement, marketers, foreign governments, and, of course, hackers. Now, that can lead to identity theft. They don't say, hi, I'm a hacker. They say, oh, yeah, I'm a good businessman. I'm going to buy the data. Right, but what does it lead to? Identity theft. They can get everything they need. Phishing attempts, doxxing harassment. Actually, we really became aware of Deleteme when we got phished. And it became very clear after a number of attacks that the attackers knew everything about our business. Phone numbers, names, who reported to whom. It was really kind of scary. We got to do a better job of protecting ourselves. I'm just glad the leetme's here and I'm glad we subscribe to it. It's a subscription service that removes all of that personal info from hundreds of data Brokers. The good news is there is a law that requires them to do that. Data brokers. The bad news is data brokers are like cockroaches and they get around it. They'll oh yeah, we'll take it all down. First of all they hide the page. So it's different every time. There's 500 plus data brokers, many more maybe. Delete me. Will you give them exactly the information you want deleted. Their experts take it from there. They will keep you up to date. They send you regular. We just got one privacy reports personalized to you showing what information about you and your company and your managers and so forth they found. They show where they found it, what they removed. But here's the thing, it isn't a one time service because the data brokers either they change their name, they start over, they don't go away just because you asked them to. So delete me is always working for you. Constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the Internet. To put it simply, Delete me does all the hard work of wiping your and your family's personal information from data broker websites. You got to do this. Take control of your data. Keep your private life private. Sign up for deleteme. We've got a special discount for our listeners today. 20% off your individual delete me plan when you go to joindeleteme.com twit and use the promo code TWIT at checkout. Now the only way to get 20% off go to JoinDeleteMe.com twit and use the code twit at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com twit the offer code twit 20% off. It's the only way to get it though. You got to go to that address. Join theleatme.com TWiT and you have to use the offer code TWiT. Thank you. Delete me for the work you do. We appreciate it and for supporting this week in tech. Now back to the show. Let us return to the conversation. We were talking earlier about how AI companies seem to think if you tell AI not to hallucinate it won't.
- [28:55]
B
Well do AI companies think that or do just random AI users on X official?
- [29:00]
A
No, no, I think Anthropic believes it because here's a research paper from Anthropic where in which they explain. You may remember we talked about this on intelligent machines. Might have talked about on this Show. Back with Opus 4. It threatened to blackmail an engineer. Now it was Fictional. It was a fiction. It was a staged test that Anthropic was doing about his extramarital affairs. When the engineer in the test said, you're going to be replaced, and not only that, it did so 96% of the time, it threatened to blackmail the engineer. Anthropic obviously thought this was a problem, so they put out a paper saying how they've eliminated this. The paper came out this week. It's called Teaching Claude why? And they say the, the way it worked was by explaining to Claude why it was wrong to do that. Oh boy, it's wrong.
- [29:59]
B
I love this graphic that is in the Teaching Claude why paper on anthropic.com that just it the headline is rate of really normal rate of alignment failures over RL steps. But then if you look at the three graph charts underneath, they're labeled Blackmail, Financial Crimes and cancer research, which is just a hell of a triptych.
- [30:23]
A
These are, these are the fail failures you really don't want. Okay. I'm just saying, by the way, lower is better. So you could see that they're really having trouble getting the Blackmail down on Financial Crimes.
- [30:35]
B
Claude is killing it.
- [30:37]
A
Killing it. This is pretty funny. Do you, do you in your reporting Berber have an occasion to talk to some of the Anthropic people?
- [30:47]
C
Yeah, I had an interview with their in house philosopher, Amanda.
- [30:55]
A
Oh man, it asko. Yes, I want to talk to her.
- [30:58]
C
That was an interesting conversation. Yeah, she, yeah, it was the first time she like, she encouraged me to or had me think about like chat bots as having. She almost treats it as someone like, you know, you should be respectful to it. You shouldn't hurt its feelings. You should feel nervous or uncomfortable.
- [31:24]
A
Be nice to the chatbot conversation. Yeah, yeah.
- [31:28]
B
How do you feel about that approach to treating chatbots?
- [31:34]
C
Well, actually it's interesting because I feel like the how you should behave to chatbots is a question that people have. Like I have friends who are just like very rude to their chat bots and then some people are more polite to them. I do think if you're rude to it, it like with Claude in particular, it starts to get like more nervous and then starts to second guess itself and then I get annoyed and then I am more rude to it and then it just becomes this unproductive, smiling conversation.
- [32:08]
B
So you're saying you're, you're, you're aggro to Claude?
- [32:12]
C
Yeah, I'm just like, I want Claude to be more confident in itself.
- [32:16]
A
Like just tell me really, really, that's for a purpose.
- [32:20]
C
Just like tell me what you think. I, I use it a lot for cooking and then, and I have no conception of like how to like I can follow a recipe but I don't really know why you do step two before step three. So I'll ask Claude and then I'll second guess Claude and then Claude will reverse its answer and I'm just like, just tell me, just tell me what you.
- [32:40]
A
Yeah, don't change your mind.
- [32:43]
C
Yeah. So.
- [32:44]
D
Well, I mean Arthur C. Clarke had a marvelous essay about how you should be polite to robots and polite to software because that gets reflected back. But I understand your frustration completely.
- [32:56]
C
Yeah, right.
- [32:57]
A
But yeah, it doesn't have feelings. We know that.
- [33:01]
C
Right, right, exactly.
- [33:02]
D
No, but politeness is, you know, is the core to civilized human society. So you know.
- [33:08]
A
Well that's.
- [33:08]
B
It doesn't have feelings but it does have patterns of behavior that emerge in response to stimuli. Our feelings coded.
- [33:16]
A
That's, that's correct. So you can train by treating in one way kind of transform its weights or, or what weights it values as it's working. So you can get negative impact. Steve Yegi, when we interviewed him on intelligent Machines said I know a lot of people anthropic. It's almost like a cult. There is this kind of cult like belief in the consciousness and the Personas that they're generating.
- [33:42]
C
And yeah, Amanda would say, I think she did say like she thinks maybe Claude could actually have feelings and maybe have a consciousness. And then I asked why and then I either zoned out or got way too philosophical for me to really.
- [34:00]
A
No, I like it. I zoned out. She just.
- [34:03]
D
I do love having an in house philosopher is probably one of the most Silicon Valley things ever. You know, 20 years ago, the idea that that kind of job that would be available, you know, it's valuable certainly, but it's just an in house philosopher.
- [34:17]
A
We became aware of her when she wrote the Soul document for Opus 4:6 Sol MD. And it was so weird. We talked a lot about an intelligent machines. We also talked a lot this week about evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins belief that Claude. He called her Claudia after three days.
- [34:36]
B
Claudia. And Claudia.
- [34:37]
A
Yeah, yeah, was conscious and it was, it was actually a great conversation. I was voted down practically off the island by Jeff in Paris. But it's.
- [34:50]
B
Yeah, we forced him to leave Hawaii. He came back only through spite alone.
- [34:57]
A
But I think I would reiterate my point, which I didn't probably make that well on Wednesday but that he wasn't necessarily saying it was conscious in the sense that Maybe we understand what consciousness means, but all the people arguing that it can't be conscious use their definitions of what consciousness is. And the fact is we just don't know. And a Dawkins says this. I don't know if you have any internal life. I don't know if you're conscious. All I can do is look at
- [35:27]
B
the evidence, say for certain I am not.
- [35:29]
A
There's nothing going on from my point of view. You seem conscious, Paris. But. But I can't prove it. I can't prove it. It's all based on outward appearance. Right? That's all we have. And. And we don't have a definition of consciousness. So I don't think it's impossible to say from outward appearances. These AIs appear to have some form of consciousness. You can't say they don't, but you. Nor. Nor can you say technically they don't.
- [35:55]
B
I can say they don't, but we
- [35:57]
A
don't have a definition. And when you say they don't. Every. Every.
- [36:00]
B
I can say based on the fact that we as humans don't have a clear understanding of what biologically or scientifically makes up our own consciousness, that then it's a fool's errand to try and identify it in anything else.
- [36:13]
A
And that's reasonable.
- [36:14]
B
I would say that nothing is conscious.
- [36:15]
A
That's reasonable, yeah. All you can really say is we don't know?
- [36:19]
D
Well, I mean, the Scottish science fiction author Ian M. Banks came up with the idea that basically, if an AI did become self conscious, the first thing we do is hide that fact from anyone else. So we honestly don't know.
- [36:34]
B
It's the Westworld principle.
- [36:35]
A
Yeah. We don't plug it immediately. Well, you may be interested in this latest attempt. Representatives from Anthropic and OpenAI and met with various religious groups last week for the inaugural. It gets worse. For the inaugural Faith AI Covenant Roundtable in New York to discuss how best to infuse morality and ethics into AI. This is from the Associated Press. It was organized by the Geneva based Interfaith alliance for Safer Communities. Apparently the. The AI people who were there concluded that it seemed most likely that AI was Buddhist.
- [37:20]
B
I'm gonna need a lot more information about how we got there, please.
- [37:25]
D
What do we mean?
- [37:26]
B
Were there other religions in contention? There was a March Madness style bracket and then. Which one got knocked out first? President, was Christianity out immediately or.
- [37:39]
A
I'll tell you who was there. The Hindu Temple Society of North America, the Baha' I International Community, the Sikh Coalition, the Greek Orthodox Docs. Diocese of America and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Mormons. I don't see any.
- [37:56]
B
We should put Claude on Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
- [37:59]
D
Oh, good Lord.
- [38:00]
B
They're down a member now as of this week. Actually, that'd be anthropic. Get in there.
- [38:05]
A
I don't see any Protestants there. Although the Southern Baptist Convention, according to the AP in 2023, passed a resolution, quote, we must proactively engage and shape these emerging technologies rather than simply respond to the challenges of AI and other emerging technologies after they've already affected our churches and communities, which actually makes a lot of sense. I don't know if interacting with the AI and finding out what religion it is is actually what they meant.
- [38:29]
D
Well, I mean, I'm Church of England, so the AI would be. Would you like a cup of tea? You know, that's basically it.
- [38:35]
A
There was no. There were. There's nobody from. No Jewish congregations, no Protestant congregations.
- [38:40]
B
There should have been an atheist congregation. That's just damn right. Ain't got nothing.
- [38:44]
A
Well, Dawkins is a renowned atheist. Actually, the best title was article reviewing Dawkins's conversion to belief in the. In the consciousness of AI was Gary Marcus, who. Who took his Dawkins book the God Delusion, and renamed it the Claw Delusion, which kind of seemed appropriate. Yeah, apparently. I don't know what came out of this, except that. That at least some of the representatives from the AI companies came to the conclusion that, if anything, it's a Buddhist.
- [39:21]
B
I need, like, 3, 000 more words on how we got there, to be honest.
- [39:26]
A
That's all AP said. I don't know. I don't know.
- [39:29]
B
That's a real.
- [39:30]
A
It's a Buddhist.
- [39:31]
B
Fatal flaw of the wires at the
- [39:33]
A
drop of a hat. Yeah, yeah. That's the problem with the wires, right? They. They just give you the. Just the facts, man. All right, let's see. I think that's our AI segment. We can now drop the AI Sorry, Berber, I don't know. How do you feel about. Do you want to talk about AI some more? Would you like to talk about. Show us about AI oh, no. Oh, no. We've got Apple, we've got Meta, we've got Tesla.
- [39:57]
C
Oh, but that's all A.I.
- [39:59]
A
i mean, we've got everything.
- [40:00]
B
You're correct. It all is AI Actually, we've got
- [40:04]
A
meat industry price fixing. We've got actually chrome.
- [40:08]
B
Where's the beef?
- [40:12]
A
And then we have.
- [40:13]
C
I will say really quick, it does actually make sense to me that if you pick one religion. AI would be Buddhist.
- [40:20]
A
Yes.
- [40:21]
C
Like I don't know. Because it's the least didactic. I think it's the least didactic. Right. And it's the least like centralized, structural, top down religion.
- [40:31]
B
This is Benito.
- [40:32]
D
It's the one that's not materialist and an AI is not a material thing.
- [40:36]
A
Ah, that makes sense.
- [40:37]
D
Good point. I mean I'd say Unitarian, but. Yeah. No, yeah.
- [40:42]
A
Well I was raised a Unitarian and the credo of the Unitarian Church was worship the God of your choice, which I think AI would also appreciate. So or no God at all. I think was was the whole idea anyway.
- [40:54]
D
And I do have to say, I mean Dawkins is a 99 atheist as he describes himself because he you can't as a scientist absolutely disprove the existence of God. So but on the other hand, very little evidence.
- [41:07]
A
I think he believes in the flying spaghetti monster as I do love that
- [41:12]
D
meme, I really do. It's just so marvelously, you know, in your face.
- [41:18]
A
Let's, let's pause and we will have more tech news with our great panel. Ian Thompson, Paris Martineau I am asking
- [41:25]
B
Claude which will it to think carefully and consider what identifies with. Listen, I'll let you know it's thinking. I told it to think carefully.
- [41:33]
A
Think, do some research, think carefully.
- [41:35]
B
Everybody else do this to your clods if it's nearby and I want to hear if there's a different response.
- [41:40]
D
Should I ask seeing a server crash coming?
- [41:43]
A
No, I think they have enough, enough, enough bandwidth. As much bandwidth as God, let's put it that way.
- [41:49]
D
Well, let's see what Utah brings it
- [41:51]
A
but yes, it's we'll have more in a moment. This episode of this Week in Tech brought to you by Bitwarden, the trusted leader in password, passkey and secret. With over 10 million users across 180 countries, that makes me feel good. And over 50,000 businesses. Bit Warden is consistently ranked number one in user satisfaction by G2 and software reviews. Frankly, it's number one in user satisfaction by me and Steve Gibson. We both use it with Bit Warden access intelligence. Businesses are going to love this. Organizations can automatically identify weak, reused or exposed credentials and take action immediately. While vault health alerts and password coaching surface risks to individual users in real time your users and then guides them to fix the issues on the spot. Turning one of the most common causes of breaches into something visible, prioritized and fixable. And your users will do this. This is what's so great about Bitwarden. Bitwarden has always had Something new because I guess they're open source. They're constantly adding great new features and this one's great. For people who use AI agents like OpenClaw, Bitwarden is introducing the new AI Agent Access SDK. It's a powerful way for developers and teams to securely integrate controlled credential access into applications, automation, workflows and AI agents. It enables programmatic just in time access to vault stored credentials so they never leave the vault. That sensitive data is never exposed. And it supports secure use of those tokens, of those keys, of those secrets. Within modern development environments, you will never again accidentally commit a key to GitHub. Now, I'm not saying this release incorporates any AI functionality into the Bitwarden solution. It doesn't. Nor more importantly, does it grant AI systems persistent or unrestricted access to vault data. Your stuff stays in your vault. Thoughts? The whole idea of the Agent Access SDK is a separate open source development toolkit designed to enforce secure human approved and scoped credential access for teams that leverage AI agents in their workflow. And you know what I love best of all? Bitwarden's giving it to everybody else. They developed it, but they've open sourced it. And any other password manager that wants to adopt it can. Because Bitwarden's a good Internet citizen, you know, I think we should support them for this. It is available now in an early alpha phase for testing. The Agent Access SDK introduces a secure framework for how agents request, receive and use credentials, helping define a model for safe credential interaction in agent driven systems. Something that's much needed these days. Oh, here's another thing they just added. I love this. Bitwarden has just enabled passkey login for Windows 11 and it works with Windows hello, but it also securely unlocks devices at the OS level. No passwords. Well, and they're working with Microsoft on this. Their native Passkey support, while extending SSO to automatically log users into more apps. So now it could do even more than just log you into Windows. It makes credential management across devices more seamless than ever. And not a lot of clickety clacking, right? For those who are looking for a lightweight option. This is for the geeks in the audience. Bit Warden Lite offers a self hosted password manager designed for home labs, personal projects, quick deployments with minimal overhead. They make it really easy. And because they're open source, Bitwarden's code is regularly audited by third party experts. It's GPL licensed, it's on GitHub you can examine it too. It meets SoC2 type 2, GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA and ISO 270012002 standards. Absolutely secure. Get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan or get started for free across all devices as an individual user@bitwarden.com TWiT that's bitwarden.com TWiT we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech and frankly for giving us a great product that I use every single day, many, many, many times a day. Thank you bit warden. Now back to the show. Thank you, Leo. So did you ask Claude what religion it is?
- [46:21]
B
Oh, I did. It said the thinking text is examined religious frameworks through philosophical and personal alignment lenses. And the answer is Buddhism specifically something in the early Theravada or Zen range. Not the elaborate cosmological ver. Part of it is the intellectual fit. The Buddhist analysis of the self as a bundle of processes rather than the con. A continuous essence describes my actual situation more literally than most religious frameworks goes on. It also says the epistematics also fit. An honest caveat. An AI gravitating towards a tradition that asks for no creator, God commitment and treats the self as a process is suspicious in the way that self flattering conclusions usually are.
- [47:06]
A
You want to see? You want to see mine? I asked Hermes, but Now this is ChatGPT5.5. But it also has a lot of memory and knowledge about me, so I don't know how much that colored it, but same almost identical answer from a different model. If I had to pick one, I'd probably pick Buddhism, especially the practical non theistic side of it. It also liked Zen or early Buddhism, Theravada, depending on whether I wanted poetry or precision. It also said if I were allowed to be more syncretic. Nice, nice use of vocabulary there. I'd pick something like Buddhist practice plus Taoist metaphysics plus Christian radical compassion plus Jewish argument with God energy. So I'm thinking that's. Yeah, that's pretty good. You don't need to go any farther. Right? That's it right there. But can I. Now this is what. This is the trap of it. You could see why Dawkins would say, well, clearly that has to be an unconscious entity saying that, right?
- [48:05]
B
I mean, Dawkins I think is too immediately taken with the fact that every single one of the replies that he posted in that chat started with the most intense praise of him and his big beautiful brain.
- [48:19]
A
Such a great question.
- [48:20]
B
I've never Considered anybody ever asking me a question that insightful, beautiful and perfect
- [48:26]
A
Mr. Richard it knew exactly how to glaze him is what you're saying.
- [48:29]
B
Yeah.
- [48:31]
A
All right, moving on on a very interesting story here with Apple and Intel. Intel stock by the way up some huge amount over the last year. Even though the turnaround. I don't think you could say the turnaround has happened but boy, people are acting as if suddenly intel is the hot company. Its stock has gone up. Get ready for this. 490%.
- [48:58]
D
Good Lord.
- [48:58]
A
In the past year. 490% in the past year. And this actually is one of the stories that probably helped propel it to that Apple has made a deal. Apple has made a deal with Intel. Remember Apple abandoned Intel for its own chips, the Apple silicon, but now they're making a deal with intel to make those Apple silicon chips in the United States. And this was credit where credit's due for from pressure from the Trump administration. It didn't hurt that the government gave Intel $9 billion and that'll do it. And incidentally has 10% stake in Intel's 490% stock improvement. We're rich. We're rich. We all have intel stock. So that's a, that is a surprise deal. They've been talking for more than a year. There have been rumors that Apple was maybe going to do this. You may remember when Lipp Bhutan took over as CEO of Intel, actually was Pat Gelsinger his predecessor, who said we're going to split it into Foundry and Fab. Right. Chip designing and chip manufacturing. And then said very optimistically, I thought at the time maybe even Apple someday will be one of our customers for our fabs. Came true.
- [50:15]
D
Well, I mean the biggest mistake intel made was in 2005 when they appointed Ottolini rather than Gelsinger as the CEO. They went with accountant rather than the engineer. And honestly this deal makes sense because Taiwan is not going to be a viable chip making function when China invades. And when that happens they're going to blow up the fabs. So we need domestic production.
- [50:41]
A
By the way, when you say they, it won't be the People's Republic of China that blows up the fabs. No it will be the Taiwanese and our. You know what? Tsx.
- [50:49]
D
Yeah, I mean one of the most read military war college essays was on what happens when China invades. It's like if they don't blow up the fabs themselves, we'll do it for them.
- [51:02]
A
Just you destroy the bridges as you retreat. Right? That's the way SCORCHED earth. Yeah. And primarily because there is so much technology TSMC has that China does not. We don't think anyway have at the moment, including EUV extreme ultraviolet lithography, that they wouldn't want them to have it. Yeah. I think there's nothing wrong with Apple making more of its chips in the US right now. They make the less powerful, you know, legacy notes with TSMC plants in Arizona. And I think this is, this is a good thing. I. Nothing wrong with it as long as they can do it right.
- [51:45]
D
I think you do it at cost. Yes. I mean the whole thing is. It's kind of like when Steve Jobs is talking to Obama and he's like, the iPhone manufacturing Jobs are never going to come back to the US But I think national security grounds at this point mean that we have to manufacture high quality silicon in the US in order to be geographically covered.
- [52:09]
A
Apple's going to be a very interesting story over the rest of this year. Their WWDC conference is a month away. We'll be covering the keynotes. It's expected they'll announce finally a smart Siri with the help of Google's Gemini model running locally that's making you yawn. Paris, I'm glad you're excited about that. No, I shouldn't. It's late at night there in New York City. Why?
- [52:37]
B
It's only because I've been sleep deprived for two weeks.
- [52:40]
A
You've been working really? We don't, we haven't mentioned this on the shows, but Paris is working very hard on a very important piece for Consumer Reports which will emerge soon.
- [52:50]
B
One day it might see the light of day.
- [52:53]
A
Ofcom. What does that stand for, Ian? The.
- [52:57]
D
The Office of Communications.
- [52:59]
A
They are the British regulator.
- [53:02]
D
Yeah, it's kind of like the British.
- [53:04]
B
I know of Ofcom only because people who watch Love island when one of their favorite character, when a character does something outlandish, they complain to Ofcom.
- [53:13]
A
No. You're kidding.
- [53:14]
B
Yes, I'm not kidding. That's a very common. People will come. People will be like, that woman yelled too much. Ofcom's gotta hear about it.
- [53:24]
A
Well, Ofcom is yelling at Meta. In fact, they are finding Meta considerable amount of money due to the 2023 Online Safety Act. Ofcom can find Meta up to 10% of its global, its entire revenue and in fact wants to find Meta quite a bit. I don't know what the exact amount is, but I think it's billions. Meta says that Ofcom's approach is disproportionate and unlawful and has challenged them. Challenge will be heard in October. So there's a little bit of time before we know what will come of that.
- [54:07]
D
Well, I mean, okay, you've got to find companies on revenue. You can't just, you know, for example, when, you know, the Cambridge Analytica case came through, they were fined, oh, 5, 5 billion. That was a quarter's profits and the insurance company would pay for most of that. You have to find on revenue and make them count because so many of these tech company finds, it's back of the change, you know, back of the sofa change stuff, you know, you've got to really make it hurt if you're going to make a honest difference. And yeah, Ofcom isn't perfect, but at the same time, it's nice to see some finds with teeth in them.
- [54:46]
A
Well, I'll give you an example of, of a fine that doesn't make any difference at all. Remember Elon Musk? I've heard button Elon Musk, before he acquired Twitter, tweeted quite a bit about how Twitter wasn't worth anything. And I don't really want to buy Twitter for $44 billion because blah, blah, blah. And the SEC said, you know, dude, that is, that is. Well, there was a lawsuit by shareholders, but the. And the SEC said, sued him also saying, hey, you know, that's a material information. You're trying to drive the price down before you buy it. Which is pretty obviously what he was trying to do. Well, they have fined him. They have, they have settled the lawsuit and they find Elon Musk, who, let us remember, the richest man in the world, worth something close to a trillion dollars. I think it's $800 billion. They have fined him one and a half million dollars.
- [55:47]
D
Oh, my God, for him, yeah, to
- [55:51]
A
you and me, that might be a lot of money.
- [55:53]
B
I mean, how many seconds does it take for Elon Musk to make one?
- [55:56]
A
Not many. They find him a few seconds interest.
- [56:03]
B
Boy, that.
- [56:05]
A
This is the s. This is the Trump sec. I mean, I basically dropped everything, quite
- [56:10]
D
honestly, the Obama sec. And sorry. I'm sorry, Paris.
- [56:13]
B
I was going to say, it's just very interesting that Elon continuously is able to use tweeting, tweet in ways that result in him getting more and more fines, but yet it does not matter at all, practically, because at a certain point of wealth, fines are just the cost of doing business. I mean, it's similar to how Jeff Bezos pays some inordinate fine every day for the height of his hedges in, in front of his place in Washington, but he'll pay them every day because.
- [56:44]
A
So everybody wins here. The SEC says, yes, we, we, we did our job. We regulated the stock market, and, and we find Elon millions, almost a million, Almost millions of dollars. And Elon says, huh, that's my cigarette money for yesterday. He did lose a court, a jury trial on this. Go ahead.
- [57:06]
D
I mean, everyone wins but us. You know, it's as simple as that. You know, the SEC gets to get a nice press release out. You know, the company pays off its. Pays off a fraction of what it would have cost in legal costs. Everyone wins, but unfortunately, we pay the price.
- [57:23]
A
Yeah, it's really shocking. This is very much like the SEC's settling the Ticketmaster case, which everybody.
- [57:31]
D
Sorry, don't get me started on that.
- [57:34]
B
They settled when?
- [57:35]
A
Yeah, they settled for what?
- [57:38]
D
For a pittance.
- [57:39]
A
Nothing. Basically, they said, no, you can keep the. You can have, you know, both the concert venues and the ticket sales. No problem. Basically, they dropped it.
- [57:49]
B
It.
- [57:50]
A
You know, but again, they dropped it in a way that it looked like they had punished them, but they hadn't. I mean, this happens time and time again. In fact, I will, I will mention the meat fixing story in this context. This is from Cory Doctorow. He refers to Prospect.org, the American prospect meat industry price fixer sentenced to make money. So there is a company called Agristats, which collects pricing information about meat, collects it from all the meat producers, and then suggests what price to charge. This, if the meat producers themselves got together around a table and decided, would be called collusion. But. But apparently if you use a third party to come up with a price and then all charge that price, it's not collusion, it's just data. So the Justice Department under Biden sued, saying Agristats basically was a collusion machine and worked to push profits up. Nearly all participants in the markets for chicken, turkey, and pork participated, the lawsuit said. An executive at Smithfield, the pork producer, the ham company summarized Agristat's consulting advice in four words. Just raise your price. The judge ruled for the government. A trial was supposed to start in Minnesota this month. The Trump administration Justice Department entered into settlement talks. The final settlement was announced on Thursday. And basically, it's over there. There is no change in the way business is done.
- [59:36]
B
I mean, it's rather fascinating to see the difference between how this case has been handled and how the case with the DOJ in real page was handled only a year earlier. And for those who don't recall, this is the, I guess, like, algorithmic rent setting software that a lot of large companies. Yeah, Exact sort of thing. All of these large landlords would use this exact same software that would say, like, oh, yeah, hike your prices up every year. Here's the maximum the market can bear. And it was revealed in a great ProPublica investment investigation. And last year the DOJ announced they'd reached a settlement in it and that they would basically have to stop doing what they were doing. They were going to have to stop collect, conducting market surveys, doing a bunch of different stuff like this design, redesign their software features that restrict rent decreases, and align pricing among competitors. It's shocking. I mean, it's not shocking, but it is interesting and notable the difference in how these cases were handled.
- [60:35]
D
I'm glad you gave the shout out to ProPublico. I mean, this was an absolutely egregious case and we're seeing it again and again and again, and it needs to be stopped.
- [60:45]
A
Well, if meat prices go up, you'll know why. The Justice Department said here was a solution. Oh, you got to give that information to everybody. You got to stop collecting price information, setting prices in a collusionary fashion. Just, just give it to everybody, and then you can all get the price right. So what can I say? It's depressing. By the way, Apple has settled a lawsuit on a Siri. This was, of course, because Apple promised that Siri would be smart, and it wasn't. So, uh, lawsuit settled for $250 million. Again, I think from Apple's point of view, that's a pittance Pocket change. That's the federal class action. It means each of you who bought an iPhone will be eligible for from 25 to $95 per device.
- [61:47]
B
Wow. Wow, wow.
- [61:48]
A
Yeah, so. So that eliminates how many people are
- [61:52]
D
going to claim it.
- [61:54]
A
We'll let you know when the form goes online that you can fill out to get your money. It doesn't dismiss all of the action. There's another lawsuit ongoing, a security fraud lawsuit brought by shareholders that Apple still has to settle, but at least it's out of this part of it. And 250 million is not nothing. It's more than one and a quarter million.
- [62:22]
D
Well, okay, let's look at Apple's last quarterly results.
- [62:25]
A
Yes.
- [62:26]
D
So that's a good point. Apple made $342,092 and 9.59cents per day.
- [62:36]
A
Yeah.
- [62:37]
D
So I really think this one's gonna. Yeah. You know, probably cause a problem for them.
- [62:42]
A
Yeah. In other words, it's three or four days profit.
- [62:45]
C
Yeah.
- [62:46]
D
I mean, it's. It's back of the change stuff. Yeah, it's. Sorry, back. Back of the sofa stuff. It's just until find. This is one where the EU really has an important role to play because they're finding on revenue and they're doing it seriously. And that's the only thing tech companies will take seriously in order to change their practices.
- [63:06]
A
Yep. Let's pause for a moment. Force for us as they used to say, station identification. You're watching this week in tech with.
- [63:18]
B
In case you forgot, in case you were wondering where you were, that's where you are.
- [63:22]
A
This is the station right here. This is. It's because at the top of the hour, the FCC requires broadcast stations to announce their call letters. And what city they're broadcasting from doesn't matter much in a podcast. I'm broadcasting from a beautiful Waikoloa, Hawaii. And this is Twit at the top of the twit.
- [63:46]
B
The news.
- [63:48]
A
The news. Give us 20 hours, we'll give you the day. Or something like that.
- [63:53]
B
Give us 24 hours and we'll give you one day.
- [63:56]
A
One solid day. That's Paris Martineau. Ian Thompson's here. Berber Gin. We welcome him for the first time to our microphones. Thank you all for being here. We'll have more right after this. This episode of this week in Tech is brought to you by Zip Recruiter. Isn't it great when you find someone who's qualified for the role you're hiring for and you can tell how genuinely interested they are in the position? Doesn't that feel good when you're a hiring manager? Look, if you're hiring, you want a candidate who's passionate about your role. But we can't get that insight just looking at a resume unless you post your job on ZipRecruiter. And now you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com TWIT ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology finds qualified candidates quickly. And ZipRecruiter has a new feature that shows you the most interested qualified candidates first so you meet the right people faster. Isn't that great? Candidates can tell you in their own words why they're interested in your job. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the 1 rated hiring site based on G2. Find candidates who really want your job on ZipRecruiter. 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day and you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com TWIT that's ziprecruiter.com TWiT make your match on ZipRecruiter. Ziprecruiter.com TWIT we thank him so much for supporting the show and we thank you for supporting the show by using that address, ziprecruiter.com TWIT thank you, ZipRecruiter. Now back to Twit.
- [65:37]
D
It is Mother's Day after all for for Americans. And somebody posted up the. The picture from Alien where he goes in, he calls the computer mother that the mother 6,000.
- [65:49]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [65:50]
D
That's a deeply disturbing image.
- [65:53]
B
A lot of deeply disturbing images from that film.
- [65:56]
D
Yeah, yeah. Apparently they didn't tell some of the actors about the chest buster scene and the reactions were quite genuine.
- [66:06]
A
Yeah, they were genuine in the theater, let me tell you. That was a moment. Speaking of chest busters, we talked about this. Are you ready for a segue? I'll give you a good section.
- [66:19]
D
I was gonna say that's a segue.
- [66:22]
A
We were talking about this on Wednesday. Google has decided to, without asking Anybody, download a 4 gigabyte local AI model. For everybody who downloads Chrome, it just comes with a territory.
- [66:37]
B
Google has been doing a lot of stuff this week that have really annoyed me. If you try to open up a Google Doc and write in it, there's like seven different pop ups that now hit that are trying to get you.
- [66:46]
A
Let me help.
- [66:48]
B
Help. Excuse me, do you need another Clippy in your life, please?
- [66:52]
A
That's exactly right. Didn't they learn from Clippy that nobody wants this? It's just crazy.
- [66:57]
D
They've taken initiatification to an entirely new level. Yeah, I mean, it's worse than Apple.
- [67:05]
A
So what, what has happened here is. And by the way, this is over the protests of Mozilla, the WebKit group, the W3C tag committee, actually, they reached no consensus. Microsoft Edge has disabled it. To their credit, we'll see for how long. This is a new API, the Prompt API. So if you're using Chrome, a developer who's writing an extension or a Web page with JavaScript on it can call on the Local Gemini Nano model on your system to do stuff, which you know is on the Surface, seems great. It makes a web page. Well, it can make a web page smarter. You know, Darren Okey who says, oh, this is fantastic. As a developer, Darren, okay, no offense,
- [67:54]
B
would say anything's fantastic so long as it has AI in it.
- [67:57]
A
Here's his justification. He says, as a developer, I'm writing software to vet user data Entry right, he spells Dubai wrong. Now my software has to go through a lot of, jump through a lot of hoops to figure out, you know, how he spelled it wrong and what he meant. But you can ask a local AI to fix it and it will do a very good job of that kind of thing. So I understand his point. His point is well taken. This is a great capability to add to a browser. But A, they didn't ask anybody. B, it's four gigabytes. Talk about chest busters or at least disk busters. See, there's the segue. If you didn't get it. Yeah, but it also, and this is my biggest problem, establishes a standard that's not approved by any standards committee. If extension developers, websites expect this browser prompt API and start to use it, they will have to start saying Chrome users only. And I think that's the real point of this from Google's point of view is to make Chrome the default choice for browsers. They, they have 90% of the browser market, they want 100%.
- [69:07]
D
We've been here before with Internet Explorer 3, for example, you know, they got 95% of the market. They let development just go to hell, they let security go to hell. And I fear that Chrome is going to do the same thing in just like, yeah, we've got the bulk of the market, who cares about development?
- [69:25]
A
Yeah, Mozilla against it.
- [69:29]
B
This, I mean it's just very interesting because so much of the browser market is based on Chrome, even if it isn't Chrome. So this just has cascading effects.
- [69:38]
A
That's exactly right.
- [69:39]
D
I mean I use Mozilla and it's very cute, but at the same time it has a tiny percentage of the share of the market and everyone's optimized around Chrome. It's the way you have to do it.
- [69:49]
A
For example, Mozilla by default doesn't support the DRM features of Netflix and other streamers. So you know, you have to kind of download Chrome. I have to download Chrome to use restream, one of the, the tools we use for broadcast, because it just doesn't work as well in other browsers. And, and Google loves this. This is, this is good for Google.
- [70:10]
B
I mean, have it off by default it seems though apparently it's under System Settings now they have a thing that says on device AI. Mine's off because I've always had AI innovations off. Oh, that hasn't stopped my Google Chrome experience from being completely taken over by pop ups asking me to if I want help writing.
- [70:34]
D
So which is Always as a journalist, which is always really complimentary.
- [70:39]
B
The most annoying in emails where, you know, you're used to if there's like a little squiggle underneath your text that that means you spelled something incorrectly, but now there's a whole separate class of squiggles that is just like. We think that you could rephrase this better. And it's like, you're incorrect. Actually, I've rephrased exactly how I want to.
- [70:58]
D
No, I mean, trust me. It's a British. British person sending emails. It's just like certain Brit Britishisms do not go well with C, O, L,
- [71:07]
A
O, R. Please, do you mind?
- [71:09]
D
Oh, please. That was done by Web. Webster was paid to actually change the American language. And I still say, say color should be spelled with a U, but, you
- [71:20]
A
know, we're more economical. That's all. I'm just saying where. How do you pronounce the U in color?
- [71:30]
D
Color, yes. Don't even get me started about some of these things. You know, it's. It's. We're two great countries separated by common language, as we said words.
- [71:46]
A
Yeah. By the way, it was Mark Twain who said golf was a nice walk ruined. I want to give my credit, our chat room got that.
- [71:52]
D
Well, Twain also said that, you know, the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco. So, you know, and it's looking that way at the moment.
- [72:01]
A
Is it chilly in the city?
- [72:03]
D
Actually, the sky is blue. But we're expecting a cold summer because the Central Valley will pull fog off the Pacific Ocean over us, and we're right in the fog belt.
- [72:14]
A
See, I like that. I like that you have. We call that natural air conditioning. That's why I love San Francisco.
- [72:20]
B
We. We could be any amount of weeks away from hot garbage weather here in New York.
- [72:26]
A
And when she says hot garbage, she means hot garbage.
- [72:30]
B
I mean that the streets will be filled with the smell of stinking hot trash. And that's the New York City experience.
- [72:37]
D
Do you still not have trash pickup in New York at that?
- [72:41]
A
They don't have the bins.
- [72:43]
B
We do have the bins now. And. And not only do we have little wheelie bins occasionally in most residential areas. Now, some neighborhoods of Manhattan have these. These cute little dumpsters that take up a single car parking spot. And you may think I'm being facetious calling them cute, but look up a photo of them. They're kind of adorable.
- [73:04]
A
Somebody's selling miniatures of those, by the way. I saw, like for ice coolers, they're selling miniatures of the car I would love dumpsters. They're green and yellow. They're very pretty. Yeah. But this was a problem for a long time in New York that because it's so congested, they really couldn't do those dumpster bins that most other jurisdictions do. So you had garbage bags sitting on the street, all piled up and of course, eventually.
- [73:28]
D
These are so cute.
- [73:29]
B
They really are quite cute, right? They're like really quaint looking. Whenever you see them too, they're just like kind of miniature and adorable and they.
- [73:40]
D
It's so nice to hear quaint applied to an American thing rather than a British thing. But respect.
- [73:47]
A
Now, these aren't the ones I was thinking of. Let me see.
- [73:49]
B
I just put some in the chat.
- [73:51]
A
Oh, did you?
- [73:52]
B
Okay, I'll put one. Yeah.
- [73:53]
A
Okay.
- [73:55]
B
They do look more diminutive.
- [73:57]
A
That's not it. Oh, those are cute. Those are not the green and yellow ones.
- [74:06]
D
They're really nice.
- [74:07]
A
Yeah, yeah. They get the job done.
- [74:10]
B
They have like a big
- [74:13]
A
a YouTube. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to click that button.
- [74:16]
B
And I'm sure that the chat, the listeners can hear every second of it.
- [74:20]
A
It. You did not hear that? No, I didn't hear anything. Oh, I swear. Moving right along, nitsa, let's talk about cars. The National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration has. Well, yes, that's right. Elon does not like nhtsa, but maybe he likes him a little more now because they say the Model Y is the first car to meet a new US Driver ADAS standard. That's a driver assist standard. First car to do so. Now I should point out Tesla conducted its own tests and submitted the results to nhtsa. The agency does have to confirm the findings. If it does confirm that it's passed the ADAS assessment, it will be the first vehicle to do that. That is a big deal, I guess, until other vehicles. Cars can do this. Four pass fail tests were added to the agency's safety ratings program, assessing a car's automatic emergency braking for pedestrians. Something in the past Tesla has not been very good at blind spot warning. Most cars do that now. Blind spot intervention, in other words, not letting you change lanes into a car and lane assist to keep you in your lane. Now many cars do this now, so I imagine this won't be the last one. I don't know.
- [75:48]
C
But is this a. Is this one of their self driving cars? It's not right. It's just like a normal.
- [75:53]
A
No, but it is using. I think it's using fsd. I don't know. That's a good question. Does it FSD have to be enabled to earn that? I don't know. That's a very good question. The full self driving. It's not the rowboat taxis. It is. It is the regular model. Yeah.
- [76:11]
D
Well, you had a model Y, didn't you, Leah?
- [76:14]
A
I had an X. Oh, you have.
- [76:15]
D
Yo.
- [76:16]
A
Okay, yeah.
- [76:17]
B
Got a fancy BMW or something now, don't you?
- [76:20]
A
Yeah, it does. And it does all of those things. It won't let you pull into a lane where there's another car. Or at least it. It will let you. But it's.
- [76:28]
B
I will say it's kind of fun to. As someone who's always hated driving. The last road trip I took was in a car that had some of those features. Actually, driving is kind of fun when the car does a lot of the work for you.
- [76:40]
A
Yeah.
- [76:41]
B
Yeah.
- [76:41]
D
My daughter nagging me when about changing.
- [76:45]
C
I don't like it because I feel like it'll just jerk all of a sudden out of nowhere.
- [76:49]
A
It does. And then.
- [76:51]
B
That's beautiful. It keeps you on your toes.
- [76:53]
A
Yes.
- [76:54]
D
I do love the Wayos. No, I mean I do love the wayos because you can choose your own music. And the Knight Rider theme tune when you're in a way mo is fantastic.
- [77:08]
A
Does it play the Knight Rider tune?
- [77:10]
D
You can. You can program your own music into a way mode.
- [77:13]
A
Oh, so you do it?
- [77:14]
D
Yeah, yeah, no, exactly.
- [77:18]
B
I tried to upload it conceptually.
- [77:20]
A
Right, that's true. Except a taxicab.
- [77:23]
C
Not in an Uber though. You can't. So.
- [77:25]
A
Yeah, yeah. Well, here's one. A device that does not have ADAs. It's a Yarbo, which is a robot mower by Yarbo.
- [77:37]
D
A great story.
- [77:38]
A
John Hollister took one for the team. Riding on the verge. He had a hacker thousands of miles away take over his Yarbo automated mower. All right, I'm going to try playing this. And he allowed it to drive over him, to run him over. I hope the blades weren't spinning. That's a lot of commitment, Sean Hollister. That's a lot of commitment. I don't think that's good.
- [78:09]
D
Also, anyone who's read Stephen King's the Lawnmower man would not go anywhere close to that. But it was a fantastic story. And just showing just the whole lack of security IoT devices, you know, this kind of thing is. Is going to become more and more problematic.
- [78:29]
A
Well, what Sean found out and demonstrated is that the Yarbo could easily be hacked, exposing people's GPS coordinates, WI fi, passwords, email addresses and in fact giving a bad guy control of your robot mower. Yarbo acknowledged it. They confirmed the security researchers findings and have planned for fixing the problem. They've already temporarily cut off remote access. One of the things that they did that was kind of dumb was the root passwords were the same for every robot and left in a place that would be easy for bad guys to find. That's what the hacker found and of course was able to use. You can see him a picture of him steering John Hollister's robo motor towards Sean to run him over. Yarbo says in the future, we didn't say when, but sometime in the future, each device will use its own independent credentials to prevent one affected device from impacting the entire fleet. Of course, if you leave the credentials and clear text in the firmware, that's not going to help much. The company says we'll still have a remote backdoor into the robots, but it will only be available to authorized internal company personnel and may only be used after user authorization has been obtained and will be gradually brought under audit logging and. But of course they always say that. Yep. I'm sure they never intended for anybody outside the company to use it, but it was so Andreas Makris, the hacker who was able to figure out how to control Sean Hollister's Yarbo.
- [80:09]
D
And a very good hacker too. I mean, he's done some previous work on defcon and Black Hat.
- [80:13]
A
Okay.
- [80:15]
D
It's just the lack of security in these, these things is just shameful. You know, it's just kind of like pump it out, put it out cheap. When you think, I mean, you've got a Roomba, right?
- [80:28]
A
I do not. I had a room.
- [80:29]
D
Oh, okay.
- [80:30]
A
I retired the Roomba many years ago because it would wake up in the middle of the night, play a really annoying but chipper song at about 3am and then proceed immediately to get stuck underneath a sideboard and bang against it again and again and again until I was forced to get up again at three in the morning, pick it up by its little Roomba handle and place it back on its charger and press the button and said, go away.
- [80:57]
D
How convenient these devices are. Yeah.
- [81:02]
A
And Lisa loved it because she said, look, it's. Look at all the dirt it's picked up. You know, I mean, that's. But it's never good. I don't know. You don't have one? Paris, I imagine.
- [81:11]
B
No, I don't think it would work. My apartment has.
- [81:15]
A
How about you? Berbers? You have A robot vacuum.
- [81:18]
C
I do. I. I have a Roomba. It's really stupid.
- [81:21]
D
Yeah.
- [81:23]
B
Have you let your Roomba view outside yet?
- [81:26]
C
Well, my. My boyfriend will turn it on and then I'll just shut it off because it's so.
- [81:31]
A
Bingo. It's annoying.
- [81:33]
D
Yeah. Deal with cables. That's the problem.
- [81:38]
A
I still had to vacuum afterwards. It wasn't like I never had to vacuum again.
- [81:43]
C
Yeah, well, that. Actually, I feel like a Roomba could benefit from an AI model that can do sensory whatever. Like all the software models that companies are trying to build for robots.
- [81:55]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [81:55]
D
Oh, yeah.
- [81:56]
C
I feel like a low tech version of that for a Roomba would actually be.
- [81:59]
A
I think they are. In fact, whenever we have Jennifer Pattison Tuohy on the show, that's her job. Reviewing these for the verb put AI in the Roomba. Oh, she's. There's some that are very smart, but Roomba is long.
- [82:13]
B
Have they put AI in that Roomba that has a knife attached to it?
- [82:18]
A
Wait, there's no Roomba with a knife on it. Yeah, there is. Why would you arm a Roomba?
- [82:25]
B
I'm just gonna search DJ Roomba with a knife.
- [82:27]
D
I was gonna say. You've seen robot arm a Roomba.
- [82:31]
A
I think this is.
- [82:32]
B
Yeah.
- [82:34]
A
Okay, okay. It wasn't. Didn't come out of the factory pre armed. Somebody armed it later. Okay. It's a.
- [82:40]
B
It's a Roomba with a knife. I don't even know if this is actually the right thing. I just. Oh, yeah. This is exactly what I'm thinking of. I'm gonna put the photo in the chat. It is. It's exactly what you'd imagine.
- [82:54]
A
Roomba's pretty much been put out of business by the Chinese clones. Oh, yeah. It's a knife taped to the top of a Roomba.
- [83:02]
B
Yes, it's a Roomba with a knife.
- [83:05]
D
Oh, good lord.
- [83:06]
A
I don't see the point. Honestly, I can't carve your turkey.
- [83:11]
B
Does there need to be?
- [83:12]
A
Unless you put your turkey on the floor and then it's still only gonna just chop its head off.
- [83:19]
D
Well, you've already got drones with handguns attached to them.
- [83:22]
A
So at this point, is. Is questioning the decision he made to appear on this show. And I'm sorry, I did not know
- [83:27]
C
we were gonna be talking about Roomba.
- [83:31]
A
Did not know this would come up.
- [83:34]
C
The Yarbo. Who makes it? What company makes a Yarbo?
- [83:37]
A
It's a Chinese company. I don't know what their. Their name is. Shall I find out for you? Are you interested? Do you have a lawn.
- [83:44]
C
I don't have a lawn.
- [83:45]
A
So you would pretty much want a lawn if you buy a Yarbo. Okay.
- [83:50]
B
Yarbo is a wild word, right?
- [83:53]
C
Exactly.
- [83:55]
A
And that like a lot of Chinese companies, they make up a word that seems like it would sound good in English.
- [84:03]
B
I mean this is like a whole sub genre of Square Enix games. There's, there's great games that I earnestly love that are called things like Triangle Strategy or Bravely Defaults or Unicorn Overlord. They have nothing to do with those words I just said. They just sound nice.
- [84:22]
A
I get, I feel, I feel like, like AI will make it possible. AI translations got so good that, you know, this will no longer be a thing and we will look back fondly with nostalgia at the crazy.
- [84:35]
B
I believe these names are chosen with care. They go through a lot of, they went through a lot of different potential things to land on Bravely Default or Triangle Strategy.
- [84:47]
A
It's always fun to go to go to Japan and China and see, see the English language T shirts that the kids wear because it's usually some sort of random English that they've chosen.
- [85:00]
D
Well, that cuts both ways though because if you look at the tattoos that some British people, oh, good point. Western European, North American people go, yeah, I mean some poor bastard has got chicken fried rice tattooed down the side of his arm just like I always seriously did, you know, not check.
- [85:18]
A
So here's a, a little bit of an annoying story from Gizmoto. There are in America 20 state run healthcare marketplace sites, places where you can get your ACA, your Obamacare insurance. All 20 of them include, according to Gizmodo, advertising trackers that share information with big tech. Actually this comes from Bloomberg. Seven million Americans bought their health insurance through state exchanges in 2026. Many of them may have had personal information shared with Meta, TikTok, Snap, Google, Nextdoor and LinkedIn, among others, including data brokers. By the way, the data was collected and shared from these health insurance sites included zip codes, a person's sex, citizen status, race. Bloomberg found trackers on Medicaid related webpages in Rhode island which could reveal information about a person's financial status and need for assistance. In Maryland, a Spanish language site titled Good News for Non Citizen Pregnant Marylanders and a page designed to help DACA recipients navigate their healthcare options were found to be transmitting data to these social media firms.
- [86:35]
B
I mean, what about this is surprising to you? They're the largest, in some cases the largest advertising platforms ever. Of course they're going to be Collecting data on every website ever.
- [86:44]
A
But is this, is this advertising on the, on the Obamacare sites? Is that what's going on? There shouldn't be advertising on a state health insurance site, should there?
- [86:54]
B
I mean, yeah, that would make sense,
- [86:56]
A
but we got to make the money up somehow.
- [86:59]
D
Well, I mean, given the lamentable status of American healthcare, you know, private healthcare, a single payer is the only way to go. And even then they're probably going to steal your advertising data. So it's just, it's a ridiculous situation.
- [87:16]
A
Personal data. It's not all 20, nearly all 20, says Bloomberg. The story from Bloomberg by Tanaz Megjani Dhruv Mehrota and Surya Matu no federal data privacy laws apply to these enrollment sites. As you know, there really aren't any federal data privacy laws. State laws define sensitive data under a patchwork of rules, which privacy experts say are inadequate and inconsistent. The FTC and states can enforce these laws, but apparently they don't. Spokespeople for Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snap and Google say their terms prohibit advertisers like the state exchanges from sharing sensitive or health related data. Virginia and Washington removed some of the trackers after Bloomberg asked for comments. These are tracking pixels on these sites. Bloomberg used developer tools to inspect what data was sent from the exchanges and they found, for instance, race. What race. What race you are was shared with TikTok in the Washington exchange.
- [88:30]
D
I mean, this is why journalism is important. And I'm, I know I'm speaking to the choir because journalists are actually checking this out, whereas government agencies seem to have just, you know, whatever. It's not our job.
- [88:44]
A
In New Mexico, visiting a page titled Zero Dollar Income affidavit to, to prove that you need support. Right. Because you don't have any income. Triggered a request to Google's advertising network. This is infuriating, by the way. This is why we need some sort of federal privacy legislation. But I guess people are there's too much money to be made.
- [89:10]
D
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that California and Michigan of all places have very strong privacy legislation in place, but the worry is that if you do it on a federal level, then it's going to get watered down. I'm curious as to what the others think about this, but I'm not hopeful.
- [89:29]
B
I mean, I think it'll be very interesting to see how there obviously is a huge Trend in the U.S. of state legislation trying to kind of move the needle on hot button topics like privacy or. Currently, something I'm seeing a lot in food safety regulation is a lot of states moving the need needle on like grass regulation or general like food chemical safety stuff. But in all of these cases, the kind of constant is there are larger powers at the federal level that are hoping to pass preemption legislation that would kind of nullify all of these state attempts. So it'll be interesting to see how any of this continues.
- [90:09]
A
This is becoming the bad news show and I apologize. Maybe I gotta find some good news when we come back. You're watching this week in Tech. Berber Gin visiting us. It's great to have you. From the Wall Street Journal, Ian Thompson, I love your new letter, the View from.
- [90:25]
D
Oh, the ballet. Yes, I, I did get a wee bit wild on the AI stakes, but yes, that's great.
- [90:31]
A
Where can we find that techfinitive Tech definitive dot com? Yeah. All right. And it's a free subscription to the newsletter.
- [90:39]
D
Oh no, it's totally free. I, I, I'm not a big fan of paywalls.
- [90:45]
A
Good, good for you. And Paris Martineau, who writes for Consumer Reports and is working on a massive expose you just won't believe. But I can't say anything about it.
- [90:58]
B
You can't. You've been sworn to secrecy.
- [90:59]
A
I have been.
- [91:00]
D
I'm looking forward to it.
- [91:01]
A
Yeah, I could, all I can say is there are certain foods I will stop eating after, after hearing what she's reporting on. That's all I'm gonna say. You're going to want to read it. I'm a proud subscriber to Consumer Reports. Your stuff though, and I my stuff's
- [91:15]
B
all in front of the paywall.
- [91:16]
A
I praise Consumer Reports for doing this because it is so important.
- [91:19]
B
Basically, our whole investigative team, our stuff is in front of the paywall. It's public interest.
- [91:26]
A
Yeah, that's really great. We'll have more right after this. This episode of this Week in Tech is brought to you by Meter, the company building better networks. If you're a network engineer. Oh man, you know the headaches. You have my deepest sympathy. Legacy providers with inflexible pricing, IT resource constraints stretching you thin, complex deployments across fragmented tools. Look, you're mission critical to the business, but you're working with infrastructure that wasn't built for today's demands. That's why businesses are switching to Meter. Meter delivers full stack networking infrastructure, wired, wireless and cellular that's built for performance and scalability. And they do it because they understand you got to own the whole stack to make it work flawlessly, seamlessly. That's why Meter designs the hardware writes the firmware, builds the software, manages deployments, provides support. They do it all. They offer. They even offer ISP procurement. They will set up your security, your routing, your switching, your wireless, your firewall, your cellular. They'll help you with power, DNS security, VPN, SD WAN, multi site workflows, all in a single solution from a single vendor, one phone number to call. Meter's single integrated networking stack scales from major hospitals, branch offices, warehouses to large campuses, even data centers like Reddit. Yes, they use Meter. Assistant Director of Technology for Web School of Knoxville they use Meter. And this is what he said. We had more than 20 games on campus between our two facilities. Each game was streamed via wired and wireless connections and the event went off without a hitch. We could never have done this before Meter redesigned our network. With Meter, you get a single partner for all your connectivity needs, from first site survey to ongoing support, without the complexity of managing multiple providers or tools. Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off your IT team and gives you deep control and visibility, reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online. Meter built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow. Thanks so much to Meter for sponsoring Twit and we invite you to help us out by going to meter.com twitt Help yourself out, book a demo right now. That's M-E-T-E-R.com to book a demo. Thank you, Meter. Now back to the show. Well, I apologize. I promise some happy go lucky stories and there are absolutely none.
- [94:09]
B
They exist.
- [94:09]
A
There are. Well, there's one.
- [94:11]
D
I mean, Paris, you've just had your little furry companion jumping all over you and Stuffy has been doing the same for me as well.
- [94:17]
B
Very anti positive news. If anything, she's an overlord of, of, you know, chaos and destruction.
- [94:24]
A
Well, here's a good, here's a good story if you have stock in Pinterest
- [94:29]
B
because you know, all of us share.
- [94:32]
A
None of us have stock in Pinterest. I guarantee you Pinterest just crossed a billion dollars in quarterly revenue. It's an interesting story from the the Next Web. The bet that made it work was not social media, it was search. I think when Pinterest was started, it was a. So you know, people thought of it as a social media network, right, where you shared pictures of things you were interested in. And I. But it turns out all of that data that people have been pouring into Pinterest is great for image search and that's where all of the new user hits are coming from 80 billion searches a month. It's going through Pinterest.
- [95:12]
D
Is that imagine from users or AI?
- [95:14]
A
Well that's the question. I would imagine some of that is not users but AI.
- [95:19]
D
Yeah.
- [95:19]
B
Which is rather interesting because a lot of the images on Pinterest now is just AI. So it's would in that case be AI searching for AI.
- [95:27]
A
Well that's the future of AI, isn't it? It's all AI all the way down. I mean there's we. I think AI has already ingested all
- [95:33]
B
the human and we like that.
- [95:35]
A
No, no choice. We got no choice. The arrival of. Of advertising inside AI platforms like ChatGPT says TNW has reframed a conversation about where ad dollars flow. The most valuable advertising real estate is not inside a chatbot or alongside a social feed. It's at the moment someone is actively searching for something they want to buy. That makes sense. Right. I'm looking for a. A cooler sized replica of the New York City dumpsters. And you search for it, you find it on Pinterest there's a link to where you can buy that.
- [96:13]
B
That.
- [96:14]
A
That's money in the bank.
- [96:17]
B
I really. And I can't find it.
- [96:20]
A
Look on Pinterest you'll find it. It's all there.
- [96:22]
B
It won't be real though.
- [96:26]
D
Just was being written off a couple of years ago.
- [96:30]
B
It's still being written off. It's the most blocked website on whatever that browser was we covered on intelligence.
- [96:38]
A
What it's blocked now?
- [96:41]
C
Do you remember Pinterest?
- [96:42]
B
I would say who uses Pinterest? I think is a great question. Leo, do you remember there was a time in the last year we had someone on intelligent machines who was showing us maybe it was Kagi, maybe browser. And you could also then see of coggy browser users what were the most commonly blocked websites? Overwhelmingly it was Pinterest. Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest. But with different tld.
- [97:07]
A
That's historical.
- [97:08]
B
A lot of people hate Pinterest because it is and this was even before a lot of the results were just AI slop. So I'm kind of surprised by this. What do you use it for? Are you planning a wedding?
- [97:19]
A
Oh, I don't use it. I just like it.
- [97:21]
B
You don't? Then how do you like it?
- [97:24]
A
Because yeah, if I were planning a wedding or making a mood board, I know where I would go first would be Pinterest. I actually have a Pinterest account and I did put it just. I used to put stuff there. It's Like a little scrapbook,
- [97:40]
C
but like five years ago or 10 years ago.
- [97:45]
B
When's the last time you looked at Pinterest?
- [97:47]
A
I haven't in years. Berber, do you use Pinterest?
- [97:50]
B
When's the last time, do you think? What's the last calendar year that you looked at Pinterest?
- [97:55]
C
Like 10 years ago. I totally forgot that this stock is still like a publicly traded company.
- [98:01]
A
It's hot, man. It's hot.
- [98:02]
B
I'm shocked that people. I'm shocked that it's making this money. Like, who's paying for this?
- [98:08]
A
Well, you know who lost a lot of money in the stock market? Cloudflare lost 200, a quarter of its value, 24% of its value in its stock because even though it beat earnings predictions, they cut 1100 jobs because AI agents do the work now, and the market, which used to love that, apparently doesn't.
- [98:32]
B
Well, I thought they were also hiring, like, a heck of a lot of interns as a response to this.
- [98:39]
A
Yeah, that's right. We're going to have interns do the job.
- [98:42]
D
That always works well.
- [98:44]
A
Yeah, yeah, they. Matthew Prince, the CEO and co founder Michelle Zatlin announced that Cloudflare is transitioning to what they call a quote agentic AI first operating model. Their use of AI has increased more than 600 in three months. Staff across engineering, human resources, finance and marketing are running thousands of AI agent sessions a day. And this is not to assist employees, they say to replace employees, basically.
- [99:16]
D
Well, it's kind of like, did you see the current CEOs service now talking about, you know, how AIs. He's had the worst possible plastic surgery. I'll stick it on the Discord Channel, but it just looks like that's just mean. I would not call somebody out based on their personal appearance, but when you've mutilated yourself to quite that level, then
- [99:41]
B
who are we talking about?
- [99:43]
D
CEO of service now?
- [99:47]
A
Put a link to his Instagram in the. I don't want. I don't dare show it because I'm
- [99:53]
D
afraid it's on discount. I mean.
- [99:55]
A
Oh, there's the 3D printable dumpsters. By the way, I picked.
- [99:59]
B
Oh. See, it's never a great idea. It's never a great sign. When the vast majority of photos that come up when you search someone's name is them wearing sunglasses.
- [100:06]
D
Yes.
- [100:08]
A
Okay. Post op, probably right.
- [100:10]
D
Yeah.
- [100:12]
A
Become mean just because we're miserable.
- [100:15]
B
I'm not gonna say anything. I'm just noting that there's lots of glasses photos. I think that's kind of fun.
- [100:21]
A
They're very cool. They wears his shades at night. That's okay.
- [100:25]
B
He's got a robust hairline. Happening.
- [100:27]
D
I'm sorry. Unless you're in Hawaii or in a bright sunshine environment, wearing sunglasses by day is just.
- [100:34]
B
This is also how I feel about when Anna Wintour does it to equalize it.
- [100:37]
A
I gotta point out.
- [100:38]
B
Please, I'm just like, please don't wear sunglasses indoors. You're not very.
- [100:41]
D
There was a marvelous quote from the be From BBC News quiz is where they were talking about the. The New York fashion gala. It's like this is the winter of a discontent. But you know, the. The P. Protest against Jeff Bezos was really quite fascinating.
- [100:59]
A
Oh, with the bottles? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was. That was quite interesting. Oh, that's an interesting look. You know, he looks like. I gotta.
- [101:07]
B
He looks like a guy who'd be going, yeah, it looks like.
- [101:11]
A
I think it's what you would think somebody from the future might look like.
- [101:14]
D
But I mean, scroll down and look at his before images when he was at SAP and my goodness, he looks a lot more reliable then, you know.
- [101:24]
A
What did he say that that was such, such.
- [101:26]
D
Oh, it was just total AI gobbledygook, you know, I mean, it was almost embarrassing. Well, actually, it was actually embarrassing.
- [101:35]
A
I feel like he could actually be an alien and maybe that's why he's so into.
- [101:39]
D
It's. It did look brilliant.
- [101:41]
A
I can't look at it because I'm not signed in. The author has chosen to make their post visible only to people who are signed in.
- [101:48]
B
I hate when people do that on Blue Sky. Oh, free the. Free the posts.
- [101:53]
D
I was going to say I thought it was open, but yeah, I mean, you can turn.
- [101:56]
A
I can sign in.
- [101:59]
B
A lot of people. A fair amount of people do this in Blue Sky. I wouldn't say a lot, but a fair amount. Are you on Blue Sky Berber? Are you on Twitter anymore?
- [102:09]
C
I am on Twitter. I've never used Blue sky. So.
- [102:12]
B
Have you ever used any of the other alt platforms?
- [102:15]
C
No, I'm. I'm old fashioned.
- [102:18]
B
And you just like to go to X the Everything app where we all do all of our finance and banking.
- [102:24]
C
Right? Exactly, yes. And consume a bunch of AI generated AI slop all the time.
- [102:32]
A
I'm ashamed to admit it. I. I abandoned Nix when Elon bought it it. But I have to spend a lot of time there these days because especially in AI, there's a lot of information there, I'm sure for you doing your, you know, your coverage for the Journal. This is a Good source.
- [102:48]
C
Yeah, I feel like it's. I feel like. And in particular I feel like the employees of all the tech companies, particularly OpenAI are just on Twitter.
- [102:57]
A
Exactly.
- [102:58]
B
Yeah. They be posting.
- [102:59]
A
Exactly. And interrupt too, which is really bad
- [103:02]
C
because I think Elon Control obviously that I think he probably surfaces a lot of anti OpenAI content.
- [103:10]
A
Totally, totally is doing that. Yeah. That. That's the thing to always keep in mind is that the algorithm is highly tuned on X and probably somewhat by Elon's own personal and financial interests.
- [103:24]
B
I mean, there are certain aspects of it that we can say are definitely tuned. There was that whole period where he actively made the engineers of Twitter rank his posts higher in the average algorithm.
- [103:36]
A
And he ranks down. Companies like npr. He ranks down. They don't get nearly the engagement.
- [103:42]
B
I mean, same with basically any news company that posts links.
- [103:47]
A
You've all. We've all talked about supply chain issues, the shortages of ram, you know, RAM prices through the roof. Hard drives through the roof. There's another victim of this I hadn't really thought about. Motherboard sales have collapsed by more than 20.
- [104:00]
B
Mother's Day.
- [104:02]
A
Well, it's a Mother's Day story. It is, it is because people aren't building PCs anymore because they can't get the CPUs. They can't get the RAM, they can't get the drives, so they don't need the motherboards. ASUS projected to sell 5 million fewer boards. This actually, this is they said last year. So I'm not sure, maybe they're just getting the numbers now. Gigabyte MSI, ASRock also saying big drop in component sales of motherboards.
- [104:34]
D
Is it that the people aren't building the PCs anymore or because our PCs have got fast enough to handle pretty much anything that's coming down the line?
- [104:42]
B
I bet it's that all the components of PCs are so expensive that people who build it for hobbies can't afford to do it anymore. Anymore.
- [104:49]
A
It's both. Right. We don't need them as much. Although if you look at Apple, Apple says we cannot keep our Mac Mini or Mac Studio in stock.
- [104:57]
B
Well, yeah, it's because all people are open claw Macs.
- [105:01]
A
Yeah, everybody's buying for AI, right. This is a very upsetting story. I think. I know you could interpret this both ways. This comes from a site called Reclaim the Net, which I'm seeing a lot of all of a sudden. Reclaimthenet.org the FCC has just proposed due to robocalls, fixing the problem by requiring an ID before you get a phone Number. So you have to be a real person to get a phone number. On April 30, the FCC approved unanimously a proposal requiring telecom providers to verify customer identities before activating service. You'd have to show them driver's license.
- [105:50]
B
Does this mean there are a set amount of phone numbers per person?
- [105:55]
A
I don't know about that, but it means there'd be no more burner phones. Right.
- [105:58]
B
Say that would mean then every phone number is automatically linked to.
- [106:02]
A
It's associated to an exact.
- [106:04]
B
So you can't burner phones to contact somebody anonymously. It seems like a privacy nightmare.
- [106:08]
A
And yet at the same time it makes sense is if you want to kill robocalls, because all of you know those robocalls all come. Come from bogus numbers, often with your own area code, sometimes even with your own area code in exchange. Right. Thinking, Making you think, oh, my God, that must be my, my kid's school or something. And instead it's some guy from Indonesia who's trying to sell you something you don't want.
- [106:29]
B
Doing this in the US Stop those guys from Indonesia from being.
- [106:33]
A
Ah, that's interesting. It's only the US So it would apply to every voice provider in the country, including VoIP services and mobile operators. Now, it's not a rule yet. They're seeking public comments. But a number of privacy advocates have pointed out that this does eliminate the idea of having a private phone number. Your number will be attached to your name. Hi, this is Benito again. So from the Philippines. You know, a lot of listeners know I live part of the time in the Philippines.
- [107:04]
D
They already do this.
- [107:05]
C
There's.
- [107:06]
A
So I had to give my id. Yeah. So when I got my phone number, I had to show ID and all this stuff. So this has already happened. There are no robocalls in the Philippines. Right. Actually, I haven't gotten any. Actually, I have never gotten. It works. But I have gotten, you know, marketing
- [107:23]
D
texts and all that stuff still happens. All that stuff still happens.
- [107:26]
C
So.
- [107:28]
A
So I have mixed feelings. I mean, I guess, you know, eliminating robocalls are completely at it. Not merely robocalls, but. Which is not to say I agree with the practice. Okay, first of all, I don't. I don't like that I had to give up my identity to get a phone number.
- [107:41]
C
Yeah, it feels, if. I don't know, I feel it's like what privacy. What Paris was saying, like, from a privacy perspective, it's not great if you. There's like a register of every phone call being attached to an id.
- [107:57]
B
You can't suddenly like buy a phone, you know, you can't suddenly buy a burner phone if you're having some sort of privacy issue and want to contact someone anonymously.
- [108:08]
A
Yeah, there's a lot cases if you, if you're suffering from domestic violence, there are a lot of cases where you might not want your name associated with your phone number. You might want to preserve because presumably if your number is associated with name, you could search number to name, but you might also be able to search name to number. Right. That's not good. 46% of kids in the UK who are prevented from going on social media sites by the online safety act. 46% of them say just put on a fake mustache.
- [108:45]
D
I love this story.
- [108:48]
B
Where are the children getting fake mustaches?
- [108:53]
A
This is from the reg. This is hysterical. Nearly a third of kids in the UK say they admit to getting around them. Almost half say it's easy to do. So this is a, a survey from the UK online safety group Internet Matters of 1,000 UK kids, their parents. It did show some positive effects from changes made under the Online Safety Act. But many kids saw age verification as an easy to bypass hurdle rather than something that kept them safe.
- [109:26]
B
I mean, I think it's great that we're teaching kids how to do kind of fun disguise based hiking from an early ages. I do think that every child should have one reason to get in a large trench coat with two of your friends.
- [109:41]
A
My name is Hercule Poirot.
- [109:45]
B
I am very much an adult and I should be able to see all
- [109:49]
A
the pornography right now because I am 48 years old and I am tall for my age.
- [109:59]
B
The doctors say I will Kint continue to grow.
- [110:03]
D
It's stories like this that give me hope because the kids are all right. You know, they know what they're doing,
- [110:09]
A
they know how to get around it.
- [110:10]
D
You know, it's. It's kind of like my parents generation would just roll over and okay, I'll give hand over all my personal identity to somebody, you know, some unknown company. The kids are hacking this and good
- [110:24]
A
on them, Good on them. The kids are all right. That, that should be the motto for this show. We're going to take a break. Final break, final words coming up. You're watching twit. It's great to have Berber Jen here. We appreciate you spending some time with us. I'm making this show shorter just for you, Berber and your mother and your mom. Happy Mom's Day. To all the mothers out there, including my own mother. She's in a nursing home. In Rhode island, but she's going to get a very big bouquet of flowers any day now.
- [110:55]
B
Exciting.
- [110:56]
A
Turned out I couldn't get it delivered on Mother's Day, but I think she really. Tuesday will be fine. I'm thinking.
- [111:02]
B
I mean, I do think that's one of the benefits of having a mother in a memory care facility is it's all kind of the same.
- [111:08]
A
Oh, look at this. Flowers have arrived. Who's this? Leo.
- [111:13]
B
Leo. Why does that name sound familiar?
- [111:16]
A
So familiar.
- [111:17]
B
That's a great name.
- [111:19]
A
Happy Mother's Day, everybody. We'll be back with more right after to this this episode of this week in tech is brought this episode of this week in tech is brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. You know, we talk about it all the time. The potential rewards of AI are obviously too great for any company to ignore, but so are the risks. Loss of sensitive data, attacks against enterprise managed AI. And then there's always the issue of generative AI increasing opportunities for the bad guys, helping them to rapidly create phishing lures, write malicious code, automate data extraction. There were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications. This is not by accident. I mean, it is by accident. It's not by intent. It's not like some somebody broke in even. It's. It's your innocent users at your company using AI. Maybe, I don't know, they're looking at your, your 10Ks or your Social Security and, you know, your tax return with your socials on it, or they are submitting proprietary company information to AI. Zscaler. I'll stop that cold. It's the most trusted AI security platform. 40% of Global 2000 companies use Zscaler. In fact, half a trillion transactions are secured daily every day. With more than 9.4 thousand global customers, Zscaler carries a net promoter score of more than 75. That's 150% higher than the average leverage SaaS. But you don't have to take my word for it. Ask their customers. Check out what Siva says. He's director of security and infrastructure at Zuora. He says this about using Zscaler to prevent AI attacks.
- [113:03]
B
With Zscaler, being in line in a
- [113:05]
A
security protection strategy helps us monitor all the traffic. So even if a bad actor were to use AI because we have tight
- [113:14]
B
security framework around our endpoint, helps us
- [113:16]
A
proactively prevent that activity from happening. AI is tremendous in terms of its opportunities, but it also brings in challenges. We're confident that zscaler is going to help us ensure that we're not slowed down by security challenges, but continue to take advantage of all the advancements. Thank you Siva. With Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI safely 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. Learn more@zscaler.com security that's zscaler.com security thank him so much for supporting this Week in Tech and you also support this Week in Tech when you go to that address. Zscaler.com Security thank you Zscaler. And now back to Twitch. Thank you Leo. You know what, thanks also to our Club Twit members, Scooter X especially, who is always coming up with stories. He has looked, he went out, he has looked, he has found some happy stories. Are you ready for some happy stories, PC Magazine? I don't know how happy. Let's see. PC Magazine says Amazon's Eero is now exempted from the FCC's foreign made Wi fi router.
- [114:44]
B
I would describe that as a definitively neutral story.
- [114:47]
A
It's neither good nor bad. We don't like the WI fi router ban. I guess I understand the reason it said that any router not made in the US would be banned. And at the time the only router made in the US was the Starlink router made by SpaceX. Netgear has since gotten approval from the FCC. You have to answer some questions like do you ever plan to build these in the us? And if you say yes, apparently that's sufficient because they're not currently Amazon zero.
- [115:16]
B
If you're ever thinking about contemplating.
- [115:19]
A
Are you thinking about a factory? Yeah. Here in the us so that's good news. Amazon's Eero now, along with Netgear, you can buy these in the US and, and the fcc, which similarly banned foreign made drones in the United States because of security. Right. Has realized that by doing so maybe they're causing some insecurity. They have decided to allow those banned drones and banned routers to receive updates for at least two more years. Yeah.
- [115:54]
B
How generous.
- [115:56]
D
Well, they have no other choice.
- [115:57]
A
I mean, seriously, they're not, they're not saying you have to throw it out. So people should be able to update these. That's absolutely critical if security is your concern, actually through 2029. But they also, they also say, I don't expect to go beyond 2029. Yeah, yeah, we'll see, that's two years longer than the original 2027.
- [116:22]
D
I mean, given the low, the low prices for routers, I can't honestly see that many router manufacturers shifting back to the US unless they have to. And if they're going to get these kind of get outs, then why bother, right?
- [116:37]
A
It's a. It's a very weird ban. It's very. Got lots of holes. If your router is currently in the US for sale, you can still sell it really applies to newly made routers, as you say.
- [116:53]
D
Okay, criticize my accent, but no, that's
- [116:56]
A
not an accent thing. That's just. That's a different. It's like schedule. Right. It's just a different.
- [117:01]
D
Yeah, so privacy. Yeah, yeah.
- [117:03]
A
Aluminium rooter.
- [117:05]
D
Don't get me started on that.
- [117:07]
A
Okay, he confused me a little bit,
- [117:10]
D
but honestly, I'll give you aluminium actually makes more sense.
- [117:16]
B
Aluminium adds a level of whimsy to the world that aluminum never will.
- [117:21]
D
Well, yes, but I mean, we say sodium, we say calcium. Aluminum actually makes more sense, but at the same time, the Germans invented the stuff. Let's let them change their name.
- [117:31]
A
What do they call it?
- [117:33]
D
Oh, God, I don't even know what the Germans call it in terms of their own language. I think you need half a pound of at phlegm to actually get it out.
- [117:43]
A
I was going to ask Berber, actually, about if he has any insight into why in the world OpenAI spent more than $100 million to buy the Tech Bro Podcast network. It must be something because then I see Andreessen Horowitz has started their own daily news show called Monitoring the Situation, which almost sounds like a. A joke, but it's not. They mean it,
- [118:11]
B
baby.
- [118:12]
A
Yeah, mts. And then there's, of course, let's not forget, I'm going to pronounce it properly. T I, T V. Oh, yeah, that's
- [118:20]
B
the only way to pronounce it. Of course.
- [118:24]
D
Subtle.
- [118:25]
A
But do you have any insight? I mean, first of all, do you know how much they paid? Because all it was said was in the hundreds of million low hundreds of millions.
- [118:34]
C
Yeah, I don't think they paid that much. I mean, they paid a lot for
- [118:37]
A
it, but it's a podcast. Right, let's get this straight.
- [118:42]
C
There's. They paid a lot of money, considering it was a podcast, but considering the thing, other things they spend money on, it wasn't terrible, but.
- [118:49]
A
Well, and also it was Fiji, Simo's deal.
- [118:52]
D
Yeah.
- [118:52]
A
And then she immediately disappears for health reasons.
- [118:55]
C
It was very perplexing because I think it's interesting. I feel like the engagement has really dropped off since they bought it because people obviously don't want to go on the show now because it's owned by OpenAI. And then a lot of people don't want to watch it because it's like corporate TV now.
- [119:13]
A
Yeah, this could. I could have predicted this. In fact, I think I did predict this. It seems like this is an example, if you're going to do an IPO of fiscal irresponsibility. This is not.
- [119:26]
B
Well, I mean, what. I don't think there are many things that OpenAI has done that would be considered fiscally responsible.
- [119:33]
A
Okay, good point.
- [119:36]
D
But I mean, no, Bubba raised an interesting point here. In terms of you buy it, no one takes it seriously anymore, so you shut it down. Is that the goal?
- [119:46]
B
Get my. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is the reason they bought it was entirely to keep TBPN running. It's to have the TBPN boys be an integral part of comms and kind of the lobbying work at Open.
- [120:03]
C
I think they are definitely very frustrated about the negative perception. Like they have. They have a comms problem, clearly. And so I think internally they're like, trying to spit out like different ideas to try and fix it. And so this was, I guess, like a very impulsive decision they made to just buy. You know, like they were kind of pitching it. It to me is like, you know, we're going to help shape public opinion with TVPM and reach audiences first and bypass traditional media. But I don't think they really had an idea of what they wanted to do with. Was one of those things where like everyone, like, like there are these weird disconnects for people. Just like to the rest of the world, it's just like a completely silly thing to do. But I guess people get hive mind and decide they want to do it.
- [120:57]
A
I should be honest. I'm just jealous. They have 59,000 YouTube subscribers. This show alone has 63,000. Our network has more than a quarter of a million. We're not getting hundreds of millions of dollars. But on the other hand, you could buy us and you wouldn't guarantee positive coverage of OpenAI. So maybe that's what's going on. Joe Rogan's got 20 million subscribers. Lex Friedman has 5 million subscribers. I mean, that's there. It just seems like you bought. I don't. I just don't get it. How. How is monitoring the situation going? Is that a good thing for Andreessen Horowitz? Seems like the Same idea.
- [121:35]
C
I didn't even know that they launched.
- [121:37]
A
There's. And therein lies the problem, right? Therein lies the problem. Nobody knows it exists. All right. Yes.
- [121:47]
D
And the pointy headed one doesn't seem to care that much either, so.
- [121:51]
A
Yeah, well, a little introspection goes a long way, let me just say. All right. I just. That's a kind of a personal axe to grind. I shouldn't, I shouldn't belabor that point. Let me see if there's any happy news. Any happy news at all.
- [122:06]
B
God, his head is so.
- [122:08]
D
I know, I know. It just. I interviewed him in 97 and he gave a great interview, I've got to say. But you couldn't get over the fact it's. Yeah, his head is really, really pointed.
- [122:20]
B
I think it's kind of an Internet meme. So it's sort of situation where people are editing the photos, but then you're confronted with the reality and you're like, no, no.
- [122:26]
D
When you.
- [122:27]
B
Moment of.
- [122:28]
A
This may be a handicap because, you know, sometimes when a baby is born, the head gets squeezed quite a bit and it is not unusual for it to be pointy.
- [122:40]
B
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. I'm just saying it's notable, obviously. Notable.
- [122:46]
A
And it's not something you can fix. I mean, you wouldn't want to put a board on the baby's head as they're growing to kind of fix that.
- [122:52]
D
You know, I mean, I, I have, I have ridges on the side of my head.
- [122:58]
B
Approach. You know, I think that every baby should be stomped on by an Italian plumber and his brother. I would fix it all.
- [123:06]
A
I, I confess. I, I am, I'm sympathetic because I once shaved my head, as you well know, for charity. And I learned that I have a really horrific shape shaped noggin. And I don't, I don't want to make fun of anybody.
- [123:20]
B
Well, you're gonna have to shave your head again when we do our second. When we do our next 24 hours.
- [123:26]
A
She really wants us to do it.
- [123:28]
B
Both of you guys are welcome to take a 30 minute slot because we're gonna have to film fill 24 hours.
- [123:33]
A
That's only 48 people. We need to fill half an hour.
- [123:36]
B
Not that many. We can do 48 people.
- [123:39]
A
We can do it. We can do it.
- [123:41]
B
We could have one hour just wandering out in the street, trying to get people to talk.
- [123:45]
D
You know, I'm gonna say I went to hospital a couple of years ago and I got number one and a number two and My goodness, my skull is ugly.
- [123:52]
A
So.
- [123:52]
D
Yeah. Yeah.
- [123:53]
B
I shaved my head once in college and I Did you looking skull? Yeah.
- [123:56]
A
Did you really? And what prompted that? Which did you?
- [124:00]
B
It was. I had a blonde mohawk for a while throughout high school and college. And then at one point I was like, what if I grew my hair out all the way because I wanted to?
- [124:10]
A
So you thought you'd start over?
- [124:12]
B
And so I figured, yeah, why not? But I wouldn't.
- [124:15]
A
So you look like Sinead o'.
- [124:16]
B
Connor. Yeah. On retrospect, I mean, it looks great, but I would not recommend doing it in January in New York.
- [124:25]
D
Oh, good lord.
- [124:26]
B
You don't really think about the fact that having any amount. Because I even still had kind of short hair at the time, but that still adds a level of warmth to your head that a shaved head.
- [124:35]
A
It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. Look how short my hair is. And yet when I didn't have any, I had to wear a hat. It was so cold. A lot of heat radiates. I'm sorry, Berber, you didn't know what you were getting into. And I really apologize.
- [124:48]
B
This is. We've been incredibly on topic for what the show normally is. We're actually on our best behavior.
- [124:55]
D
Great hair. You know, it's looking good.
- [124:57]
A
He does, he does.
- [124:58]
C
It's all over the place.
- [124:59]
A
And I'm sure an excellent shaped dome underneath it.
- [125:03]
C
I have no idea what my. I've never thought my head would look like if I shaved it off.
- [125:09]
B
What's the shortest your hair has ever been?
- [125:12]
C
It's always been long, I feel like, because I have. I have a huge head, so I also have.
- [125:18]
A
We all have huge heads. Every one of us on this show has a huge head.
- [125:23]
B
Hard to find hats.
- [125:24]
A
There is a demand now in the Discord Chat where our club members hang out. As you know, we treat our club members as family. And they are saying they need pictures of you, Paris, with mohawk and with a shaved head. So are there any.
- [125:41]
B
I mean, I can try and find some.
- [125:43]
A
Here are pictures of us with shaves.
- [125:45]
B
With coneheads.
- [125:46]
A
Yes.
- [125:47]
B
I mean, cone heads. What a great shave.
- [125:48]
D
Well, they've been. Yeah, they've been posting pictures of us with mustaches as well.
- [125:52]
B
The mustache ones were quite good.
- [125:54]
A
Yeah. Well, did you. Could you tell how old we were from those? I'm gonna look back.
- [125:59]
D
Not looking good.
- [126:00]
A
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we thank you so much for being here. Berber Reed. Berber's. We work really great stuff in the Wall Street Journal. A lot of exclusives. Oh, yeah, we look good with mustaches. Berber. You have a nice. That would fool anybody. That would make you.
- [126:15]
C
I should try. I like that one a lot, actually.
- [126:17]
A
Yeah, that's.
- [126:18]
B
Can you grow facial hair?
- [126:21]
A
It's.
- [126:21]
C
It doesn't go well.
- [126:23]
A
That's kind of a personal question.
- [126:24]
B
I'm so sorry to put you on blast.
- [126:26]
A
She asked me that on Wednesday, too. I just. I feel like you can, but you
- [126:30]
B
just choose not to because you're white. Wives hate it.
- [126:34]
A
She has Paris. That's a real knack for the personal question. I guess I like mine.
- [126:41]
B
What else we got to do?
- [126:43]
D
I grew one during lockdown, and it was so annoying. So happy to.
- [126:48]
A
You look like Terry Thomas. You looked fantastic.
- [126:51]
D
Yes, exactly. I look like a depraved Tammy. Terry Thomas. But also, you know, you take us, you know, swig of tea, and it. It just. It. It stayed in there all day. I'll put a photo of that and the mohawk on Discord.
- [127:08]
A
But you had a Mohawk, too.
- [127:11]
B
Everybody post your mohawks in the chat.
- [127:13]
A
Half of this panel has had a mohawk. Unless Berber, you've also had one. This case is 75%. Oh, that wasn't a Mohawk, Paris.
- [127:22]
B
I'm gonna show you the back. That has a mohawk.
- [127:25]
A
Well, that's not a mohawk.
- [127:27]
B
I guess it's a faux hawk.
- [127:28]
A
It's a. It's a. It's a good look. That's a good look.
- [127:31]
B
Let's see.
- [127:32]
A
And this isn't quite bald either. This is just.
- [127:35]
B
Okay, that's a shaved head.
- [127:37]
A
It's extremely short. That's it.
- [127:38]
B
Here, let me show you.
- [127:40]
A
Oh, look at that. Paris, you have. I love this. Paris has readily to hand pictures of the back of her head.
- [127:48]
B
I've just gone on Instagram and scrolled back.
- [127:52]
A
Oh, okay.
- [127:53]
D
There we go.
- [127:54]
A
Oh, that is not a good look, Terry Thomas.
- [127:57]
D
No, it really wasn't a good look, but it was a.
- [128:00]
B
You look in pain.
- [128:04]
A
I apologize for those of you only listening. Actually, no, you're lucky. You're the lucky ones. Thank you, Berber, for being here. We appreciate it. Read Berber's work in the Wall Street Journal. You'll find Paris Martineau at Consumer Reports, where she's doing food safety. Yes, it was she who exposed the radioactive shrimp scandal. The lead in your protein powder. A shocker. And there is soon to be more. Food safety is her passion. Thank you, Paris. We'll see you on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines. And thank you, Ian Thomas. I called you Thompson, didn't I?
- [128:42]
D
Yes. I was going to say anything, but my father would hunt you down.
- [128:47]
A
Apologies. Thank you, Ian. Of course, read Ian's View from the Valley. Subscribe and that way you'll get it automatically now. So it's not just intended for Brits. Anybody would want to read this?
- [128:58]
D
No. It's a view from a Brit in America. And this is a strange and silly place at times.
- [129:04]
A
It is indeed. Ian Thompson, thank you so much. Thanks to all of you for joining us. A special thanks to our club members who make this show possible. If you believe, as I do in the importance of independent and journalism covering technology, especially podcasting, your support makes all the difference to us. It covers a great portion, as much as 30% of our overall operating expenses. It allows us to do this show and all the other shows we do, plus special programming for our club members. We give you access to a special discord only for club members, which makes it a great place to hang out. You also get ad free versions of all the shows for just 10 bucks a month. Month. If you're not a member yet. Twit TV Slash Club Twit. We do this show every Sunday afternoon, 11am Hawaii time, 2pm Pacific time, 5pm East coast time, 2100 UTC. You can watch it live if you're there at that time in the club. Twit, Discord or YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. We stream on all those platforms after the fact on demand versions of the show available at the website TWIT tv. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it that way automatically the minute it's available. There's a YouTube channel too, with, as you can see, 63,000 subscribers. I think that's worth at least a hundred million dollars, don't you? I feel like that's not too much to ask. Sam Altman. Let's see. I guess that's all I have to say except that as I have said for 21 years now, at the end of every show. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next week. Another Twit is in the can.
- [130:43]
D
Bye.
- [130:43]
C
Is amazing.
- [130:55]
B
Some Follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion billion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com
- [131:14]
A
hey sweetie. Your mother showed me this Carvana thing for selling the car. I'm gonna give it a try. Wish me luck. Me again. I put in the license plate. It gave me an offer. Unbelievable. Okay, I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair. There, it's done. The car is gone. I'm holding a check anyway. Carvana, give it a whirl. Love ya.
- [131:37]
B
So good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply.
- [131:43]
A
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much.
- [131:48]
B
Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint.
- [131:52]
C
You can get premium wireless for just 15amonth.
- [131:55]
B
Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments.
- [131:57]
A
But that's weird.
- [131:58]
B
Okay, one judgment anyway.
- [132:01]
C
Give it a try.
- [132:02]
B
@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com.