1-800-CHATGPT, TPLink, TikTok Ban
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Leo Laporte
It's time for Twig. This week in Google, the last show of 2024. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris Martineau is here. Lots to talk about. TikTok is going to get its day in court. The Supreme Court. There's a problem with TP link routers. Turns out the most popular router in the US Is made in China. The Commerce Department says we might have a problem here and I'll place a call to my buddies at ChatGPT. It's all coming up next on Twig. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiG. This Week in Google. Episode 799, recorded Wednesday, December 18th, 2024. What's a basketball? It's time for TWiG. This Week in Google, the show. We cover the latest news from Google and all the Google verse, including the Twitterverse, the X verse, the obverse and the reverse. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the performer, not former still, emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Emeritus, but going forward, professor at SUNY Stony Brook, the state university of New York. So you move from city to state, which is good in the Montclair, New Jersey. Montclair is state. So you got New Jersey State and New York State.
Jeff Jarvis
I'm a man of the people. I don't these private, snotty things. I don't education.
Leo Laporte
Do you ever want to be at the Berkman Center? Anywhere like that?
Jeff Jarvis
I love them. They're great.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Good people.
Paris Martineau
That would require a living in Boston.
Leo Laporte
Bastin. Well, that is Paris Martin.
Jeff Jarvis
I was up for a deanship at BU and oh, that was Boston.
Leo Laporte
I like what's wrong with Boston.
Jeff Jarvis
It's nice. I just didn't want to move.
Paris Martineau
It's nice.
Leo Laporte
You New Yorkers.
Paris Martineau
It's just no New Jersey.
Jeff Jarvis
This is the center of the universe.
Leo Laporte
Have you seen. Okay, that's Paris Martino. She writes for the Information the weekend and Information. Have you seen. We had Emily Forlini on Twitter on Sunday and she is in New Jersey also and was complaining about the drones. Have you seen the drones, Jeff?
Jeff Jarvis
I heard one over toward Bedminster, but I have not seen them.
Leo Laporte
Apparently have been a few.
Paris Martineau
I know that I brought up the drones drones last week, but I will say I've since been. Many of the things people are saying are drones are clearly airplanes and helicopters. And I'd like to, you know, issue a mild correction when I talk about drones. Not talking about those.
Leo Laporte
There are a lot of difference There.
Paris Martineau
Are a lot of instances where someone is like I 5 minutes ago just saw a drone. Here's a video from my. And it's an airplane in this city. And then someone looks up the flight path, the stuff on Flight Aware and there was a hell, a plane right above their house. At the exact same time you can hear a drone.
Jeff Jarvis
Sounds different. I get helicopters over here a lot, I think partly because we're near Trump's golf course. But you can hear the difference between a drone and a helicopter.
Leo Laporte
So. Okay, do we have any thoughts about the drones?
Jeff Jarvis
I'm so sick of them. I'm so damn sick of them.
Leo Laporte
Do we even care, stupid? No, we spent some time. So you know what? We spent most of the time on Twitter on Sunday talking about, by the way, Paris is going to be on Twitter. Our year end episode this Sunday. Very high. If your plane makes it.
Paris Martineau
If my plane makes it, I will be there. I'm cutting it close, but we'll see. Hopefully the allegiance.
Leo Laporte
You're a little late. It's okay. We have other people too. Father Robert Ballisar. Yeah, be there. Micah Sargent will be there and Richard Campbell from Windows Weekly. So it's going to be a good panel and if you, if you're a little late, no one will be be the wiser.
Jeff Jarvis
However, if you're not there, it's a mantle, so you have to be there.
Leo Laporte
That's true. You are there to break up the sausage fest. What'd you call it? A mantle.
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I like mantle better.
Jeff Jarvis
You've never heard of that?
Paris Martineau
You've never heard of a male?
Leo Laporte
Oh, for decades I get produced.
Jeff Jarvis
Oh no, not anymore.
Leo Laporte
Well, we try to get as diverse a panel as we can.
Jeff Jarvis
Or man, given who we are, what.
Leo Laporte
We are, given that we are a tech network, which.
Jeff Jarvis
So Paris, I've got a question for you. Be honest because we're going to hear soon about the gifts we discussed last week. And I was wondering because the gifts have some surprise element. What that tells me is that you know that no friend of yours ever, ever watches any of this.
Paris Martineau
Oh yeah, I'm sorry. This is a great show. I love it. I am not in the business of recommending three hour podcast featuring myself to my friends. Why the hell be egotistical? I mean, I'll recommend it to people who are not. Who don't spend multiple hours a day in communication with me. But you know, when people ask me for link, I send to them blasting for information. Then I'm like, oh yeah, love it. Love twig.
Leo Laporte
The bourgeois should Say I am the reason it's not a mantle.
Paris Martineau
That's true.
Leo Laporte
And that would.
Jeff Jarvis
Do they ever ask you, Paris, what is this crazy podcast you're on with your grandpas they don't know about. What are you doing?
Leo Laporte
They don't even know.
Paris Martineau
People are like, oh, that's the podcast with Jeff Jarvis. That guy who's mad online all the time, right? Yeah, it's either mad online or Luminary. It's like one of the other one.
Leo Laporte
Or the other.
Jeff Jarvis
Or Salt Hank's dad.
Paris Martineau
That's true. Actually, the men, the men I've met in New York do know you more as Salt Hanks dad than Leo Laporte. Actually, it's kind of split. Some of them are like, oh, my God, Leo Laporte. I'd watch him all the time. I remember Salt Hank's dad.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
Now the big news is, Leo, you know that Paris now needs to open a bakery next to Salt Hank's restaurant because Paris is an award winning baker.
Paris Martineau
That's true.
Leo Laporte
Wait a minute.
Paris Martineau
I am. There was award winning. There was a. The information had our annual holiday bake off this week. Yesterday, actually. And I entered and I won. I made a coconut caramel tart, which is one of the New York Times new pies of the year. It's kind of like the.
Leo Laporte
You made the pie of the year. I love it.
Paris Martineau
Like the girl scout cookie known as Caramel Delight or Samoa, depending on where.
Leo Laporte
So good.
Paris Martineau
They're my favorite girl scout cookie. And it's a tart that tastes exactly like it. There's a photo of it.
Leo Laporte
It's not on the Information. Did they not publish this?
Paris Martineau
They should have.
Leo Laporte
You're all put upgrade to pro so I could see the pictures of the.
Paris Martineau
The Bake Off.
Leo Laporte
Bake Off. Yeah.
Paris Martineau
Let me.
Jeff Jarvis
It's in there. It's in there. Scooter X. Put it up.
Paris Martineau
I'll put it in the discord.
Leo Laporte
Oh, Scooter X discord. Okay.
Jeff Jarvis
At 5, 20.
Leo Laporte
Oh, it's you. You, you. You X'd it. Oh, look at that. That does look good.
Jeff Jarvis
So Paris kept the suspense going. We saw this and I'm wondering which one did Paris bake? Because I couldn't read enough.
Leo Laporte
Well, now that we know it's a Samoa, I'm thinking it's these two here.
Paris Martineau
Yes, it is. Yes.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. The pie of the year, Paris coconut caramel tart. Kristen Moore's bark. That looks like a good.
Paris Martineau
That was really good.
Jeff Jarvis
That one looks beautiful.
Leo Laporte
Here's Cory's Gateau Breton. It's in French. And he has a spring form, which is pretty fancy.
Paris Martineau
His boyfriend is, like, a master baker. So we were all, andrew, make those fun. He's like. And he's like, this year I made it myself. But he has all baking equipment this.
Leo Laporte
Year, and he's definitely this year.
Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah. We look at a little showing. I don't know. It's my first year entering it, and.
Leo Laporte
Fudge brownie banana bread sounds pretty darn good.
Paris Martineau
We were all in a sugar coma yesterday.
Leo Laporte
I bet. I'm zooming in. You realize I'm zooming in on the recipes.
Paris Martineau
I mean, that's kind of. Yeah, you gotta do it.
Leo Laporte
Gotta do it. Looks good. Paris. Congratulations.
Jeff Jarvis
Major honor.
Leo Laporte
I now it's a major award.
Paris Martineau
An entire half of a pie I've got to consume.
Leo Laporte
You didn't leave it there. You. You took it home?
Paris Martineau
Well, they. I had two pies. One and a half were eaten, and all the other stuff was going to go in the trash. So I was like, I guess I'll take it home.
Jeff Jarvis
Sure.
Leo Laporte
Meanwhile, as long as I'm on X. New Jersey drone mystery. Security concerns and missed official reassurances trending right now. Mysterious drones, some described as car size, have been spotted across New Jersey.
Paris Martineau
Jesus Christ.
Leo Laporte
Biden says there's nothing nefarious about the sightings. Okay, Joe, but what are they?
Jeff Jarvis
Well, the thing is, who was it I saw on the air on MSNBC earlier today where they said one guy who's a drone expert, I don't know what that means, regularly checks them and had like 3,000 a year over their other house. There's drones all the time. There's drones.
Leo Laporte
So that's. It strikes me a little bit as like a mass hysteria, like the. The Salem witch trials, where, you know, people start talking about it, then you say, I saw him. And then you say. And then it balloons. But it's probably nothing. I don't know. I don't know. We spent a considerable amount of time. Emily Forlini said they should shoot them down. And they said, no, wait, no, hold on.
Paris Martineau
That's the most New Jersey response.
Jeff Jarvis
She's already. Jersey.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what she said. She said, yeah, shoot him down. But what we spent the most time talking about because Kathy Gellis was on and debating a hot debate over the TikTok ban. And Kathy's firm opinion is that it is a First Amendment right that you cannot. The government cannot shut down TikTok. She. The rest of the panel disagreed kind of violently, almost as usual. I'm on Team Kathy, as I Am. You know, in general, I mean, she's a Supreme Court admitted attorney, so she certainly. Well, the Supreme Court has decided to take the case. Not only take the case, but on a rush basis. They are going to hear the TikTok ban. The oral arguments will be on the 10th, January 10th, and that's an expedited timeline so that they can rule before the law takes effect nine days later.
Jeff Jarvis
I know we're not gonna get political, but I just want to say they expedited TikTok, but they didn't expedite the presidency and all that was around that.
Leo Laporte
But okay, hey, they got their priorities. Yeah, TikTok, what do you think is going to happen? Denied in federal appeals court. They asked for a stay, which forced them to go to Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said in a brief order that the Justice Department and lawyers for TikTok, as well as a group of users who separately challenged the law. That was the interesting thing is you get a lot of TikTok users, like people Salt Hank didn't do it. But people like Salt Hank who have found real value in being on TikTok, they should be prepared to argue whether the ban passed by Congress violates the First Amendment. So it's going to go right straight down that. That alley that Kathy Gallister argued so vehemently.
Jeff Jarvis
I think there's a chance that the repeal of that law will go through with the continuing resolution in the House because Trump said that he, like he.
Leo Laporte
Said he has a warm spot and.
Jeff Jarvis
The CEO of Tick Tock is visiting him. I think it's gonna be something that'll happen.
Leo Laporte
It was right after the TikTok CEO visited him that he said he had a warm spot.
Paris Martineau
But, I mean, I'm confused as to what Trump saying something like he has a warm spot. Well, he was the guy who do.
Leo Laporte
He started the whole thing.
Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, but it's already in motion. It's been passed by Congress. They. The day that all this is happening is one day before Trump takes office. And companies from ByteDance to any, like both Apple, Google, as well as any ISP that is found to be hosting TikTok can be charged, I think somewhere around, like, $5,000 per user accessing it per day. Like, these are massive fines that these companies are going to want to avoid. How is Trump going to stop that?
Jeff Jarvis
Can I ask this question? I mean, couldn't his Justice Department say, we're not going to enforce this law?
Paris Martineau
I mean, yes, but I don't know. Is that going to happen under his orders?
Jeff Jarvis
He might do it.
Leo Laporte
That's an interesting thought. So they could just, it could remain the law. It'd be a little bit to it.
Paris Martineau
But yeah, but I'm curious then what happens on the 19th because that's when.
Leo Laporte
Ostensibly this all takes the day before Inauguration Day.
Paris Martineau
So are those companies all just going to chance it on the fact on the hope that Trump, let's say Trump comes out and says I'm definitely not going to enforce it when I take office, Would those companies chance those sort of fines on Trump's word? I don't know.
Leo Laporte
And Biden, the Biden administration has said already to both Google and Apple your stores will take down the app. So that's how they enforce it, by the way.
Paris Martineau
But I think that that would remove, that would remove the app from the App Store for like updates or being accessed by new users. That wouldn't remove the app from iPhones and Androids.
Leo Laporte
Well, it is an interesting point. In effect May this so called security decision makes it an insecure app. Now that's not getting on millions of phones in the US So that's not a good outcome either.
Jeff Jarvis
Did Kathy predict from a political perspective what the court will do that she.
Leo Laporte
Had no, she had no expectation. She just did not know.
Jeff Jarvis
She just, it was her own opinion.
Leo Laporte
We will ask her again because I'm sure she'll listen to the oral arguments on the 10th and I'll be very curious what she has to say about those. So plan on getting Kathy back on this show? Probably. Well, see, we're going to be on the air on the 8th. The arguments are on that Friday the 10th, maybe the following week, on the 15th we can get Kathy on. Maybe you should see if you could.
Jeff Jarvis
Get her on hi Kathy.
Leo Laporte
Because then there'll be a big question mark. What's going to happen between then and the 19th, by the way, this ties in with a story that broke today that U.S. officials are investigating a Chinese manufacturer of a routing device, routers that are not only best sellers in Amazon but have 65% of the US market. The TP Link routers, I bet many of you are using TP Link routers. I have TP Link hardware. It was recommended by Wirecutter as the best router has been for years. It's the best selling router on Amazon and it has been linked apparently according to the Wall Street Journal to Chinese cyber attacks. It's really nice. They make great gear. I use their TP link. I used to use their TP link powerline networking stuff.
Jeff Jarvis
And we've known there were Chinese forever, right?
Leo Laporte
Well, everything's Chinese, I tell you. Even if you buy it from Belkin, chances are it's manufactured in China. Authority investigators at Commerce, Defense and Justice have all opened their own probes into the company. Authorities could ban the sale of TP link routers in the US Next year. Now the difference here, there's no first amendment issue and, and there's a long standing tradition. We blocked Huawei equipment. In fact we've, we're spending billions. The Biden administration has allocated, I think another 8 billion, something like that to rip and replace for network operators that have Huawei equipment in their stack. Huawei is a Chinese manufacturer of not only cell phones but also equipment used in 5G networks. The an office of the Commerce Department is subpoenaed. TP Link According to some people are familiar with the matter. Quoted by the Wall Street Journal, action against the company would likely fall to the incoming Trump administration. An analysis from Microsoft published in October found that a Chinese hacking entity maintains a large network of compromised network devices, mostly TP link routers. Now I have to point out if you listen to our show Security now, the many routers, including routers from Netgear and other not Chinese companies, are vulnerable and not patched. Netgear has a number of popular routers out there that they've said we're not going to patch them. We know there's a flaw in them. You should just buy a new router. So these cyber attacks are launched on older routers, unpatched routers of all stripes. So the fact that, oh well, you know, compromised TP link routers are on, are present in some of these, you know, botnets is not really any different than anything else.
Jeff Jarvis
Right.
Leo Laporte
Journal says TP link routers are routinely shipped to customers with security flaws. Again, what they don't say is this is very, very common. When you get hardware, almost always the first thing you have to do is apply an update. Very often those updates are to fix security flaws as discovered. Wall Street Journal says the company often fails to address those security flaws according to people familiar with the matter. I'm guessing somebody in Commerce. While routers often have bugs regardless of their manufacturer, TP Link doesn't engage with security research. Concerned about them. The people said I'd like to see who those people are. I think we're rapidly moving to a time when anything made in China is going to be suspect.
Jeff Jarvis
Is this legitimate or is it a get ready, get ready moral panic?
Leo Laporte
Well, the Chinese answer as the US Is using the standby, God no God, please, no, no. What's that from?
Jeff Jarvis
That's from the office.
Leo Laporte
Oh, I thought it was you.
Paris Martineau
Could we get a clip of that, Jeff, so that Nita can put it in the next one?
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's really cool. Oh, God, no, Please, no.
Jeff Jarvis
How's that?
Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's great. That's good.
Leo Laporte
Li Ping Yu, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington says the US was using the guise of national security to quote, suppress Chinese companies. So it could be moral panic, could be xenophobia, could be an economic, could be warfare, or it could be legit. It probably is legit. Here's the thing. It's, it's easy to say all of those things about any router at this point. I mean, when Netgear says, yeah, we know there's a, there's a, an exploit in millions of routers that we sold over the years, but we're not going to patch them because they're old. Asus, same thing. Now that's a Taiwanese company. Here's the story. Actually, this is funny. This Netgear story has happened many times. Here's one from 2021. Thousands of Netgear routers can be hacked. Here's what to do. I know a lot of people listening. I have Netgear routers or have had over the years and ASUS routers.
Jeff Jarvis
You've had every kind of router there ever was.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're good. And so this is the story from bleeping Computer. ASUS warns of critical remote authentication bypass on seven routers. Now the deal is this happens all the time. ASUS in this case is updating the firmware. Unless it's end of life router, Netgear will update it. But unfortunately Netgear, for instance in the WNR614 router, this came out earlier this year, allows device takeover, no fix available. So this is not at all unusual in the router world where after a while these companies go, eh, we're not going to fix it. D Link won't fix critical bug and 60,000 exposed end of life modems. This one's from November, just a couple of a month ago. And they won't fix it. D Link is, I think Taiwanese. I wonder who owns Netgear. Probably Taiwanese. That's not China, by the way. They're an ally. Netgear is based in San Jose, California. Known Chinese hangout TP Link. I guess one of the big deals here is TP link is dominant 65% of the US market.
Jeff Jarvis
Wow.
Paris Martineau
Well, I mean, that's what being the first result in Amazon will get you.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And. And a wire cutter pick.
Jeff Jarvis
For years I wonder who makes my FIOS router. I don't even know.
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I was about to say, I also just have a FIOS router that I didn't even pay for the. When the guy came to set up FiOS in my current apartment, he just left one of their fancy new routers in my home.
Leo Laporte
It may be TP Link. TP Link has partnered with more than 300 Internet service providers to provide the router that's mailed to new homes that sign up for their services. TP Link routers supply everything from the, from NASA to the Defense Department to the dea. The routers are sold online at, on the, on the px. On military exchanges. You know what? We should do something about this. There's 65% of the households out there. But this is problematic. Taiwan did ban TP Link routers from government and educational facilities. So has India, or at least India's warned about them. US okay, now here's the important quote. This is again from the Wall Street Journal. U.S. officials have not disclosed any evidence that TP link is a winning conduit for Chinese state sponsored cyber attacks. And American router companies have also been linked to major hacks.
Jeff Jarvis
So the Guardian had a story today about how you shouldn't. How your, your air fryer is a policy violation and saying over all kinds of information and I no longer know how to judge these things. Evidently it ties to your phone and your phone can then send your audio up to the air fryer manufacturer and it's in China. And your air fryer is at risk and you should never do this.
Leo Laporte
Air fryers are the latest surveillance threat you didn't consider from malwarebytes Labs. So I got to tell you that almost every appliance now is, has an app and is connecting to the Internet. My. My refrigerator, my. My stove, my oven. You bake those pies in that oven, it's going to tell China my toothbrush, everything in the house. I have 99 Internet connected devices in my home alone.
Jeff Jarvis
And TP Lake is telling China about it right now.
Leo Laporte
Well, that's the thing. I mean, I use Ubiquiti Equipment, which is an American company, but where do you think Ubiquiti makes that equipment? Well, yeah, or any of the equipment or your air fryer, any of that. Ubiquiti is based in New York City, so, you know, it's okay.
Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's the center of the universe.
Leo Laporte
Yes.
Paris Martineau
Nothing bad has ever happened Here, I.
Leo Laporte
Wonder where ubiquity makes itself its products. I bet you it makes them in China, right? I mean, Apple, look at this. IPhone is made in China, designed in California. Yeah, but the malware has been inserted in China. So that's the question, I guess, is how do you solve this problem? Do we stop or put a 60% tariff on everything shipped from China?
Jeff Jarvis
Well. Well, then we won't get any, any modems. There's nobody here is.
Paris Martineau
Nobody makes routers.
Jeff Jarvis
Nobody here is making them.
Paris Martineau
Yeah, you just go back in time and stop globalization.
Leo Laporte
Doesn't Germany make good stuff?
Jeff Jarvis
I think somewhere I have my old acoustic coupler. I can try that.
Paris Martineau
What are you going to do with your 99 devices, Leo? How would you determine which ones are and are not sending stuff to China?
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, and what could possibly. No offense, Leo, but what could China possibly care about anything in your house?
Leo Laporte
Well, I don't think tp. The issue with TP Link or Huawei is privacy specific. It's infrastructure based. So TP Link, for instance, routers can be used as many as many. In fact, not all routers are used in malware attacks because they create botnets with routers that have security flaws. You wouldn't necessarily know. Remember last year, the year before the FBI said everybody should turn their router off and on again?
Paris Martineau
What? Really?
Leo Laporte
Yes.
Paris Martineau
For what reason?
Leo Laporte
Because. Let me see if I can find this story. The. There was a very, very, very common malware exploit that lived in Ram. And if you. So this is from 2018. The FBI says you should reboot your router. And there was a reason, because the malware lived in memory. So if you rebooted it, the malware was called VPN Filter. It had infected over half a million routers and network devices, many of them not made in China. Well, many of them not from Chinese companies, maybe. That'd be fair to say that. So since you can't tell if it's been infected. Oh, yeah. So here's the. Here's the manufacturers, just in case you want to know. Linksys, Microtik, netgear, QNAP and TP link. So reboot. This was 2018.
Paris Martineau
Some are still living on in the memory of old people's homes everywhere.
Leo Laporte
Right. How often do you reboot your router?
Paris Martineau
Not frequently.
Jeff Jarvis
Especially now. I have a UPS on it and I have a generator. I don't.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, the only time people reboot their routers is if their Internet goes down and they think the router's to blame. So they'll restart their mode that's also.
Jeff Jarvis
The first thing they tell you to do. Have you. Have you turned on and off the router?
Leo Laporte
Turn it off and on.
Jeff Jarvis
Wait. And why do you really have to wait 30 seconds?
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Because the electricity has to dribble out. And so this gets. Sometimes it gets pulled up in the router and so if you wait 30 seconds, it kind of dribbles out of the plug.
Paris Martineau
Don't hang out on the floor.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you might have a lot of.
Paris Martineau
You got to get a rag.
Leo Laporte
So wipe it up because nobody wants to. Electricity plug.
Paris Martineau
Slurp up that electricity. A couple big licks will take care of it.
Leo Laporte
I mean, I'm not diminishing the danger here.
Jeff Jarvis
What do you do?
Leo Laporte
It's everywhere. That's the problem. We have. We have all agreed that we should connect everything in our house to the Internet. By the way, I think the primary reason for that. I told you that Lisa sent back her Dyson hair curling iron because it required an app.
Paris Martineau
It doesn't require an app.
Leo Laporte
I know you can use it without the app, but it says in the manual and everything, install the app and control with the app. There's probably a way to use it without the app. But it sure implied that you needed the app. Why do they do that? Because they want to be on your phone where they can spy on you and then send it on.
Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's the same as when you had to send in the warranty cards.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but this is much better. That's right. You still have the warranty even if you didn't send in that postcard.
Jeff Jarvis
Right.
Leo Laporte
But they wanted your name and address and phone number. So your phone's doing that for you. Conveniently, you don't have to send in the warranty notice. You don't get anymore.
Jeff Jarvis
Not sending your name unless you agree to it. Probably not sending the data about you.
Leo Laporte
It's probably sending your IP address. So they would know that somebody like.
Paris Martineau
Identifier on your device which can be used to get all the other information.
Leo Laporte
Your IMEI or whatever. Yeah. And then they cross reference it. So Dyson says. Oh yeah. Well, we noticed somebody from that IP address ordered that device with this credit card number to this address. So now we've kind of got that IP address's address and credit card number.
Paris Martineau
And name and your phone number.
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah. I guess we needed a phone number for delivery, didn't we? Yeah. So they've got that and they should. It's all about cross referencing and then either they use it or more likely it's a Very valuable bit of information that they can sell to a data broker. And everybody's doing that now. That's. I mean, it's. So I'm not worried about privacy so much. I think we just might as well give that up. If you want to worry about privacy, go live in a cabin in the woods and whatever you do, don't have electricity.
Paris Martineau
I don't know. I think that there's a way to care about privacy and still exist in a modern world. Like, I have the time and know how. So whenever I get stuff, I turn off all the settings. I go through every new app or service. I sign up and say, like, delete my information. Don't use it for marketing purposes. And it's exhausting. But I do do it every time. And I always double and triple check every year that my cell phone as well as my Internet provider haven't sneakily turned back on the setting. That's like, sell my browsing data or whatever. And I'm sure that doesn't make much of a difference, but.
Leo Laporte
Well, see, that's the question is it makes you feel good and it makes you feel like you're. You're closing down those avenues. But I feel like there's all these other avenues that you can't close down that you don't know about that are still exfiltrating your air fryer. Like your air fryer. Well, but I bet you you don't put your appliances on the Internet. You don't get a.
Paris Martineau
No, I specifically don't get appliances that are Internet enabled. Like, I have a Breville, ostensibly smart oven, but I got one that doesn't connect to WI Fi. I did download the Dyson app because it told me I needed it for setup. Then I realized it was really just videos of how to curl your hair. So I watched a couple because I did need to know that. And I deleted the app.
Leo Laporte
Oh, so you're smart.
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paris Martineau
I don't know. It's frustrating. Like, I even. I'm very on top of this. And I even found a setting I hadn't realized was there on Instagram. Maybe it was new. The other week about. I turned off. Off platform ad delivery that I was.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that sounds good.
Paris Martineau
On the web from Meta platforms.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that sounds good. And I do all that stuff too, by the way, but. And you know, Apple put in that checkbox and Meta said that cost us $10 billion because of the. You could turn off app tracking. But we know that Meta's still getting all that information. Right. And that even if meta's not. Apple is right. The first parties always are. So I don't know, I feel like that information somehow it's magically getting out there, including your social and your address and so forth. And it's not just data breaches. I think it's. It's really getting out there. My Breville coffee maker gets updates from the Internet, so I want to have it updated. Wouldn't want to.
Paris Martineau
Why Mr. Coffee Maker need updates.
Leo Laporte
What if it had a security flaw and the Chinese government, it doesn't need any.
Paris Martineau
It shouldn't be connected to the Internet to begin with. Then it won't have any security flaws. This is why I'm afraid to ever buy a new, new tv. Because I have a dumb tv.
Leo Laporte
Still coffee recipes.
Paris Martineau
I have a dumb tv and like, if I get a new one, you.
Leo Laporte
Can'T get a dumb TV anymore. No, there are no dumb TVs. So you just.
Jeff Jarvis
I have a dumb TV is the new. I have a black, white TV.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
You're going to hold on to it forever. Who needs this color?
Leo Laporte
Hey, I got an idea.
Paris Martineau
Photo frame.
Leo Laporte
I have that one too. We should start selling black and white TVs to the hipsters of Brooklyn.
Paris Martineau
I'd buy one. That'd be cool.
Leo Laporte
This is an opportunity we're missing here.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, and phones like mine, I think a good old phone. Yeah, yeah.
Paris Martineau
Corded phones. That's in.
Leo Laporte
So what do we do?
Paris Martineau
We Faraday cage wrapped around your whole home.
Leo Laporte
See, but if you lived in Rhode island, doesn't matter that you turned off all that stuff because an international cyber criminal group has harvested hundreds of the information of hundreds of thousands of people from the state's own social services and health insurance.
Jeff Jarvis
So your mother is in on this?
Leo Laporte
I'm like, my mother's in this one.
Paris Martineau
Listen. I mean, I just assume that my Social Security number is. Is gone at this point.
Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte
So what are you protecting? What do you feel like you're protecting against by going to these off strip miles?
Paris Martineau
I like to make it more difficult for companies to target me with ads and make money off my data.
Leo Laporte
But why would you want to see ads that aren't targeted at you? Because you're going to see the ads. You're going to get ads for barbed wire fences instead of hair curling irons.
Paris Martineau
I think that's fun.
Jeff Jarvis
You're gonna get the ads.
Paris Martineau
Well, actually. Actually a perfect transition. If I wasn't doing so many weird things with my ads, I wouldn't get delightfully weird ads like a sticker that Says Italian.
Jeff Jarvis
That I now have.
Leo Laporte
I love it. So your stickers came. This is from last week's episode, Shrimp. Now, you were looking for something for a white elephant party, and are you going to give these away or are you going to keep them fully cooked? Would you do me a favor? Just take one of those off and put it on your forehead or do you not want to sully them?
Paris Martineau
Well, I was thinking about not selling them, but I do think it's pretty good.
Leo Laporte
I think for our thumbnail for this episode, we should have.
Paris Martineau
It's on here.
Leo Laporte
Tight.
Jeff Jarvis
Last week.
Leo Laporte
Wish we had stickers.
Jeff Jarvis
We had it on our faces.
Leo Laporte
Hey, we did. Last week.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, on the thumbnail.
Leo Laporte
Oh, don't take it off then. Apparently.
Paris Martineau
Well, it's already off.
Leo Laporte
We have the technology. The fully cooked Paris martino, ladies and gentlemen. What other ones did you get? That's so cute.
Paris Martineau
Italian.
Leo Laporte
Good.
Paris Martineau
And shrimp.
Leo Laporte
And shrimp.
Paris Martineau
I wanted to get great for soup, but it was from a different website that had like a 40 ordering minimum. Oh, I couldn't find any other stickers I like.
Leo Laporte
So not great for soups.
Paris Martineau
I would have had to get like four or five thousand packs of crate for soup, and I felt like that was probably too much.
Jeff Jarvis
I love the topography of the fully cooked.
Paris Martineau
I mean, that's the thing is this is. It's really good. It's shiny. It's got a lot going on.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it does.
Paris Martineau
It's pretty nice. And I like how minimalist shrimp is.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's just shrimp.
Paris Martineau
Shrimp. It's just simple in like a sans serif font.
Leo Laporte
Shrimp. It's more shrimp. Shrimp.
Paris Martineau
Yeah. So this is going to be at the skeeball White elephant party.
Leo Laporte
Oh, you're gonna give it away.
Paris Martineau
I am. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Well, that's. I think I would save one of them. I mean, what, are you gonna put them on all your stuff at home? I mean, that's not.
Paris Martineau
I mean, yeah, I'll cut one off and put them on my fridge. Probably not stuck in the fridge, but like magnet to the fridge.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Fully cooked. It's so good. They're so non sequiturian.
Paris Martineau
It's really. I mean, I just was scrolling through Instagram and I saw a 500 pack of shrimp stickers. And I want to live in that world.
Leo Laporte
Targeting.
Jeff Jarvis
I take credit last week for pointing this out, that this was the. It was incredible sausage, which is just too obvious.
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I know. That is too.
Jeff Jarvis
It was right under your nose.
Leo Laporte
A giant sausage.
Paris Martineau
Well, a yard o beef. And I've seen people commenting yard of beef. It's specifically yard.
Leo Laporte
So get it right, because it's from the. It's from Ireland, I guess.
Jeff Jarvis
Did you know that there is caffeine. Caffeinated jerky called. The brand name is Perky Jerky.
Leo Laporte
Oh, why do I think they thought of the name before this?
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah. I. I went to speak about how to be googly to a conference of truck stop owners, and I wandered the convention floor in Vegas, and there it was. Perky jerky.
Leo Laporte
Whoa, wait a minute. Okay, we gotta back up a little bit on this. So the International Conference of Truck Stop.
Jeff Jarvis
Owners, and I was giving the keynote on how to be a googly truck stop.
Paris Martineau
Hold on.
Leo Laporte
There's so much there to unpack.
Jeff Jarvis
There is. There is indeed.
Leo Laporte
How big a conference?
Jeff Jarvis
So that was a pretty big conference.
Paris Martineau
There is a Forbes article that says how Perky Jerky, the caffeinated beef jerky lost its perk.
Leo Laporte
Oh.
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, no.
Leo Laporte
Because I feel like. Yes, it is the kind of thing a truck stop would sell.
Paris Martineau
After experimenting with different sources of caffeine, including a failure extracting coffee beans, Levin, I think the CEO and founder landed on Guara Guarana.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. That's what's in there.
Paris Martineau
A Brazilian berry grown in South America.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paris Martineau
With Guarania flavoring. Early versions of perky jerky in 2009 included as much as 150mg of caffeine per bag. More than a cup of coffee. And he marketed his product as such. But the USDA had something to say about that. Telling Turkey Jerky in 2010 that the company couldn't advertise Guarana on its packaging. And the stimulant was approved only as a flavor additive, not as an energy boost.
Leo Laporte
This is why RFK Jr is going to save this country and get the regulators out of the pocket of the jerky industry. And you can quote me, they still sell perky jerky.
Paris Martineau
But Levin stripped Perky Jerky packaging of its key differentiator, cut down on the amount of Guarana in its manufacturing, and the dose of caffeine dropped accordingly. First to around 50 milligrams, but now below 20 less than your average cup of tea. Not very perky at all.
Leo Laporte
I think this warrants an investigative journalism report. You need to go out and look at trucking accidents and the rise of trucking accidents since Guaranya was taken out of Perky Jerky and correlate those in a graph with fluoride.
Paris Martineau
Any caffeine at all?
Leo Laporte
It's not perky at all.
Jeff Jarvis
Not perky.
Leo Laporte
It's just jerky.
Paris Martineau
So not perky.
Leo Laporte
It's bold and tender, but it's not perky.
Jeff Jarvis
Wow.
Paris Martineau
That's devastating.
Leo Laporte
So they. Why would you buy it because you think it's still perky? You know what you could do is buy that in a cup of coffee. You'd have the 200 milligrams of caffeine you've been looking for. Yeah, look, they have some recipes. You might bring this to the next Bake Off. How about Halftime Club Sliders made of Berkey jerky? Or a holiday charcuterie Jerky chili. Mmm. Loaded jerky fries. Perky quesadillas. Stuffed mini peppers. This is good. This is good. I'll. I'll save you a bookmark and send it on.
Jeff Jarvis
Wait, wait, wait. There was a vegan thing there. How can it be vegan if it has jerky?
Leo Laporte
Oh, now you're asking the difficult questions.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Let's take a break while you all try to digest the turkey. Turkey jerky?
Jeff Jarvis
Do they have turkey? Perky jerky.
Paris Martineau
They have savage jerky, too.
Leo Laporte
I can't believe the FDA wouldn't let them put caffeine in their jerky dough.
Paris Martineau
She's gonna really change everything about Doge.
Leo Laporte
Is gonna fix everything. I do have to say that in this probably foolish hope, in the back of my head, I have this thought, maybe they. Maybe they. Maybe it'll all be. Maybe they will fix everything. There are a lot. It is a big bureaucracy, the federal bureaucracy.
Jeff Jarvis
Well, we're about to get a government shutdown thanks to Musk. What he's killing. He's. He's. He's stopping the. The. The funding.
Leo Laporte
Musk is not the President. Trump's not even the president. What is. How. How does this happen?
Jeff Jarvis
As he's pressuring the gop. There's too much. Ramaswamy says. There's too much wasted money in this.
Leo Laporte
So we're not going to pay our debt.
Jeff Jarvis
Right.
Leo Laporte
So that people won't lend us money.
Jeff Jarvis
Right.
Leo Laporte
So that profit. Step three, profit.
Jeff Jarvis
What is going to happen does to inflation.
Leo Laporte
It's not, by the way, that bill. We don't cover this. Let's go back to. Yeah, router or something.
Jeff Jarvis
We need some jerky.
Leo Laporte
Jerky. You're watching this week in Google, desperately trying not to be political. It is not an easy. You keep. You keep bringing this stuff up. You keep bringing this stuff up. Our show today, brought to you and quite literally brought to you by our good friends at Cash fly. For over 20 years, Cash Fly has held the track record for high performing Ultra reliable content Delivery. Serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. In fact, we're one of them. We have been using Cashfly almost since the beginning and I can't tell you what a blessing Cashfly has been. Cashfly is better prepared for the holidays than ever before. The only CDN built for throughput, Ultra low latency video streaming delivers video to over a million concurrent users with less than one second latency. If you're a gaming company, you'll love their lightning fast gaming. It delivers downloads faster, but also you can game with zero lag, zero glitches, zero outages. You got images on the web, mobile content optimizations for you, automatic and simple image optimization. Your site will load faster on any device because all the images are optimized for every size screen. Boom, boom, boom. Plus flexible month to month billing for as long as you need it. Discounts for fixed terms. This was a big deal for us because when we started we didn't know how much bandwidth we needed, right? So we were able to create our own contract. When we switch to Cashfly, you can do the same thing. Cashfly. Several exciting updates to announce as we hit the end of the year. Managed object storage is one of them. Cashfly has a new object storage solution designed to increase speed and reliability to industry leading levels. Because hardware is entirely based I Love this on NVMe. Wow. It'll be better suited to users with a large number of small objects. Still completely S3 compatible, it'll easily integrate into your cash fly MOS, S3, or any other toolset you've designed. There are no egress or ingress costs, just a flat volume fee, of course. Cash Flight, is it right? They've also announced a new pop in Vienna. Just in time for a New Year's Eve in Vienna in Austria's capital city. Central Europe will see significant improvements in latency and average transfer speed. Now, if you're a Cash Fly reseller, you will love this. They have added some new features to your portal. You can now be classified as a reseller and have numerous full accounts, all under your reseller account, each of which can operate independently, but billing remains centralized. Very, very cool. Cashfly delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs and allows you to shield your site content in their cloud. Which means, and we do this by the way, and it's incredible, a 100% cash hit ratio. If you get a cash miss on other guys, it's a whole deal, right? They have to go get the content loaded on their server, then send it to your customer. All that means slowdowns and delays. Never happens to us with Cash Fly. And with Cash Fly's elite managed packages, you get the VIP treatment. Your dedicated account manager will be with you from day one so they can ensure a smooth implementation and a reliable 24. 7 support when you need it. I love Catchlight. Thank you, Cashfly, for saving Twit. Really, back in the day, learn how you can get your first month free@cashfly.com Twitter I'm going to be on the Cashfly podcast, I think next month. I'm excited about that. Matt Levine, the founder of Cash Fly, the guy who came to me, this must have been 2006, very early on 2007, and said, Leo, you're having so much trouble with your downloads. We can help. And they sure did. Thank you, Matt. Can't wait to talk to you. And you've heard me say it over and over again. I'll say it again. Bandwidth for this week in Google is brought to you by Cash fly at C-A C-H-E F L Y dot com. Thank you. Cash Flow on Vigo Visa show.
Jeff Jarvis
Can I ask you a question about.
Leo Laporte
One device you can ask me about my YouTube TV going up 10 bucks a month.
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, yeah.
Leo Laporte
Okay. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
What's it cost now?
Leo Laporte
83. $83 a month.
Paris Martineau
Jesus.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, we yelled at cable companies, right, because it was out of hand. Well, now I have an Internet plan from Comcast and basically an $83 a month cable bill.
Jeff Jarvis
And do you get any premium chat? You get HBO or anything for that?
Leo Laporte
No. Well, you get like, it's basically, it's basic cable, so you get like some off, you know, weird stuff. You get to get all the locals, which is why I do it.
Paris Martineau
Do you get the cutlery corner?
Leo Laporte
I don't think you get the cutlery corner. But you do. There are some home shopping. I don't know. I might. You might.
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, Paris, have you ever done any home shopping in the tv?
Paris Martineau
I've never bought the tv, but I do watch the cutlery corner once a year with my friends.
Leo Laporte
You guys are so cute. You just. You're so. You're so Brooklyn. They're such hipsters.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Let me go to my YouTube TV because I can. Actually, that's one of the other thing. I like it. I can watch it on any device. And let me go to the channel listing here and you can see I get abc, I get ACC Network. I guess that's college football.
Paris Martineau
The Cronks.
Leo Laporte
Christmas with The Cronks. You don't want to miss that. This is all reality. We tv. Amc. AMC thrillers. So yeah, there's a lot of Lock Up Raw.
Jeff Jarvis
I think you need to see that. Now it's Lockup Raw.
Leo Laporte
That's on American Crimes Channel. That's on the Crimes Channel. There's Animal Planet, BBC America, BBC News, bet. So you see, I get a lot of channels. It's basic. This is basic cable, right? Cartoon Network, Cheddar watch. Mad Money, huh? Yeah. You see and don't you like the interface where it shows the video as it. You know.
Jeff Jarvis
That's nice.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I like the interface. It's got a. They've messed with this library feature, but it's got a DVR so you can, you know, you can record your Fox News on here and watch it at your leisure, that kind of thing. I'm sure that's what sounds like it's worth.
Paris Martineau
What sort of channels do you watch?
Leo Laporte
Well, you know I pay. Speaking $83 a month. I pay $250 extra for the NFL Sunday ticket. So all the football games.
Paris Martineau
Is that. Forgive me, Is that like a one time charge or is that.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that was once. Once per season. So six months. So that's another $40. And then I think I pay extra for 4K.
Paris Martineau
Gotta have those extra pixels.
Jeff Jarvis
Do you pay for any tv, Paris?
Paris Martineau
No, I pay for streaming services.
Jeff Jarvis
Which one?
Leo Laporte
Well, you're smart and I think anybody under. Under 68 is gonna. Which is a literary.
Jeff Jarvis
TV's dead. Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte
They're not world, huh? Honestly, for live TV sports. That's the only reason I have YouTube TV. The NBA season. Yeah. And I like the Golden Globes and I like the Oscars and I pay for.
Paris Martineau
I guess I just did a summary in my head, I think four streaming service with an asterisk. One is Taskmaster Supermax plus, which is the streaming service just for all Taskmaster shows. Highly recommend. Second is Dropout, which we've talked about. It's like all the Dimension 20 and the Lola Tumor like type shows that they have. Fantastic. Another is the Criterion channel. Great.
Leo Laporte
I love the Criterion channel.
Paris Martineau
But I would say is the asterisks is. I recently subscribed to a local cinema here that does like art housey stuff called the Metrograph. But they also have their own like streaming platform where they will have occasionally like interesting movies on there. And I subscribe to it because I can get discounted theater tickets.
Jeff Jarvis
So you don't do Netflix, you don't do Hulu, you don't do.
Leo Laporte
You're leaving out the most important one, though. Paris. I know you are YouTube.
Paris Martineau
I don't.
Leo Laporte
Not YouTube TV, but YouTube. You don't pay for YouTube Premium.
Paris Martineau
I don't like watching videos.
Leo Laporte
Well, then you're different.
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I'm broken in that I would.
Leo Laporte
Say YouTube for your generation is.
Paris Martineau
Oh, definitely.
Leo Laporte
Everybody watches. That's what they watch is YouTube.
Paris Martineau
I know that I am an unusual person for not paying for YouTube and not being a big YouTube person. I just. I don't know, I never got the bug and I think that's probably Good.
Jeff Jarvis
Down online. 174. I have the YouTube replay of the year.
Leo Laporte
Oh, they did that again this year. So they stopped for a while, didn't they?
Jeff Jarvis
Well, there's not like this video. It's just text. It's just text. Viewers globally streamed over 1 billion hours of content daily on their TVs. This is the point.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
That it's moved. YouTube has moved to the living room.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
This is the year of the living room.
Leo Laporte
Not. Not a surprise when I. I mean, I knew this was coming when I saw my son 15 years ago and he was sitting with his friends, you know, in middle school, watching YouTube music on the TV. They weren't. They don't watch. They're not watching anything.
Jeff Jarvis
Podcast watching is growing rapidly on TVs. Yep. Picture that. Viewers watched over 400 million hours of podcasts monthly on living, much like what.
Paris Martineau
We'Re doing right here.
Leo Laporte
People laughed at me because we've been doing video since 2008 or 2009, and they said, you're a podcast. Why are you doing. That's not. What are you doing video for. And for a long time, I felt kind of guilty. Like that was a big part of our cost was the studio and the cameras and the people to operate all that equipment. And now it turns out I was way ahead of the game.
Jeff Jarvis
Share of videos uploaded to YouTube in 4K is up by 35% year over year. Yeah, that's part of the living room factor. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
We are not in 3K, I might add. We are. We're not barely in 1080, I think.
Jeff Jarvis
Well, hello.
Leo Laporte
Nobody needs us in 4K.
Jeff Jarvis
Focus this week.
Leo Laporte
The reason we're not in 4K right now, it used to be because we didn't have the cameras and the tricaster wasn't. But now because we're streaming on Restream and this. We're doing this on.
Jeff Jarvis
And Zoom, it's not. Zoom is not 4K.
Leo Laporte
I think that we don't Have. As soon as those had 4K to be. No reason we couldn't. Well, my camera's 4K gigantic. This kind of. Yeah. The file sizes would be giant. Yeah. Nobody's demanding 4K. I'm gonna regret that I asked her.
Jeff Jarvis
No fun.
Leo Laporte
To edit a. Yeah, it's a pain to edit.
Paris Martineau
No one needs to see all of those pores.
Leo Laporte
You already see too many pores as far as I'm concerned.
Jeff Jarvis
I don't.
Leo Laporte
I'm going to back up a little bit. Let me sit back here. You look fine. You're young. You don't have to worry. You look fine. The best makeup is youth.
Paris Martineau
That's true.
Leo Laporte
The next best makeup is Vaseline.
Paris Martineau
I will, though, starting January, being subscribed into a mainstream streaming service. I'll be subscribing to the. To a Peacock for a month so I can watch the new season of the Traitors.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paris Martineau
Which is very important to me.
Leo Laporte
Peacock is the. Has become the reality.
Paris Martineau
I hate it because I don't think Peacock is particularly good. Like, I think their UI is awful. I think their name terrible. I don't like anything they're doing. But I do need to see the new season of Traitors. I need to see what fun outfits.
Leo Laporte
I feel like Netflix is worth it. I'm surprised you don't have Netflix, actually. I think a lot of people in your age demographic.
Paris Martineau
My parents have a Netflix account that I ostensibly have access to, but I'm not going to. I don't.
Leo Laporte
I forgot to mention the Diplomat. Yeah, I forgot. I did forget to mention that both my kids are watching Netflix on my account. I shouldn't say that out loud. Every once in a while, I'll say, who was watching that? And then I go, oh, I know I was watching that.
Paris Martineau
The last time I think I watched something on Netflix was last November or December, because I tried to log in to the Netflix on the tv, and it's essentially my Netflix account. I've just given it over to my parents because I don't use it anymore.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're sharing your account count.
Paris Martineau
They were. The two people were watching it. And so I called my mom. She's like, oh, I'm watching some show. Then I call my dad. He's in the other room watching a rerun of Emily in Paris. I'm like, I have 10 people over to watch Chicken Run 2. You need to get off one of them. And they eventually did.
Leo Laporte
Oh, you need a better account where you can have more streams. That's what you. Listen.
Paris Martineau
That was once in a Year, though.
Leo Laporte
You called them and said, look, we need to watch Chicken Run too. You got. One of you has to get off.
Paris Martineau
My dad valiantly fell on his sword and was like, I took you to Chicken Run one when you were just a baby. And I was like, yeah, I know. That's why we're watching Chicken Run.
Leo Laporte
Sweet. That's so Sweet.
Paris Martineau
Chicken Run 2, a fine film. Enjoyable time. The making of chicken run two, phenomenal. It's like a 15, 20 minute. Yeah, it's. No, it's animated, but it's all claymation.
Leo Laporte
Oh, a stop motion.
Paris Martineau
Stop motion film. It took them like over a. It took them like two decades to come out with Chicken Run two. In part because the technology wasn't there for them to make and manufacture and operate that many little, like, clay chickens.
Leo Laporte
Chickens aren't running. What are we gonna do?
Paris Martineau
It's a. The making of Chicken Run too. It's like 15, 20 minutes. I think it's on YouTube. Highly recommend it.
Leo Laporte
Do you like the Fantastic Mr. Fox? Have you ever seen that?
Paris Martineau
I love that.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paris Martineau
I love Wes Anderson and also that style.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And it's that claymation thing again.
Jeff Jarvis
If Paris arrives. Wallace and Gromit, folks.
Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's the Wallace and Gromit who do Chicken Run. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Okay.
Jeff Jarvis
If Paris arrives in Florida in time for the holiday show, I'm really hoping for a guest appearance by her father.
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, the legendary. Oh, tell him we're going to sell him as a major international film star.
Paris Martineau
He would be like, you don't need to sell me as that. I already am.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, he would.
Paris Martineau
His ego would go through the roof if he was on this show. I can't. I can't let it happen.
Leo Laporte
We're going to call him Fabio Martineau. And ladies and gentlemen, the international film star. You've seen him on screen and TV has decided to grace. Ladies and gentlemen, Fabio Martineau is here. Oh, my God. We've never had such a big celebrity on the show. Fabio.
Paris Martineau
Oh, man.
Leo Laporte
She's really gonna be fun. He does look like Fabio.
Paris Martineau
He does. He can also do the thing. He would play along it. I don't think it's gonna happen, though. I don't know if we need that.
Jeff Jarvis
She's not gonna allow it.
Leo Laporte
Your mom won't allow it. She'll get over here.
Paris Martineau
She'll be like sacrificing one of you for three hours. There's another one that's gonna be gone.
Jeff Jarvis
How bad were they at Thanksgiving when you delayed the dinner?
Paris Martineau
This Thanksgiving only got a couple. They went to dinner without me and left my sister behind to take me. And then she took a minute getting ready once I got. I got on time this Thanksgiving. So then by the time we were driving over, we got like four texts like, we're hungry. Where are you?
Leo Laporte
You're watching this week in Google with the daughter of Fabio Martineau. She's famous in her own right as a reporter at the Information Paris Martineau. Actually, he should be like, Rome Roma Martin.
Paris Martineau
That's true.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And your mom could be Geneva Martineau.
Paris Martineau
You got all the places.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Wonderful to have Paris. And of course, Jeff Jarvis. Congratulations on his new job. He's also the author of so many great books. You see them right there over his left shoulder. The Gutenberg parenthesis. The web we weave the latest and of course, magazine and many others, including what would Google do? Which he's apparently still able to make a living off of by going around to truck stop conventions. It's kind of impressive.
Paris Martineau
And chewing on caffeinated jerky.
Leo Laporte
Perky jerky. It's better over here. AT&T customers switching to T Mobile has never been easier. We'll pay off your existing phone and.
Jeff Jarvis
Give you a new one free.
Leo Laporte
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Paris Martineau
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Leo Laporte
On we go with the show. WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg lost a legal battle. A court ordered him and I. I'm actually now kind of in his court, so to speak. Oh, a court ordered him to reinstate WP Engine, which is a third party. You might think it's part of WordPress. It's not. Despite the use of the kind of WordPress WP and Matt was so miffed that they did not contribute back to WordPress that they kind of wrote on WordPress's coattails that he cut off their access to WordPress.org, the open source site for WordPress downloads, and, and disabled their plugin that they had and so forth. He was so angry after the court's decision that he basically said I'm not going to do any more development on WordPress. That's it. He posted this on the, on the Slack that's maintained by the open source project. But I thought his statement, Let me see if I can find it.
Paris Martineau
Well, do you know what else he did in addition to quitting the slacking? The statement. Now, in order to log previously in order to log into WordPress you'd have to say check a box saying I'm not affiliated with WP Engine.
Leo Laporte
The court wanted to take that off.
Paris Martineau
Right now there's a checkbox that you have to hit where you agree that pineapple is delicious on pizza.
Leo Laporte
Oh, I'm never checking that. That's it, I'm done.
Jeff Jarvis
That's it. That's a Craig Newmark. Craig. Craig is a big defender of pineapple pizza. And you know, I'm, I'm with Craig. I'm on Team Craig for everything imaginable. But that I'm on. It's just too manufactured. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
So Matt wrote on the Slack before he said to delete my account. It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this. I should point out Matt Mullenweg single handedly wrote WordPress back in the day. I was an early user and he's been on the show and we love him. He said, I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted. His username is.
Paris Martineau
But isn't this about, is this what open source is all about? You don't get to choose who is using. It's open source, it's available to the community.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's one argument. But, but there's. Remember the WP Engine was purchased by Silver Lake which is a private equity company. And I think that Matt is correct that Silverlake has taken that company and basically said, you know, you're not going to contribute back to WordPress.org, you're going to use everything without contributing back. He didn't. Mullenweg started this back in September when he called WP Engine, which is a web hosting platform that offers WordPress a cancer to larger WordPress open source project. He said it improperly uses the WordPress brand. I think he makes an excellent point. It really brings up a problem in open source, which is yes, you can use it, you can even fork it. I mean, WP Engine could have taken the WordPress source code, forked it, renamed it something else and modified it. But the license requires that they offer it back the same way. And there is an unwritten, I think, but very important caveat that when you use a open source tool that anything you add to it or modify should be contributed back. That your use of it should benefit the community.
Jeff Jarvis
Is that unspoken or is that a condition?
Leo Laporte
It's unspoken. What is in the GPL license? I don't know what license WordPress uses, but the, the most common open source license is the GNU Public License. What's in the GPL licenses? If they call it kind of a viral clause. But if you use this software, you have to make or modify the software. You have to make your modification available under the same license so that you can't just take it and make it private. People do that all the time, by the way. And that's the problem. There's not much. It's not. You'd have to sue to enforce the license. And there's not a lot of money going around in open source. I, I'm increasing. I think the court made a mistake and I think I understand Matt's being upset. This is also unfortunately very common in open source where the, the founder or the main contributor leaves in a huff over some perceived slight. There will be a trial, by the way. This was just a preliminary injunction. There will be a trial.
Jeff Jarvis
So he could still win.
Leo Laporte
He could still win.
Paris Martineau
What is, what's changed your mind on this, Leo? Because I think before.
Leo Laporte
Well, just the more I've read of it and the more I've read of what Matt has to say about it. I always was predisposed towards Matt because I really think he supports and believes in open source. And he. And WordPress is an amazing.
Jeff Jarvis
He's done so much.
Leo Laporte
He's done so much and I think he, I think he went too far in saying you have to denounce your affiliation with WP engine before using w.WordPress.org that was maybe a little too much. I think he would have been wiser just to raise the issue and say, look, here is a private equity funded company that is sucking us dry without contributing back would have been a better way to go about this.
Paris Martineau
But are they sucking it dry or are they just not contributing?
Leo Laporte
So they're not contributing, but they're also, he feels, giving the impression that they are somehow part of the WordPress community with his WP engine offering WordPress. So sucking them dry isn't right, but, but, but riding on their coattails.
Jeff Jarvis
But what, what does WordPress lose because of they do that? I think what Paris is asking properly, what, what harm comes to WordPress?
Leo Laporte
Well, that's probably why the court ruled in WP Engine's favor because there isn't really any harm, but it is ultimately harmful to the entire open source community if people use open source without contributing back or they misuse it or they.
Paris Martineau
I mean, I certainly think that if there's an issue of people getting confused for confusing WP engine and WordPress, that's definitely a problem.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're not look it, this is neither here nor there. But people are saying in the discord the WP engine is terrible hosting. You can get better with more control for half the money. As a former WordPress web, this is trust, Noah. And as a former WordPress website design agency, I've always hated WP Engine. Never had a client that was happy to be with them. Everybody wanted to escape. So WordPress is GPL 2. Okay, thank you for that. Out of sync. So maybe they're tarnishing the brand a little bit, especially if they don't discourage the notion that they're Somehow part of WordPress.org?
Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's a fair point.
Leo Laporte
Maybe we should get Matt on to talk about it. I think he's really hopping mad though, so I'm not sure he'd want to. He's really kind of withdrawn. It is a big thing for Matt Mullenweg to say. It's hard to imagine continuing to work on WordPress after this. That's a big deal.
Jeff Jarvis
That's. That's huge.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. On the other hand, I have to say Automatic, his company has done very well, made lots of money, enough money to buy Tumblr and lose a lot of money trying to save it, which I supported. They own quite a few interesting companies. They've done a pretty good job, I think, of acquiring, which means they had a pretty big war chest.
Jeff Jarvis
It's rather Craigslist. Like you don't think this is a huge money making company. It's not ripping people off. And so you wonder how do they get all this money? Because of scale.
Leo Laporte
Let me see. In the companies that they have acquired, there is another developer, by the way, an English developer, Mike Little. I don't know anything or I've Heard anything about his. What he thinks about all of this. But WordPress was really one of the very first modern web content management systems. Very good one. Let's see who else do they own? I'm going through the Wikipedia article, which is very long. Matt and Mike were co founders of the project. They are. I don't know how active they are as current in the current development. Look at Automatic. I'm looking at the wrong thing. That's.
Paris Martineau
I'm sure that it's a Wikipedia page made even longer by all of the weird posting Matt has done over the last couple of months.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So a WooCommerce is one of theirs. They bought WooCommerce, so that's a commerce site associated with WordPress. They own Gravatar. They own Pole Daddy, which is now called Crowd Signal. Better brand Tumblr.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Day One. Oh, that's what it was I was thinking of. It was Day One, which is a really good journaling app. And they own the number one podcast. Yeah, they own the number one podcasting app for subscribers, Pocket Casts. They bought that.
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, that's right.
Leo Laporte
For public radio.
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I use Pocket Cast.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's right. They also.
Paris Martineau
Do I have to like pineapple pizza now?
Leo Laporte
Yeah. They also bought Beeper, which is that messaging app that was translating between Android and Apple. Matt is the founder and CEO. He does have, you know, investors, so. Including True Ventures. So I don't. You know, it is a very complicated story. I'd love to hear Matt's side more, but the more I read Matt, the more I feel like, okay, there's some merit in this. And I can understand why he's so upset that the court said no. Yeah, but that's not unusual. Right? I'd be upset, too. This is how it works in this country. And there will be a trial. All right. I think you should start putting in.
Jeff Jarvis
Stories, things that I like.
Leo Laporte
Yes. You put asterisks. Is that your new thing?
Jeff Jarvis
You put a little star.
Leo Laporte
Give me a gold star.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. So you can pick from them. There's one.
Leo Laporte
Teens Media, Social media technology. Do you like this Pews? This recent Pew study.
Jeff Jarvis
I didn't ask for that, but go ahead.
Leo Laporte
I asterisked it, man.
Jeff Jarvis
Because you're a boss.
Leo Laporte
Well, I just think it's kind of almost a shocker. And it does very much apply to this discussion about YouTube. How to what sites do teens use? Okay, so they surveyed U.S. teens, 13, 17 years old. YouTube number one by far. 90% down, 95% last in 2022. And this year 90% use the site. That's pretty dominant. But then TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat pretty much neck and neck. 60% use tick tock and Instagram. 55% use Snapchat.
Jeff Jarvis
For all the protestation that they're not on Facebook. The third of them are on Facebook.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, third, but not a lot. I think a lot of them are on it because, you know, their high school is on it or, you know, their groups are on it. 32% of teens say they use Facebook, but that's a big dime. That's down 10 years ago. 71%. Only 17% of teens use X. That's half what it was.
Paris Martineau
The Everything platform.
Leo Laporte
The everything but teenagers platform. One quarter of teens say they use WhatsApp. That's up. 14% of teens use Reddit. That's been stable over the past few years, says Pew. We asked about Threads. For the first time this year, only 6% of teens report using it. Although you probably saw. Mr. Zuckerberg says Threads has 100 million daily active users, and close to 300 million monthly active users is getting in the Twitter. Twitter range. Now.
Paris Martineau
I'm curious as to how many of those people actually mean to go to Threads and how many of them simply have swiped by the little thread carousel on Instagram and accidentally clicked it.
Leo Laporte
I've done it. Yeah. Yeah.
Paris Martineau
Or even if you don't accidentally click it, if you just, like, are swiping down and you accidentally go through a couple like. Does that count as Threads interaction? I don't know.
Jeff Jarvis
Yes. Zuckerberg and the meta stuff has always been notoriously bad about counting numbers. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
If you just look at it. So, yeah, consider that when he says 100 million daily active users, 300 million monthly active users.
Paris Martineau
Okay, so those stats we were just talking about were teens that reported using those platforms at all, ever? These are the stats of teens that say they use these sites daily. 73% of teens say they use YouTube daily.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, not surprised. Yeah.
Paris Martineau
57% visit TikTok daily, and about half go to Instagram daily. 48%.
Leo Laporte
It's their TV. It's their entertainment. It's my entertainment. If I want something, a quick hit, you know, I'm waiting in line at the grocery store or whatever. I. I often will pull up TikTok. Actually, I have to say less.
Paris Martineau
So do you while using headphones, or are you just out there blasting?
Leo Laporte
No, I turn off the sound. No, I don't. I know. No, I'm like, I like to sit on airplanes and blast my TikTok you should hear this. Oh, I know.
Paris Martineau
Everybody needs to hear it.
Leo Laporte
It's hair. It's horrible. No, I don't. A lot of times I don't have the sound on. But most TikToks now have, like, captions, right?
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, they do.
Paris Martineau
Yeah. But you do it without the sound. That's crazy.
Leo Laporte
You should try it.
Jeff Jarvis
I've done it. Yeah.
Paris Martineau
So much less stimulating, you know, a.
Leo Laporte
Woman in a bikini. Let's just open whether you got the sound on or the sound off. That's all I gotta say. No, that's. I'm just playing up. I get the weirdest stuff on Tick Tock. Here's somebody. It's not streaking. This is the Niners game. I don't know. She's.
Jeff Jarvis
What do I have?
Leo Laporte
She's happy. Oh, we all know. Why do I get so much Irish dance?
Paris Martineau
Because you pause whenever you.
Jeff Jarvis
And you look at the legs and that's what does it.
Leo Laporte
How about. Would you like to buy a new rotating bookshelf? Because I. I get a lot of ads also.
Jeff Jarvis
Jesus.
Paris Martineau
A spiced carrot recipe.
Leo Laporte
Ooh. Anyway, yeah, it's entertaining, right? Even with all those ads. And I have to say, it's every other TikTok now. Instagram and TikTok both have become massively inside TikTok. I understand there is their farewell performance.
Paris Martineau
Have you guys been seeing on TikTok? I've been seeing the trend of, like, a bunch of creators posting, oh, goodbye to the platform that made me everything. I'm no longer gonna have a job. I will say the only. Obviously, I don't know. I hope that Tick Tock stays around. I enjoy using it, but also if it doesn't, that's fine by me. I would take a small bit of schadenfreude pleasure if Tick Tock goes away. Because my sister is, I guess, an influencer, though she doesn't have that many followers, but she gets so much free stuff from brands through TikTok. Over Thanksgiving, she got like four giant boxes of fancy clothing from J. Crew for free.
Leo Laporte
Wow.
Paris Martineau
Like, somebody thousand dollars. I am jealous.
Leo Laporte
How many followers does she have?
Paris Martineau
Like 10,000, 15,000? Not that many for that much.
Leo Laporte
This is what's really interesting because brands obviously are paying attention to these stats that we're talking about, and they want to reach young people and they've just decided influencers are the last place we can go. We gotta go somewhere.
Jeff Jarvis
Yep, Yep.
Leo Laporte
So this is where we have to go. And they're fairly indiscriminate, I think. I mean, hotels now are full of young people who haven't paid who are going around shooting instas of everything in the hotel. It just seems like they're everywhere and they've fostered this. This kind of economy, Influencers economy that's kind of making it no fun, to be honest, to travel. All right, I'm just an old man shouting in the clouds. Don't listen to me. Go on and do your little influencer thing. Although, do you know my favorite Instagram account is Influencers in the Wild? Have you. Have you seen that?
Paris Martineau
Oh, no, but I bet that's great.
Leo Laporte
It's always an influencer making a video, her boyfriend is shooting it, and then it's somebody off to the right going, wow, this is crazy.
Jeff Jarvis
I like the Brits who are trying American food.
Leo Laporte
Oh, that sounds good.
Jeff Jarvis
There's a bunch of them if you search for that.
Leo Laporte
What. What do they like and what don't they like?
Jeff Jarvis
They were agog with Chipotle.
Leo Laporte
Like they loved it.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah. And it's these huge American sandwiches, you know, with this. And. Yeah, I'm. One of my problems besides bridges is people eating with their mouth open. Can't stand it. So there's a lot of that on Tik Tok, which bothers me.
Leo Laporte
This is Influencers in the Wild. It's just a lot of. You see people.
Paris Martineau
Oh, God.
Leo Laporte
You know, it's. It's just influencers doing really dumb, annoying, annoying things. I. It's quite a. It's a. It's certainly worth following, I would say. All right, Jeff, we're gonna take a break. When we come back, Asterisk City. Another, by the way, excellent Wes Anderson film, Asteroid City.
Paris Martineau
Phenomenal. One of my favorites.
Leo Laporte
Oh, I thought it was Asterisk City. You're watching this week in Google with Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau, and me. I'm deef. Never mind. Time's almost up on holiday shopping, and so are amazing deals at Amazon. You'll save so much on holiday athletic gifts like bikes, tents, and outdoor gear. You'll have money left over for a premium yoga mat so you can try to touch your toes by New Year's. Almost there. Or snowshoes, so you can hike to your super secret spot to find the perfect tree.
Jeff Jarvis
Aha.
Leo Laporte
Oh, what fun it is to save. Shop. New deals added every day. Now at T Mobile, get four 5G phones on us and four lines for 25 a line per month when you switch with eligible trade ins, all on America's largest 5G network. Minimum of 4 lines for 25 per line per Month with auto pay discount using debit or bank account, $5 more per line without autopay, plus taxes and fees and $10 device connection charge phones via 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue build credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement due bill credits end if you pay off devices early. CT mobile.com all right, on we go with the show and asterisks galore. What are you. What do you. I haven't seen with asterisks. Where are they?
Jeff Jarvis
Right there. It's on the.
Leo Laporte
Oh, I see them there. Yeah, but these are all things you submitted.
Jeff Jarvis
That's what I'm saying. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
You know, there's not one asterisk next to my stories. Oh, okay. Notebook LM has been modified. This is that feature, particularly that feature that makes a podcast out of everything you upload. Now you can interrupt them, which I think is an improvement.
Jeff Jarvis
It's just like talk radio.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Oh, well, now it's better than that because you get to decide when to interrupt.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, they have a little demo, just very short.
Leo Laporte
Where's the demo? Is it up here?
Paris Martineau
Wait, so do you interact with it and then it responds?
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you can ask it a question. So here we go. Join your audio interviews to speak with the hosts. Ask questions and get custom responses based on your sources.
Paris Martineau
These laws are like the rulebook for.
Leo Laporte
How everything in the universe moves and interacts. So that's one of the Notebook LM hosts is a guy, too.
Jeff Jarvis
Boy, she's busy.
Paris Martineau
Hey, I think our listeners got something to say.
Jeff Jarvis
Can you explain the three laws of motion?
Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. So she's talking.
Paris Martineau
Three laws are like the rulebook for.
Leo Laporte
How everything in the universe moves and interacts. Okay.
Paris Martineau
Oh, hey, I think our listener's got something to say.
Jeff Jarvis
Can you explain the three laws of motion with a basketball example?
Leo Laporte
Sure, I can do that. Let's use a basketball. Imagine you're dribbling Newton's first law. That ball keeps moving until you. Wow. Oh, hey, our listeners got something to say.
Jeff Jarvis
Somebody's listening.
Paris Martineau
I want to say that right now.
Leo Laporte
Oh, hey, Scooter X has something to say. Hey, hey. They could make that maybe a little bit better. Yeah, they could, but it is nice that as. So I guess this is because people are using NotebookLM to understand or ingest content. And so it's great that you could say, well, wait a minute, explain that a little bit more.
Jeff Jarvis
Or something like that. It's very cool.
Paris Martineau
I love that they try and keep it in the podcast.
Leo Laporte
Oh. Listener has something to say.
Jeff Jarvis
Where are you calling in from, Joe?
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I learned in my many years as a radio talk show host, I am a recovering radio talk show host, that it's better to be snotty than nice on the radio. What do you want? I think if you're too nice, people go, ew. But if you go like, okay, what do you got to say? Tell me. Listen to the radio. You'll see that's there. That's the they always have attitude. Yeah.
Paris Martineau
Well, I always assumed that was because you didn't want to invite small talk because that would take up time on the.
Leo Laporte
Absolutely. In fact, we used to have the call screeners. I never. I always told my call screener not to do this. We used to have the call screeners say, okay, get to the point. Get to the point. Do not say, how are you doing? Do not say any of that stuff that you would say in a normal conversation. Just say, hey, Leo, what's the story with this thing? Not, hi, Leo. Love the show. Ditto. You know, all that stuff.
Jeff Jarvis
First time caller.
Paris Martineau
Yeah, first time caller. Long time.
Leo Laporte
But I told my screeners, don't say that, because that just shortens the show. It means I have to talk more. So have them do whatever they want. Tell them to say nice things.
Paris Martineau
Tell them to compliment me.
Jeff Jarvis
Howard Stern could not stand the. He used to scream about the, how are you, Howard? He finally gave up. Now he just takes it.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you just take it. It's worse to make a big deal out of it. Yes. Fine. What's up?
Paris Martineau
The thing that kills me is whenever I'm listening to someone call into a show or, like, some little, like, guest spot on it, and the person is talking for way longer than they should, it makes me want to crawl out of my skin and, like, I can't listen to it. I'm so hypercognizant of time whenever I am on any sort of air or on anybody else's show in particular, that it just gives me up.
Leo Laporte
Wow, that's interesting. All right, I'm going to make a phone call to my friend here. Let me just put this on the speaker. Hi, I'm ChatGPT, an AI assistant.
Paris Martineau
Just so you know, our conversation may.
Leo Laporte
Be reviewed for safety. By continuing this call, you agree to OpenAI's Terms and Privacy policy. So how can I help you today? Can you explain Newton's third law in terms of basketballs?
Paris Martineau
Sure.
Leo Laporte
Newton's third law says that for every.
Paris Martineau
Action, there's an equal and opposite reaction in Basketball.
Jeff Jarvis
And you could interrupt her too.
Paris Martineau
Jump.
Leo Laporte
To make a shot, you push. Wait a minute, wait a minute. I didn't mean in basketball. I mean using basketballs.
Jeff Jarvis
Ah, got it.
Leo Laporte
Let's use a basketball as an example. It's very patient.
Paris Martineau
Sure.
Leo Laporte
Happy to explain further. Think of it this way.
Paris Martineau
When you throw a basketball against a.
Leo Laporte
Wall, your throw is the action. The ball hits the wall and the reaction is the ball bouncing back. Okay. Okay. But what's a basketball?
Paris Martineau
A basketball is a round, usually orange.
Leo Laporte
Ball used in the game of basketball. It's made of rubber or synthetic leather designed to bounce and comes in different sizes for various levels of play. Wait a minute. In the game, you're saying a basketball is something used in the game of basketball. That's a little tautological, isn't it? You're right, that was a bit circular. Let me clarify. Okay, enough. You only get 15 minutes a month, so I'm not going to waste time annoyed by you.
Paris Martineau
She was like, you're right, that was a bit circular.
Leo Laporte
That is the new 1-800-chat-GPT number.
Jeff Jarvis
Huh?
Leo Laporte
So you can call them and everybody gets to use it for 15 minutes a month for free.
Paris Martineau
That is kind of cool, actually. I will say that was. That was a fun little time.
Leo Laporte
It was a fun interaction. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
See, it's worth an asterisk, wouldn't you say?
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, I guess it is.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
This is part of. Is this part of their 12 days of opening of.
Jeff Jarvis
Of Shipmas shipments?
Leo Laporte
I feel like.
Paris Martineau
Is it past the 12th day?
Leo Laporte
No, they started day today.
Jeff Jarvis
This is the test day. So two more days.
Leo Laporte
I feel like they're stretching a little bit now. It's like, what do you got?
Paris Martineau
Anybody got anything like yesterday on the phone?
Leo Laporte
We could put it on the phone. It's Opie, but It's also on WhatsApp. You can do it on WhatsApp with.
Jeff Jarvis
For international people. Americans can call the 800 number because it costs some money, but you can't do that outside.
Leo Laporte
The thing I thought was they talked about Sora, which is their video thing, but every single announcement that OpenAI has put out, Google's gone. Wait a minute, hold on. We got that too. Let me show you VO2, which is their version of Sora cutting a steak. Now, I have to warn you that this is. If you're a vegan, you're not. Don't watch this because it's gonna. It's gonna really get to you. I saw it on Reddit, so I'll play it from Reddit in The sync, by the way, I follow a Reddit subreddit called Singularity. Okay.
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, geez.
Leo Laporte
So up in the upper left hand corner, that is Google VO cutting a steak. Then there's Sora, which is having some trouble with its take. I don't know what it's doing. And a few of the other competitors. The Luma Dream Machine. Some of these are really gross, but this is. Look how good Veo looks. This almost. This is generated fully. Let me read you the text prompt.
Paris Martineau
They're using good steak cutting technique too. Those hands are in kind of a claw.
Leo Laporte
Remember a year ago we were saying, oh, yeah, they can't do hands. Oh, they can do hands. So the prompt for this was a pair of hands skillfully slicing. So that's where the skill came in. A perfectly cooked steak on a wooden cutting board. Faint steam rising from it. There are some where the steam is. I don't know. Faint is the word I would give more like it's on fire. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
The steak is rare and uncooked, but.
Leo Laporte
Yet it's uncooked, but it's on fire. This one's not too bad.
Paris Martineau
It's very juicy.
Leo Laporte
Ha. Lui. This is a.
Jeff Jarvis
This would never actually get through.
Paris Martineau
Oh, that one just cut off.
Leo Laporte
Cling, cling. I don't know what's going on with the steak. It got two with one blow, three with one blow, and then they're disappearing. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it's right. The steak is still alive. It's right away. My father. I want it rare. So rare.
Paris Martineau
It blew cutting one way, but the pieces are falling the other.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. This one's close, but just not luscious. And he's really having trouble at the end. I think VO2 won this one battle handily.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Easily beating sora, the open AI competitor. What else did they announce in the 12 days?
Jeff Jarvis
A project, which is the big deal. It's there.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. You could save all your stuff into a project on the chat. Gpd and some.
Jeff Jarvis
And some. Some things for developers they're going to love.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's pretty much it. So 12 days of. What was it?
Jeff Jarvis
Shipmas.
Leo Laporte
Shipmas. That's not felicitous at all.
Jeff Jarvis
No, no.
Leo Laporte
It's not the weirdest job in AI.
Jeff Jarvis
So these two are. Things are related here. Kevin Roose got mad at me.
Leo Laporte
Okay.
Jeff Jarvis
Because the New York Times.
Leo Laporte
Kevin Roose, the guy who the AI fell in love with?
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's the. That's the one below the story below where he said, well, it's. It's really. Claude is the hip one everybody loves. And I said it was all anthropomorphic and worse than that, it was celebritizing. And he said, oh, you're lazy. And I said that I quoted all the anthropomorphic things in the story. And I said, I stand by my judgment. And he was still mad at me. So that was Claude. So that was bad.
Leo Laporte
Is, by the way, excellent. I like Claude, but I. Yeah, yeah, really careful.
Paris Martineau
Let's be honest. The reason, real reason, why you criticized Kevin's article is because it described Claude as San Francisco's most eligible bachelor with the title you still.
Jeff Jarvis
That's my title, damn it.
Leo Laporte
To the people who love it, Claude feels different, more creative and empathetic. He's doing it again, less gratingly robotic. Its outputs, they say, are like the responses a smart, attentive human would give. Unless, like the generic prose generated by other chatbots. You know, Steve Gibson was great yesterday. He has, by the way, now decided he's really going to look into how LLMs work. He's reading some important books about it and so forth. He says, I want to get to the bottom of this. I want to understand it. He says he's come around to saying he used to think that AGI was possible. He's saying, I don't think it's around the corner. And he's also become very hypersensitized to where programming is added to the LLM to make it seem more human. Like, oh, I'm sorry, you're right, that was circular. Let's talk about, you know, that's all added. That's not even the LLM that's added after the fact by coders to, say, make it, make it more. Sound more genuine.
Jeff Jarvis
Say every 15 words. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
And so I think when you say Claude sounds more insightful, it's not that it's a better AI.
Jeff Jarvis
It's manipulative.
Leo Laporte
It's manipulative. They're trying to make it seem more human.
Jeff Jarvis
So that's my problem, doing all that. And now we go to the story above that. The weirdest job in AI. This shows the problem is there's now a job at Anthropic. And Anthropic is a. Is a test, real company where they are worrying about the feelings of the AI and the. And the. And the ethics of dealing with the AI. And should we be monitoring its happiness? Oh, give me an effing break.
Leo Laporte
This goes along with the story about OpenAI's 01 wanting to escape being turned off, right? Yeah, it's all bs.
Jeff Jarvis
It's bs.
Leo Laporte
It's code added by people after the fact in the so called tune stage to make it feel more human. And it's bs.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
Paris Martineau
Kevin writes in his article, during character training, Claude is prompted to produce responses that align with desirable human traits such as open mindedness, thoughtfulness and curiosity. Claude then judges its own responses according to how well they adhere to these characteristics. The resulting data is fed back into the AI model. With enough training, Anthropic says Claude learns to internalize these principles and displays them more frequently when interacting with users. So it's not that this is feeling anyway, it's that it has literally been programmed to say sort of things that will make you think that they.
Leo Laporte
Let's be honest. I think you're right that the media, just as the media is complicit in many other things because we, we forget that they're not objective reporters on facts. But not you, Paris, you are. But that often the media is for its own good and its own profit, taking the side of AI and making it sound like it's real, it's human. For instance, this headline from Tom's Guide By Elise Stanley OpenAI's new Chatbot 01 model will try to escape if it thinks it'll be shut down, then lies about it researchers now I can, I could kind of live with that. But then the sub is researchers uncover all kinds of tricks chat GPT01 will pull to save itself. No, that's not what's happening. And you know what? I bet you Elise knows that. I think Elise is writing a headline that's going to generate trust.
Jeff Jarvis
That's the problem with Kevin. I wanted to say, when he, when he complained about me, I wanted to say, oh, I guess I'm not going to get invited to your wedding with Claude when it falls in love.
Leo Laporte
Oh, that was mean. That was really mean.
Jeff Jarvis
Corey. Corey Doctorow on Mastodon responded and just said that he's. I forget what he said. Oh, it was funny. Damn it.
Leo Laporte
Corey's very good. Of course we are.
Jeff Jarvis
He really criticized him more than I.
Leo Laporte
Good. So he's, he's joining the, the club. I think it's very tempting. It's almost like make believe, like telling. It's like saying it's not okay to say Santa's not real because he has kids.
Paris Martineau
I mean, I think there is, but.
Leo Laporte
They'Re kind of doing this Santa's not real with AI. Like, oh, let's all kind of play along, right?
Paris Martineau
I think the answer is in many cases more. While you're Entirely correct. I think the practical answer is more boring than that in the sense that at places like the Times especially, there's been a big emphasis on narrativizing every story. You'll see this in the way that they coverage everything's like a big yarn. And in the sense of these little cute Pat news items, they're trying to make them more conversational and approachable to readers. And it's a very common framing that you're talking about some sort of inanimate object. But instead, your first paragraph or two, you describe it as like, he's all the rage. Everybody loves talking to him. His friends rave about him.
Jeff Jarvis
Right.
Paris Martineau
The problem is he's an AI, you know, and they don't really realize that when you were doing that, it may seem fine in a single story in a vacuum, but when you were doing that institutionally, on the scale of a company the size of the New York Times, with the heft of the New York Times, it changes the way that people think about these technologies.
Jeff Jarvis
Right. And it leads to. It leads to policy, and that matters. Cory Doctorow said he's text perfect. Pat Stable.
Leo Laporte
Say that again.
Jeff Jarvis
He is Tex. Perfect Patsy. Referring T, E C H is patsy. Yeah. And. And Roos, when he got it from me, he said I miss. And he used the name of the. Of my imposter on Twitter.
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
And I thought. I didn't know.
Leo Laporte
I did bring that up.
Jeff Jarvis
That's. So he got. He got banned from even. He got banned from X because he impersonated the Pope. Who?
Leo Laporte
Kevin Roose?
Jeff Jarvis
No, the other guy.
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
He didn't get banned for misunderstood.
Leo Laporte
That's one thing. But not the Holy Father, not the Pope.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
So let's make a deal, you and I. I really don't want us to fall into that trap of narrativizing this stuff. Or I think if you catch me imputing, you know, some sort of personality to this stuff, you will call me on it and I will do this thing to you.
Paris Martineau
Absolutely, yeah.
Leo Laporte
Because I think for. For you, our audience, we really want to make sure that we don't misrepresent what these AIs are. And there were more call people on it when they are and say, and especially when AIs are doing it themselves. By the way, Elise's article is based on this test that OpenAI hired a company called Apollo to do on safety. And I don't know how she got from this Very Academic OpenAI01 System Card this very didactic, you know, challenges safety evaluations. To they were trying to escape.
Jeff Jarvis
Well, jailbreak is in there. This, but that was safety in the open AI terms. And in anthropic terms, jailbreaks are not.
Leo Laporte
The AI trying to break out. They're human. Humans trying to get the AI to say something. I know by. By breaking its training. So I'm, I'm looking. I'm still trying to find. They also talk about regurgitation. We evaluate the text output of the O1 models using an extensive set of internal evaluations looking for accuracy, I. E. The model refuses when asked to regurgitate training data. Ah, that was a big problem where you could get the training data out of the AI we found that O1 models perform nearer at 100% on our evaluation, so don't sue us.
Jeff Jarvis
New York Times.
Leo Laporte
They evaluate hallucinations o1 preview and 01 hallucinate less frequently than 4.0 and 01 mini hallucinates less frequently. And then 4.0 mini more weak is needed to understand hallucinations holistically. And I agree with you, Jeff. Hallucinations is a bad, bad word word. Because it's. It's also personifying it, anthropomorphizing it. So we call it some of them.
Jeff Jarvis
It's really hard to. I use the word train and learn.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
Because it's a training set and it does learn how to do something. I think that's kind of on the edge. It doesn't think, it doesn't know, it doesn't feel. Those are the things that are. I think are wrong. And you use the right. Right view, Leo. It's misleading. Yeah, but Leo, for a mere $249.
Leo Laporte
Yes.
Jeff Jarvis
You can now build your own AI.
Leo Laporte
Well, it's only 200amonth to get the special version of no. GPT. No, no, no.
Jeff Jarvis
You can buy your own physical AI supercomputer for 200.
Leo Laporte
Oh, I saw that.
Jeff Jarvis
I both marked Raspberry PI of AI.
Leo Laporte
Yes. Isn't that cool?
Jeff Jarvis
So if you. If you go to that link on 84, you will see Jensen Wong doing a.
Leo Laporte
From Nvidia. The guy who runs Nvidia, they're selling this Jetson nano.
Jeff Jarvis
So the shtick is he pulled a bigger. His last big machine he pulled out of an oven. And then he pulls this out. You'll see if you go down there is Jensen.
Leo Laporte
Welcome to my house. Yeah. By the way, in the past, that's not been his house. It's been an AI generated backdrop now. Oh, yeah, New house. We're fixing the house that you guys saw the Last time you were in my kitchen.
Jeff Jarvis
And let's see, what were we doing?
Leo Laporte
My hair was a lot longer and I lifted a brand new HGX out of my oven. Okay, now look at the size of that thing again today. And let me show it here. And now this is the new one.
Jeff Jarvis
Here we go.
Leo Laporte
And it's not quite. Ladies and gentlemen, our brand new AI computer. Look at this. I'm tempted. I think.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's why I wanted to show it to you.
Paris Martineau
Something about how this video is recorded makes it look AI generated.
Leo Laporte
It is. I'm sure what he's always done in the past is the kitchen has dissolved around him or flown out of of the backdrop. I don't know if he does that in this one, but it looks like he might actually be in his house. There's some dogs. I think he really is some dogs. So this Jetson Orin Nano, 250 bucks, which is half what its predecessor was. $500. But here's what's interesting. Now, you've heard us talk about the term tops Terra. What is it? Tera. Operations per second or something? Teraflops per second. I don't know what it's a. It's a number that's often used to talk AI capacity or capability. The Apple M3 Max, I think was 48 tops. The Surface from Microsoft's around 40 some tops. This thing, this $250 computer, is 68 tops. And will in fact be faster still when they update the software. That's pretty. In other words, it's a very capable AI machine. Now, obviously, you'd have to attach.
Jeff Jarvis
No, he calls it a supercomputer. Is that just marketing? What's the definition of a supercomputer?
Leo Laporte
There is no definition.
Jeff Jarvis
Okay, fine.
Leo Laporte
Because the Cray one, which was a supercomputer that actually was furniture you could sit on, is now slower than your handheld iPhone. So it changes over time. Yeah, it's probably superish.
Paris Martineau
A dumb question. What does this mean?
Leo Laporte
Yeah, what do you do with it?
Paris Martineau
This inside of robotics. Computer robotics?
Leo Laporte
No, no. It's a standalone computer. So it's got an ethernet port.
Paris Martineau
So you connect this to a monitor and then you do stuff.
Jeff Jarvis
It's small, so you can put it.
Leo Laporte
In robot Raspberry PI or you could put it in something.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, or your air fryer. You could have an AI air fryer.
Leo Laporte
They're just gonna get smaller.
Paris Martineau
So I could. Could I buy this and run video games on it?
Jeff Jarvis
No.
Leo Laporte
So I don't think so. Why would you not that kind of computer.
Paris Martineau
I don't know.
Leo Laporte
Actually. Legitimate question. Is it running, is it running an operating system? I don't know.
Jeff Jarvis
That's what I'm curious about. What do you want me. That's why. That's why I wanted to attempt you with this. What would you do with this? This is what really Paris is asking.
Leo Laporte
I would put it in a frame and make it into a. It's pretty, pretty good performance, I gotta say. Put it into. So there's robotics generative AI at the edge. You know, you can put it in a frame and have it display AI, movies, stakes being sliced. It's gotta. Gotta be Linux on it or. Let's see here, let's look. Look at the specs. GPU is an Nvidia Ampere with 1024 CUDA cores, 32 tensor cores. It's a six core, ARM Cortex 78 AE8 gig memory.
Jeff Jarvis
Is that a Google creation tensor? Well, it's a generic.
Leo Laporte
Okay, that's a term. It sounds like it doesn't return to the software features section. Ah, it's Linux.
Jeff Jarvis
So you could just run.
Leo Laporte
You could use it as a computer. I. Yeah, it's like a Raspberry PI and then you can put models on it doesn't come with storage, so you'd have to attach it to something like an SD card or something for storage. It's just like a Raspberry PI, which doesn't, you know, doesn't come with storage either. Has a little TF card slot.
Jeff Jarvis
So crypt. Paris, you're not going to ask for this for Christmas though.
Leo Laporte
No, you were tempted, but your little laptop is perfect. But it's not as. I have to say, it's not as performant, not as many tops.
Paris Martineau
I mean.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but it also is more ram probably.
Paris Martineau
I've recently. Yeah, it has the max amount of ram for a MacBook Pro, which isn't.
Leo Laporte
Much, but I'm trying to remember what the top score was for which one do you have the MacBook? What's the processor?
Paris Martineau
It's a great question.
Leo Laporte
When did you get it?
Paris Martineau
I have the M2 MacBook Air.
Leo Laporte
Oh, it's an Air. So it's an M2. Yeah, I have the same exact one. Let me see what the tops score is because I've run, you know, there's Olama, there's Anywhere lm. There are quite a few local models you can put on that Mac. Let me just look at the specs. Do they.
Paris Martineau
I don't even know how to search for a top score, to be honest.
Leo Laporte
Yes, Apple mentions it often in the keynotes, but sometimes they don't mention it. And they. They didn't do it.
Paris Martineau
What is tops?
Leo Laporte
What is tops? Is it teraflop operations per second? Trillion floating point operations per second.
Jeff Jarvis
Jesus. Trillion.
Leo Laporte
Trillion. Yeah. They're very.
Jeff Jarvis
You know, let's call CHAT GPT and ask IT to explain it to us.
Paris Martineau
You're gonna burn through all your minutes.
Leo Laporte
I could do that. Maybe. Maybe I won't call. Maybe I'll just.
Jeff Jarvis
1-800-Chat-Gpt.
Leo Laporte
Is it an 800 number? That's. That's nice of them.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Here, let me ask. Gemini.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, good.
Leo Laporte
What does TOPS stand for when it comes to AI? Oh, come on. You got to talk it. TOP S stands for trillions of operations per second. It's a measure of how many operations a processor can perform in one second.
Jeff Jarvis
How many did a Cray, the original Cray, do?
Leo Laporte
I don't. They didn't talk about tops. Well, they didn't talk about TOPS or Megaflops.
Jeff Jarvis
Right.
Leo Laporte
How many Tops did the Cray supercomputer deliver? Spells CRAY with a K? Not with a K. You gotta stop talking. It said with a.
Jeff Jarvis
Not enough to answer this question.
Leo Laporte
Cray made many different supercomputer models over the year. Each had different performance capabilities. Okay.
Paris Martineau
What about Cray Newmark?
Leo Laporte
How fast was the Cray 1 supercomputer expressed in trillions of operations per second? The Cray 1 supercomputer performed at 0.16 gigaflops or 0.000016 teraflops. Here's why. It's not measured in trillions. It's very slow. So it was. It wasn't even a gigaflop.
Jeff Jarvis
So the new. The new Nvidia chip, the one that. The real one that they announced a few months ago.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
How many times.
Leo Laporte
Come on. You keep asking these questions. All right. Let's ask the name of that new chip.
Jeff Jarvis
What's that big one?
Leo Laporte
Was it Blackwell? I can't remember.
Jeff Jarvis
That's it. Yep. Yep.
Leo Laporte
How many tops does the new Blackwell processor from Nvidia delivery? The Blackwell processor from Nvidia is incredibly fast, but it's not measured in tops. Instead, it's measured in petaflops, which is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. The Blackwell processor is capable of up to 10 petaflops. That's a lot more flops.
Jeff Jarvis
A lot of flops.
Paris Martineau
That's a lot of flops.
Leo Laporte
Wow.
Jeff Jarvis
So I searched for Blackwell tops and I found some very nice T shirts. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Tops is a weird measurement. I don't know why the industry decided on that. Because for years we'd use there's either integer operations or floating point operations. Integer operations are faster, but a lot of times you want floating point arithmetic. So we've been years, the industry's been using flops, floating point operations per second. And as you can see, I mean, the supercomputers of yesteryear were not very fast compared to the supercomputers of today. What did he say? Ten PETA flops. That's incredible.
Jeff Jarvis
That's a thousand.
Leo Laporte
A thousand. A thousand trillion flops.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
Paris Martineau
Oh.
Leo Laporte
So if flops are like tops. If flops are like tops, it'd be basically the equivalent of a thousand tops. Yeah. No, 10,000 tops. Pardon me?
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, right, right.
Leo Laporte
Compared to. What was this? 70 tops. So that's a lot faster.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. Wow.
Leo Laporte
That's Cray. Cray with a K. You know, it scolded me. It said, there's never been a computer called Cray with a K. I said, that was your decision, not mine. Oh, I did it. I personified it. I'm sorry, you did it.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
Paris Martineau
We're just gonna have a little button that can shock you every time you do it.
Jeff Jarvis
We need Stacy's.
Leo Laporte
Everybody always wants to hurt me. Why?
Jeff Jarvis
You're too damn nice.
Leo Laporte
So what was the weirdest job in AI? Oh, the person was going to worry about it.
Jeff Jarvis
No, worry about its welfare. It's the HR for AI.
Leo Laporte
I have been using the Perplexity shopping feature. I really like Perplexity.
Paris Martineau
AI, what is this shopping feature?
Leo Laporte
So when you do a perplexity search now. Running shoes. Running shoes. It'll show you shopping. Actually shopping recommendations. So it's still thinking here. But as soon as it shows me. What's it doing? Oh, oh. It says it's searching for recommended running shoes.
Paris Martineau
It's taking its sweet time.
Leo Laporte
And there you go. Nike. Don't you hate it? It in the middle of this it's saying, hey, would you like to rate me? No. Nike Pegasus 41 out of focus.
Jeff Jarvis
There we go.
Leo Laporte
Is this top, then the Saucony Exodus Ultra 3.
Jeff Jarvis
But on what base it?
Leo Laporte
A whole little table.
Jeff Jarvis
Go the other way. No, the other way.
Leo Laporte
Reliable and versatile. Okay, so. And these are. You see, there's little footnotes. That usually is a source and it's usually not. It's objective source. It's usually a running blog or running magazine or kind of like that. Here's the shopping.
Paris Martineau
Have you bought anything from there?
Leo Laporte
No, but look, I mean, if you actually Think how useful that is. I'm searching for running shoes. Okay, based on these reviews, the Nike Pegasus 41 is the best. Look, here you go. For 103, $30, you could buy it directly. And this is, by the way, not from YouTube or Google Shopping. This is REI. This next one is also REI. That's the sock, honey. Oh, they're all REI now. I wonder if REI is paying for this. Oh, nope. There's Zappos. I actually like Hokas. I wear Hokas.
Jeff Jarvis
So the Wall Street Journal did a story today on the trouble with searching Google for, quote, the best.
Leo Laporte
Oh, that was actually a good story.
Jeff Jarvis
But it's really complaining about the web. It's not complaining about Google. It says, well, there's people out there putting these fake things. Yes, they do.
Leo Laporte
And Google tries as hard as they can to not put those in search results.
Jeff Jarvis
And then they get sued for. For antitrust, for getting rid of this crap.
Leo Laporte
Right.
Jeff Jarvis
They can't win. Poor Google.
Leo Laporte
I don't think that's what I came away with in this story. It's poor.
Jeff Jarvis
What a Google can't win.
Leo Laporte
Small. It was actually a kind of a fun enterprise story. But the woman who wrote it, I actually want to. I want to give her credit. So let me. Let me find this story here. It's Wall Street Journal, and her name is Andrea, Andrea Fuller. And I kind of. I thought you might know her. Paris. I feel like she's, like, in your cohort, but maybe not.
Paris Martineau
I don't. Actually.
Leo Laporte
She did something that I could just see you doing. She talks about Thanksgiving. Her parents are visiting from North Carolina. She says, in what was surely a commentary on the state of my New York City apartment, my dad proposed buying me a new vacuum for Christmas. And he suggested this model on snapbuy us, on sale for $260. He said it's ranked the number one vacuum. And he pointed to the listing. Fortunately, she says, I'm an investigative reporter. I already knew fake product reviews are a dime a dozen, but they seem to go for a lot farther. In fact, she's right, because the. This. This company, it's. It's actually a deep dive. It's the kind of thing you would do. I could totally see you doing Paris doing all this investigation on this just because their dad said, it's tech, it's number one.
Paris Martineau
And then she should do is ask.
Jeff Jarvis
Dad, why are you giving me a vacuum cleaner for Christmas? Geez, dad.
Leo Laporte
Well, she says at the end, he finally did get me a vacuum cleaner for a lot less than $260 and a lot better. Vacuum cleaner. Vacuum cleaner. But basically this number one ranking came from website called Product Reports which was from Germany which in fact seemed to have a relationship to snap by. The whole thing was just kind of put cobbled together media appearances. If something says as seen on check it out. So for instance they say this V70 vacuum was as seen on Fox TV but if you click it, there's no link. She says that's a red flag if you can't click the review link. And I've seen that time and time again.
Paris Martineau
And then she searched the website and you couldn't find it there either.
Leo Laporte
There was nothing there. Yes, contact information. They only listed in number in Germany. So she called and she got a recording saying not here. Called back during business hours 3 to 9am Eastern time. She said I called twice, sat on hold, was eventually disconnected both times.
Jeff Jarvis
Meanwhile, Line 70 Forbes is blaming Google for having to fire the freelancers who write this kind of review spam. Which is really saying that Google is getting rid of the kind of crap that Forbes is putting up on the web.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well Forbes doesn't want them to, you know, take away their lunch. Yeah, I thought she did a good job for the average person of explaining why when you see number one pick.
Jeff Jarvis
You really have it's Google's fault.
Paris Martineau
System that Google has created.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but she doesn't actually mention their fault.
Jeff Jarvis
It's jerks who she searches Google.
Leo Laporte
But this would come up on any search site because by the way productreports.org buys the ad on Google okay for best cordless vacuums. And it's. And it, the whole problem is this productreports.org is owned by the company that's owned by the company that has the place of selling it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Probably they said max, they have a link to trustpilot that doesn't go anywhere and it's made up. It's a lie. Trustpilot says snap buys reviews might not be trustworthy. And she said beware of sites claiming trust. Stellar trust pilot reviews that don't link back to the reviews. And that's exactly right.
Jeff Jarvis
That's, that's good consumer.
Leo Laporte
But you see her dad like me and anybody's dead isn't going to do that deep dive. She's going to say hey, I see it said it was number one.
Jeff Jarvis
You just needed to add Reddit at the end of his search string there.
Leo Laporte
That's exactly right.
Paris Martineau
Same thing with the running Reddit too.
Leo Laporte
That's true. There Is a lot of astroturfing going on on Reddit. So the headline writer said Google. But you're absolutely right, Jeff, it could be Reddit.
Jeff Jarvis
Now meanwhile, after you've been very nice to a Wall Street Journal reporter, I'm going to drive you crazy with line.
Leo Laporte
Well, I just, I just thought she might be a pseudonym for Paris Martineau.
Paris Martineau
Writing under a. Yeah, me moonlighting at the Wall Street Journal.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, Daylighting. Moonlighting.
Jeff Jarvis
Go to 119 and click there. And this is going to drive you.
Leo Laporte
I gotta scroll all the way down to 119.
Jeff Jarvis
It's gonna grab you bananas.
Leo Laporte
New app lets home buyers see no one farther.
Jeff Jarvis
That's it.
Leo Laporte
Joanna Stern book all about. I don't want to rag on Joanna Stern. No, but I did already.
Paris Martineau
Just look at the. Just click the link.
Jeff Jarvis
This is on the publishers marketplace.
Leo Laporte
Well, look at that. I'm writing a book. It's all about letting AI smart machines and computers take over my life for a year. It's going to be fun. Exclamation mark. An interesting exclamation. How many exclamation marks so far? And weird exclamation mark. If you know of a company idea or something wild I should be exploring for this, let me know. Oh, she just signed a deal. She hasn't even.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. To my old publisher at Harper.
Leo Laporte
It's going to be called chat. But oh geez, when machines become our everything.
Paris Martineau
Chat. But Chat.
Leo Laporte
But no, it will not be. I, I have a prediction. It will not be called Chat.
Jeff Jarvis
But I'm just thinking after that sales.
Leo Laporte
Conference when Harper business gets a hold of that one, you know, we have another idea. How about 101 things you ought to know.
Paris Martineau
So anyway, I am interested to see though because this book is going to come out in spring 2020 26. It seems like a very of the moment book. Will anybody particular. Will we still be as interested in the idea of someone letting AI rule their life for a year in 2026?
Leo Laporte
Yeah, and probably not.
Jeff Jarvis
It's one feature story.
Leo Laporte
Somebody named Claude.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. Book is.
Leo Laporte
Well, good for her. I'm glad she has a book deal.
Paris Martineau
Glad she has a book deal.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paris Martineau
That's great.
Leo Laporte
And I'm sure she got a big advance and she's got plenty of time to write it.
Paris Martineau
How does he.
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it takes forever to go through the process.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And she has good agents at UTA that helps and gives them credit.
Jeff Jarvis
So meanwhile, the story you almost read.
Leo Laporte
I thought that was an interesting story.
Jeff Jarvis
It is interesting story.
Leo Laporte
New app lets us home buyers see neighbors Politics.
Jeff Jarvis
It's a service to realtors.
Leo Laporte
So they always, in the listing put like schools, walkability of the neighborhood. Now they're going to say liberals. Liberals in the neighborhood. Watch out. I confess, you know, I, that's a. I mean, I wouldn't not buy a house because of its neighborhood.
Jeff Jarvis
Because there was, there was a book called the Big Sort that came by Bill Bishop that came.
Leo Laporte
Yes, I remember this. Yes.
Jeff Jarvis
What year? I'm not sure what year. Which is all about Americans moving into like mind clustering into like minded places.
Leo Laporte
That's why I have red and blue states. Right.
Jeff Jarvis
And then it's happening more now. People are moving, it's publishing.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
You're moving from purple to red or blue.
Leo Laporte
Right.
Jeff Jarvis
And that's happening more. So this, this app helps you do that. I want to move to a liberal neighborhood.
Leo Laporte
I want to say the neighborhood we live in was very careful not to put up lawn signs or for anything bigger than city council member. We did have some local campaigning.
Paris Martineau
Did anybody try to put up national stuff and were they told to take it down?
Leo Laporte
I think everybody's very cautious. I don't think anybody was gonna.
Jeff Jarvis
Are you, you're in an hoa?
Leo Laporte
No, no hoa.
Jeff Jarvis
Well then how can you restrict his First Amendment? You can put it.
Leo Laporte
You can't restrict. It was a, it was a. We all agreed in our heads.
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I see.
Leo Laporte
Not to raise that specter. Although we have a family member who flies a Trump flag, has banners everywhere. It's amazing going over there. It's. It's like a circus came. All right. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's probably not something you should check out, to be honest. It's. The one funny thing about this article is that the, the picture which they took from the EPA has a Trump Pence poster that they covered over the PE and replaced it with va because in effect, everything is interchangeable on this.
Jeff Jarvis
Yes.
Leo Laporte
On this poster. So.
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
Musk.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paris Martineau
I mean, I think Vance is in there. Peter Thiel is in there.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
I, I did my, my tweet about two weeks ago. I said, I'm old enough to remember JD Vance.
Paris Martineau
No Politics Zone.
Leo Laporte
Npz. Where's your lawn sign? Take it down. Katie Couric is wrong, writes Mike Masnick. Why did Katie. Is Katie Couric in the public eye at all?
Jeff Jarvis
She did.
Leo Laporte
Yes.
Jeff Jarvis
She does a newsletter and I think a podcast. And she also was, she was the co. Head of that Aspen Institute thing with Prince Harry.
Leo Laporte
Oh, good. That's two people I trust to understand the Internet.
Jeff Jarvis
Policy.
Leo Laporte
The Commission on Disinformation produced a report on how to tackle disinformation. Mike writes, the report was, well, not good. It was written by people with no real experience tackling issues related to disinformation. And it shows Prince Harry and Katie Couric. There's the two people I'd like to go to. A mix of unworkable and nonsensical ideas.
Jeff Jarvis
He writes, it's well intentioned and the.
Leo Laporte
One thing he's really pointing out is that the repealing Section 230, which was one of the recommendations, would not solve disinformation online.
Jeff Jarvis
But Katie's evidently still out there saying these.
Leo Laporte
Boy, I want to say this again and again. And it ties actually to another article I put in here. This was actually from Hacker News and I think it didn't get into the. I think this, the Hacker News link didn't work. But it was from a European moderator of a forum for fixie bikes. Pretty big forum, I think. Was it?
Paris Martineau
I was about to say, I bet people have lost their minds on that forum. Bike forum people are some of the most hardcore forum people.
Leo Laporte
Well, he's decided because of the UK's new law, which effectively holds, just as eliminating Section 230 would do, holds the publisher, the moderator of a forum, responsible for the contents of the forum. He said, after this law in the uk, I am shutting down my forums because I cannot. We're on a shoestring as it is, mostly comes out of my pocket and I cannot defend a court action against me.
Jeff Jarvis
It's line 32.
Leo Laporte
Oh, it is on here.
Jeff Jarvis
It's on there because I knew, I read it.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. LFGSS is the name of the forum.
Jeff Jarvis
That, that trips off the tongue.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's like I said, it's a, it's some acronym having to do with bicycling. But he. So for some reason he feels safer having a discord. I'm not sure that that's going to.
Jeff Jarvis
Solve because he's not responsible for, for he doesn't decide what goes up. He can't edit it.
Leo Laporte
Maybe, I don't know, I don't know. He says, reading the OFCOM regulation and we're done, we fall firmly, you know, this is the regulation. By the way, there was some dispute over in Hacker News whether he would be liable for this, the UK online safety regulation, but it has the same effect as repealing and for the same very good reason. Children's voices heard. No more sexualized messages, no more grooming, etc. Etc. Has the Same kind of seemingly sensible reasons to do it, but it has the same problem, which is it. And this guy points it out. He says, the act doesn't care that this site and platform is run by an individual. I do so philanthropically without any profit motive. The act only cares that it's linked to the UK because he's a UK native and it's in the UK and the users are from the uk and that's the scope. He says big tech can afford to defend themselves. It's the little guys who are most damaged. I've said this again and again by things like repealing the Section 230 or the new UK Online Safety Bill. I'm sure there will be a similar. This is what cosa, by the way, is basically trying to do. And COSA probably won't survive this current session of Congress, but I suspect will be, you know, reinvigorated. Resurrected is probably a better term in the next term of Congress. And this keeps coming up. And the problem is if you. Section230 defends me against a lawsuit for something that happens in our chat on our. We have a mastodon. We have forums at Twit Community, Mastodon, Twit social. We have eight different chats going on right now on YouTube and Twitter and Twitch and everywhere that we're streaming. And we would be held responsible if somebody did something bad in there or we moderated them, let's say. And this happens all the time. I have people in my mastodon that I've just kicked off because they're spamming or because they're, you know, being harassing people or aggressive or whatever. And I think I have the right to kick them off to keep it to a pleasant environment. But if they decided to go after me, section 230 would throw. Defend me. It would say the court would throw it out, saying, no, no, it wouldn't even get anywhere. It wouldn't get anywhere. Leo has the right to moderate and he's not responsible for people's comments on the site. He's not, you know, he can moderate it, but throw that out and suddenly I'm liable. And I have to say I would follow the same exact steps as Velocio, who's the guy who runs the lgfs.
Paris Martineau
London Fixed Gear and Single speed is what it stands for.
Leo Laporte
That is good. London Fixed Gear and Single speed. See, it rolls right up the ton. A lot of people were very sad about this. The Online Safety act takes. Becomes the law in England on the 17th of March. And he says, we're Going to shut down on the 16th.
Jeff Jarvis
This is the problem. And Tik Tok 230 online safety. It's all about our speech. That's why it matters.
Leo Laporte
And I wish somebody would tell Katie Couric, all these people think we're going after big tech. It's not big tech that's going to suffer. They can afford to defend themselves in court.
Jeff Jarvis
I know Katie from back in the day. And so I don't know if she saw it, but everywhere this was, I said, would you please listen to Mike Masnick? This matters. He knows what he's doing.
Leo Laporte
Good.
Jeff Jarvis
I made a video about two years ago responding to Joe Scarborough about this, which is why he actually did call me at the time. And I had put that video up too, saying, listen to the people who know what they're doing about 230. It's not what you think it is.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And I understand they think it's all about big tech.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. They must aim to pay.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. We are running up against the Tick tock clock. I'm going to take a moment to invite all of you to join the club. We have some big club events coming up this week. Tomorrow morning at 9am get up early to join Micah in his crafting corner. He is building a kitchen. What are they going to make? He's making like a little dollhouse kitchen, I think. And that's what he showed me. Anyway. He's done other things. He's done needlepoint and needlework and stuff. And then other people are building Legos and stuff. It's not like it's just a hangout, so you just kind of hang out.
Jeff Jarvis
It's like watching them play a game.
Leo Laporte
It's not even watching them. It's like you're doing your thing. They're doing and we're chatting, we're talking and it's cool. This is what the club. The club is a real clubhouse.
Jeff Jarvis
Quilting bee. Yes.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Tomorrow at noon Pacific time, we're gonna do Stacy's book club. We have a little book club going. Stacy eganbotham picks really good sci fi. She picks it. Oh, wow. The book this week or this month was recommended by Jason Snell, voted in by the club members. It's. I've. I loved it. I was so sad when it ended. James S.A. corey's newest. They wrote the Expanse series, which was beloved and of course a TV show. The new. They've started a new series and the first book is the Mercy of the Gods. And it's really wonderful. It's too late. I Guess, probably, unless you're a fast reader, to read it before the book club. But the book club is tomorrow at noon. If you have read it, join us or just lurk. It's so unlur. No, because it's full of spoilers. So it will spoil the book for you. But we do a lot of things. We have coffee, we have photography. Chris Marco did his photo hour last week. He'll do it again in a month. So we do all these things in the club because we love the community. The Club Twit Discord is a great place to hang out. It's part of the benefits of joining Club Twit. Club Twit is seven bucks a month. I mean, I think that's a really fair price. It's as low as we can make it. We thought about increasing it. We thought, no, we want to make this accessible to everybody. You can pay more, by the way. You can pay as much as you want. But the. But the starting price is $7. You get ad free versions of all of our shows. You get video from shows that we don't do in public. Like we don't do video in public. Like hands on Windows, hands on Macintosh. This Week in Space. Actually, I think we do put out video for this Week in space. Untitled Linux Show. Home theater geeks. We do a lot of stuff. And this gives you like an all access pass to get into all the content that we make here at Twitch. But it does another thing. It helps us stay alive. And that is really, really important. I said earlier, I don't. Was I on the air when I said there's been very good news or was that pre show?
Paris Martineau
That was pre show. This is important news too.
Leo Laporte
So I have been begging people to join the club. I said My goal is 5,000 new members by the end of the year. I don't know if we're going to make that 5,000, but we've had many, many, many new members. Thank you.
Jeff Jarvis
Thank you.
Leo Laporte
I appreciate you responding to the call. The other thing that's been very good news is, and the real concern was ad sales had just disappeared. People, I think, are a little skittish about the economic future and so forth, but a lot of people I think were just waiting. And this week for some reason we booked a bunch of ads. And I'll be very frank, we saved this show. This show was perilously close to being canceled at the end of the year. And I didn't tell anybody that. I didn't tell you guys that. I think, Jeff, you sensed it, but you probably always are sensing it. We were in a financial crunch and we had. We were. We were figuring out, strategizing, well, how are we going to save money? We're going to cut shows. We were going to lay people off. But this advertising coming in and your contributions to Club Twit made a huge difference and has saved us. So thank you. I really appreciate it. And if you want to keep going into the rest of the year, please join the club. It makes such a difference and I think you'll be very glad we do. We're going to keep doing the two week trial so you can at least see if it's something you like. I think you'll really love the community. And we're also going to continue to offer the referral code, which can get you free months if you get other people to join the club. So please go to Twitter TV club.
Jeff Jarvis
And recommend the show too.
Leo Laporte
Do that too. You know, we have. That's one of the reasons we put video up on YouTube so you can clip it and send it out to people. Because that really, I think, is a great. To promote it. We need to grow the shows. That's also important. We need to grow the audience. The amount of money we make on an ad is directly tied to the number of people who hear the ad. So it really is helpful to us if the shows grow. And also I like it. Our egos like it. If more people are listening.
Paris Martineau
If you want the show to continue existing.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paris Martineau
If you want the show to continue existing throughout next year, you need to subscribe to support it.
Leo Laporte
Thank you. And Paris does. She wants that.
Paris Martineau
I do. What am I going to do if I don't spend my Wednesday evenings talking to you guys?
Leo Laporte
We all want it to continue. And I know people. There are some people who say, oh, Leo, you should just do it for free. Good news. I am. But I have to pay the staff. I have to pay Jeff and Paris. And I would never ask them to do this for free. I'm willing to do it for free as needed, but I think it's really important. Benito needs to get paid. Everybody needs to pay rent. They need to eat. That's the way it works in this world. So, I mean, I guess if worse came to worst, you'd see me just sitting here talking. You don't want that.
Paris Martineau
Replace me and Jeff with AI.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte
Now Leo going. So then I had a ham sandwich and I took a walk.
Paris Martineau
It wouldn't be as coffee machine was on the fritz.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Couldn't have any coffee.
Jeff Jarvis
Let me call ChatGPT.
Paris Martineau
Oh, my. 15 minutes expired.
Leo Laporte
Oh, darn it. See, that's why you need to join the club. Twitter, TV Club, Twit. I'm sorry, I'm going on and on. I'm actually very grateful. A lot of new members welcome. It's great to have all of you.
Jeff Jarvis
Thank you, people. Thank you.
Leo Laporte
Thank you. Yay, @t customers. Switching to T Mobile has never been easier. We'll pay off your existing phone and.
Jeff Jarvis
Give you a new one free.
Leo Laporte
All on America's largest 5G network. Visit t mobile.com carrierfreedom to switch today. Pay off up to $650 via virtual prepaid MasterCard in 15 days. Free phone up to $830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax qualifying port in trade and service on go 5G next and credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance and required finance agreement is due this holiday season.
Paris Martineau
Surprise everyone on your list with the best gifts tickets to see their favorite artists live. Choose from thousands of concerts and comedy, including Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, Matt Matthews, Metallica, Thomas Rhett, Trans Siberian Orchestra, Sarah Silverman and so many more.
Leo Laporte
Share a memory together or give a.
Paris Martineau
Gift they'll never forget. Find the most exciting gift for every fan@livenation.com gifts. That's livenation.com gifts.
Leo Laporte
Was there. I can give you a few more minutes if you.
Jeff Jarvis
No, I think you hit.
Leo Laporte
I think. I think we got everybody. Paris won the Bake Off. Off.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
That's important. Paris, do you have a thing for us this week?
Paris Martineau
A pick for this week? I do. Hold on, let me get my thing. I have two, which are two fun little Instagram accounts I came across. One is called I don't Give a Seat and it is photos of seat patterns from public transportation all around the globe. No, they're beautiful. Full. Leo, look at that one. No, only some of them are soiled. They're so.
Leo Laporte
This is kind of nice. This is nice. Where is this?
Paris Martineau
This has got to be your green one. Look at the one that's next.
Leo Laporte
The next one here. This one.
Paris Martineau
That one's pretty.
Leo Laporte
Oh, you don't love that?
Paris Martineau
I love that. It's beautiful.
Jeff Jarvis
That was my rec room couch when I grew up.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what it looks. All of it looks like.
Paris Martineau
Buy a chair in that pattern.
Leo Laporte
Well, that's right. You'd like like mid century modern. I forgot I do.
Paris Martineau
I have a bunch of apartment books published in the 50s.
Leo Laporte
What's going on here? I feel like there's a secret code in this Croatian that does seem. What's that all about?
Paris Martineau
But I do like, you get to see like, where it's from, who posted it, you know, it's cool. And then. So the next one is another person. Another thing by the same person.
Leo Laporte
Okay.
Paris Martineau
I found on Blue sky. And it's compendium of transit tickets from all around the world. And they're all high resolution scans. They promise to never use AI and they tell you when the ticket is from.
Leo Laporte
This guy likes.
Paris Martineau
It's kind of nice.
Leo Laporte
Likes transit, apparently.
Paris Martineau
Yeah. It's so interesting.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paris Martineau
I don't know. And they're just a bunch of cute little tickets. It's fun to see around the world.
Leo Laporte
It is. It's like traveling.
Paris Martineau
It is, but you don't have to leave your seat.
Leo Laporte
And I presume that these. That he has contributors. He doesn't go to all these places.
Paris Martineau
Yeah, people will send them in. Or. No, actually, I guess you just take commission requests.
Leo Laporte
This is the Osaka subway, which I've been on and is a wonderful subway. Look at these. I have to say, Japanese public art. You know, I wonder. There must be a Japanese manhole cover insta. Because they have beautiful manhole covers.
Paris Martineau
Oh, are there?
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Let me just search for manhole. Maybe I shouldn't search for manhole.
Paris Martineau
You should keep your screen on the thing.
Leo Laporte
Don't show this. Oh, yes. There's quite a few manhole cover sites. This is from Oleg Veleshnikov. These aren't quite as well. They're some pretty good ones.
Paris Martineau
Manhole covers. Just the word manhole covers is just Japanese manhole covers.
Leo Laporte
That's the one. That's the one you want. Let me go back.
Paris Martineau
Oh, and these are so cool.
Leo Laporte
They're beautiful. Japanese beautiful.
Paris Martineau
They're very involved.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. They really. I. The Japanese sense of art, especially in public art, is just truly gorgeous. Yeah. Look at these. This is from Ruggerio Lima. He's been collecting these. Just gorgeous. Benito, you were just there. You were just in Tokyo. Did you notice the manhole covers?
Jeff Jarvis
I noticed that the manhole covers were beautiful.
Leo Laporte
You have to look down, down everywhere in Tokyo. They're gorgeous. John Ashley's there right now. I like the. Hello kid here.
Paris Martineau
They're just covered in piss.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
Frankly, you got a problem with that?
Paris Martineau
No, I love it.
Leo Laporte
There are. But you know, you should look down in cities because I find weird things in the. On the little plaques and stuff embedded in the concrete. In New York City.
Paris Martineau
Always read the plaque. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
There's. Yeah, it feels like there's a, there's something going on. Some, some.
Jeff Jarvis
The great Stolpersteine Life of the In Germany is that in Germany are memorials to people who lived in this home and were taken away and murdered. The Holocaust.
Leo Laporte
Brilliant.
Jeff Jarvis
It's the best memorial you can imagine. All around you find it.
Leo Laporte
Somebody lived here. What they don't mention is and then our family moved in after they took off and we've really enjoyed living here. Thank you very much, Jeff. Your pick of the week.
Jeff Jarvis
So it's Claude Day, apparently. Because if you go down to line 174, Claude has a system called CLIO for privacy. Never mind that. If you scroll down to a bunch of circles, you'll find the top use cases on Claude. AI Keep going down.
Leo Laporte
Out of my tie, my shoes.
Jeff Jarvis
So this is top use cases. So 10.4% are web or mobile app development. I believe 9.2% content creation and communication.
Leo Laporte
Sure.
Jeff Jarvis
7.2% academic research and writing and so on.
Paris Martineau
I assume that's all got to be teens and people.
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, it's academic for my ninth grade report. Yes.
Jeff Jarvis
But then I found this interesting. If you scroll down further to the next chart, it's different conversations culture. Yes. So in China. Right. Crime filler thriller and mystery fiction with complex, complex plots and characters. I can't talk.
Leo Laporte
Do you think you get a good mystery if you asked Claude?
Jeff Jarvis
I don't know. I'm hungry. I don't want to do it now. Japan create and analyze anime and manga content and related projects. Spanish explain and analyze economic theories and their real world applications.
Leo Laporte
Supporters in. In that one.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, probably.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis
So.
Leo Laporte
Wow, that's fascinatingly interesting.
Jeff Jarvis
Yes.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, very.
Jeff Jarvis
Chinese provide information and assistance on space exploration topics.
Leo Laporte
Well, these are conversation topics that appeared more frequently in three selected languages. Yeah, I, I don't know. Maybe this is. I think you'll like this, Paris, because you recommended a. A app about dying.
Paris Martineau
Yes.
Leo Laporte
Right.
Paris Martineau
We croak.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, we croak. So you might like this. This was actually an article that appeared at NPR opinion piece in 2005. But I, after reading it, I realized and I went out and I wrote some thank you notes. I did some things. It's called always go to the funeral. I believe in always going to the funeral, writes Deidre Sullivan. My father taught me that. First time he said it to me directly. I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Ms. Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher. I didn't want to go. My father was unequivocal D He said, you're going always go to the funeral. You're doing it for the family. It's a wonderful little piece, but it's also a wonderful story with a great kind of moral. And it doesn't have to be a funeral. It's about doing the little things that you don't want to do. You don't think they're important, the little courtesies that might make a big difference to somebody else. She finishes it. On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the work week. I had been numb for days. For some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most beautiful, humbling, powerful, inhuman thing I've ever seen in a church was at a church at three in the afternoon on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believed in going to the funeral. So I wrote some thank you notes. After I read it, I thought, you know, I need to do more of those little inconvenient things you don't want to do that make a big difference to someone else. So I'm going to put on that one. Yeah, I think for the holidays, just a reminder, you may not want to go to that Christmas dinner. You might want to go see Nosferatu instead. But always go to the funeral or the dinner.
Paris Martineau
I'm going to bring this energy whenever I go to the extended friends and family dinner I'll probably attend in Florida with the Fluoride Truther song.
Leo Laporte
Exactly.
Paris Martineau
I know, perfect.
Leo Laporte
Don't talk about fluoride if you can avoid it.
Paris Martineau
I will try.
Jeff Jarvis
But if, but if you, if you don't get your vaccinations, you're gonna have a funeral. But I'll go to it.
Leo Laporte
You know, it's a funny thing. While I was talking about this, I have a little screen over here that's got camera views of the front door. And Lisa, when we moved here some time ago, put out a little refrigerator with drinks and a sign that says, thanks for the packages. Have a drink. Oh, and the FedEx guy was just here. I was looking down and there he was taking a drink. Isn't getting back in his trunk after dropping off a package. And yeah, it's a nice, it's a little.
Jeff Jarvis
Now your neighbor is stealing the package and you can see that too.
Leo Laporte
Oh my God, get out of there. No, we don't actually. We don't have porch where they Call them porch pirates. We don't have them around here for some reason. Maybe they take the drinks, though. I don't know about that. This is the last show of the year, but not the last show ever. We will be back. Thanks to you, club Twitter. We will be back in 2025. Our next show will be.
Jeff Jarvis
Imagine how sad we.
Paris Martineau
Guys, this is show 799.
Leo Laporte
Do you want to say we will have an 800?
Paris Martineau
Going to be missing 800 with so off week. What do you guys have to say about 800 of this week?
Leo Laporte
There will be an 8. 800. There will be an 800 next week. It's a best of, so.
Paris Martineau
I know, but we're not gonna be there, even though we will be.
Leo Laporte
Well, you'll be there, but it'll be old you, not new you.
Paris Martineau
I know that doesn't rerun us.
Leo Laporte
Rerun, Jeff. No, it's how to rerun.
Paris Martineau
How do you feel about doing 800 of these shows?
Jeff Jarvis
I want at least 1200.
Leo Laporte
You've been here since the beginning, haven't you, Jeff?
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, yeah, yeah. You can't get rid of me. You tried and tried, but I can't get rid of it.
Leo Laporte
We first started doing the show 800 episodes ago with you, Jeff Jarvis, and Gina Trapani. And it really was about Google.
Jeff Jarvis
For the first 200 episodes, we thought her name was Trapani.
Leo Laporte
We mispronounced her name for the longest time.
Jeff Jarvis
Yep, yep.
Leo Laporte
And let me see, I'll find that date this week in Google. Number one, it says in beta was August 1, 2009. It was two decades ago, right?
Jeff Jarvis
That was audio only, no?
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paris Martineau
Wow.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, audio only only. We shortly after added a video. And what's the news? FT, FCC investigates Apple and AT&T over Google voice app block. That kind of blew over, didn't it?
Paris Martineau
Did you guys have any idea when you did that show that you'd be doing this all these years later?
Leo Laporte
Nearly two days. Both of us thought we'd be long gone by now. Gina has gone on to better things. She's run companies and she's doing great stuff. Had a kid, she's a big executive. And then, of course, Stacy Higginbotham took over for Gina for several hundred shows. And now it's the wonderful Paris Martineau.
Jeff Jarvis
We've worn them out one by one.
Leo Laporte
You have breeze new life, Paris us into this show. It's been wonderful having you.
Jeff Jarvis
And that's another reason, folks, for you to recommend the show anew.
Leo Laporte
She's giving us artificial resuscitation.
Paris Martineau
Gonna pass Out.
Leo Laporte
Gotta do the. Stay in a Mississippi to Mississippi. We will be back. So next week's the best of. Then there's a week off because next week is Christmas Day and then there's New Year's Day and. I'm not making you come in, are you. What are you doing for New Year's, Paris? Do you. Is this the skeeball event or.
Paris Martineau
No, I don't know. I normally do a New Year's Eve Eve party, but that's because New Year's Eve falls on like a weekend. So New Year's Eve Eve is also on a weekend. And it's great because then I have no competition. But this year, because New Year's Eve falls on like a one on. No, it falls on like a Tuesday or Wednesday or something.
Leo Laporte
New Year's Eve Tuesday and New Year's Day Monday.
Paris Martineau
So it's just not. It's not really going to work. So I don't know, I might just go to a bar for New Year's Eve instead.
Leo Laporte
You know, Jeff, we really should bring back that 24 hours of New Year's.
Paris Martineau
We should bring back 24 hours.
Jeff Jarvis
Will be the. Well, she'll be the star of the. Of the whole day at night.
Paris Martineau
Look at a small tattoo. Not that's.
Leo Laporte
I got the smallest tattoo you can get. I mean, I don't think you. I mean, it's so small.
Jeff Jarvis
Lisa was not happy.
Leo Laporte
She was so unhappy. She came screaming out of her office. You were there. That's right. You. You were.
Jeff Jarvis
I'm not sure it wasn't my fault. I was trying to goad you into what you could do.
Leo Laporte
So we were raising money for UNICEF, by the way, we raised more than $80,000 that night. They built a hospital in Central America thanks to our. Our efforts. And we started raising the ante. And Jeff said, well, I'll shave off my beard if we get. What? Whatever it was. $10,000. And I said, well, I'll shave my head if we get $20,000.
Jeff Jarvis
Really psychological.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, because we're getting married about three weeks after that. So I bawled and all the.
Paris Martineau
Oh, my God.
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah.
Paris Martineau
Leo, that's crazy.
Leo Laporte
That's a mistake. I will confess. I do not have a felicitously shaped head.
Paris Martineau
Oh, wait, Jeff, you're not allowed to look at discord whatever you do. How many day. How many days do you think you have spent doing this week in Google?
Leo Laporte
Oh, my God.
Paris Martineau
Since the beginning.
Jeff Jarvis
Let's see. Each show is five hours long.
Leo Laporte
That seems that way.
Jeff Jarvis
Times 800. I'm bad at this. How many is it?
Leo Laporte
61 days, 8 hours, 19 minutes and 27 seconds.
Jeff Jarvis
Wow.
Paris Martineau
Two months. Two months of this podcast straight.
Jeff Jarvis
And they're happy?
Leo Laporte
Not more.
Jeff Jarvis
They're happy.
Paris Martineau
But no sleeping?
Jeff Jarvis
Well, no sleep, then no eating, just.
Leo Laporte
And by the way, Jeff, that's only counting the times you've been on twig. So you see, see, out of 800 shows, you've missed a few. But that's 717 days. So that's more than me, by the way.
Paris Martineau
Nice.
Leo Laporte
Okay, I'm sorry, I should not start looking at the discord. These guys are having way too much fun.
Paris Martineau
Are you looking at containers?
Leo Laporte
That is the word of the year, by the way. I think it is counts as the word of the year. Containers. Paris Martino, have a wonderful new year. Have a great Christmas. You're going down to Florida with your family. We'll see you back here Sunday for the the year end twit. So glad you could join us. We also thank you, Jeff Jarvis, you wonderful fella you, for all these years of making this show happen. I appreciate it. Mirth and merriment. Thank you, sir. Mastodon socialeffjarvis jeffjarvis.com for his books. Paris has been on the show for a total of six days, one hour. It's 15 minutes and it feels like. Yeah, you're a little outranked there. Thank you, Patrick Delahanty, our web engineer, for doing that. Hey, a very special happy birthday to Benito Gonzalez, our producer and technical director and editor. Happy birthday, Benito.
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, yay, Benito.
Leo Laporte
Is it, Is it a big one?
Jeff Jarvis
No, well, you know, they just.
Leo Laporte
Everyone's a big one after. After 40. They're all big. We wish you all a wonderful holiday season. I go, are you going to be doing anything fun, Jeff, for the holidays?
Jeff Jarvis
No.
Leo Laporte
No.
Paris Martineau
Bah humbug.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I am, I am looking forward to a few weeks off. You are going to get a few weeks off and we will see you all January 8th for a brand new year of this week in Google. Tell your friends, join the club. Have a great holiday. Happy new year. We'll see you in 2025. Bye bye everybody. After investing billions to light up our network, T Mobile is America's largest 5G network. Plus right now you can switch. Keep your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800. See how you can save on every plan versus Verizon and at&t@t mobile.com. keepAndSwitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit service ported 90 plus days with device, ineligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months. It's been so long. How have you been? Hello? I'm doing well, Dave. Why are you talking that way? Please say one for a compliment, two for a question. Yeah, this is weird. I think I'm gonna go Talking with.
Paris Martineau
An automated phone tree can feel pretty ridiculous. That's why when you call Pacific Source Health Plans, you'll get a real person to answer all your important questions.
Leo Laporte
Pacific Source Health Plans.
Paris Martineau
This is a real person.
Leo Laporte
How can I help you?
Paris Martineau
Human service, not automated phone trees. Find a plan at PacificSource members first.com.
Leo Laporte
People are driven by the search for better.
Jeff Jarvis
But when it comes to hiring, the.
Leo Laporte
Best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all.
Jeff Jarvis
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Leo Laporte
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Jeff Jarvis
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Leo Laporte
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Jeff Jarvis
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Leo Laporte
Podkatz12 terms and conditions apply.
Episode Summary: TWiG 799: What's A Basketball? - 1-800-CHATGPT, TPLink, TikTok Ban
This Week in Google (TWiT) Episode 799, titled "What's A Basketball?", features hosts Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau engaging in a multifaceted discussion covering significant tech and societal issues. Recorded live on December 18, 2024, the episode delves into legal battles surrounding TikTok, cybersecurity concerns with TPLink routers, privacy implications of smart appliances, and personal achievements within the team.
The episode opens with a heated discussion about the proliferation of drones in New Jersey, sparking public anxiety and confusion. Paris Martineau clarifies the misconception between drones and other aerial vehicles:
Paris Martineau (02:23): "Many of the things people are saying are drones are clearly airplanes and helicopters."
Jeff Jarvis expresses his frustration:
Jeff Jarvis (03:17): "I'm so sick of them. I'm so damn sick of them."
The hosts conclude that the drone sightings may be more a case of mass hysteria rather than genuine security threats, with President Biden downplaying the concerns.
A significant portion of the episode focuses on the ongoing legal battle regarding the potential ban of TikTok in the United States. The Supreme Court has expedited hearing the case with oral arguments scheduled for January 10, 2025. Kathy Gellis, a Supreme Court-admitted attorney, argues passionately for TikTok's protection under the First Amendment:
Kathy Gellis (10:38): "It is a First Amendment right that you cannot. The government cannot shut down TikTok."
Hosts debate the likelihood of the ban being upheld, especially with potential interventions from incoming administrations. Leo Laporte shares insights into the expedited process, while Jeff Jarvis humorously raises concerns about the timing aligning with political shifts:
Jeff Jarvis (10:38): "But they expedited TikTok, but they didn't expedite the presidency..."
The conversation shifts to cybersecurity issues surrounding TPLink routers, which dominate 65% of the U.S. market. Reports from the Wall Street Journal highlight vulnerabilities linked to Chinese cyber-attacks:
Leo Laporte (14:23): "TPLink routers are routinely shipped to customers with security flaws."
Jeff Jarvis questions the legitimacy of escalating fears:
Jeff Jarvis (18:09): "Is this legitimate or is it a get ready moral panic?"
The hosts compare TPLink's security shortcomings to other brands like Netgear and ASUS, emphasizing that security flaws are ubiquitous across all router manufacturers, not exclusive to Chinese companies.
Paris Martineau brings attention to the pervasive nature of smart appliances and the resulting privacy risks. She shares her proactive measures to safeguard her data:
Paris Martineau (29:31): "I like to make it more difficult for companies to target me with ads and make money off my data."
Leo Laporte expands on the challenges of maintaining privacy in an interconnected home:
Leo Laporte (28:07): "Almost every appliance now has an app and is connecting to the Internet."
The discussion underscores the difficulty of eliminating data exfiltration points without sacrificing modern conveniences.
Amidst the technical discussions, Paris celebrates her triumph in an annual holiday bake-off, where she crafted a coconut caramel tart reminiscent of popular Girl Scout cookies. This personal milestone adds a heartfelt touch to the episode:
Paris Martineau (06:17): "I made a coconut caramel tart, which is one of the New York Times new pies of the year."
Leo Laporte commends her achievement, highlighting the blend of personal and professional successes within the team.
A deep dive into the turbulent relationship between Matt Mullenweg, WordPress CEO, and WP Engine reveals tensions over contributions to the open-source community. Matt's legal battle culminates in his decision to cease development contributions:
Matt Mullenweg (61:11): "I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine."
Jeff Jarvis and Leo Laporte discuss the broader implications for the open-source ecosystem, emphasizing the necessity of contributions to sustain community-driven projects.
The hosts engage in playful interactions with ChatGPT, exploring its capabilities and limitations. This segment highlights their skepticism about anthropomorphizing AI systems:
Jeff Jarvis (83:07): "I can't stand it. Do you think you get a good mystery if you asked Claude?"
They critique media portrayals of AI, arguing that narrative-driven descriptions can mislead the public about the true nature of artificial intelligence:
Leo Laporte (91:24): "If you say Claude sounds more insightful, it's not that it's a better AI. It's manipulative."
The latter part of the episode focuses on the financial challenges faced by the show, emphasizing the importance of listener support through Club Twit memberships. Leo Laporte shares personal anecdotes about nearly facing cancellation and underscores the critical role of community contributions:
Leo Laporte (130:49): "Your subscription helps us keep producing quality content."
Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau echo this sentiment, encouraging listeners to join and support the show to ensure its continuity.
As the episode wraps up, the hosts share their personal holiday plans and reflect on the year's accomplishments. Paris discusses adjusting her usual New Year's Eve traditions, while Leo expresses gratitude towards the listeners and team members:
Leo Laporte (135:24): "We have some big club events coming up this week. Tomorrow morning at 9am..."
They bid farewell, looking forward to returning in 2025 with continued insightful discussions.
Notable Quotes:
Jeff Jarvis (03:17): "I'm so sick of them. I'm so damn sick of them." (Regarding drones)
Kathy Gellis (10:38): "It is a First Amendment right that you cannot. The government cannot shut down TikTok."
Leo Laporte (14:23): "TPLink routers are routinely shipped to customers with security flaws."
Paris Martineau (29:31): "I like to make it more difficult for companies to target me with ads and make money off my data."
Paris Martineau (06:17): "I made a coconut caramel tart, which is one of the New York Times new pies of the year."
Matt Mullenweg (61:11): "I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine."
Leo Laporte (91:24): "If you say Claude sounds more insightful, it's not that it's a better AI. It's manipulative."
Conclusion:
Episode 799 of "This Week in Google" adeptly balances technical discussions with personal narratives, offering listeners a comprehensive look into pressing tech issues and the show's ongoing journey. From legal battles and cybersecurity to the ethical considerations of AI, the hosts provide thoughtful analysis while fostering a sense of community and appreciation for their dedicated audience.