A (2:28)

Okay, yeah, let's stay up past your bedtime tonight.

D (2:30)

This is normal time for me and. And honestly, it's normal time for the pop. He's from Chicago.

A (2:35)

They stay up late, see, on east coast time. Still, he's only lived in Italy for most of his life. By now. Hey, is the Jubilee Gate still open? Because I think I have some people who need to go back through it.

D (2:47)

It is open until January 6th.

A (2:49)

Okay, we have.

D (2:51)

And if they come, tell them to contact me. We'll hook them up.

A (2:55)

Well, she did Christina Warren.

D (2:57)

Oh, okay, fantastic.

A (2:58)

She was on the show last week and I said, I hope you went through the Jubilee Gate. She said, I did. And then she swore and I said, well, you got to go back through it. So I'm glad to know she's got another shot.

D (3:06)

But did she get the indulgence?

A (3:09)

She says she did.

D (3:10)

The certificate, there's a certificate that you can get.

A (3:14)

It says you are. You are officially. You don't have any sins, you're washed clean. Is that what it says?

D (3:21)

You doing Guido Sarducci?

A (3:22)

I am Father Guido Sarducci.

D (3:25)

Oh, my goodness.

A (3:25)

With a cigarette. He would throw you at a cigarette. Do. Do priests still wear those big broadband round hats?

D (3:32)

Some do. I've actually seen them. I've seen.

A (3:36)

Get one and you could smoke.

D (3:38)

Look terrible.

A (3:38)

I don't know what's going on.

D (3:40)

Actually, you'd like this, Leo. Those the certificates? The. Of the indulgence?

B (3:45)

Yeah.

D (3:45)

You can ask to put any name on it. It's. It's your intention. Who is it for?

A (3:49)

Oh, that's.

D (3:49)

And you would pay €3 and they'd print up this very nice thing, put it in a tub so you could, you know, carry it back.

A (3:55)

Hey, look what I did for you, dad.

D (3:57)

But somebody, somebody did one of those secret about the Vatican and they made a TikTok video about how you had to get this certificate. And so the first time I got it last December, nobody there. I walked right up, I paid my three. My three euros and I was in. I just tried to get one last week and because of that Tik Tok video, the line goes around the.

A (4:15)

Oh, no. Discovered it. Oh, they discovered it.

D (4:19)

Tick tock. Come on, man.

A (4:21)

Is it somewhat tongue in cheek? Because I think indulgences were kind of. Didn't. Didn't One of the Vatican.

D (4:29)

We had a whole thing. That was a whole thing.

A (4:31)

There was a whole thing. Vatican 2 or something. They got rid of those, right?

D (4:34)

They did Martin Luther. Well, no, no, see, indulgences still exist. That's the whole thing about the Holy Door selling indulgences.

A (4:44)

You got to give them away. Okay, there you go.

C (4:46)

Have you considered putting them on the blockchain?

D (4:50)

Oh, my God. Okay, okay, I know you said that in jest.

A (4:54)

He's good.

D (4:55)

That actually was in an early Planning meeting. If we. If we wanted to put it on the blockchain.

C (4:59)

It seems like a pretty obvious choice.

A (5:03)

It's decentralized. Nobody's in charge of it. It lasts forever.

C (5:07)

Yeah. I mean, you could sell it to other people and make a profit.

B (5:12)

Sure.

A (5:13)

Every single person who has a copy of the bitcoin will have.

C (5:18)

Just like Bitcoin hacks your wallet. They'll have a million indulgences.

D (5:21)

Exactly. Well, I mean, it's. It's infinitely divisible. Just like Bitcoin.

C (5:25)

A fractionalized indulgence.

D (5:28)

Boom.

A (5:30)

We've got. I mean, there's something here. We got to work on this. This sounds good. This sounds really good.

C (5:34)

Stop the. Stop the show. We need to get to the.

A (5:36)

You have till January, Molly, to work on this. So they did an interesting thing on X the other day. They decided to put a new feature in that would tell people where an account comes from. Whoops.

D (5:53)

That would turn out really, really well, I think.

A (5:55)

Top Maga influencers accidentally unmasked as foreign trolls. There's one Maga influencer with 400,000 followers coming out of Eastern Europe. Some come out of Russia. I mean, I think this is a good thing. This is exactly what they should do.

B (6:12)

But they rolled it back. I didn't see any messages. Ye. Yeah, it lasted for like a day and a half. And then they're like, oh, no, we got.

C (6:20)

What do they expect to happen? That seems like a pretty obvious.

D (6:24)

They had the data.

C (6:25)

Yeah.

D (6:26)

They knew where their influences were coming from.

A (6:29)

Oh, my goodness. So this is. This is one of them. The Ultra Maga Make America Great. Ultra Maga Trump. This is the one that comes from Eastern Europe. And so it's too bad you can't see this anymore.

B (6:44)

Yeah.

A (6:45)

So they turned it off. It's. He says he's in Washington D.C. account based in Africa. I can't believe they turned it off.

D (6:54)

Oh, I can. Come on. By the way, every time I hear economy of Twitter, every time I hear.

B (7:02)

Ultra Maga, I think of killer instinct. If you've ever played that video game, those combos, Ultra Kill.

D (7:09)

Formers, Ultra Magnus was, you know, the second command to Optimus Prime, Come on, finish him.

B (7:15)

But it's more like the people who. What is the saying? People won't know something unless if they're paid not to know it.

A (7:25)

If it's in their interest that they not know it, they'll never know.

B (7:28)

So the verified people are making money for, like, being influencers. And if they lose all their influencers, then they lose advertisers. And so it's in their interest not to let people know that they're being swindled.

A (7:43)

A verified account posing as border czar Tom Homan. Verified, I might add, traced to Eastern Europe. Of course, if blue check doesn't mean what it used to, does it? America first zero from Bangladesh. An entire network of Trump supporting independent women claiming to be from America. Actually located in Thailand. But then of course immediately they started showing off left wing X users who also were. Were bogus accounts. I mean, I think it's fair to say that X.com is filled with bots.

D (8:16)

It's a den of trolls.

A (8:17)

Yeah, a den of trolls. Yeah.

D (8:21)

I got off X, what, a year and a half now And I'm so happy. Seriously, my days are so much happier. I had much less doom scrolling, much less rage baiting. I'm not angry all the time. It's a good move, I think.

A (8:35)

Well, Molly's off of it, right?

C (8:36)

No, I'm on it still.

A (8:38)

Oh, I thought you. I thought you said you don't. So you do. Why, why are you still there?

C (8:43)

So I mostly. Most of my social media these days I actually post my website and then it just syndicates out to master Mastodon Blue Sky.

A (8:52)

You're.

C (8:53)

Yes, but I spend very, very little time like scrolling Twitter these days because there's just nothing useful there. I mostly stick around because a lot of crypto Twitter is still on Twitter.

A (9:05)

You do it for research purposes?

C (9:07)

Yeah, but it's pretty much garbage, so I don't really spend much time reading it.

A (9:13)

It just makes me angry.

C (9:14)

A lot of spam?

A (9:15)

Yeah, it just makes me angry and upset and I don't want to feel that way. Wesley, what about you? Are you still in the ex.

B (9:24)

No, no, I think. What was it, November of 2023, 22, something like that, when I left.

A (9:33)

Yeah, me too. Yeah, it's just I use Mastodon. We run our own Mastodon instance, so of course I spend time there. But honestly, I don't think in general social media is good for my mental well being. I did. I pretty much deleted all my. I still have the accounts because I have to show. I have to show screens and stuff, but I rarely go there. It just makes me unhappy.

B (9:54)

Yeah, I think it's a privilege to be able to walk away from.

A (9:57)

Well, that's true. That's a good point. Yeah. Why would people. So I'm privileged, clearly. But why would people who aren't privileged need to stay there? What keeps them there?

B (10:10)

The profession that I am mostly associated is developer relations. Talking to developers and finding people who would be interested in your tool set, tool chain, technology, stack, whatever. There is still a good amount of people who are on X to reach those people. And the people who are in developer relations, sometimes part of their value or their paycheck is based on their following. And so you can't just jettison that portion because it actually will decrease your value to employers.

A (10:46)

It's a communications medium and you still need to communicate with some people.

B (10:50)

Yes, but in order to say that you're influential is not just saying that you know how to use these different networks. So even if like you're saying I could use a corporate account. No, it's being able to, when you hire someone for that role, to bring the follower with you. And so that is part of the worth of some people who are trying to make sure that the marketing department hates it.

A (11:16)

Because I had half a million followers on Twitter and I refuse to use it. And they go, what, are you crazy? You have such a, you have an opportunity here. So. Yeah, but I don't want to talk to those people.

D (11:28)

I get much better conversations on blue sky. Much, much better conversations on blue sky. But if I was still doing this full time, X, Twitter, whatever I want to call it, the monetizable metrics from Twitter are so much better than any other platform.

A (11:44)

Oh really?

D (11:45)

If I was. Yeah, seriously.

A (11:47)

And that's vanity metrics.

B (11:50)

So one or vanity metrics.

A (11:52)

Well, but there's also money. There's real money. That's, I mean one of the things you might say, well, all those MAGA influencers are attempts by foreign governments to destabilize the U.S. that's not necessarily true. Many of them are there because they can make money, right? I mean it may not be on.

D (12:08)

Either side and they don't care. They don't care which side they're shilling for. As long as you pay them, they're fine.

A (12:12)

Right? So if you're in Australia right now and you are under 16, get ready because you're going to lose access to X, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat threads, Reddit, TikTok, and most importantly, I think for a lot of people, YouTube, Kick and Twitch as well. December 10th is the cutoff. This is gonna happen.

D (12:40)

Darren Okey, our man in Australia says it's already happened.

A (12:44)

Oh really? Oh, it was supposed to be December 10th, but that was, I guess, not a hard day. So that's gotta, if you're, that's got a lot of 15 year olds going, what? I have to watch YouTube, kids. What the hell happened there? How am I supposed to. How am I supposed to play Call of Duty?

D (13:04)

Darren says, if this had been a story 10 years ago, I would have been incensed. Now I'm actually. I want to see what the results are going to be. I want to see if they can undo some of the damage. I want to see if they can lay down a possible actionable plan for other actors to use to protect their young. Because I think we're now at that point where the consensus is, yeah, the way that social has been going is not good for the development of children.

A (13:30)

You're not worried about unintended consequences?

D (13:33)

I'm absolutely worried about unintended consequences.

A (13:36)

Cut off from support systems, from friends.

D (13:39)

They might have to go outside, they might have to touch grass.

A (13:42)

A lot of people learn from YouTube. I learn a lot from YouTube. My son learned how to cook from YouTube.

C (13:48)

How is speech verification being done?

A (13:50)

Yeah, that's a good question. Never done well, but I haven't seen stats. But I'm thinking VPNs are probably selling pretty well right now in Australia. But that's speaking of privilege. Those are the kids who are sophisticated enough and have money enough to bypass.

D (14:08)

And VPNs are just whack a mole. It just becomes whack a mole. We know that here. We've tried to do age verification here. So if Australia wants to give us some real data about whether or not this will work, you know, run the program for a couple of years, I, I'm actually interested. I think they're doing a great service for the planet.

A (14:26)

France is thinking of doing the same thing. Denmark has announced plans to ban social media for under 15s. Norway considering the same thing. Spain has sent to Parliament a draft law for under 16s to require legal guardian approval. That's even. That is a little risky because if, if you're gay and your parents are pissed off that you're gay, they're not going to let you go online and that might be your only resource.

B (14:53)

Is the Fediverse still not able to enforce this the way that it's run?

A (14:57)

Yeah. This is something that Mastodon has said from day one. We don't have a way that might.

B (15:01)

Push people to the Federation.

A (15:02)

It actually scare. Well, maybe, but it scares me because here I am running a Mastodon instance. All I did, I changed my terms of service, said you must be 18 to use this service, and that's all. And then by signing up, you agree you are 18. I mean, that's all I can do. I don't Want to do age verification.

D (15:22)

But what if California passes a law like Texas where no. It puts it on the company to establish some sort of age verification system or you have to shut it down.

C (15:31)

I was going to say, I wonder if people. If they'll start blocking services that don't or can't enforce it.

A (15:37)

Who would do the blocking? The government. The ISPs.

C (15:40)

The ISP is probably. Yeah.

A (15:42)

So the government would. Foresight. This is why I hate centralized anything. Because if you have, you know, one or two ISPs, as we do in the United States with Comcast and Cox, that. That have 80% of all the Internet connections, it's easy for the government. Say Comcast, you know that merger you wanted to do with Warner Discovery? It would be too bad if anything should happen to your merger.

B (16:05)

Wait, wait one second. Did you mention Discord? Was Discord on the list?

A (16:09)

Discord is not on the list.

B (16:10)

Interesting.

A (16:11)

Not at least in Australia.

D (16:13)

So Darren posted from the. From the Australian government, if you want to see that it's on.

A (16:19)

Oh, good. Yeah. Let me look in our. In our.

D (16:21)

And he says it's on the app. So it's like Apple, the App Store. You cannot download YouTube.

A (16:29)

Ah.

D (16:30)

So there will be a renaissance in desktop computers and web browsers. Fantastic.

A (16:35)

So, Darren, do you have a teenager? Darren? I guess you must safety settings enabled for your teen. Oh, yes. Little Alex. Okie. When Alex updated his device to iOS 26 one or later, two safety settings and screen time were enabled. If you would like to change or disable these, you can do so as a parent. Okay. So this is Apple doing it.

C (16:58)

I was going to say great time for the Android users.

A (17:01)

Yeah. But at the same time, I don't think this is compliant with the law because this is. You could turn it off. Yeah, the law does not allow parents. Yeah, in Australia, the law does not allow parents.

D (17:13)

That note was from Apple, not the government.

A (17:16)

Yeah, right. NetChoice is, which is of course the industry group representing Google and Meta and all the others is suing Virginia to block a law there, the state of Virginia, that limits kids under 16 to one hour a day. Must parents approve more time.

B (17:34)

What happens in a decade?

D (17:36)

Yeah, we're legislating parenthood now.

C (17:38)

Yeah, but I was a kid, we had an egg timer on the computer table that we would use because we were only allowed to take so much time.

A (17:46)

And it turned you into a hacker, didn't it, Molly?

C (17:49)

Well, got to the point where we would just start to move the timer back quietly.

A (17:56)

The timer's been going on for a long time. Little Molly.

B (18:03)

This needs to be done more programmatically to be able to. There needs to be some sort of way for companies to present either what state they're in or what toggles they have, or to be able to have some sort of negotiation. Having to rewrite your software, having to change your networking on the network level is just too much overhead. And there needs to be some sort of standard where the software can present its capabilities and present the way it can be restricted and then send it to the router to the isp. And the ISP itself could help navigate some of the stuff. If there's no common way that I know laws change, but there can be a way of presenting the law which would make this a lot easier for both parties.

A (18:51)

Apple does not want to do this, but Meta and others say Apple should be the ones or Android. Apple now knows exactly what my age is because I put my passport in there. They support digital ID now for US Passports and in many states driver's licenses. So that means Apple has my age. Apple could enforce laws like this. I think eventually they'll be forced to do so. That's where is that the best place to do it? In the platform? Apple has an API that a application can query. It doesn't ask for specific age, it just says what age group is this user in? And by the way, in that case the parent chooses which I think is appropriate. The parent should be the one who says, well my kid little Mickey is chronologically 12, but he's got the mental capacity of a 40 year old. The parent should be able to say, well he's 40 to Apple, right? But in that case, an app meta could query Apple with this API that exists already and say what age group is he in? Oh, little Mickey's all grown up. Okay, let him in.

B (20:02)

But if you did it as an API level, this would be able to help companies or even instances like Mastodon to be able to say they're transmitting that they want these restrictions, they're transmitting that they're in this location, right? Or I can transmit these are the capabilities I have and then have it turned on on the client side to be able to toggle these settings. It's just a way of negotiating where it could be on either party. It's just like there needs to be some way of negotiating because even if an Apple then it needs to be on websites and it needs to be on other.

A (20:39)

Well, that's the problem.

B (20:41)

If you're using an LLM, maybe you want to use it about filtering how you are able to interact with different entities like that. There just needs to be a language around what is restricted and what is available for both parties.

A (20:54)

I just think it's a terrible idea all around. But I guess, I mean the problem is all the little gaps and little issues. Roblox, which is under a lot of heat for having, you know, groomers in their chat, adult groomers in their chat, is now requiring kids to submit video selfies. Kids as young as 9 to submit video selfies for age verification. Is that a good idea?

D (21:25)

Fun fact. I actually used AI vibe coding and I coded a way around this in about.

A (21:31)

No, you're a priest, you're not allowed to do that. You better go through that gate again.

D (21:36)

I just wanted to see how easy it would be to defeat those. Those.

A (21:39)

So what did you. Just out of curiosity, what, what was the trick?

D (21:42)

Provides. It provides device layer access so I can make it play anything and it looks like it's the real video.

A (21:48)

Wow.

D (21:49)

And I mean, that wasn't hard. It wasn't hard at all.

A (21:54)

This new policy is being rolled out in three countries. According to Engadget, it will be rolled out globally soon.

B (22:04)

Wow.

A (22:04)

I. It feels like. So they're starting in Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands.

C (22:11)

This is one of those things though, where it's like, how accurately do we actually think whatever system they're using can distinguish between an 8 year old and a 9 year old? Like, I don't understand how that's supposed to be terribly useful. And like, how young do we expect a kid to be where they can actually upload a video? Like, I'm just curious about like the, the age at which they're old enough to be able to upload the video selfie, but they're younger than 9 years old. Like that can't be that big of a gap, right?

A (22:41)

Roblox's Chief Safety Officer Matt Kaufman said it's pretty accurate. What we find is the algorithms that between 5 and 25 are typically pretty accurate within one or two years of their age. They're using something called Persona. Persona's model.

D (23:01)

Good enough, right? Pretty accurate.

A (23:02)

Pretty accurate.

C (23:05)

So if they're, if they can make sure it's like, okay, so maybe they're eight or seven. It's like, okay, so who are we actually restricting here if they're like, that's two years?

A (23:13)

Well, what they do is if you're eight, you can only go in appropriate chats and only people in your age. It's a group instead of by year in your Age group can go into those chats. The idea is they want to keep adults out of there. And look, admittedly Roblox got a problem. I understand why they might be aggressive in doing this.

C (23:35)

Oh yeah, for sure.

D (23:36)

But I 100% expect that there will be a story at some point in the near future that shows that the algorithm Roblox is using has different issues with certain ethnicities.

C (23:47)

That's I've already read. Yeah, I've already read that. Where the age, especially when it comes to determining age, it's very inaccurate for. For people who aren't white, basically.

B (23:57)

Yeah.

A (23:58)

What a shock.

D (24:00)

Well, that's every single facial recognition software on the.

A (24:03)

Because they're all trained on white people. Yeah.

B (24:05)

And how long is this lived for? Like how.

A (24:08)

Since day one.

B (24:09)

No, no, no, no meaning like let's say I'm an 8 year old, I train. Do I get a random pop up says okay, let's time to re verify to make sure.

A (24:17)

Probably when you're tuned nine or Happy birthday.

B (24:22)

It should be like drug testing. It should be random and it should just show up and then you have like a certain time period to do it and then you get locked out just so you don't get your niece or nephew or someone off the street to be able to do the verification for you.

D (24:35)

Oh, this is why every child at birth needs to be put on the blockchain. Exactly how old they are.

B (24:41)

World Coin.

A (24:43)

It's finally time I was at Molly's site. Web3 is going great.com and I saw Balancer exploited for at least under 10 million. And for briefly I thought it was you, Father Robert Ballisar.

B (24:55)

But no.

D (24:55)

Yes.

B (24:56)

No.

C (24:57)

Your millions and millions are all gone.

D (24:59)

They took all my dogecoin.

A (25:04)

This is funny because you would think by now that this site wouldn't need it anymore. But no, it's just. It just continues and continues and continues. So the counter says 79.632 billion. Is that this year? Is that all time? What is that number?

C (25:21)

Since I started the site in 2021 four years. And that's a really. That's actually a much lower estimate than most analyses of crypto thefts.

A (25:34)

You call it the grift counter. I love it. You're watching this week in Tech. We're looking at the tech news. Of course this week. A bad week for Cloudflare. We'll talk about that in just a little bit with Molly White. Web3 is going great and MollyWhite.net citation needed her fabulous newsletter. Also the Digital Jesuit himself now $110 million poorer. I'm sorry, I don't want to start that rumor. Father Robert. Just want you to know when, when, when you were on staff and we paid you, the checks did not go to you. They did not. They went to Rome. And we've enriched Rome significantly over the years. And happy to do it, Robert. We love you. Do. So you take a vow of poverty.

D (26:22)

I do, I do. Which is why our food here in the house is not great.

A (26:27)

They, you know, they could.

D (26:29)

It's a little bit of a shame.

A (26:30)

Decent food. They really could. Well, yeah. And you can't just go out to a restaurant every night. I can.

D (26:37)

As long as all those restaurants together don't equal more than €50amonth.

A (26:44)

I.

D (26:44)

Save it up, Leo. It's special occasions.

A (26:46)

Yeah, you're not going to Da Fortunata for a little cacio e Pepe anytime soon.

D (26:50)

That is a nice place, by the way.

A (26:51)

Ah, it's the first place we hit when we got to Rome because I wanted some carbonara. Also with us, Wesley Faulkner. So good to see you. Works-not-working.com. what is that site all about?

B (27:06)

So right now it's a newsletter. We were supposed to launch actually on the 15th. I missed that date. We pushed it to the 30th of this month. And it is going to be a site for a community, for people who are in jobs, feel like they can't leave the job either because of the job market being very poor. Health care, yes, they need health care, but they have to endure non optimal work environments. So bad managers, bad treatment, disorganization, lack of planning, lack of work, life balance. And so it's a place where people can come together, share tips and tricks and also for them to feel less alone while they're trying to survive in this capitalist society.

A (27:54)

I love your logo, which is a phoenix rising from a dumpster fire. It launches in one week, kids, one week from today. So Wesley's got his work cut out for him over the next seven days. Works-not-working.com Great to have all three of you on the show, by the way. Robert, here's another great restaurant you can't afford in Rome. Love the pizza at Emma's. I highly recommend it. It's really.

D (28:18)

Oh no, I've been at Emma's.

A (28:20)

It's really good. Yes, Yes. I wish I were in Rome right now, but I'm not. I'm here on Twit in the beautiful Twit Addict studio, which is mere steps away from my bedroom. It's Great. That's a five. Five stair commute. Five step commute. Our show today brought to you by Spaceship. Now you if you've been listening for a while, I think you've heard me talk about Spaceship. It's the new domain registrar that does everything right. They are so good.

B (28:52)

In.

A (28:53)

In the just a few months they've been around, they passed a major milestone. Over 5 million domains under management. That kind of growth does not happen by accident. It's because Spaceship delivers real quality and features that make sense. It's not just domains. I shouldn't really say domain registrar. They do everything from helping you build and run your own online presence via hosting to business email. They have an excellent email solution, even tools for creating and managing web apps. Vpss. They have a messaging app I love called Thunderbolt. It's all in one, end to end. Encrypted. Yes, all in one straightforward platform. But there is a reason people are using it as a registrar. The pricing. Essentially Black Friday and Cyber Monday level values all year round. So you don't have to wait till Friday to get a great deal. Right now, Twit listeners get exclusive offers that make it even better. Well, I wanted to use their Thunderbolt end to end encrypted messaging. It has a very clever idea. Instead of using a phone number or a handle to register, you get to use a domain. So if you're a business, your business domain could be how people message you in. Thunderbolt. I didn't have one to, you know, to use, so I registered for 5 bucks a year. Leo's IM I mentioned this the other day and somebody said there's no website there. No, no, it's just my handle for Thunderbolt Messaging. Five bucks a year and the Thunderbolt's free. It's really. They're really smart, really clever. So whether you're planning a new online project or maybe you've got your hosting, you know, domain registrar or hosting elsewhere, it's very easy to move to Spaceship. Spaceship has everything you need to get launched, connected and running smoothly, much more affordably. And they make it really affordable by giving you a great deal when you switch over. Find out more Spaceship.comTwit to see the exclusive offers to find out why millions have already made the move, including me. Spaceship.comTwit we're big fans. They have some nice features too, like the ALPH AI that will all do all those DNS chores that you don't want to do or don't know how to do. Things like that. It's really, really impressive. Spaceship.comTwit we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. So it was two weeks ago it was Amazon. Last week was Microsoft. This week it was a Cloudflare. And you know what we learn each time these cloud services go down is how much big sites are dependent on them. Spotify was down, x was down. OpenAI was down. I did my beat check using RSS feeds and my software couldn't get RSS feeds from so many sites that I use. Everybody uses Cloudflare. Somebody pointed out you probably don't need to use it if you're not worried about getting ddosed. Right. Maybe, maybe rethink that dependency on a single point of failure.

C (31:57)

It's kind of nice though to have the when you accidentally screw up your web server, having it served from the last live is very nice, but there are non Cloudflare options for that.

A (32:08)

Are you on Cloudflare just out of curiosity?

C (32:10)

No, I am on Fastly.

B (32:12)

Ah.

A (32:12)

I like Fastly. Yeah.

C (32:14)

And they have a very nice program where they support open source developers and other developers by providing free cloud services, which is very nice.

A (32:25)

My posse site, I do the same thing as you do is Microblog and I don't think that went down. I think he's on AWS and we do here at Twit we use DDoS production. But I won't tell you who it is, but you now know it's not Cloudflare.

D (32:42)

All of our services were Cloudflare and so we lost most.

A (32:45)

Oh, the Vatican was down.

D (32:48)

Wow. It happens.

B (32:50)

The company I work for that actually pays the bills, they use Warp from Cloudflare. So even though they weren't served, that's how we as employees connected and so that went down. And as a home labber, I use Cloudflare tunnels to have access to my home lab outside.

A (33:09)

In lieu of tailscale.

B (33:10)

Yes, in lieu of tailscale.

A (33:12)

Yeah. The thing is you could use Tailscale or AWS or some other service and they could be down. I mean, all of these points of failure. Molly posted a revised XKCD cartoon Chad Loader I revised it the entire this is the old cartoon where the entire Internet is based on one little library written by some guy in Indiana. The entire Internet is based on these little tiny toothpicks holding up everything. AWS and Cloudflare, I don't know, aren't.

D (33:42)

AWS and Cloudflare the two big ones at the bottom though?

A (33:44)

The two.

D (33:44)

The two big flat ones at the bottom that should be aws and Cloudflare.

A (33:48)

Right.

C (33:48)

I guess it depends a little bit on if you're interpreting, like how much of the Internet they hold up or how good they are at doing it.

A (33:56)

Yes.

D (33:56)

Well, there should be one.

A (33:58)

Toothpicks are holding up the big flat one.

D (34:00)

So there should be one pole says bgp because border Gateway protocol holds everything together and it always breaks. It always breaks.

A (34:10)

It's so easy to misprogram bgp. Remember a couple of years ago somebody accidentally post put something on their BGP that routed all the traffic in the world to.

D (34:22)

They advertised all the routes, they said give it all to us and BGP.

A (34:27)

Said pacific, why not? BGP says you got it, boss.

D (34:35)

The Cloudflare failure, actually they had a decent report on it.

A (34:40)

That's one thing we like about Cloudflare. They're very forthright. Right. So what did Matthew Prince say went wrong?

D (34:48)

They've got a thing called bot management which allows them to detect whether or not activity that's coming in is from actual users or from an automated system. Very important when you're trying to alleviate DDoS problems. The issue was there's a thing called the feature file. And the feature file is sort of instructions to the entire network of bot management servers that gives them sort of their marching orders. At some point someone made a change to that feature file and I guess fat fingered it. It doubled in size, doubled more than double the size that it was supposed to be. And unfortunately that was automatically propagated to all the machines that did bot and it crashed. They all crashed. Because that, that file has a. It was a. Yeah, it has a limit on how large it can be. So it was double the file limit. All those machines shut down without the bot management. The entire network went down. That's just.

A (35:42)

Yeah, yeah. Here's the graph they. Prince writes that initially they thought they were being ddosed. They pretty quickly realized they had, they had. It was just a foot gun and they were the ones who fired.

D (35:55)

They kind of DDoS themselves. Yeah, it was a self dos.

B (36:00)

Cloudflare has been like growing exponentially the last, I don't know, 12, 18 months to the point where they're adding services. They're becoming more of a provider, I think. What was it just. Is it last month or the month and a half ago that they said that they're going to basically make all of their services enterprise level services, self service for everyone. So you can just go in and just buy it yourself, no matter what they offer to everyone. You don't need to talk to a salesperson so they have been scaling so quickly that I think that they haven't built the automated systems for some of the new things that they are.

A (36:38)

There's another reason for that, because if you automate it, then you're not as responsible. So in the next automate check, you can check.

B (36:46)

You have automated checkers, not necessarily automated, doing everything, but you could have it in such a way where you could say, this doesn't look right. Are you sure you want to push this?

A (36:55)

Yeah.

D (36:56)

You know, Cloudflare did me a solid with the. The Minecraft server that, what, eight years ago, we started getting DDoS and they reached out and they have a thing called Project Galileo where they will help small entities that are suffering because they're being DDoS out of religious hate, political hate, etc. Etc. So they said, we will give you.

A (37:17)

Wow.

D (37:18)

In perpetuity. Our entire enterprise package. It was like a $10,000 package and it solved everything. Every single issue we had with the server just went away. So I have trouble saying anything bad about them.

A (37:30)

I think in many ways they're really a boon. But it does point out that if. If there's a single point of failure, that's always risky. But this is how the cloud is. There's always a single point of failure somewhere. Right.

B (37:44)

And they went down when GCP went down as well. And so this is one of those things where it's just like. Yeah, it's.

A (37:51)

It's.

B (37:52)

Any point of failure in. Any link in the chain that's broken could cause issues, and that's externally and internally.

A (37:58)

Yikes.

D (37:59)

Do any of you use cloudflare for your domain registrations?

B (38:03)

I do.

D (38:04)

I do all of ours.

A (38:05)

I didn't know they did domain registrations.

D (38:08)

Oh, yes, yes. I've got birthday.

A (38:10)

I did it with Google domains for a while because they seem simple and cheap and Google's going to be great. And then they killed it. I thought, you know what?

D (38:20)

How many times does Google have to fool us?

A (38:22)

Yeah.

D (38:24)

Every single service.

A (38:25)

Yeah. Oh, no, I think. Yeah. I think in the. For the most part, I've always been a fan of cloud player Cloud Flare. John Graham coming is a. Of course, a friend of the network. I've known him for years. He was their cto. We actually just had him on intelligent machines recently. He's now just on the board. He's retired as cto. So I always thought they were well run. I had a little bit of an issue with them when they went after Perplexity.

D (38:52)

Yeah, that was. Yeah, okay.

A (38:54)

And this is the same issue. I have with Google, which is when you. When you are the choke point for so much traffic and you decide to use your power to enforce something which Google's done with, for instance, HTTPs everywhere. You could say, well, that's a good thing. But it also gives them an awful lot of power. Google's also decided that they want domain certificates to expire, like, in 30 seconds. I don't know what it is now. It's like, fast. Right. And I understand why they're doing that, but I. I think that's too much power for them to tell the Internet, the entire Internet, yeah, these certificates last too long. Or, yeah, you got to be HTTPs. I don't need to be HTTPs@twit. We don't. There's no logins, there's no. There's no accounts. I guess maybe somebody could use us as a man in the middle. I mean, we had to go out and we had to buy an expensive, at the time, very expensive certificate for that. And that was because Google said you had to. So Cloudflare decided that, well, we don't think Perplexity should be allowed to search sites because they're AI and they're using it to train. Perplexity said, we're not using a train. A user has said, perplexity, tell me about this site. So we go to the site and we load it. But now Cloudflare is saying, no, no, our bot protection says you can't do that because you're AI. And I think that there's legitimate causes on both sides. But what bothered me is it felt like Cloudflare had a little too much power in that conversation.

D (40:28)

You guys agree to unilaterally be able to just shut them out.

A (40:31)

Yeah.

C (40:32)

And it's interesting because Cloudflare has made arguments in the past about not taking actions based on that sort of exact same logic. Is that like, oh, we're just an infrastructure layer. We don't want to be making any decisions on who can and cannot use our services. And so they sort of pointed to that when it was convenient. But then when they decided that they don't want Perplexity doing something, suddenly they're fine with taking a decision.

A (40:59)

Yeah, I just don't like the centralization of power. That. That worries me. By the way, El Duderino in our Discord chat, is pointing out that Galileo, which is a service that Cloudflare has donated to the Vatican, is named after. You might remember him.

D (41:18)

I might have heard the name times.

A (41:21)

Yeah. Didn't you. Didn't they burn him at the stake? I think they did. I think they did. I will point out they have apologized. Okay.

D (41:31)

The same office of the Inquisition that prosecuted Galileo also prosecuted the founder of my religious order, St. Ignatius of Loyola. So we're kind of kindred spirits there.

B (41:43)

Yeah.

A (41:43)

Their mistakes. Mistakes were made. And actually, I'm sorry, they did not burn him at the stake.

D (41:48)

No, we just. We imprisoned him, jailed him for life.

A (41:52)

We. We.

D (41:53)

House arrest. He was under house arrest.

A (41:56)

That terrible food in your.

D (41:59)

No, no, no. They had good food back then. It's just us.

B (42:03)

The issue with. I think with Cloudflare is that they bring up really valid points, and I am a big fan of Cloudflare.

A (42:13)

Yes.

B (42:14)

The issue where it becomes really questionable is that they give an avenue where people can pay your way around the wall that they're building, which is always a little suspect where, like, you can't do this unless you have the right amount of money. And then. And now our morals and ethics, maybe they can be bought.

A (42:37)

Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

B (42:40)

Yeah.

A (42:40)

All right, well, so, I mean, there's nothing to see here. They had an outage. And the thing that Cloudflare is great about is they were very forthright, even to the point where they posted an internal slack message from Matthew Prince saying, we're being ddosed, which I thought was. You didn't have to be that honest, Matthew. It's okay. Hey. Good news or maybe bad news, depending on your point of view. Apparently, Doge has kind of disappeared from the federal government. Elon Musk. This is from the New Republic. Trump's Doge is dead, and we won't miss it. RIP the Department of Government Efficiency. You know, when Elon and the President had their falling out and Elon left Washington to go back home to be a private citizen, most of the Doge staff stayed. But apparently many of the Doge staff has since found jobs elsewhere. Acting Doge Administrator is now an official advisor to rfk, the Department of Health and Human Services. The after effects of Doge's dismantling are over. But the. Perhaps this is good news. Doge is dead.

B (44:00)

I have an unpopular opinion. I'm sad that it's dead, and I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why.

A (44:07)

Why?

B (44:08)

Because the thought of it is still good. The execution and who was in charge. Every little part of it was bad. And what's.

A (44:21)

Oh, I'm not against government efficiency. Exactly.

B (44:23)

Right.

A (44:24)

Yeah.

B (44:24)

So it's the same way when you hear about dei, they're like, oh, it's. And they use those acronyms or those initials to mean something that it has nothing at all to do with what it actually is. But then they say this is what it is, so we should kill it. I think there should be a Department of Government efficiency. I don't, I don't agree at all with their execution and how they did things or. Well, I do think we should focus on how can we have more long term investments in a way that doesn't, doesn't, doesn't stay with the status quo, but is continuously improving based on either technology, based on other types of policies, that sort of thing.

D (45:08)

Yes, I will. I do want to throw in a little bit of context though, which is much of the waste that people will see was actually previous attempts to increase efficiency. When you look at like the offices of the ig, when you look at oversight groups, when you look at third party oversight groups, those were all efforts to create something that could monitor the government and look for ways to improve efficiency. But what happens is you end up adding generations upon generations upon generations of Doge. We've had Doge in the past, it just wasn't called Doge. So, I mean, we don't need Doge. We had the IGs. Well, we used to have the IGs until Trump fired them all. We don't need Doge. We have the guest record for the offices of Congress and the White House. At least we had them before Trump got rid of those. So we had the tools to actually look behind the curtain and see what was going on in our government. It's just that most people didn't. And then the power to the hands of people who had ulterior motives for.

A (46:12)

Well, that's the point is, wasn't really about government efficiency. It was about getting all the databases in one place so they could be easily accessed and used for a variety.

D (46:22)

Of reasons over Starlink, an unsecure network.

A (46:25)

In the White House and Palantir could be used to, you know, get the data out of there and find whatever.

C (46:33)

If Doge is dead, who's maintaining the databases?

A (46:36)

That's my concern. That's an interesting question.

C (46:38)

And also, like, didn't Doge sort of usurp the US Digital Service? And so that's.

A (46:44)

That's still dead.

D (46:45)

Yeah, yeah, that's double dead now.

C (46:47)

They were doing super good stuff, I.

A (46:49)

Thought when Alex Stamos was on the show about a month ago, he said, we are in a very bad state. SISA has basically been dismantled. You know, USDS is gone. What was it? F18 is gone. 18, folks. All of these, I think good initiatives have disappeared and now we are just sitting here, a sitting duck in effect for nation states that decide to go after us.

D (47:18)

And it's not just the initiatives. We, we. I think the Trump administration really went after the people who had the talent to do those jobs.

A (47:26)

They're gone.

D (47:27)

So even if they were to be re established, they're not going to want to rejoin government service, not after the way they were treated.

C (47:32)

Plus, like hopefully they have new jobs by now.

D (47:35)

Yeah, exactly.

A (47:36)

One hopes Meta has won a victory in court. Remember, the FTC was going after Instagram and WhatsApp with kind of the plan, I think of forcing Meta to divest. Of course, Meta says, but wait a minute, wait a minute, Yana, you gave us permission to buy him in the first place. A key court has ruled that the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp does not violate US antitrust. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington said the FTC failed to prove the deals allowed the tech giant to illegally monopolize the social networking market. Actually an interesting opinion. This is interesting. We're seeing more and more of these judges. Remember the Google judge in the Google search monopoly case saying, well, a year ago we ruled that Google was a monopoly, but a year later AI seems to be taking over Internet search. So we really aren't going to punish them for this. Now the judge in this case, Judge Boasberg, says with apps surging and receding, chasing one craze and moving on from others and adding new features with each passing year, the FTC has understandably struggled to fix the boundaries of Meta's product market. Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show it continues to hold such power. Now we hold that the FTC has not done so. Victory lapse.

B (49:05)

It's hard to prove a negative. You can't choose an alternate timeline and examine it and say, looking at this timeline, we can tell that this allows you to get here. That's a really, really hard barrier in terms of winning these cases. So it's is as expected. But I think this doesn't also bolster the case that things should be intervened earlier, which I think is the logical conclusion that you should take from this.

A (49:34)

Right. It's unknown whether the FTC will appeal, but experts say unlikely. According to Bloomberg Law. On another front, Europe seems to be scaling back its landmark privacy and a line laws. A lot of people are very happy that the cookie banner law is being modified. I wish they just get rid of it because it's based on the pretty much incorrect notion that cookies are somehow a horrible privacy invasion. That's why you see those pop ups everywhere you go. We even have to do it on some of our sites, all of our sites, because if European viewers come there, we're required by law to pop that up. I stole from Mike Masnick at Tech Dirt. His pop up says, yeah, we use cookies. What about it? What do you care? And then you have one choice, which is okay. The EU apparently is thinking about changing that so that it's a browser setting, a global browser setting. So you can as a user said in your browser, please just. I don't ask me, I don't want cookies or I do want cookies, either one. But that's that.

D (50:54)

We've had to deal with that pretty consistently in my office because we're always rolling up new services and we have to put those banners and warnings on everything. And actually in recent years we found this new sort of attack where people would file nuisance claims to delete their themselves from our databases and our databases don't really contain anything.

A (51:17)

Yeah, we get that all the time.

D (51:18)

Yeah, it takes up our time, it takes up money.

A (51:21)

Yep. They know it's. We got to defend it and we got to go after it.

B (51:24)

And I was just about to launch my startup where I was going to sell ads in the, in the cookie space.

A (51:33)

Damn.

C (51:34)

You just have to make sure that your cookies are still invasive enough that they still have to show the banner and then you can, I mean, you got it.

B (51:42)

Yeah, yeah.

A (51:43)

So I just go to my UBlock origin and I use. There's an annoyance filter that you can turn on that you don't see cookies, those, those cookie banners. So in a way, I do have a global browser setting. It's called UBlock origin. That's the problem with, with these kind of regulations is that they end up teaching people how to, you know, end around them was.

B (52:05)

Or perplexity clicking those but banners.

A (52:09)

I don't know. That's a good question. What does perplexity do when it goes to a site and looks at it? Yeah, I have to. We'll have to ask. I have no idea.

B (52:18)

Did it prove it was over 18?

C (52:22)

We need a selfie of perplexity.

A (52:25)

Look left, look right, smile. Let's see. They're also going to relax or delay landmark AI rules. See, this is one thing somebody said to me. I don't know if this is true, but it was a credible source that said this is the difference in regulation in the US and in the EU in the Us, we make a law, that law is on the books. That's it, we're done. It's perfect in every way. We're never gonna modify it. And that ban.

B (52:52)

TikTok, Right? Yeah, continue.

A (52:54)

Yeah, well, except for that one. That one different. But in the eu, they see it as an evolve. They see regulation as evolving. And if something doesn't work, you know, they're willing to back off or change it. I don't know if that's the case, but this is an example.

D (53:09)

It's a guideline. The European way is more guideline than hard and fast rule. You know, we want you to get to a certain end. We think this rule, this law, will help you get towards that end. If it doesn't help you get towards that end, we'll find something else.

A (53:23)

In the US There was a story last week which I covered, and I wish I hadn't now, that the President was considering an executive order to ban state regulation of AI. Since then, there's been stories saying, no, no, they decided not to do that because they think they can add it to the Defense appropriations bill. They just put it in there. It's got to pass. Nobody's going to say no to Defense Appropriations. And then it'll just be the law of the land. They won't have to do an executive order.

C (53:57)

Is this executive order isn't really lawmaking?

A (53:59)

Right. Better to make it a law. Why not? So my question, is that a good thing or not?

C (54:11)

Well, I feel like it's similar to a lot of Internet regulation where it's like, a lot of the time it doesn't make sense for it to be done even at the country level. But then in the US doing it at the state level is just like, how are we possibly going to enforce that across state lines?

A (54:30)

Yeah, I'm sure if I were Google or OpenAI, I would not be thrilled. Because then there's 50, potentially 50 different. A patchwork of 50 different laws.

C (54:40)

But also, on the other hand, I have a little bit more confidence in the state's ability to regulate at this current moment.

A (54:49)

I don't think the feds have any interest in regulating AI at all right now.

C (54:53)

Yeah. And honestly, we've seen some fairly good examples of states doing a good job on regulating some digital things. I mean, like, if you look at New York and their digital currency enforcement, it was actually pretty good that New York was taking a pretty strong stance against crypto fraud. And that did, I think, improve some things. Although some companies just stopped doing business in New York. But I Think there are good examples of good state level digital regulations. So I don't think it's impossible for it to happen, but I think just from a practical standpoint, it's very challenging to implement.

A (55:32)

One of the things California did is they made a law that said if you're an AI chatbot, you have to identify yourself as AI, which seems like a very minor but appropriate.

C (55:41)

It's like if you're a policeman, you have to tell me or else it's entrapment.

A (55:45)

Yeah, I don't know if that's the rule.

C (55:47)

Don't.

D (55:49)

I think actually the US can take a page from the European Parliament here because the recognition when they were meeting and talking about AI, and actually we've had the same discussions in places like Italy and in England, was that that people generally understand that there is an oncoming threat from AI. They understand that it can be abused, that it is a very powerful tool. But they also recognize that at the moment the threat is so diffuse and vague that any legislation you make right now is going to land wrong. And so that's basically what the EU is doing. They're saying we need to wait to see where the problems are before we actually start legislating to fix the problems, which I think sounds like a good idea. The United States needs to do the same thing. Is there going to be disruption from AI? Absolutely. Is all that disruption going to be bad? Not necessarily. Is there going to be abuse? Absolutely. Do we know where that abuse is going to take place? No, we don't. So trying to legislate either through putting something into an appropriations bill or making a straight up law is probably not a great idea at the moment.

C (56:57)

I mean, I think the goal of the, I think the goal of the appropriations law would be to avoid states doing any sort of regulation rather than imposing some.

D (57:06)

But I mean, even then you're, you're taking a stand, you're saying, no, no, everything they're doing is great. And now it's, it's on the books. So if you want to, if you want to then address another issue.

C (57:15)

Right.

D (57:15)

You're going to have to repeal that law. So why do it in the first place? Because we know, we know that it's being abused. Is it actionable? Is it something that we can fix with the legislation? We don't know yet. It's, it's really, it's, it's. Right now it is. We are afraid of AI like we were afraid of radiation back in the 80s where it's all around us and everyone's Scared and so we're going to panic. Well, that's not a good way to go into legislation.

A (57:43)

AI is the new radioactive banana, Is that what you're saying?

D (57:46)

Yeah. Oh, show title.

A (57:50)

That's why I said it. Sometimes I throw in things just so I have a show title. It's a. You could. Your choice. Radioactive banana, Radioactive shrimp. You get to choose.

B (57:58)

We're talking just really quickly, just like the first Trump term, where they're talking about the healthcare and they're trying to do repeal and replace.

A (58:10)

Right.

B (58:11)

And they're trying really hard to do the repeal part and didn't have a plan for the replacement, the replace. And so if they want us still to be safe, it's not. Let's get rid of all legislation and let's figure it out later. They should be focusing on the figuring out later now part if they're going to be removing these safeguards for some communities, some states.

A (58:33)

I think people look at what happened with the Internet and particularly with social media, which was completely unregulated for the first decade, and say, oops, maybe we should have thought harder about that because now what we're trying to do isn't working so very well and we've got a whole generation perhaps of kids who are damaged by it. So they're saying, well, maybe we need to do something about AI. But I have to say, with David Sachs in the White House and lots of money flowing in, you know, for a ballroom from AI companies, it seems unlikely that there'll be any support in the federal government for any regulation at all.

C (59:11)

There's also the AI super pacs which are springing up and very much styling, lots of money in the image of the crypto super PACs which they thought were very successful. So that should be something to watch in the.

A (59:24)

Do you think the crypto industry elected Donald Trump?

C (59:27)

No, no, but I, I do think that didn't hurt. It didn't hurt, yeah. And there was certainly money in it.

A (59:33)

But they're getting what they wanted.

C (59:35)

Well, well, to some extent. I mean, bitcoin's at an all time low right now. Or not.

A (59:39)

I don't think the president has much local impact on the value of bitcoin. I mean, he did everything.

D (59:44)

You know, it only has an impact when it goes up.

A (59:47)

Leo?

C (59:47)

Yes.

A (59:48)

The Gen act might have been the problem with this, that supporting stablecoin might have undermined bitcoin a little bit. What do you think, Molly? Is that, that's.

C (59:56)

I don't think that's accurate. No.

D (59:58)

Well, I mean, look Bitcoin has always been a fantastically speculative financial instrument, tying.

A (60:04)

It to a stable nothing.

D (60:06)

Yeah, exactly that. I'm with Molly. I don't think it had a huge effort, but I think the very idea of trying to tie it to a currency that's a non starter, I mean.

C (60:17)

I think the stablecoin legislation legitimized stablecoins more, which brought more money into the crypto ecosystem, which is good for bitcoin prices. So I don't think that stablecoins undermine bitcoin.

A (60:28)

It was a net positive.

C (60:29)

But, you know, I mean, people were calling bitcoin, you know, bitcoin's run that we saw during the last year the Trump pump, because, you know, he was responsible for the executive order on the digital assets stockpile, which people were very excited about because they thought the government was going to start buying bitcoin.

A (60:45)

Yeah. What happened to that? Don't we have a strategic bitcoin reserve?

C (60:49)

Yes and no. We, we have it. No one knows how much is in it and there's most of it's way.

A (60:54)

Confiscated to it, right?

C (60:56)

Yes. Yeah. I mean, right now pretty much the only assets that are in it are confiscated and like released crypto assets that are no longer involved in an active criminal investigation.

A (61:08)

And I have to say that the, the Trump and Melania meme coin rug pull didn't help overall in the confidence people have in cryptocurrencies.

D (61:18)

I mean, just because it dropped 98.7% in volume doesn't mean that it's a rug pull.

A (61:24)

It could still go up. I'm, I'm holding diamond hands.

C (61:28)

I was actually just talking about this with a couple of journalists where I am really interested to see what happens if Trump basically loses some of his power or if he becomes less popular. If Trump, you know, the balance of power shifts in the midterms or of course, after his presidency, what the ramifications are going to be for crypto because the crypto industry has so tightly tied themselves to Trump that if Trump goes down, you know, I'm sort of wondering what the effect is going to be for crypto, which is now seen as sort of one in the same.

D (62:03)

Well, they're going to lose their access to free pardons. I mean, that's going to be.

C (62:07)

And that will be devastating.

A (62:08)

They've never been free. Robert, I'm sorry, I just have to correct you there. There's a set fee, there's a set price. You just have to know what it is. Is it offensive that he pardoned the coin? The coinbase yes.

C (62:24)

Binance.

A (62:25)

Binance. Not Coinbase. Binance.

D (62:27)

That wasn't any political persecution. That was a man admitting that he had committed crimes. And not Bitcoin. Crypto crimes. Actual financial crimes.

A (62:37)

Yeah.

D (62:38)

So, I mean, if you're pardoning that just because you like the fact that he's in crypto, what are we doing? You want to undermine the trust in the government.

A (62:47)

It seems like that's the kind of thing that undermines the value of a cryptocurrency, not supports it.

B (62:53)

The thing is, people and institutions are moving forward. The bigger banks, like, I think Chase said that they're going to be releasing a stablecoin, right?

A (63:04)

Yeah.

B (63:04)

And so once these are cemented into institutional financial backing and transaction systems, you can't. If, if Trump went away, those aren't just going to be unwound. I think those are going to keep moving forward because they have, they have, they have now skin in the game, even the larger banks, to make sure that this works.

C (63:26)

Yeah, yeah. Although I would be hesitant about those announcements that, like such and such bank is releasing whatever or they're, you know, piloting this, because there are a lot of announcements that are like, we're doing a research study on the possibility of releasing a stablecoin something, and then you look at it like, like 10 months later and it's. It's totally tanked. Yeah. So I think the only.

D (63:47)

Are those just.

B (63:48)

Are that's.

D (63:49)

Are those just all pump and dumps? I mean, is that why they release those? Because I see those all the time.

C (63:53)

It's usually just pr, you know, the.

A (63:56)

Bank, just to reassure investors that we are on top of things. And if this turns out to be the next big thing, we're there. And if not, we never really were going to do this.

B (64:07)

I'm going to give, like, the positive side of this. Of stablecoins, one is being able to transfer money across borders without having to go through a separate entity, which they take their chunk or their fees.

C (64:21)

That's one part of why they're a separate entity.

D (64:25)

They transfer the stablecoin.

A (64:27)

Yeah, but the commission's lower. Right.

B (64:30)

Unless you have your own. If you have your own stablecoin.

A (64:34)

So I want Wesley coins.

C (64:37)

So what do you mean if you have your own.

A (64:40)

Chase doesn't pay anything.

C (64:42)

But then you have to. What happens when you want to actually convert that into money you can spend at an establishment? You're still having to cash it out.

B (64:50)

If they're on both ends of the transaction of the transmission and they are able to use their own Infrastructure to convert it back into fiat for the local currency. And so the other part is when the time that they're holding real fiat that's converted into stable coin, they're able to lend that out. And so it actually makes them more liquid because they can use that money for loans, they can use that money for other capital intensive projects.

C (65:23)

They're able to lend it.

A (65:25)

If you do that at scale pretty.

C (65:27)

Carefully, especially under genius, they're going to.

D (65:30)

Be fairly carefully run afoul of money, money laundering laws, I mean, immediately, if you're doing it that at scale.

C (65:38)

Well, it's also just a liquidity issue, which is like you need to be able to redeem your stable coins and if they're loaned out to some guy who's starting a business, like you can't just be like, hey, we need those back because our stablecoin guy wants them. So usually they're in like cash or very short term treasuries.

B (65:53)

They have to be backed short term treasuries. So like they could still. Well, yes, you're 100% right. I am not saying this exactly correct. I wish I had the vocabulary. But basically the more money that they're given, they can make money off the money that they got for stablecoin is what I say. But yes, the last time she was on it needs to be a one to one.

A (66:14)

Explain stablecoin. And now we're still trying to figure it out.

C (66:18)

It's what I do. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that's true. But you know, there's, you could sort of say the same thing about banking just in general, which is that, you know, they take deposits, they make loans, you know, it's kind of the same deal. But I mean, I do agree that, you know, there are improvements to be made around, you know, the price of transferring currency. It should just be free, right? Or it should be much cheaper and faster, which is, you know what people say we need stablecoins to do. I'm not convinced we need stablecoins to just improve currency transfer.

A (66:50)

Let's take a break because I need to go sell my entire stablecoin investment. But your Wesley coin, my west coin, it's good. It's going to be good. Wesley Faulkner is here. He's got his very own stablecoin. No, he doesn't. He's the founder of works-not-working.com which opens one week from today.

B (67:12)

Molly, I'd like to say for the record, yes, if you look at me, I should be considered unstable.

A (67:18)

Unstable coin, that's an idea. I want to start some unstable coin. Father Robert, you introduced us to dogecoin. Maybe. Yeah. There you go.

D (67:29)

This, this is my stable coin.

A (67:31)

This is a lira.

D (67:33)

It's the Vatican euro.

A (67:35)

The Vatican has its own euro. I guess we have.

D (67:37)

We have a limited amount of euros.

A (67:39)

Wow.

D (67:40)

And I have what this is. You can't see it. This is the one that has Pope Francis on it. So this is never beautiful, it's never.

A (67:45)

Been touched, it's never been shiny. Wow. Of course, every state in the EU has to have its own version of the, of the euro. Right.

D (67:56)

They're so hard to get though, because I don't, I don't buy them from the gift store because I'm not paying €5 for 50 cent piece.

A (68:04)

That's the main point of it, isn't it? That you can sell it at the gift store. I would imagine.

D (68:07)

But if you buy from the Vatican market like once every six months or so, your change will come and you might get one.

A (68:15)

Nice.

C (68:15)

Kind of nice.

A (68:17)

Also here, Molly White, who will not explain Bitcoin or stablecoin again. This is it. I hope you got it the last time I've. The last. This is the last time I'm going to ask you to do that. I had a lovely night's sleep last night thanks to our sponsor, Helix Sleep. I wanted to tell you about it. I Learned that every six to eight, maybe six to 10, if you really want to stretch your ears, you should replace your mattress. Mattresses break in, they get, get saggy, they lose their resiliency. So a couple months ago, Lisa and I were realized that our mattress was eight years old. It was maybe time to get a new one. And I went out and did some research and I have to say, after looking at all the reviews, I picked Helix Sleep and I could not be happier. We love our Helix Sleep, especially now that up in the northern hemisphere it's getting a little chillier. We're spending more time indoors, cuddled up, reading books. We got the electric blanket on high. The kitty cat comes in there. This would be a good time if you're going to spend more time in your bed to get a new mattress. Stay comfortable inside with your Helix mattress. And I have to say for our listeners in southern hemisphere, which we have quite a few like Darren. I know summer's here, it's going to get hot. There's nothing like the cool, breathing coolness of a Helix mattress. No more night sweats. It's just wonderful. And no back pain. It supports you perfectly. No Motion transfer. When the dog jumps in the bed, you don't have to go earthquake. Don't settle for a mattress made overseas with low quality and questionable materials. Rest assured, your Helix mattress is assembled, packaged and shipped from Arizona US made within days of placing your order. It doesn't spend months on a container ship and it doesn't smell. You don't open the box and you smell like container ship. No, it's nice, it's fresh. One of the things we did, we went to the Helix site, helixsleep.com TWIT and we took the Helix sleep quiz which asks you, you know what your style of sleeping is. I'm a, I'm a stomach sleeper, slash side sleeper. And so they help you pick the perfect mattress for your sleep needs, your personal preferences. We got a lovely mattress and I have to say my sleep score going way up. In fact, there's scientific proof. In a Wesper sleep study, Helix measured the sleep performance participants after switching from their old mattress to a Helix mattress. What we did and the study found that 82% of participants saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle. Participants on average achieved 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night. That is a big difference in your overall sense of well being, your overall health. On average, participants achieve 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. Sleep longer, sounder, better. And that's been my experience too time and time again. Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand. This is what sold US Wired tested 100 bed in a box mattresses. Number one their top pick, the Helix Midnight Luxe hybrid is the best bed you can buy online. That's the one we got. Forbes has tested 90 beds so far this year to find the very best mattress for every sleeper. They also recommend as their top pick, the Helix Midnight Luxe. Now's a great time to shop. Go to helixsleep.com twit for 27% off site wide during their Black Friday sale. Best ofWeb that's helixsleep.com TWIT 27% off for the Black Friday sale. Best of web now this offer ends December 1st. When you go there, make sure you enter our show name into the post purchase survey. That way they know we sent you. That's very important to us. And if you're listening, after the sale ends, gotta still check them out. Helixsleep.com Twitter we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. I don't know if you've seen the ads for Microsoft Windows. Talk to your computer. It says talk to your Computer. The computer has this little tinny voice. Well, according to the Verge, talking to Windows Copilot AI makes a computer feel incompetent. The Verge tested all of the queries in those ads, and unlike the ad, they did not do very well at all. They said multiple versions of the ad are posted online and even airing on NFL games. Surely, says the Virgin, must be easy to replicate the specific task Microsoft wants millions of people to see. Well, you know that microphone, the HyperX Quadcast 2S microphone, the one, the Rainbow microphone in the ad? If you've seen the ad, you know what I'm talking about. And the woman on the ad system, what mic is she using in this video? So independently, Antonio G. Di Benedetto, writing for the Verge, tried it. What mic is she using? In my test, the assistant first gave me the basics about the benefits of a dynamic microphone. I do agree with that. That's what we use. Then, unprompted, it started talking to me like I was the person in the video, not the person asking about the person in the video. It said, and I'll do this in the best copilot impression. I can see your setup right now, and I'm noticing you have a big setup there. Hey, big boy, I like your setup. And then it told me the mic in question was actually the first generation HyperX Quadcast. To be fair to Benedetto writes, HyperX makes a lot of similar looking mics. Although at one point it said without seeing. I don't know why it sounds like Mickey Mouse. Without seeing the exact lighting pattern or any specific features, it's hard to say definitively what model it is, despite it being bathed in RGB lighting in the image. On two other occasions, it identified the mic as a Shure SM7B. And when I asked, as they did in the ad, where can I get it? Nearby, it gave me a dead link to Amazon and then a correct link to the wrong mic at Best Buy. I'll go on. The ads also show a person asking, what sort of thrust does this thing have on it? No, get your mind out of the gutter. He's talking about a PowerPoint presentation about the Saturn V rocket. Unlike the ad, Copilot Vision could not identify the rocket from the image or from the words Saturn V visible on the screen. When I told Copilot it's a Saturn V, it told me its thrust is generally measured in Newtons or kilonewtons, then gave me an estimated thrust of 7.5 million pounds.

D (75:09)

Huh?

A (75:10)

Huh? I can go on. It's a moron. It's basically Siri or Amazon's Alexa. They're all morons. Telling copilot, oh, sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up, go away. Telling copilot to quote, run some simulations on burn time as the guy does in the ad, led to it telling me I can't, but maybe you want to try Matlab instead. It goes on.

B (75:39)

Yeah, the ads who thought like an indeterminate system would make you have virtual like infinite.

A (75:47)

But why does Microsoft do this? Didn't they try it?

B (75:51)

They're selling the sizzle, they need to sell computers. Everyone who is not familiar with AI saying how do I get started? And this is the answer that they're looking for for people who don't know. And I have to say, like, visual interpretation of what you see is not very easy. I'm not sure if we'll talk about it, but I've been testing out Anti.

A (76:12)

Gravity which is oh, Google's new ideas.

C (76:17)

To say in general.

A (76:18)

Oh, Google's invented antigravity. That's fantastic. I've been waiting for that.

B (76:23)

It does sound like it does jumping really high.

A (76:25)

You know the theory on the name, by the way, I saw this on Reddit, is that Google wants to co opt the autocompletes for antitrust so that when you type start typing anti instead of antitrust, you type Google anti. It goes Google oh, anti gravity. Oh yeah, Devious.

B (76:42)

That's smart.

A (76:43)

Yeah.

B (76:44)

But there's several times where I've had it to use the browser for visual checking of any type of work that it's done. Like add a hero image to this using nanobanana and it'll go through and it'll put the layering and the image behind it and it'll say that it's still there even though it's not visually there. When it spins up the browser, it just looks at it. It's like, yeah, I see it, I see it. It lies all the time.

A (77:10)

It's trying to please you, Wesley, trying to make you happy.

B (77:15)

Yeah, everything worked. Yeah. No, visually. So being able to have it use to have a random image and understanding what's going on and what you're talking about, it is not going to work every single time. And for the example that I posed, one of it was like text layout and one of the it was like dark mode, so the text was white, except for portion of it was black and then the rest of it was white where it was trying to emphasize a specific word. And I said, tell me why, tell me what Color. You see when you read this phrase and then it says, oh, now I can't see it. It's just like one of those things.

A (77:58)

Where it's like, I knew what color it was, but I'm not telling you.

B (78:02)

Yeah, this thing is so buggy that.

A (78:07)

I have to say this is bad timing because Google's Gemini 3 is pretty impressive. I haven't tried any Gravity yet, but the nanobanano Pro is really good. AI generator. Both of those came out this week. Microsoft might be a little bit in the Apple position of having kind of laggard capabilities.

C (78:28)

I feel like I've never seen the use. Maybe I'm just like old and stuck in my ways, but like I have never seen the use case of like 90% of the voice activated agents. Like, I, I don't want to talk to my laptop. It has a keyboard.

A (78:47)

Like, people look so dopey in these ads.

C (78:50)

Yeah.

A (78:51)

And even then, even in the ads, the roommates going, what are you doing?

C (78:53)

Yeah, well, yeah, we're like, do these people never work in an office? Like, can you just imagine you're all of your co workers being like, computer, you know, tell me the.

A (79:03)

But I have to say, Claude code is really amazing. What did you use to vibe code that Australian teenager workaround Robert?

D (79:12)

Oh, no, that was just open AI.

A (79:15)

Okay, so you just did.

D (79:16)

I didn't even do anything special. I mean, seriously. It was just from their, their GitHub training.

A (79:21)

Huh. Interesting. I know, I'm, I'm pretty. So this is, this is kind of where we are with AI now. It's simultaneously mind blowingly good and horrifically stupid.

B (79:33)

It's marketing being told to sell this. That's why you have ads like this. They're like, hey, this is what we're selling. And they throw it over the wall. And marketing's like, okay, well this sounds pretty cool. This sounds the future we're living in now. Does it work?

A (79:47)

I don't care.

B (79:47)

It's.

C (79:48)

At least these were a little bit more realistic than those super bowl commercials where it was like, code me an entire open world video game or something like that. It was like, yeah, sure, I need it.

A (79:59)

Another copy of Flappy Bird. Can you get that done quick?

D (80:03)

I mean, the thing is these are all, all LLMs are just probability machines or probability generator generators. And it depends on the architecture, it depends on the data that you're training it on. So the companies that have figured it out, they've realized, oh no, we can sell a video AI generator, but we have it trained on a Very specific subset of data. Microsoft is still trying to do this sort of general LLM and it does not work. There's, it's just, it's simply if you try to make it do too many things, voice recognition, image recognition, and at the same time include the, the generative conversational AI pieces, it doesn't work, it breaks. So I mean, at some point they're going to figure out well no, you have to start combining different LLMs in order to make, make an outcome that isn't completely embarrassing.

A (80:51)

Well, there might be a side negative to this because there is a distribution of Linux I haven't used it called Zorin that is aimed at Windows users. It looks like Windows, huh? Zorin Mumzani is now the mayor of New York. So there. How does that happen?

C (81:09)

We've elected our first AI, first Linux.

A (81:12)

Distro as a mayor. No Z O R I N O S In October they claimed they had 100,000 downloads in a little over two days following Microsoft's end of support. Remember October 15th for Windows 10. Now a month later they're saying 780,000 people using a Windows PC downloaded it in the last month. A million downloads since October 14th.

C (81:41)

When it's finally the year of Linux on the desktop.

A (81:44)

Hallelujah, we're here. It happened. It actually Linux is now up TO I think 4% of desktops, which is kind of remarkable. And Apple was 4% for a long time with the Mac.

D (81:58)

I mean, I'd love to go.

A (82:01)

I don't think Linux is for everybody, but it's gotten to the point where it's a lot easier to use.

D (82:09)

Well, you've got Microsoft admitting that most of their features in Windows 11 are broken. So I mean, at some point they're just gonna give up.

B (82:18)

Games run better on Steam than they do on Windows.

A (82:21)

Well that's the interesting thing. So of course Valve announced the Steam machine last week, which is their next generation computer console designed for the. They did a Steam machine eight years ago that was not so hot. But this one now there's a lot of games that most games run on it because of the Proton layer. It's a Linux box, but it's got the Proton compatibility layer which they didn't have eight years ago. There's still a number of big AAA titles that won't work on it because they have anti cheat code which doesn't run on Linux. But in a way Steam is pushing forward, at least for gamers. The idea that you can play some pretty, you know, a lot of really good games Some of the games you play, Robert, on not just the Steam machine, but any Linux box now, thanks to Proton.

D (83:11)

Really the only thing that's keeping me on Windows for my personal machines is that I have to do. I have to use the Adobe Editing suite. Yeah, and that's. That's Windows or Mac that.

A (83:21)

Although DaVinci Resolve is Linux now for free.

D (83:24)

Exactly. So actually we started playing with DaVinci Resolve. Half of the team is redoing our projects in Resolve. If we get to the point where we feel that we can do most of the work with Resolve, we're switching. And at that point I'm all 100% Linux shop.

A (83:40)

I am. I bought the. I've mentioned this before, so I apologize if I'm boring you folks, but I bought the Framework Desktop for. I wanted to play with local AIs and it's running Linux and it's. It. It's running a Linux. It's optimized for the AMD processor and the AMD's GPU. It's called cache OS and it's so. It's so much faster than my Mac. So much faster than any Windows machine ever. It's just. It's beautiful, it's elegant, it's responsive, it's. It's reliable. It makes snapshots. Every time I install something or change configuration, it makes a snapshot. It makes it very easy to roll back things that Windows System Restore never really did work. I just feel like. I don't know, I'm an advocate for Linux on the desktop.

D (84:24)

Wait, what LLM are you running on that?

A (84:25)

Leo So I run LM Studio so I can use almost anything, but because I got the highest end, it's a STRIX Halo. So it's the AMD395AI plus with 128 gigs of RAM, so it has a lot of VRAM. I think it can go up to 96 gigs jam. So I'm able to run ChatGPT's OSS GPT, OSS 120, the big one. But you know what's interesting? There are a lot of smaller models now from QN and others that are really quite.

D (84:54)

I'm still stuck on Mistral 7B.

A (84:56)

I mean, Mistral's great. There's some really good. Now, I admit local AI is nowhere near what I'm Getting from Gemini 3 for instance, which is.

D (85:07)

But that's the only option my organization has the data, the information that we deal with is sensitive. It can in no way shape or form touch the Internet because you Know.

A (85:17)

All about my sins.

D (85:18)

Exactly. Well, we've got those indulgences.

C (85:21)

Yeah.

D (85:24)

Call back, tell me more. No, But. But I mean.

A (85:28)

So you're not allowed to use SAS AI applications.

D (85:32)

No.

A (85:33)

100. So you have to do it locally.

D (85:37)

It's either local and. For example, I am. I am building up an LLM right now that we will use in what we call our owl. It's the big meeting place where important things happen. Because we would like to use LLMs for all of our translations. The translators have always been the biggest problem because, you know, when we have one of these meetings, we could have 10 different languages, 12 different languages, and they're all what we call closed forms. They're. They. So they have to be priests or nuns or religious who can be sworn to secrecy.

C (86:06)

Wow.

D (86:07)

And if I could replace Those all with LLMs, everyone would be very happy.

A (86:11)

Now I see the headlines in newspapers all over the world. Vatican priests sworn to secrecy. But we won't. We won't mention that.

D (86:19)

I mean, 99 of the stuff is really.

A (86:21)

Privacy is a better word than secrecy, right?

B (86:24)

The.

A (86:25)

The seal of the confession.

D (86:27)

Here's. Here's a little inside baseball story for you, Leo. There was at one point, we were having one of these meetings, and there was a participant, member of the clergy, who. He was going on and on and on and on. And the man who did the translation from Italian to English, I'm hearing nothing on the channel, so I'm like, is something. Something wrong? The guy's talking for, like, five minutes, and then he gets to the end, and the translator just says, no. And it's like, yeah, okay, that's. That's human intelligence realizing.

B (86:59)

And.

D (86:59)

No, none of this matters. Nobody said was no.

B (87:03)

No.

A (87:04)

You'll never hear an AI just say no. That's a really great idea. You're super smart, but, no. I'm sorry, Molly. I didn't mean to step on you.

C (87:14)

I was gonna say, I feel like AIs should maybe do that more just.

A (87:17)

Yes.

C (87:18)

No.

A (87:18)

Yeah, you can tell.

C (87:19)

Bad idea.

A (87:21)

I told my AI, my chat, GPT5.1 to be concise, professional. Never say nice things about me.

D (87:29)

We'll call it the Hold My Beer LLM.

A (87:32)

Yeah. Hold my Beer.

D (87:35)

Hold my Bear.

A (87:35)

Hold my Bear. Fortnite, this is an interesting gaming story. Then we'll move on. Fortnite is getting Unity. Now, Fortnite comes from Epic Games, the creators of the REAL engine, which is the dominant gaming engine, but they've decided to also allow Unity. That's interesting, right?

D (87:58)

So are they rewriting it in Unity.

A (88:01)

No, they're just going to have. So you can now write. I, I, I am not up on the the latest with Fortnite because I every time I play I get killed right away so.

C (88:10)

But apparently past the nine year old face recognition.

A (88:13)

Exactly. They won't let me in. They say you're too young. Next time I'm gonna come in as Sabrina Carpenter and I think I'll be able to get in anyway. The apparently you could do like Roblox you could do, you can do like oh, kind of standalone. I know that experiences in Fortnite creator made experiences and I think this is actually what Epic is saying is we want to make Fortnite a platform like Roblox, but maybe more, I don't know.

B (88:41)

Is this related to the Apple agreement about outside payment systems? And I know that ah, now that.

A (88:48)

They now that Epic thinks it's going to be able to have a store, they could do it. And Google, Google made a deal. Apple's going to be forced to make a deal. Interesting.

B (88:58)

Yeah. So them releasing the Apple tax allows them to do more things where they can take some of that recapture.

A (89:06)

I didn't know this. By the end of 2024, Fortnite had 70,000 total creators, according to the Verge publishing, nearly 200,000 islands, which is what they call these, you know, standalone experiences. But Unity.

D (89:23)

So is everything going to be a platform now?

A (89:25)

Sorry?

D (89:26)

Is everything going to be a platform now? Yeah, it's going to have a platform.

A (89:29)

Yeah, everybody's.

D (89:30)

Epic's going to have a platform. Minecraft will become a platform.

A (89:33)

I'd like to announce the new Twit platform. That's right, build your own podcast platform. We'll provide you with an AI. You can make your own or you can have the AI do it for you.

D (89:43)

You know Leo, you could actually pitch that at TechCrunch Disrupt. I totally could probably get, I'd probably get investors.

A (89:50)

This is where I'm a failure in life. I just don't know how to make money.

B (89:58)

Well, you've got AI now.

D (89:59)

Yeah.

B (90:00)

Launch your own Bitcoin or cryptocurrency and.

A (90:02)

You can dollar sign Leo.

D (90:05)

Yeah, we've got an AI backed stablecoin that links into Bitcoin and provides age verification. Oh my gosh, you're hitting all the buzzwords, Leo something.

A (90:16)

Some quantum in there. Yeah.

C (90:18)

Resistance twit coin.

A (90:22)

Quantum resistant twit coin. See Molly, you really missed your call.

C (90:27)

I think that very often actually.

D (90:29)

And Leo's Leo Stablecoin will be called Gold Pressed Latinum.

A (90:36)

There we go.

D (90:36)

Now we get all the Trekkies.

A (90:38)

Twitcoin looks a little too much like Twitcon, but okay, I think we're in the right ballpark. We'll have to. Well, let's run it up the flagpole and see who spits or whatever they say in business. You're watching this week at tech. Wesley Faulkner, Molly White. Father Robert Balasaire. So glad to have you here. You here today. He. He answers to a higher authority.

D (91:03)

Oh, there was that commercial. Was it the hot dog commercial?

A (91:07)

Hebrew National.

D (91:08)

Yeah, Hebrew National. Thank you, thank you.

A (91:11)

Because they were kosher. Our hot dogs are better because we answer to a higher, higher power. Boy, that takes me back.

D (91:20)

I'm sorry, I just disrupted your ad read.

A (91:21)

I'm. I'm sorry. I. I wish it were an ad read for hot dogs, to be honest with you.

C (91:26)

It could be.

A (91:27)

Yeah, it could be. No, it's actually an ad read aimed at all the nine year olds in Australia. Our show today, brought to you by ExpressVPN. This is the VPN I use the VPN. I recommend if you have ever gone online. I mean, last time I used it, I think I was at the airport and it said free airport wifi. And I was right about to join it. And then I thought, wait a minute, hold on there. Fortunately, I realized, oh, I have ExpressVPN on my tablet. I'll just launch that and then use the free wi fi. See, ExpressVPN protects you. Protects your privacy. Protects your security. If you've ever. Privacy is really a big part of this. If you've ever browsed in incognito mode, I gotta tell you, it's not as incognito as you might think. Google just settled a $5 billion lawsuit. It was accused of secretly tracking users in incognito mode. Google's defense. Well, your honor, incognito does not mean invisible. Actually said that. In fact, incognito definitely doesn't mean invisible. All your online activity is still 100% visible to Google and to third parties. Unless you use ExpressVPN. This is the one I use, the only VPN I use, the only one I trust when I go online. Especially, like I said, when I'm traveling in airports, coffee shops. When I'm out of the country, ExpressVPN is my go to. Actually, when I'm in the country, ExpressVPN is a great way to avoid geographic restrictions because ExpressVPN invests in their infrastructure. And this is very, very important. You've probably seen ads for free VPNs. Ask any security expert, they'll say no, no, no, no, no. Because if you're not paying for it, they need to pay for their infrastructure somehow. They're selling your information, not ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN goes the extra mile to make sure they don't know anything about, about you. They, they, they created their own. And it's been verified by third party audits. Trusted server runs in ram, cannot write to the hard drive. When you start the server, it spins it up in ram. When you close the server, it's gone. And there is no trace of your visit. That would be enough for anybody else, but if ExpressVPN says no, no, we got to do more. They're using a custom Debian distro on all their servers that every morning they reboot, wipes, the drive starts fresh. So those, those drives, those hard drives are empty. Even if it could write to the hard drive, there's no trace of your visit. This is why everyone needs ExpressVPN. Without ExpressVPN, third parties can still see every website you visit, even if you're using incognito mode. Your Internet service provider could see it, your mobile network provider, the admins of your Wi Fi network. ExpressVPN routes 100% of your traffic through secure encrypted servers, so third parties cannot see your browsing. But ExpressVPN is the best VPN because not only does it hide your IP address, you know you're going to merge on the public Internet with an IP address they provide you. So that makes it really hard to track you because it's different every time. But they also invest again in rotating their IP addresses so they're not obviously from a vpn. And they even have a new technology which is really cool. Zero knowledge. This is an optional technology. Zero knowledge that even they don't know what IP address you're using. I don't. These guys could really rest on their laurels, but they don't. They keep making it better. And the beauty of ExpressVPN, it's easy to use. You fire up the app, you click one button, you're protected. It's, it works on every device. You've got your phone, your laptop, your tablet. They even offer it for routers. In fact, they sell routers if you want, but you can also add it to your router or some models and then your whole house is protected. You could stay private on the go. You could stay private when you're home. ExpressVPN's rated number one by Top Tech reviewers like CNET and the Verge. Secure your online data today. Visit expressvpn.com Twitter E X P R E S S vpn.com TWIT Find out how you can get up to four extra months. Expressvpn.com TWIT Privacy, security and Netflix. Anywhere you want to be. I love ExpressVPN. Here's a story. I don't want to mock them, but. So the International association of Cryptologic Research, iacr, that's one of the world's premier security organizations, had its annual leadership election, which they had to cancel because they lost the encryption key needed to unlock the results. They said Friday. The votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, which is an open source voting system that uses peer reviewed crypto to cast and count votes in a verifiable, confidential and privacy preserving way. I mean, this is good. This is better than locking you up in a conclave and burning the votes afterwards. This is even better than putting on the blockchain, unfortunately. And this is the way they do it. There's. This is. They're cryptographers. They have three members of an election committee that act as independent trustees. To prevent two of them from colluding, each trustee holds a mere one third of the cryptographic key material. This is kind of like how ICANN rotates the. The keys, right? They've got like multiple holders, unfortunately. This is from the IACR's press release. One of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key. An honest but unfortunate human mistake.

B (97:26)

Yeah.

A (97:27)

Cannot compute their decryption share. As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process. It is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.

D (97:41)

Okay, yes, it's funny. And yeah, it's kind of a bonehead mistake. However, I give them props. They're having a way around it. If they were, if they lost it, but they were still able to get the results, that would be okay. Now that. Now we've got a story. This is just people forgetting that. Yeah, humans are the worst part in that chain. So you have to account for that.

A (98:02)

Hey, I lost my, my crypto key. I understand my password to my crypto wallet. So these things do happen. They are holding another election. It started Friday and it runs through December 20th. This time will not lose the keys.

C (98:15)

Well, that's why a lot of those crypto projects that use multi signature accounts use like a three out of five or something.

A (98:21)

Oh, That's a good idea. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

C (98:23)

It adds some fault tolerance.

A (98:24)

I kind of feel bad. The trustee who lost the key has resigned. He was so ashamed.

C (98:29)

I wonder how he lost it. You know, like wiped the hard drive, wrote it down on a piece of paper and it flew out the window.

D (98:36)

It was uninterested.

C (98:37)

Yeah, there's so many fun ways to lose keys. I want to know the details.

A (98:43)

I'm looking at the three keys. I'm looking at his public key fingerprint, but yeah, you got to put it somewhere safe. Maybe the hard drive died or it's.

C (98:52)

In a landfill in Wales that he's trying to.

A (98:54)

That's right.

D (98:55)

Have, have they tried Password or password? 1, 2, 3.

A (99:00)

That would work. Or like the Louvre. Louvre. Good password. No one's gonna forget that one anytime soon. Oh my. This is not such a good story. The SEC has dismissed the case against Solar Winds and the Solar Wind ciso. This was, I think, arguably one of the worst cyber attacks ever. Yes, yes, yes.

B (99:25)

I was traveling when that happened.

A (99:28)

So what happened?

B (99:31)

Oh, just the system went down and it crashed so many other systems. I don't, I didn't look at the technical reason.

A (99:38)

It was a Russian cyber attack.

C (99:41)

Yeah.

A (99:42)

And the SEC said, this is a failure on your, your part and we're going to hold you accountable. They sued Solar Winds and the, the CISO that was tied to the Russia linked cyber security attack. They had, the SEC said they had violated US security laws by concealing. Oh, this is the other thing. They knew that it happened and they concealed it. They delayed it, they delayed the result, which, correct me if I'm wrong, Father Robert, but Solar Winds was a security tool used by many, many companies. So the fact that it had been breached meant all of those companies were vulnerable. And so the, the follow on impact of this was devastating.

D (100:24)

Correct.

A (100:24)

Yeah.

D (100:25)

These companies had been relying on SolarWinds to help support their, secure their networks. And so when the Solar Wind software itself was exploited, it essentially opened up all those networks to the attacker. Now, SolarWinds should have, should have immediately told their users there's something wrong. Please shut down the software. Please check your networks, please secure them. But they were, they immediately went into damage control mode. How much of this can we hide? Is this really as bad as it looks like what it is? And they, they just, they hid under the, the veneer of. Well, we're trying to make sure we give you the correct information, but we have a really good protocol for this. It's been established for the last 10 years of when you have a breach that is actively being exploited, you do not wait to get the full information. You tell the people using that software, stop. So unfortunately, the reason why the lawsuit was controversial was they were trying to chain a bunch of different obligations under the law to charge him and it didn't really work. Honestly, we don't have laws for this. We don't have laws for people being criminally idiotic, which is what they were.

A (101:37)

30,000 private and government and federal agencies used SolarWinds Orion software. It was hacked. There was a backdoors hacked in September of 2019. SolarWinds started sending it out in March. Unwittingly sent out updates with the hacked code. In March, more than 18,000 customers installed the malicious updates. Through the code, hackers access SolarWinds customer information technology system, which they could then use to install even more malware. So I mean, I think frankly the impact of the SolarWinds hack is still kind of unknown. Homeland Security used it, the State Department used it, Commerce and Treasury used it. It there was evidence emails were missing from their systems. FireEye, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and Deloitte used it. They were also breached. And of course SolarWinds probably could have, I mean could have told people, but they didn't. And so these companies ended up breached. The it wasn't publicly discovered or reported. Well, the question is discovered when reported when it wasn't reported until December 2020. Which means the attackers may have had as much as 14 months of unfettered access.

D (103:10)

Probably more honestly is probably more 14 months was the point at which they could start tracing large exfiltrations of data. But I mean if AP it was it apt. It was apt 29 if they would have spent many, many months just seeing how far they could take the exploit.

A (103:34)

So Trump members said it was Chinese hackers because I don't know why at the time he was not happy about China, but it turned out it was Russians. Yeah, it was. I don't know if it's a GRU.

D (103:45)

Or but I mean we know that APT 29 is. Is Russia state sponsored?

A (103:51)

Yeah, it's state sponsored for sure. Yeah.

D (103:57)

And just, I mean it's almost unfathomable to think of the amount of information they had access to immediate access to.

A (104:09)

So SEC brought the case in 2023 at the toward the end of the year, a judge dismissed many of the charges, as you say, because they didn't really have a way to charge them. They charged him with a violation of U.S. securities law by not by concealing the vulnerabilities.

C (104:28)

Yeah, I was going to say it's kind of a weird thing to see coming out of the SEC.

A (104:32)

Like all agencies, SolarWinds says the firm is, quote, clearly delighted. I wouldn't take a victory lap at this point. You might. We hope this resolution eases the concerns many CISOs have voiced about this case and the potential chilling effect it threatened to impose on their work. I guess if there's a threat that you could go to jail for not revealing that you'd been hacked. Yeah, that's a chilling effect. Maybe not such a bad idea.

D (105:03)

I mean, if you're a cfo, you can go to jail if you sign off on a fraudulent return. So why can't there be something like that for a cto?

A (105:13)

Get ready. Because, of course, one of the questions about AI is who's going to pay for it? Google has started testing ads in AI search results, Sponsored links at the bottom of AI generated responses. I'm less worried about that because we already see ads on Google search results. I'm much more worried about, you know, chatgpt saying, if you're looking for a hot dog, that Hebrew national is pretty darn good. Right? Yeah.

C (105:41)

I'm curious, like, how clearly delineated they'll be if it'll be like AI reply line break, clear advertisement, or if it's the type of thing that they'll start to sort of.

A (105:53)

It will say sponsored links. So.

C (105:55)

But.

A (105:56)

Yeah, how big will it.

C (105:57)

But I mean, yeah, I was going to say there's some ads that Google has run that are very hard to distinguish as ads.

A (106:04)

So. Yeah, I mean, even if you look.

C (106:05)

At Google search ads or I feel like they're getting less and less clearly marked.

A (106:10)

It's. It's at the bottom. This is Brody Clark on x dot com. This is the organic links. And then the ads are down here. See? Sponsored. Little thing that says sponsored. So if you're searching for emergency plumbers, you might get a little ad at the bottom.

B (106:32)

I wonder if they'll like, make a YouTube influencer and just make a whole new video of.

A (106:37)

Hey, hey, you know, I see you're searching for my plumber. I got this friend Joe down the street. He's fantastic.

D (106:47)

I mean, will they.

A (106:48)

That's what worries me more, is that cryptic ads, if you ever label it sponsored. Okay. It's got to be clear, though.

D (106:56)

But now there's sponsored ads. But there's AI generated sponsored ads that are trying to personalize it.

A (107:04)

Yeah, that would worry me a little bit more. I'm just saying.

C (107:08)

And I wonder, like, as far as truth and advertising regulations go, what happens when the AI lies about your product? Like, who is held responsible for that?

A (107:17)

Right.

B (107:20)

That is a good call.

A (107:24)

I'm running out of stories. Wait a minute. We never had. This never happens. Molly, what's the, what's the biggest story in your world these days that you're most worried about?

C (107:38)

That's an interesting question.

A (107:40)

I mean, I think, is it always crypto? I mean, or.

C (107:45)

Usually. Because that's what I write. Well, I would say if you're asking me what I'm most worried about, it's usually not crypto. But if you're asking me about the stories that I'm following.

A (107:54)

Right.

C (107:54)

Usually crypto.

A (107:56)

Right.

C (107:57)

I think right now one of the big things I'm focusing on is the market structure, regulation, or legislation that's being drafted and that they're trying to push through the Senate by the end of the year.

A (108:08)

But question, Tell me about that. I don't even know anything. See, this is, this is why we got you on. You follow this stuff. What is this market structure legislation?

C (108:16)

Yeah, so they've been working on it all year. It's sort of, you know, the Genius act obviously passed earlier this year that was very specific to stablecoins. This is meant to be the overarching framework for how crypto will be regulated in the United States, including which agencies are responsible for it and things like that. Which has always been sort of the big burning question in crypto is, is it the SEC or the CFTC or some other agency? So they've been working on draft legislation for the better part of the year. There was a bill called the Clarity act that passed through the House. The Senate decided instead that they were going to draft their own market structure bill. Now there's actually two drafts. There's one of them in Senate Banking and one of them in Senate ag. And so they have to sign off on the committee versions of the bills and then consolidate them somehow and then bring them to the Senate floor. And they're trying to get this all done before too much focus shifts over to the midterms because they're worried that that will just completely derail any progress on actual law. And then by the time the midterms are over, there might be a less crypto friendly Congress. You'll be less willing to pass legislation that's essentially written by the crypto industry. So I've been watching it very closely because it'll be interesting to see if and when and what they are able to pass into law.

A (109:48)

Who's pushing this Is this coming from the White House or crypto industry? Yeah, and they have tame Congress critters that they've been.

C (109:56)

I mean, crypto industry executives have been living in Washington basically trying to influence this legislation. I mean, they've been meeting with senators constantly, Democrats and Republicans. They are constantly providing feedback on these drafts and rewriting sections of them. Essentially, they just held this big dinner for a bunch of senators to try to push them on the crypto legislation. It's very much the crypto lobby pushing this stuff.

A (110:25)

It's interesting because we heard a lot about it after the election. We know that they put a lot of money in. There was a crypto ball at the, after the inauguration that Trump went to. But honestly, maybe our attention has turned to other things. There's been so much to talk about, but I haven't heard a lot about this, so that's interesting. The crypto industry is asking for its payback, basically.

C (110:51)

Right. I think part of the reason we haven't heard about it is because a lot of the crypto news that we get, especially in sort of mainstream media, has been focused on trading Trump's crypto corruption, which has frankly thrown a bit of a wrench into a lot of the legislation. It's making it harder for pro crypto Congress people to pass these bills because, you know, Democrats have been pushing to put in language about preventing office holders from selling crypto or promoting crypto or running crypto businesses. And it's like as Trump does more and more egregious things in the crypto sector, it's, I think, becoming harder and harder for Republicans to sort of push off those requests.

A (111:35)

Does the, the, the fall in value of bitcoin change any of the calculus here? Are people shifting their attention to stablecoin and away from Bitcoin, or is bitcoin still the dominant cryptocurrency?

C (111:50)

Bitcoin is still the dominant cryptocurrency, I would say. But I mean, a lot of these companies do issue stablecoins and so they' interested in the stablecoin regulation. A lot of them are also interested in essentially becoming banks, which has been sort of an interesting trend. There's like a ton of companies that have open applications with the OCC about receiving national bank trust charters, you know, for the, for the purposes of custodying stablecoin reserves. So they're, they're certainly interested in stablecoins. But bitcoin is sort of the crypto and it always has been. And I think I, we'll see, I guess, if it always remains that way.

A (112:31)

I think people are becoming more aware of it because so many people have fallen for bitcoin investments, even in their. In their retirement accounts and so forth. I think the. The general populace is much more aware of the value of bitcoin than they were or.

C (112:46)

For sure. Yeah, absolutely.

A (112:48)

And so when you have a flash crash. Was this a flash crash?

C (112:51)

There was a flash crash in October. This. The sort of.

A (112:56)

By that, I mean like an algorithmic drop.

C (113:00)

Yeah, right. That happened in October. It was, I think, October 10th. There was a sudden flash crash. But there has been more of a prolonged downturn, I would say, since the beginning of October and going up until now.

A (113:13)

That was triggered by Trump's hundred percent China tariffs.

C (113:16)

It's a mix of things, but that was certainly part of it. Just like general macroeconomic concerns. I think the flash crash contributed as well. I think that, you know, there were sort of losses that market makers and others absorbed during that time period that they're now having to recoup by selling bitcoin, probably.

A (113:35)

And then that's the concern others have had, is that there's so much of that bitcoin investment is on margin and that the margin is support once the margin is called, that they're now selling legitimate. I shouldn't use the word legitimate, but I will legitimate equities in the stock market. And it's going to cause. It's causing the drop in the stock market, right?

C (113:56)

Yeah. I mean, this is sort of the thing that a lot of critics have been warning about for a long time, which is that crypto and traditional finance are being much more tightly coupled and have been growing that way for a couple of years now. And so we see these incidents where it used to be that the stock market would. Would go down and people would sell off their bitcoin. So bitcoin would go down because people would sort of flee to less risky assets. Now we're seeing, you know, potentially bitcoin going down and the stock market following. There's, I think, a good question of whether or not bitcoin is a leading indicator or if it's actually a causative type of movement. But there's clearly a very strong link between bitcoin prices and equities, especially tech equities.

A (114:45)

For a while, ether eth looked like a kind of a bitcoin competitor. You say Solana is also very popular?

C (114:55)

Yeah, I mean, there's a handful of sort of big altcoins. Eth is still big. Solana is Big eth definitely was, you know, a couple years Ago, people were talking about ethics, essentially outpacing bitcoin.

A (115:09)

Yeah, I thought that was gonna be the next. Yeah, yeah. They'd replaced proof of work with. What was it? Proof of?

C (115:16)

Stake.

A (115:17)

Stake, yeah.

C (115:18)

Yeah. And I mean, it's certainly a very actively traded and used cryptocurrency, but I don't think it has quite lived up to the potential that a lot of people envisioned for it at least, you know, a year or two ago, when people thought it would sort of usurp bitcoin.

A (115:31)

Huh. And Samuel Bankman Fried wants to get out of jail.

C (115:36)

He sure does.

A (115:39)

Is that news or is that.

C (115:41)

I mean, he. We knew he was going to appeal basically as soon as the conviction was handed down. So it's no surprise that he's appealing. But I don't think. I don't think this was two years ago.

A (115:53)

Why is it taking so long to appeal?

C (115:56)

Things move slowly in the court, court systems. I mean, the collapse of FTX was in November of 2022, and I don't think he was in court until a year later, at least.

A (116:07)

So do you think it's likely he'll get his appeal?

C (116:09)

No, not at all. I don't think it went very well, frankly, for him. The arguments that they were making were being very much questioned by the panel of judges. You know, he was arguing, essentially we should have been allowed to bring up in court that I was acting on, you know, with lawyers giving me advice.

A (116:30)

Advice of counsel defense.

C (116:31)

Yeah. And the appeal, or the appellate judges basically said, well, you decided not to bring a formal advice of counsel defense. You could have decided to do that, but you didn't. And one of them basically pointed out that arguing that there were lawyers in the vicinity when you were, you know, committing crimes does not actually mean that they were signing off on those crimes or advising you to commit those crimes. And then he's been making all these arguments about how FTX was actually solvent and all of the victims have been paid back. And that also doesn't really hold up to scrutiny because it's. FTX was only still solvent at the time of its collapse if you use Sam Bankman Fried's innovative definition of solvency. So not true, basically. And then even the prosecutor pointed out that, you know, the victims have been repaid in the dollar value of bitcoins at the time of FTX's bankruptcy, which was like a very low point in bitcoin prices, partly because of Sam Bankman Fried, that bitcoin prices were so low.

A (117:40)

He crashed the market. And that's.

C (117:42)

Yeah, Exactly. It almost like benefited him. I mean, people are being repaid at, I think, think around 16 or $17,000 per bitcoin. And even at Bitcoin's recent low prices, it is above $80,000. Earlier in the year it was at 120. And so people, needless to say, don't feel like they've been repaid because they wanted to be repaid in kind. And obviously there's huge, you know, the victims still suffer even if they were repaid the full amount because they didn't have access to those assets. That's for two plus years. So I don't think the appeal stands much chance, frankly.

A (118:20)

What about a pardon? I mean, I know, yeah, I know Trump pardoned Binance's founder, but that's got to be a bridge too far to pardon S.B.

C (118:28)

Yeah. So my knee jerk reaction to that idea is like, of course Trump is not going to pardon Sam Bankman Fried because Changpeng Zhao is incredibly wealthy. He's one of the wealthiest people in the world. He is still highly influential in the crypto markets and just sort of the crypto industry. Whereas Sam Bankman Fried does not have much to his name at this point. He is despised by the vast majority of people in crypto. And so, you know, there's not really a monetary benefit to Trump to do it. He doesn't really get any influence or goodwill because of doing it. But then I was thinking, well, and then there's also the fact that Sam Bankman Fried sort of has a reputation as being a Democrat Democratic mega donor, because that's right, was a huge Biden donor. He was also donating to Republicans, which he is now very quick to point out because he's trying to use the whole like, I'm being persecuted argument that all of these guys try to use, but that certainly doesn't work in his favor as far as a pardon. But, you know, I, I sort of think of that and then I look at the fact that Trump pardoned George Santos, who doesn't really have any money, who doesn't really have any influence, but.

A (119:41)

He'S a nice dresser, he's a, he dresses nicely.

C (119:44)

That's true. Sam Bankman Fried does not have that going for him.

A (119:47)

No, he doesn't. No, you're right. Get a haircut, Sam.

C (119:51)

Yeah, so I mean, he did say, you know, George Santos is a good Republican or something like that. And so there was some partisan aspect to it. But like, part of me is like, well, if he can pardon George Santos, maybe he'll pardon Sam Bankman freed.

A (120:03)

Like, you never know.

C (120:04)

Yeah. I mean, it just seems like kind of anyone and everyone is. Is eligible at that, at this stage.

D (120:10)

Well, I mean, also, Z already served a sentence, so it wasn't like, Like Trump was getting him out of prison.

A (120:15)

Santos. He got out of prison? He did, yeah.

D (120:19)

Actually, he had only reported for like a two weeks.

A (120:23)

It was long.

B (120:25)

Yeah.

A (120:25)

He was still wearing the V neck, so I think.

D (120:27)

And he was still complaining about his, the, the conditions. He's like, oh, it's horrible. I, I have to wear drab clothing or something.

B (120:35)

Was Santos parted?

D (120:39)

I think commuted?

B (120:40)

Did, yes.

D (120:41)

Oh, that's right.

B (120:41)

That's right.

A (120:42)

Yeah. Which means get out of jail. It doesn't. That's the most important thing. I mean, he immediately started making the rounds on the nightly news shows, which just I found.

D (120:52)

What was that line that he was using? I. I will. I will pay everything that the law requires me to pay.

A (120:58)

Oh, that's always so noble. Yeah, yeah, so noble. All right, we're gonna take a little break. I. I will find some other news. But if you've got something on your mind, Father Robert Ballisaire, Digital Jesuit, or on your mind Wesley Faulkner, we could talk about it. There was an interesting Elon Musk post about the end of work that you might have something to say about, Wesley. We'll talk about that in just a little bit. You're watching this Week in Tech. A look at the week's tech news brought to you this week by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. Zscaler solves a very interesting conundrum. You know, you just heard the Vatican. They're not allowed to use SaaS AI because of the risk of exfiltrating confidential information. But so many businesses now are looking at, you know, what can we do with AI? The risks maybe are outweighing the rewards. I don't know. Then there's also the risk. The fact that we know who's using AI. The bad guys are using AI to attack you more effectively, more rapidly than ever before. Zscaler Zero Trust Plus AI can solve this problem on both accounts. We know the potential rewards of AI are too great to ignore. We also know that the risks are too great to ignore. Loss of sensitive data attacks against enterprise managed AI, generative AI increases the opportunities for threat actors, helping them rapidly create phishing emails that, you know, used to be. You'd look at a phishing email, you go, well, that's obviously fake. The grammar is all messed up. It's. Now they're Perfect. They're indistinguishable from the real thing. Bad guys are. We've seen this happen. We've seen proof of concept. They're using AI to write malicious code. They're using AI to automate data extraction. There were, get this, 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers accidentally leaked to AI applications, chat, GPT and Microsoft Copilot saw nearly 3.2 million data violations. It's happening every day. I can understand why the Vatican says, well, you can't use that stuff, but maybe you want to. Well, it's time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private AI. That's what Chad Pallet says. He's the acting CISO at BioIVT. He said Z Skiller helped them reduce their cyber premiums by 50%. That's how good it is at protecting you. Well, it was. They reduced it by 50% and they doubled their coverage and improved their controls. We got a video. Watch this video from Chad with Zscaler. As long as you've got Internet, you're good to go. A big part of the reason that we moved to a consolidated solution away.

D (123:44)

From sd, WAN and VPN is to.

A (123:47)

Eliminate that lateral opportunity that people had and that opportunity for misdirection or open access to the network. It also was an opportunity for us to maintain and provide our remote users.

D (124:00)

With a cafe style environment.

A (124:02)

With Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across the business. Their Zero Trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related data loss, protects against AI attacks and guarantees greater productivity and compliance. Learn more@zscaler.com Security that's Zscaler. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Check it out. Zscaler.com Security this happened. This just happened I think on a Friday both sides made their closing arguments. The Justice Department's lawsuit accusing Google of illegally monopolizing the ad tech market. Now we mentioned that Judge, was it Amit Mehta or was Joe Azalsopp? I think it was threw out the even though he had ruled that Google was a monopoly, a year later basically said, well, they're a monopoly but there's nothing really much we can do about it. So Google skated on that one a couple of months ago. This one may not go so well. Google really has a problem here. In fact, the judge wants to make a penalty ruling. Judge Leonie Brincama wants to do a penalty ruling before Google has a Chance to appeal, according to Reuters. So the district judge held that Google has a monopoly in the online ad tech space. She asked the Justice Department how quickly an anti competitive measure could go into effect, saying time is of the essence. We want to get this done before Google can stall us with an appeal. Google's attorney, Karen Dunn argued that forcing Google to sell its advertising tech subsidiary would be extreme, your honor, and hurt customers in the process. Google is reportedly planning to appeal the latest decision, but the judge Brinkhama noted that any sort of remedy most likely would not be as easily enforceable while an appeal is pending. So hurry up, let's get this done. This is cool. I think if you're gonna. Yeah, if you're gonna say that Google has a monopoly in any area, it's this ad tech. Cause they're both the buyer, they're the seller, they make the market, they control the market. It really is a monopoly. The judge is considering whether they should be broken up, whether they should be forced to sell their advertising. Advertising part.

D (126:54)

How do you break that up though? Yeah, I mean I understand why, but how do you break the. You break AdSense and AdWords apart from each other. You divorce the content that's the ads are being sold on. I just don't see how that happens without causing major disruption.

A (127:13)

The DOJ and the states have asked the judge to make Google sell its ad exchange adex. That's where online publishers. So like citation needed. Let's say you had Google Ads on there. You would pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when the website is loaded. I mean it literally happens that quickly. The DOJ argued on Friday nothing short of a forced sale would bring a brighter, more competitive future for the open web. I mean, essentially this is Google's vig on all ad sales for almost every website that uses for every website that uses Google Ads. And almost every website uses Google Ads.

D (127:56)

I mean, so who could afford that? Apple, Microsoft, SoftBank?

A (128:00)

Who would buy it? Well, it would be a good thing to buy. If I had the money I could.

D (128:04)

Great thing to buy, but I mean that it's a major, major purpose purchase. So acquisition that's only a couple players. She said there's only a couple players who have that money and those players would do something worse with it.

C (128:16)

Yeah, basically we would be going from a monopoly to a cartel.

A (128:21)

That was the argument, frankly with the search. Monopoly was oh good, so you sell Chrome. Let's say that was one of the remedies they considered. Now you got two Monopolies, you haven't solved the problem.

B (128:35)

But this is why you go to inaugurations and why you go to these dinners and why you buy filled ballrooms, it's true, is to have like an ace up your sleeve, a trump card, if you will, to make sure that even if it's the worst thing possible, you have someone who can step in on your behalf.

A (128:53)

The DOJ still has cases against Amazon and Apple pending. But you have to feel like the Trump administration has kind of lost interest in some of these prosecutions. Right?

C (129:04)

Yeah. I mean, I think these companies, a big, a big reason these companies have been so generous to Trump is that, you know, we've seen the DOJ pull back on a lot of these cases against tech companies and the SEC and, you know, other agencies that had previously been going a little bit harder on antitrust.

A (129:28)

Here's the story I thought you might be interested in Elon Musk's creepy utopian dream from Salon. This is Elon talking, talking, it looks like, with Jensen Huang at the U. S Saudi Investment forum this week. He said rapid advances in artificial intelligence and humanoid robots will make human Labor Optional within 10 to 20 years and that money will stop being relevant at some point in the future. That for instance, Tesla's Optimus prototype will eventually their, their AI powered robots would eventually handle all the work that needs to be done. Yeah. Now, before the show, we were talking about Douglas Rushkoff's latest piece in Fast Company, which he said, this has been the goal all along of these tech giants. They basically don't care if an entire class of workers is eliminated. They make noise about UBI and stuff. They don't care. There's not going to pay ubiquitous if you all starve. They don't care because the robots will make them everything they need.

B (130:45)

He just wants this trillion dollar bonus.

A (130:47)

He wants, by the way, in order to get that, he has to sell a million optimus robots.

B (130:52)

That's what I want to keep in mind.

A (130:53)

This is Tesla, one of the benchmarks to himself.

D (130:56)

That's how it will work.

B (130:58)

Yeah, yeah.

C (130:59)

I mean this is one of those things where we see AI companies continually are arguing that AGI is going to happen. We see robot companies saying that robots are going to take over the world. Like it's all just like it's in their financial interest to make these arguments regardless of whether or not they're plausible. And certainly if anyone makes implausible promises, it's Tesla.

A (131:20)

True. Although don't you think it's interesting that this is his goal?

B (131:26)

They haven't made the roadster.

A (131:28)

That's true. We're still waiting for the roadster.

C (131:31)

Right.

A (131:32)

Sam Altman, say, I put down $20,000 for that roadster. I want my money back. And then Elon said, no, we gave you your money back. And Sam says, where? Show me the check. And then I don't know how that's resolved itself yet, but it's, it's billionaire finance.

D (131:48)

Billionaire finance works differently than our finances, I think. Essentially, what, 11 AI companies that are transferring billions and billions of dollars in between themselves and calling it a trillion dollar economy? Yeah, all right, sure, why not?

C (132:03)

I also, whenever I see articles like this, I am increasingly convinced that Elon and people in his echelon don't know what jobs are like or what people do for work. Because the idea of just like replacing all jobs, you know, it's like, have you ever met a plumber before? You know, or like a farm laborer, you know, like.

A (132:24)

Well, that's why they're making these bipedal humanoid robots.

C (132:28)

Have you actually seen them?

A (132:30)

Yeah, well, they're not really good at them yet.

C (132:32)

Turn a doorknob, much less shovel. Like a ditch or something like that.

D (132:37)

Yeah, like, do you know, do you know exactly how many people are required to get you your super expensive sandwich every time for lunch? It's like, you don't, you don't you don't you just think, oh, robot, human, therefore enough. It's this very strange intersection of. Of ignorance and ego.

A (132:55)

Yeah.

B (132:56)

He also wanted to have a fully autonomous assembly line for Tesla. These are non humanoid robots that he went into production hell for because nothing worked the way he wanted to. And that has not informed his decision that this autonomous repetitive work, even that is predictable in the highly power assembly is something that they can even get under control.

A (133:22)

It's actually the COVID story of this month's Harper's Magazine. The great Robot con game and the selling of a $5 trillion pipe dream. The article's called Kicking Robots. They say it's the tech industry hype machine, that everybody's got these humanoid robots, but none of them really can do much. In fact, remember the. I forgot which company was doing it. The robot that they showed them unloading dishwashers and very slowly putting laundry into the dryer. Well, it turns out there was a human at the other end that was looking through the eyes and trying to manipulate the robot to do it.

D (134:03)

Also, a dishwasher is already a dishwashing robot.

A (134:06)

Well, that's a good point, but you have to load it still so we got to get another robot to load.

D (134:10)

The robot, one robot to put something into another robot robot.

A (134:13)

What you need is just a door on the robot that you put dishes in and then it washes them.

C (134:20)

I think it's just like, if you look at even, like, some of the most sophisticated robots that we have in just, like, everyday consumer life, you know, like, if you think of like, robot vacuum cleaners and things like that, you know, like, that is a very. Those. Those have been around for what, two decades now?

A (134:37)

Probably. They're still not very good.

D (134:39)

Yeah.

C (134:39)

And like, I mean, they do okay, but they are incredibly buggy. You know, they're still falling down stairs. And that is a very specialized robot. And now we want to have just like a gen, like a general robot that can do everything. I mean, it doesn't seem plausible, at least in this kind of time frame.

B (134:57)

Also, the conversation was with Jensen Huang, who is talking about doing this AI simulator for robotics, like practicing and, and, and, and how you can train your robot. So they're both kind of trying to promote this robotic future because they're both, like, investing or want people to invest in their companies because of it.

D (135:21)

So you need an AI simulator to train the AI on robots. So what trains the AI simulators?

C (135:28)

This is like when we train AI models on AI generated content. You know, you just get this, like, recursive loop.

D (135:36)

Yeah. Just go into hallucination hell.

A (135:40)

Get ready for this. Remember the Boston Dynamic robot dogs that would dance?

D (135:44)

Of course.

A (135:45)

They were so cute.

C (135:47)

That's not the word I would use.

A (135:49)

Well, they're a little scary. Yes. So apparently especially.

D (135:52)

Yeah. When you put a cannon on the back of one. Yeah. They're incredibly scary.

A (135:55)

According to Bloomberg, they're being deployed in vast numbers in policing. More than 60 bomb squads and SWAT teams in the US and Canada are now using spot. According to Boston Dynamics, they've been finding a home among law enforcement agencies. ICE recently spent $78,000 on a robot that could perform similar tasks as Spot also deploys smoke bombs. In 2022, law enforcement used a robot to approach a man who had crashed a car trying to kidnap his son, checking to see if the man was armed. In Massachusetts last year, two different incidents robots helped assess a chemical waste accident. I mean, that's a good thing. You don't want to send a person in there. Intervened. When a suspect in Hyannis, Massachusetts, took his mother hostage at knifepoint point and fired at offices officers, Spot was deployed to corner him. Oh, that sounds scary. And police eventually followed with tear gas. It did its job, said trooper John Rugosa of the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad.

D (137:13)

Do you think these robots will gain sentience? And remember all those engineers who practiced kicking them to check their balance?

A (137:21)

Trooper Rugosa says the suspect was stunned, thinking, what is this dog? It's not cheap. It starts at $100,000.

B (137:33)

This is how we get ED 209. For those Robocop fans.

A (137:40)

What's amazing? Go ahead.

C (137:42)

I always wonder with these dogs if someone could just throw a blanket over it and if it would get stuck.

A (137:48)

It doesn't seem like turning on its back.

C (137:50)

It doesn't have any hands.

A (137:51)

Like how robot legs?

D (137:53)

We're gonna find out.

A (137:54)

2000? Yeah, we're about to find out. 2000 spot units, 2000 are now in operation globally. The Dutch Ministry of Defense, Italian National Police, Massachusetts State Police Station.

D (138:08)

I have not seen them on the streets of Rome yet, but I'll be looking for them.

A (138:12)

Keep your eye peeled. It is kind of terrifying if you.

B (138:16)

Throw holy water on it though.

A (138:21)

And this is of course the Chinese version. Unitree makes a whole variety of robots. They have the A2 Stellar Explorer, which is probably not going to make it to a star anytime soon, but can run, run down the street coming after you. It's autonomous. It's an industrial grade legged robot.

D (138:43)

It's a chicken walker.

A (138:47)

See that coming for you.

C (138:49)

I just want to see more of these, like actually in the wild getting stuck in funny places because I feel.

A (138:55)

Like I think these are carefully curated.

D (138:58)

Yeah.

C (138:59)

And like, you know, it reminds me of when people would like put a traffic cone in front of the Waymo, you know, and it's, oops, we didn't think of that. You know.

A (139:06)

Yeah. Okay.

D (139:07)

That looks exactly like the robot from the movie with Vel Red Planet.

A (139:13)

It can go on wheels too. The wheel leg option available will unleash greater performance.

C (139:22)

It's way sillier on wheels.

A (139:24)

Oh my God. Let's see. Destiny. This is called Destiny Awakening. Oh, apparently.

D (139:30)

I want to try that whole throwing the sheet over the robot thing.

A (139:33)

Actually.

D (139:33)

That might be fun.

C (139:35)

I mean, this one has hands at least, so it could maybe pick off a sheet. But I don't think the dog robot could Wait.

D (139:41)

Is this the one that they had to cut it open on stage to prove that it wasn't a person?

A (139:45)

No, there is one that looks that. That sachets like a woman intentionally and has. And has prosthetic breasts.

D (139:53)

And that seems like people thought, oh.

A (139:55)

There'S somebody inside there. And so they had. They cut it open to show that it doesn't type.

D (140:01)

Oh, look, the Billy. The Billy Bob robot.

A (140:06)

You're gonna see one at the mall soon.

C (140:09)

Why is it wearing a hoodie?

A (140:10)

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

C (140:13)

Why?

D (140:14)

Because you're gonna want to accessorize your robot.

A (140:16)

Look at the wasps.

C (140:17)

No pants is my favorite.

A (140:21)

Yeah. Creepy as heck. So bank of America.

D (140:28)

Building Cylons, Stop. Building Silons.

A (140:30)

Stop.

C (140:32)

Ball. You know, it's like, that's.

D (140:33)

Yeah.

C (140:33)

That's the one thing we really don't need.

A (140:34)

We want to do ballet.

C (140:36)

Yeah.

A (140:36)

Bank of America says there'll be at least a million dol. Robot humanoid robots shipped every year by 2035. In the next 10 years, Morgan Stanley says a billion will be in use by 2050. I don't think I'm going to make it that far.

C (140:49)

They all have credit cards. Like, why does bank of America care?

A (140:53)

Why do they care? Yeah. It's more of the hype cycle, isn't it?

C (140:56)

Yeah.

A (140:56)

Yeah.

D (140:57)

I mean, if we could get one at defcon, we could see how easy it is to exploit one of these.

A (141:02)

You need to have. Just like you have the. What is it, the election machine.

C (141:08)

Yep.

A (141:08)

Then you have the robot hacking pavilion. Yeah, Yeah.

C (141:12)

I had a roommate in college who hacked a furby one time, and it just seems like this is the next step for him. I should see how he's doing.

D (141:20)

Have you ever seen Furby without its covering?

C (141:23)

Yes, unfortunately, because of that.

D (141:25)

Look demonic. They look horribly demonic. Oh, my goodness.

A (141:29)

Do not take clothes off the furby.

B (141:32)

Could you imagine this robot in your house recording everything, and then someone's able to hack it? And to see this robot.

C (141:38)

Well, that. I mean, it brings me back to the Roomba thing. Like, that's what we've had with Roombas, which is what? You know, people see that they're phoning home with, like, detailed maps or photos of your house. And then there were some that were hacked not too long ago, and they started, like, playing over the speakers like racial slurs in people's houses. You know, it seems like. Like we have some precedent for what can go wrong with these things.

B (142:02)

The good thing is, right now it's a rich person problem, so.

D (142:05)

Exactly.

A (142:06)

I feel like this is going to.

C (142:07)

Be another one of those things where, like, anyone who is involved in software at any, you know, to any level will never allow one of these things in their home, you know?

A (142:15)

Oh, no. Well, already we know that many of them are operated by a human at the home office who happens to be able to look right through those cameras at whatever you're doing. Excuse me, sir, would you like a hand with that? Let's take a look. Let's take a little break. Just leave you, you know, use your imagination. Dr. Father. Dr. Father. Are you. You have many degrees. Do you have a doctorate?

D (142:45)

Yeah, well, one, but I don't consider it a doctorate.

A (142:48)

Can I call you Dr. Father?

D (142:50)

You can, but I mean, it's theology. It's that.

A (142:53)

That really doctor of Theology counts. You have some masters, too, in there. So don't you?

D (142:58)

Master's, bachelor's, everything. All those things. We do the whole collection through formation. Yeah.

A (143:04)

That's nice. I'm impressed. Father Robert Baliser. Doctor Father Robert Balasir. The app, Jesuit pilgrimage app you helped create. Tell us about that.

D (143:16)

So we wanted to give people an experience of how our founder, St Ignatius of Loyola, how he ended up founding the Society of Jesus, the Jesuit Azuits. And so we kind of mapped his routes around Rome and through space.

A (143:29)

Oh, that's fun. So when you go to Rome, you could do this, get this right, and you can actually.

D (143:33)

You can preload the app and it will actually, like, take you on a pilgrimage. This is how we walk from this place to this place. This was the.

A (143:41)

Then it will.

D (143:41)

It will give you VR tours of the churches that he was in. It will show you. We tell you the stories of what happened there. And I think we've got it up to, like, 20 languages now. We've just been slowly adding languages as we go, and it's been very well received. Way more than we thought it was going to be. We. We just created it as a sort of a thought experiment, and now it's an actual thing.

A (144:03)

It's free.

D (144:04)

It's free? Yeah.

A (144:05)

ON Android and iOS. That's really neat. I like.

D (144:10)

And you can spot the ones where we didn't have someone to voice.

A (144:14)

Because it's you.

D (144:15)

Because then you hear my voice.

C (144:17)

A.

A (144:18)

Well, why not? You have a lovely voice. Oh, I didn't.

D (144:21)

I mean, it's. It's one. I don't want to be in my own app. Come on.

A (144:25)

It's interesting how the church is embracing modern technology. I know there's a. A virtual reality experience of St. Peter's right? You can go into the basilica and look around and look up and down and stuff. That's really cool.

D (144:41)

Although right now, I. I'm not a big fan of St Peter's at the moment, because for the jubilee year, what they did was they blocked off the middle of the church. Oh, so you have to walk around the edges because they wanted to keep the flow. People coming in through the holy doors, door and going out.

A (144:54)

Right.

D (144:55)

But that means you can't just loiter. You can't just sort of sit in the church and look up at the artwork, which used to be my favorite thing. I would. I would love going over there, just spending hours, just relaxing.

A (145:06)

I could spend literally weeks in the Vatican Museum. It is the most amazing collection of art.

D (145:13)

Well, I've got a special card for you then, Leo. You can use my employee card and go in after hours.

A (145:19)

I think they'll probably know that I'm not one of them. I'm just saying.

D (145:22)

I'll give you a clerical collar. Just.

A (145:24)

I won't wear the orange shirt, though. I'll promise. Or something simple. Thank you, Father, for being here. Molly White, also here, of course, citation needed. Is her newsletter where you can follow the latest news in crypto and all kinds of stuff. Mollywhite.net is her website. Do you still do the Wikipedia editing? Are you still.

C (145:45)

I sure do, yep.

A (145:47)

Do you take, like a special area that you focus on, or is it just what should I edit today?

C (145:55)

Yeah, I edit whatever crosses my mind, or sometimes I just patrol to see what people are editing and then I. Oh, that's cool with that. Yeah.

A (146:04)

Do you go to the discussion page? Where do you go sometimes.

C (146:09)

Sometimes that there's actually automated tools that. That some of us use to basically, as new edits are coming in, we review them and see how they look and then we undo them or fix them or whatever needs to be done. So I do a fair bit of that, too.

A (146:25)

93 million articles in the English Wikipedia, and there are 300 other languages as well. I thanked Jimmy. I said, you created perhaps the single most useful, important proof of concept that the Internet really can be a place for something very valuable. And you also showed that people can work together to create something.

C (146:50)

Yeah, I know it's an incredible project in terms of just getting a bunch of people who don't necessarily agree with each other to collaborate on a single article about any given topic.

A (147:01)

Yeah, a lot of people get attention. Albert Einstein, Franklin Roosevelt. But I. I think Jimmy deserves to be in that pantheon as somebody who created something truly amazing. He did it. He told us, and it's in his book because his daughter, when she was born, had an illness and the doctors were suggesting a fairly scary procedure. And he said, I went to the Internet to try to find out more and there was nothing there. And I thought at the time, maybe there needs to be somewhere you could go to get reliable information about something like this. And he created wikipedia. And now 20 years later, the illness she had, the treatment and all of that, you could read all you want on Wikipedia. So he succeeded in that personal quest. Wesley is also here. Wesley Faulkner, founder of works-notworking.com and I will ask you when we come back what stories you're thinking are important. If there's anything we didn't cover cover.

B (148:08)

This week, it might be politics related.

A (148:11)

Yeah, that's okay. That's okay. I won't hold it against you. Our show this week brought to you by Deal. D E E L. If you this has happened to us, it's really challenging to hire. We are completely remote and it's really challenging to hire people working in different states, let alone different countries. There's a lot of extra paperwork that has to be done. It's very complicated. If you have ever found you know the perfect engineer overseas and then realize hiring them is harder than getting your VPN to connect on hotel wi fi, you might want to know about deal.com twit they do entity setup. They do local payroll laws. They jumping through those compliance hoops is a total nightmare. But Deal fixes it. One global AI powered platform that lets you hire on board and pay anyone anywhere, fast and compliantly. No third party vendors, no duct tape integrations. Just one clean system for hr IT and payroll that scales with your team. You could spin up new hires in minutes. You could ship their devices, grant system access and run payroll in a hundred plus countries. You can kind of think of it as DevOps for people operations global infrastructure that just works. Ask the CEO of Airwallex who said it best. Quote Deal lets us hire and support top talent anywhere without slowing down. Probably why over 35,000 companies trust Deal. Visit D E L D E-E-L.com TWIT that's deal.com TWIT thank you Deal for supporting this week in tech flow Connect says in our Discord Excellent app. Thank you Father.

D (150:01)

It's very nice. I enjoyed it. And we are actually going to be expanding it because we've now showed to shown the our superiors that there's a demand for it. It's good for us and we have the confidence to create it.

A (150:16)

So yeah. Do you. Are you still flying the quadcopters around around the Vatican?

D (150:22)

Funny you should ask that because we got another warning message from the Swiss Guard.

A (150:29)

Oh, you don't want to mess with those guys. They may wear funny costumes but they do carry those Pointed things and machine guns.

D (150:37)

They also have some very nice RF jamming equipment that they can use.

A (150:42)

They took you down?

D (150:44)

Yeah, they threatened.

A (150:46)

Really?

D (150:47)

Yeah.

A (150:47)

What were you doing? You just looking around?

D (150:50)

I mean, the problem is. So we can fly in our garden, and I. I thought it would be okay if we just fly in our garden, but our garden is right next to the Pope and.

A (150:59)

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I'm surprised you didn't get shut down right there.

D (151:04)

Well, I mean, they. They asked me to not do that eight years ago when I first got here, and I thought maybe the policies had changed. They had time.

A (151:12)

Do you do fb, fpv, or have you.

D (151:14)

I do fpv.

A (151:15)

You do. So you put on the visor so you could see what the drone's seeing and steer it around?

D (151:20)

Well, I was doing a video where I was. I was navigating the caves behind our gardens here. And so I. I did this awesome straight shot, and I was doing these shots where I was going up and then diving down in that. That they like that.

A (151:35)

No, I don't blame them. It's a little scary. Especially since we know drones are widely used now in the. The Ukraine, Russia war.

D (151:43)

That's actually a point that one of them brought up.

A (151:45)

Yeah, yeah.

C (151:46)

So.

D (151:47)

So I won't be doing that anymore, I think.

A (151:50)

Well, so you could say that out loud. He said something in our private chat.

B (151:55)

I said, the higher the drone, the closer to God.

A (151:57)

That's right. There we go. Have you tried the new DJI drone? Everybody's ready.

D (152:03)

Yeah, they're. They're quite nice. And actually, do you remember that concert we had here a couple weeks ago ago? The hope for the world that they. In front of St. Peter with, you know, with all the stars.

A (152:12)

Very cool.

D (152:13)

The production crew had two of those massive DJI drones with red cameras on them, and they would just.

A (152:19)

Oh, my God.

D (152:20)

They would hover over the. The piazza, and then they would go out to the river to get those long shots. And so every 20 minutes or so, you'd see them come back in land, they'd change the batteries and then go back out.

A (152:29)

Wow. They were allowed.

D (152:33)

They were allowed.

B (152:34)

Yeah.

C (152:34)

Yeah, that's.

A (152:35)

So that was a big deal, that concert.

D (152:38)

It was beautiful. Although I want to be the person who pitched that to Pope Francis who said, like, yeah, we're going to get Andrea Bocelli. We're looking at Sarah Brightman. Jelly roll.

A (152:50)

Jelly roll.

D (152:50)

It's like, wait, what?

A (152:51)

Jelly roll. In front of the St Peter's it was quite a sight.

D (152:56)

It Was different. Yeah.

C (152:58)

I wanted to ask you, actually, now that we're talking about concerts, what is the deal with the Pope with a. A rave? I saw something going around online.

A (153:08)

Oh, it's got to be AI.

D (153:10)

No, no, no, it was not. It was not. The Pope wasn't there. So the Pope had sent a birthday greeting to the Archbishop of. I think it was in a Slovenia, for his 75th birthday. And there is a famous priest there, a Catholic priest who is also a dj, who was pretty good as actually running raves. So they were in front of St. Elizabeth's Cathedral and they played the message from Pope Leo where he was saying, you know, congratulations, thank you for your service, so on, so forth. And the DJ that the priest had actually set up his set so that as the message ended, that was the drop into music. It was very well done.

A (153:52)

Wow.

B (153:54)

Wow.

C (153:54)

I am learning that people at the Vatican have a lot more fun than I thought they did.

A (154:00)

You see? We do see.

D (154:01)

We do. Especially with these last two popes have been. They've. They've sort of said, okay, you know what? Go make mistakes. Make some mistakes, and we'll see what works.

A (154:11)

Also, they've got to be part of the modern world. I mean, the world is changing, and if you want to be relevant in today's world, you know, you got to be with. With the. With the kids.

D (154:23)

The number of conferences that we've had in the Vatican on AI and every aspect of AI, AI in medicine, AI in industrial applications, AI in schooling. It's. I. I'm pretty sure it outpaces every other national effort to do the same. And we're bringing in experts from around the field, from around the world to. To give us different cultural perspectives on the issues. And the nice thing, what I love about every one of these conferences is they're not approaching it in panic. They're not approaching it as a problem. They're saying, okay, show us what you think are the positives of this technology and what it could. What it could do to affect culture in a positive way. And that makes the conferences so much better than let's do a laundry list of things we hate about AI.

A (155:11)

Absolutely. Absolutely. I agree, Wesley. You had a story for us to wrap it up.

B (155:18)

I. This is funny. It's not really a story. It's just a. I was a rant.

A (155:23)

Hard drive, a rant.

B (155:25)

I found a video of myself. I think it was in two. In 2020, the end of 2020, talking about Amazon, and they just finished, I think, the Pillpack acquisition.

D (155:39)

Oh, God.

A (155:40)

One of our sponsors. Yeah.

B (155:42)

Or one medical or something like that. And talking about the commercialization of and the high tech in the health space. And as we are moving forward with the January, end of January deadline of talking about healthcare and the Affordable Care act extensions and credits and then since I made that video then there's been a lot of talk about reducing costs in GLP.

D (156:11)

1.

B (156:12)

Even Mark Cuban has talked about lowering drug costs.

A (156:17)

He has his own drugstore that sells low cost medications. Yeah.

D (156:21)

For insulin. Yeah.

B (156:22)

And with also the focus on lowering the barrier of entry with regulations and also how close the tech industry is to the administration, it made me wonder if we will see more of a privatization rather than a socialization of healthcare here as part of the conversation as we move forward.

A (156:44)

Oh, I hope not.

B (156:46)

That's where my thought was. Because putting all these pieces together, it feels like if that was going to happen, we're really close to the tipping point that will push us in that direction. Where?

C (156:58)

Well, isn't Trump trying to launch his own like good RX clone basically? The Mark Cuban thing. Yeah.

A (157:05)

Is he really? Because he's jealous that Mark Cuban did it.

C (157:10)

I don't know.

A (157:12)

Should the President of the United States be selling drugs? I seems like.

D (157:16)

Well, I mean he did. Trump did launch. He did announce what he wants for his health care plan.

A (157:22)

Oh yeah, what was that? We give you money and you buy.

D (157:25)

No, no, no. It was the 50 year mortgage. Because if you owe that much money to the bank, they're not going to let you die.

A (157:32)

That's a good idea. Good thinking, Good thinking. By the way, I just want to disabuse everyone of the idea that this is a true photo of Pope. Pope Leo on Whose Line Is It Anyway? He did not appear on that improv show.

D (157:47)

No. But he was at a rave.

A (157:49)

Or was it. Or was that video. He came put a video appearance at a rave. It's amazing what you can do with Nano Banana these days. I gotta tell you, I like that.

C (157:58)

He is doing things like appearing at Rave to just continually keep people guessing as to whether it's AI or not.

D (158:05)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A (158:07)

Oh my God. Trump. Rx. This isn't you. This is not a joke.

B (158:11)

No.

D (158:11)

Is that what? No, no.

A (158:14)

An official website of the United States government. Oh, no.

C (158:18)

Yeah. So I think it's actually, I don't think it's supposed to be one of his private businesses. I think the idea is that it would be a drug website that the government. Government operates, but it would be branded after Trump because I don't know if he's like jealous that Obama got Obamacare and so he wants Trump Rx or something like that.

A (158:35)

But yeah, well, I'm, I'm all for it if he wants to do this because it's really a little peeve of mine. I've lost about £30 because I'm on Ozempic and I'm on Medicare and the Medicare rules are you can get, get Ozempic if you're a type 2 diabetic. Now I could be 100 pounds overweight and not get Ozempic even though it would be a life saving intervention. But it wouldn't. It's not covered by Medicare. And this is the case all over the country that a lot of people who would benefit from some of these new weight, you know, I don't want to call them weight loss drugs, but these new GLP1 drugs can't get them because they're very, very expensive and they're not covered by insurance unless you have another condition. I often think that the comorbidity that I have has saved my life because I have type 2 diabetes. I was able to get a COVID vaccine, I was able to get Ozempic. You know, it's just my advice to all of you, if you can type 2 diabetes, it's a lifesaver. Oh my God. This is where we are in this country with medical care. It's terrible.

D (159:46)

I don't like that. That makes sense.

A (159:48)

It makes sense.

C (159:50)

Oh.

B (159:52)

And when you think about.

A (159:55)

He.

B (159:55)

Said that something like instead of giving it to the healthcare companies, we'll give it to you. Also rings a little bit about what he was saying about Trump accounts where if a baby's born, they'll, oh yeah.

A (160:07)

We'Ll give you a little money when the baby's born.

B (160:10)

Yes. There's going to be someone who's going to need to facilitate that. There's going to, someone's going to need to hold that money to make sure that it's used appropriately. This is also another possible vehicle for privatized entities to control and monitor those accounts and modernize it. Where I see definitely a company like Amazon who deals with a lot of finances, a lot of people's money, where they can say, well, you have a lot of experience in doing this.

A (160:37)

It's an opportunity.

B (160:39)

I just saying all the parts are there. And I'm just saying if this is, if this is gonna happen, it's probably gonna happen.

A (160:47)

That's the Republican plan. Yeah.

D (160:49)

Leo, just as an aside, how many Twitch sponsors went on to get acquired by Amazon. Because there's Pillpack.

A (160:57)

Almost all of them. Pillpack. Audible ring. I think the. I think Irobot. I think, I think you could, you.

D (161:07)

Could, you can now make the claim that if you want to get picked. Network. Yeah.

A (161:12)

Advertise on.

C (161:13)

Maybe you can get Amazon to acquire Twit the Fun.

A (161:18)

Oh, I'm open to it. I'm gonna. You know what I'm all in on. Big, big finance, big capitalization. Let's. I'm ready. I'm ready to become a billionaire. Come on, Jeff. Take me up. Take me up to space. I'm ready.

C (161:36)

On the GLP. One thing. Did you see the press conference where Dr. Oz said that, that he believed Americans will lose 135 billion pounds by the midterms, which works out to like almost 400 pounds per person.

A (161:49)

We're a very fat country. A lot of Europeans said. Yes, I think that's true.

B (161:54)

A lot of people could die with the way that rfk.

A (161:59)

I am not prescribing Ozempic to anybody. You ask your doctor. And I really think it's a very bad idea. There are lots of online places. This is what's sad about this. It creates this market where people can go online and kind of get prescriptions for kind of sketch, you know, versions of this, whether peptides from China or, you know, compounded versions.

D (162:22)

Yeah. Do not buy fake Ozempic.

A (162:24)

Don't. Don't buy fake Ozemic. Go to your doctor, make a case. Say, you know what would be a life saving intervention for me to lose £40 or just get type 2 diabetes. I'm telling you, eat as much candy as you can as fast as you can right now.

D (162:40)

Soda.

A (162:41)

Don't take medical advice or stock advice from Leo. That's a bad idea. Bad idea. Father Robert, so nice to see you. Father Robert Balaser, the Digital Jesuit. Are you coming back to the States for the holidays or are you going to be busy in Rome?

D (162:55)

I will be coming back late December. I am doing a bunch of stuff in the Middle east starting this week.

A (163:04)

Okay.

D (163:05)

Yeah, they've got to take care of some projects over there, but then I will be back in the United States for ces.

A (163:11)

So, yes, we're going to get our CES coverage again this year. We missed you last year.

D (163:17)

Absolutely. Well, last year I was recording and about halfway through I said this. There's nothing. This is terrible.

A (163:24)

It wasn't worth it.

D (163:25)

It really wasn't worth it.

A (163:26)

CES will be worth it this year.

D (163:28)

I think. So. So, so what I've from what I've been getting in the press releases. There's there going to be at least a few interesting things especially of course in the AI sector but also a couple of new categories for consumer electronics that I think might actually make it.

A (163:42)

Yeah. So we will have a long report from Father Robert from CES and we'll sprinkle some little reports as well. And we'll also get you on the week after CES of course Twitch so that we can talk about all of the stuff that happened at ces. I expect you will see some some bipedal robots walking the the hall and.

D (164:03)

I'm going to try the sheet trick. We'll see.

A (164:05)

I'm going to bring bring it with me.

C (164:07)

Please do a report back.

A (164:08)

I need Molly Wood said I should throw a blanket over you. Molly White. I'm some Molly Wood. Molly White.net Go bother her. She's the one who said I should kick you. It's all her fault. Bring one of those Batman nets. You know that he has a net gun. Yeah, net gun. That's what you need. Mollywhite.net so great to have you on. Always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for the work you do at Wikipedia and of course the newsletter Citation needed is a must read. Really appreciate your time. Thank you for explaining Stablecoin to me again. I still don't get it but thank you for trying.

C (164:42)

We'll get it next time for sure.

A (164:44)

Next time. One more time. And Wesley Faulkner, you got one week to launch. Works-not-works working.com. is it going to be a crazy week getting it all running?

B (164:55)

Yes. And we have family probably arriving just now. I hear them.

A (165:00)

Oh, Thanksgiving's coming. Yes.

B (165:01)

Thanksgiving's gonna hear I'm off the whole week so I'll be heads down trying to get us to work when I'm not entertaining and having fun and spending time with.

A (165:09)

Are you responsible for the turkey this year, Wesley?

B (165:13)

That's no.

A (165:15)

You have a bunch of aunts and grandmas coming in. They're gonna take over the kitchen. Kitchen.

B (165:19)

We're gonna figure it out. I think that's still. We were. Our family has been very, very busy. I've been busy. My kids have been busy. My wife has been busy. And it's more of like we're just surviving and trying to figure out the next thing. The next thing. Next thing. And so we will figure out dinner because we'll go shopping, we'll figure out what everyone else wants and then we'll have fun together.

A (165:43)

I'm gonna be responsible this year I.

D (165:45)

Always look forward to deep fried turkey. Deep fried turkey.

B (165:49)

No fire. No fires.

A (165:51)

Paris.

D (165:51)

You know what?

A (165:52)

Paris, Martino's father does that every year in Florida and Paris always puts up a video of it. We're very interested to find out how it goes this year. He has yet to up and down the house.

D (166:03)

I want a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

A (166:05)

So where do you go for that?

D (166:07)

Chinese.

A (166:07)

Yeah, Chinese food. That's where all the Catholics go on Thanksgiving. They've got a Chinese restaurant. Restaurant. Molly, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?

C (166:14)

Anything Planned Thanksgiving with the family. But I am not cooking the turkey, thank goodness, because that is not my strong suit. I do all of the. The. I do all of the yeasted sides.

A (166:26)

Oh, you're a baker.

C (166:28)

Yes.

A (166:28)

Yeah, I want to do. I found a recipe for Amish dinner rolls that have a cup of mashed potatoes in them.

C (166:37)

Potato bread is really good. Yes.

A (166:39)

Yeah, yeah. So I'm thinking, you know, maybe when I make the mashed potatoes, I'll set aside a cup. The problem is you don't want to make mashed potatoes too far ahead. This is very tricky timing wise.

C (166:48)

You just mash one potato in advance.

A (166:50)

I'll just mash one for the bread. Yeah, no, I like the baked goods. That's going to be. That's always a highlight. Always a highlight.

C (166:57)

Yeah. I've recently my. I've been on a multi year quest to find the best stuffing recipe because stuffing is my favorite and I think I finally found it last year, which is a stuffing that instead of just plain bread, you use cornbread.

A (167:13)

I've made cornbread stuffing. It's delicious.

D (167:16)

Game changer.

C (167:17)

So I think we're going to repeat that this year.

A (167:19)

I have the Cook's Illustrated cornbread and sausage stuffing recipe in my Paprika.

C (167:25)

There's an app, by the way, that I. I shill paprika like no other.

A (167:29)

Isn't it awesome? It's so good. It's so good.

C (167:32)

I have 800 recipes in my Paprika.

B (167:34)

Yes.

C (167:35)

I love that thing.

A (167:36)

I went to. So you go. Because Cooks Illustrated is the best. You go to Cooks Illustrated in the Paprika browser and it's got a button that says download. You don't have to read all the pros that these days they put. Actually, Cooks Illustrated is pretty good. There's the recipe right there. You download it and you save it and it's in your recipe kit.

D (167:54)

Look at that.

A (167:55)

Look at how it converts that.

C (167:56)

And I don't know if you sell this as a. I don't know if you sell this as a feature. But it does bypass a number of paywalls as well because it just scrapes the page out.

A (168:04)

It just scrapes it. Yeah. I pay for. I pay for America's test kitchen.

D (168:09)

I love deep fried turkey because it's so moist, but you don't get stuffing with it. That. That is a drawback.

A (168:14)

You're not supposed to put the stuffing in the turkey. Although Kenji Lopez Alt says in of course, the king of cooking@serious eats.com, if you heat the stuffing to 350 degrees in the microwave before you put it in the turkey, then you don't have to worry about it because it won't bring the temperature of the turkey down down. It will stay hot and the bacteria won't grow.

D (168:37)

Okay.

A (168:37)

So just keep that in mind. Heat the stuffing, then you can use it inside. I agree.

C (168:41)

I've always taken a separate stuffing person.

A (168:43)

Yeah, you're right.

C (168:45)

That you don't get the turkey juices.

A (168:47)

Yeah.

B (168:48)

By the way, casserole kind of person.

D (168:50)

Do. Do all of you have cranberry juice? Do you like your. The cranberry jelly sauce in the can? You mean the sauce? Yeah.

A (168:56)

With the ribs.

D (168:57)

Yeah, it has.

C (168:57)

Yeah.

D (168:58)

It has to have the rings around it.

A (168:59)

Right.

C (169:00)

Chunk. Then it doesn't count.

A (169:01)

Right. It's gotta go.

C (169:02)

Yeah.

A (169:03)

I actually, at the grocery store, I bought it and it says traditional. So they know. They know traditional cranberry jelly from Ocean Spray. They know I bought it because I thought this is going to be gone when I come back to the store to get the turkey on Tuesday. So I'm buying it now. Unfortunately, I have my Italian grandma's sausage. Italian sausage stuffing recipe that uses orange juice juice. But my wife has declared because her son likes it, we will be using stovetop stuffing.

C (169:36)

Oh, I do like stovetop stuffing.

A (169:38)

I will say it's not bad. I know I don't.

C (169:40)

I don't do it for Thanksgiving, but I do eat it the rest of the year. It was quite a discovery for me when I realized that you can just have Thanksgiving food anytime. Yeah.

A (169:50)

You don't have to have the turkey or you can just get the turkey breast by itself and then it cooks much more easily. Easily. Should I Spatchcock? I'm thinking about it.

B (169:58)

Yes. Yes.

D (169:59)

Wait, what. What is this?

A (170:00)

You cut the spine out of the turkey. It's like it's roadkill turkey. It's flat. But see, the problem with turkey is the breast and the dark meat don't cook at the same speed. So you're either going to have dried breast or raw dark meat. So you've got to kind of. And spatchcocking it solves it because it's all the same.

D (170:21)

They call it spatchcocking. Oh, I never knew that. Okay.

A (170:25)

I've never done it. You need some very strong scissors.

C (170:28)

It's tough to do even with the chicken. It's hard.

B (170:31)

Yeah.

A (170:31)

So you've done it?

C (170:32)

I've done it with the chicken. Never with a turkey.

A (170:35)

Can you do some butcher turkey? You could.

C (170:39)

What if you could do a full turkey with. I mean, I'm sure you could, but.

A (170:42)

You could want to. I'm gonna ask the butcher if he'll spatchcock it for me because maybe he will. If he will, then they've got the tools for it.

C (170:51)

During COVID I did do. I was just doing a small Thanksgiving for me and one other person because I was self isolating and I did sous vide some turkey breasts, I think it was, and they came out really well. It was almost like coffee. It was really good.

A (171:04)

It's much better to be honest with you. Yeah, it's. The problem is Turk cooking the whole turkey. It's a no win proposition.

C (171:11)

Yeah.

B (171:12)

A day or so.

A (171:13)

Right.

B (171:13)

To do a whole series we turkey.

D (171:15)

At least I would think probably longer.

A (171:18)

Yeah. The trick is how do you vacuum seal it? You're going to. If you spatchcock it.

D (171:24)

Yeah. Spatchcock it, then vacuum seal it. Yeah.

A (171:28)

Maybe I. Maybe I'll try it. I don't know.

D (171:30)

Spatchcock it and then open it and seal the two halves into different bags.

C (171:35)

I mean, at that point you could just butcher the turkey and do it.

D (171:38)

Instruments.

B (171:40)

Oh, just one little tip. If you are living on a budget buying turkeys the week after Thanksgiving, you can get some really good deals.

D (171:48)

This is true.

B (171:49)

Just putting that out there.

C (171:50)

Those of you at the chest freezer, now is your time.

B (171:52)

Yes.

A (171:53)

Stock up. We are in poultry countries. So I get a fresh turkey every year from the. I ordered it ahead of time.

D (172:03)

You are in the land of the chicken and eggs.

A (172:05)

We are. Thank you everybody. If you live in the US have a wonderful Thanksgiving. If you live in Canada, I hope you had a good Thanksgiving last month. I hope you have. You'll be back here next Sunday. We do twit every Sunday 2 to 5 Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern. 2200 UTC. We stream it live in the club. Of course, club members get special behind the velvet rope access in our club, Twit Discord. We also stream it for everybody on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn. X.com and Kick. So you can watch us live, but you don't have to. On demand versions of the show available at the website that is Twit TV. You can also go to a YouTube channel dedicated to this week in tech and get the video. Great way to share little, you know, turkey cooking tips, for instance, with friends and family. Or subscribe on your favorite podcast player. You'll get it automatically the minute it is available. But whatever you do, I do hope you will listen each and every week. A very special thanks to our club members who make this all possible. 25% of our operating expenses are paid by the club. It is a group effort and we would love to have you in the group. Twit TV Club Twit. Now is a good time. We have a 10% off coupon for annual memberships. Great for giving whether it's to yourself or to a geek in your life. There's also a two week free trial, there's free family plans, there's corporate plans. You get ad free versions of all the shows and a lot of extra content. TWiT TV Club TWiT. Please join the club. We'd love to have you. Thanks everybody for being here. Have a wonderful holiday. We'll see you next Sunday. In the meanwhile, another twit is in the can. This is amazing. Twin baby.

D (173:52)

Doing the twin.

A (173:53)

All right, love.

D (173:55)

Happy Thanksgiving to y'.

A (173:57)

All. Yeah. So Robert, do they make any concessions to the Americans in the.

D (174:03)

There's a small group of us who invite any Americans.

A (174:06)

Oh, you have a friendsgiving. Oh, good.

D (174:08)

We, we go to this very nice restaurant and the staff there knows us so well that they attempt to cook turkey. They don't, they don't know how to do turkey. The Pope's American.

A (174:21)

Now though, can I hope is a donation? Because I'm feeling bad about your €50amonth. Can I send you a turkey donation?

D (174:30)

This is, this is the way that we do it here. It's a point, Leo. That's the point.

C (174:34)

Are you allowed to save up your 50s? So you like for put them all together and then you could go, I have to.

A (174:40)

That's not much you can get for 50 years euros.

D (174:43)

So like I go, wow, you know, my, my shoes don't have soles on them, so I should probably save a little bit and buy when I get back to the States. Which is weird because even with the tariffs, it is still cheaper for me to buy stuff in the US and bring it back here.

C (174:57)

Huh?

A (175:00)

Oh.

B (175:00)

Oh, yeah.

A (175:01)

Why would that be?

D (175:02)

I don't Know, but like, if I.

A (175:04)

Buy a MacBook, that makes sense.

D (175:07)

Here it's like €3,3000.

A (175:10)

Yeah.

D (175:10)

Because I buy it in the US it's €1500.

A (175:13)

But shoes should be cheap in Rome. I mean, this is, you're in a country of cobblers.

D (175:17)

But if you're buying Nikes or something, because they're importing that from the States, is importing it from somewhere else. So it's like a.

A (175:23)

You need Huarachis, made in Oaxaca.

D (175:28)

I have steel toe clerical shoes.

A (175:30)

Oh, yeah. I guess a priest really couldn't wear warrants.

D (175:36)

Although I. What, two, three weeks ago, we had a meeting with Pope Leo and one of the brothers who I very much love and I trust. His view is he came up to me and said, hey, you know, Robert, the next time you have a meeting with Pope Leo, if you could maybe look a little less homeless.

A (175:56)

I'm like, oh, okay, I've taken a vow of poverty.

C (175:59)

I can't have you take a vow of poverty and then say you look too ragged.

D (176:04)

But, and then he showed me the photo.

A (176:05)

Were you wearing Bermuda shorts? What? Were you.

D (176:07)

No, I had a cloth clerical shirt on. But I mean, compared to everyone else who was there, I did look.

A (176:13)

You didn't have your finery.

D (176:15)

I, I, No, I had my finery. My finery was not fine. So that, that, that's what he was saying.

A (176:20)

Yeah. Well, they were probably all cardinals and stuff. They got the bright reds, beautiful clothing, and you got it.

D (176:26)

I mean, I know where they make the, that stuff. It's in the, the train station. When you come back, I'll take you to the train station. You can see where all those vestments are made. And, and it's, it's like a, a, a 200 year old Italian man, but man, can he tailor.

A (176:39)

Oh, I'd like to. Can I get some? I guess I can't. That would be stolen valor.

C (176:44)

What?

D (176:44)

No, you just, they wouldn't make you cardinal vestments.

C (176:49)

Just get cardinal vestments and like wear it into the.

A (176:52)

I'm tired of wearing the orange papal.

B (176:57)

Oh, did you serve? Where'd you serve?

C (176:58)

Yeah.

A (177:01)

Yeah, 453rd.

D (177:03)

I've had Christina Warren here. I've had. Mike has been over here. Jason Howell has been over here. Brian Burnett has been over here. Leo. Leo.

A (177:13)

I missed you. We crossed like ships to pass in the night. I was there the day I left. The day you were coming in, Lisa and I were in town. I love Rome. It's one of my favorite places in the world. I would, I would move there if I could, to be honest. But I am stuck here in the attic.

D (177:30)

We can give you a studio. I mean now that you don't work from. From the brick house.

A (177:35)

Yeah. Thank you wonderful people. So nice to see you. Thank you, Wes. Thank you, Wes.

D (177:41)

Molly, very nice to work with you again. Father Dr. Wes Again, Molly, for the first time. Take care.

A (177:47)

Have a wonderful evening and a great Thanksgiving.

B (177:49)

Bye all.

A (177:51)

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