TWiT 1078: The Great British Marmalade Scandal - Building Your Own Router

Summary

This Week in Tech (TWiT) Ep. 1078 — "The Great British Marmalade Scandal – Building Your Own Router"

Date: April 6, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Ian Thompson, Abrar Al-Heedi, Patrick Beja

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Episode Overview

This jam-packed episode covers a whirlwind week in tech, with topics ranging from NASA's Artemis 2 mission, AI news, the epidemic of social media litigation, privacy and surveillance, new airline seating innovations, the dangers and opportunities in supply chain nationalism, and — for good measure — a thorough investigation of a marmalade-based moral panic in Britain.

The panel, in their usual witty and frank style, debates the balance of technological progress versus societal consequences, the persistent foibles of software (even in space), and the ever-more critical intersection of everyday life and "big tech" decisions, all while tossing in nostalgia and international perspectives. They close with a dose of internet history and culinary controversy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Artemis 2 Lunar Mission – Tech Trials in Space

Timestamps: 02:28–11:40

• The Artemis 2 "Integrity Capsule" is on its way to the Moon, boasting some beautiful photos of the far side.
• Microsoft Surface tablets with Outlook were used aboard — and promptly crashed mid-mission, requiring a remote reinstall.
  • [06:04] Leo Laporte: "NASA had to reinstall Outlook remotely... Orion is not connected to the Internet, obviously. It's a quarter million miles away."
  • The iPhones brought as cameras performed reliably, serving as an indirect Apple ad.
• Panel debates use of consumer tech (like Surfaces and iPhones) for critical missions and the political procurement process behind "every state gets a piece" of SLS.

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2. Microsoft Copilot Overload & Google Gemini Invasion

Timestamps: 12:55–16:57

• Microsoft's AI branding chaos: There are now at least 80 products named "Copilot."
  • [13:46] Leo Laporte: "How many products does Microsoft have named Copilot? ... The total is 80. It’s like, I guess all the good names are taken."
• Users are annoyed at AI-assistant features being shoehorned into Windows and Google products, often with no clear use case.
  • [15:12] Patrick Beja: "Having the Copilot button in Notepad and Paint, it’s crazy. It feels like it’s being crammed in places..."
  • [14:57] Abrar Al-Heedi: "Why is Gemini summarizing my tool?"
• Critique of both Microsoft and Google for AI strategy overreach and branding confusion.
• Notable: Google launches Gemma, a small, Apache-licensed, open-weight model praised for its openness and local-host viability.

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3. Social Media on Trial – The “Big Tobacco Moment”?

Timestamps: 26:00–50:00 (and throughout)

• Discussion of recent major US legal decisions holding Meta, YouTube liable for social media addiction and mental health impacts on minors.
  • [27:46] Patrick Beja: "There’s a knee jerk reaction...it’s not about Section 230 moderation, it’s about product design, about addictiveness."
  • [28:03] Leo Laporte: "You designed your sites to be super attractive."
• Debate:
  • Are such lawsuits a threat to Section 230?
  • Can/should platform designs that maximize engagement be legally considered defective/addictive products?
  • Where do individual responsibility, addictive design, and government regulation intersect?
  • Should there be outright bans/restrictions for minors, à la cigarettes or alcohol?
  • Concern over unintended consequences: e.g., bans in Australia impairing social support for marginalized youth.
  • [33:42] Abrar Al-Heedi: "I try to set screen time limits for Instagram...I’m not even enjoying being on this app, it’s crazy."
• Comparison to video games’ moral panics and subsequent ESRB labeling; analogy to food/nutrition regulation.
  • [37:58] Patrick Beja: "That is when [ratings systems] were created...it’s an important societal reaction."

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4. AI Ecosystem: Claude Code Leak, Subscription Restrictions, and Memory

Timestamps: 55:00–62:16; 58:14–61:54

• Claude Code's source leaks; creators restrict third-party tools (like OpenClaude), citing overuse by hobbyists/agents degrading service.
  • [56:20] Ian Thompson: "The free party is over."
  • Consensus: Open ecosystem is better, but usage abuse forces paywalls and platform lock-in.
• Delve into prompt engineering and AI’s "memory" limitations. The leak reveals Anthropic’s plans for "infinite memory" using compression and nighttime "dreaming" consolidation.
  • [61:29] Leo Laporte: "It doesn’t remember anything you did before...like Memento."

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5. Privacy, Smart Glasses, and Ubiquitous Surveillance

Timestamps: 64:11–74:47

• Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses now come with prescription lenses, raising accessibility and privacy considerations.
  • [65:20] Abrar Al-Heedi: "Meta Ray-Bans and smart glasses in general are really great accessibility tools."
  • Concerns over privacy and "glasshole" territory, as well as unintentional offensive use (e.g., hotel staff wearing them).
  • Ongoing quest for the “always-on AI companion” via smartglasses or wearables.
    • [70:13] Leo Laporte: "I want to be able to talk to my AI, I want it in the air, I want it to be there at all times."
• Broader debate: Is privacy in public a lost cause? Ubiquitous surveillance (ring cameras, license plate readers, facial recognition) is everywhere.
  • [73:08] Abrar Al-Heedi: "How many people’s ring cameras am I [on]?"

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6. Military Tech Fails, China, and the Router Supply Chain

Timestamps: 83:53–100:04

• Report: US military’s new $7.6B GPS system years late, still broken.
• US military (and submarines) are using Xbox controllers for laser weapons and other systems.
  • [85:58] Patrick Beja: "It’s not funny."
• Discussion of growing international cyber warfare, US underinvestment in cybersecurity (CISA), and the threat from Iranian state hackers as traditional war escalates.
  • [90:28] Ian Thompson: "Cutting over $700 million from CISA's budget seems ridiculous."
• Router ban: FCC bans all non-U.S.-built routers — especially TP-Link (40% market share) — out of supply chain/national security fears.
  • US lacks homegrown router manufacturing (apart from Musk's Starlink).
    • [94:22] Ian Thompson: "We don't have any [domestic routers]."
• DIY alternative: Building your own router — instructions for using open-source firmware on old hardware (PF Sense, Raspberry Pi, etc.).
  • [100:04] Leo Laporte: "There's open source Linux distributions that are designed to be routers ... it's a simple thing to do."

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7. Right to Repair: Pushback from Tech Giants

Timestamps: 124:18–125:49

• Colorado and other US states pass right-to-repair laws; Cisco, IBM lobby for exemptions, citing "national security" threats.
  • [123:21] Leo Laporte: "It's basically big tech. They just want you to have to go to them and give them an exorbitant amount of money."
• Discussion of the hypocrisy with tech companies’ “sustainability” marketing vs. active anti-repair lobbying.
  • [123:53] Abrar Al-Heedi: "It kind of runs counter to the whole sustainability measure...yet you can’t easily repair the device that you’ve bought."

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8. Global Trends: Payment Systems, Minitel, and Supply Chain Resilience

Timestamps: 104:30–111:45

• In Europe (notably France), national payment alternatives (Carte Bleue/CB) are being revived to reduce dependence on Visa/MasterCard.
  • [104:31] Patrick Beja: "France has CB... most people didn’t even know what it was."
• Deep dive into France’s Minitel system: early, successful national online service pre-internet (1980s); now only a nostalgia item, but a powerful example of “national tech stacks.”
  • [107:05] Leo Laporte: "Someone brought me a Minitel terminal..."
  • [108:11] Patrick Beja: "You would connect through a low-speed modem...a place to meet people, chat..."
  • Anecdotes about French keyboards (AZERTY), intractable for foreign reporters.

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9. Miscellaneous Tech & Culture

• Baseball & AI-powered replays: [116:08–119:19] Automated Ball Strike (ABS) system introduced; allows players to challenge umpire calls with AI review, but limits frequency to protect the "drama."
• Airline innovation: [129:16–131:57] United introduces "lie-flat" economy rows; Starlink/LEO Wi-Fi on Delta and United.
• Turing Award: [135:13–136:45] Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard win Nobel-equivalent for quantum cryptography innovations.
• School-issued Chromebooks: [137:58–140:35] Some districts pulling them due to distraction — return to pen and paper for most activities.
• Internet nostalgia: [140:35–143:28] Zombo.com taken over by new owners; panel reminisces about early Flash meme sites (Zombo, Badger Badger, etc.), worries that meme fragmentation means loss of collective internet moments.
• The Marmalade Scandal: [147:01–150:05] British media panic over potential "citrus marmalade" relabeling post-Brexit; turns out to be manufactured outrage.
  • [147:06] Ian Thompson: "A story went out...the UK was going to have to change the name of Marmalade ..."
  • [147:48] Leo Laporte: "Paddington would not approve!"

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Outlook failing in lunar orbit:

  • Leo Laporte [06:04]: "NASA had to reinstall Outlook remotely because...Orion is not connected to the Internet, obviously. It’s a quarter of a million miles away."

• On Microsoft Copilot overuse:

  • Leo Laporte [13:46]: "Turns out there’s 75 different Microsoft Copilots...as of this week, the total is 80."

• On social media lawsuits:

  • Patrick Beja [27:46]: "There is a knee jerk reaction...but this is not moderation. This is product design, addictiveness by design."

• On meta’s Ray-Ban glasses and accessibility:

  • Abrar Al-Heedi [65:20]: "Meta Ray-Bans and smart glasses in general are really great accessibility tools."

• On the supply chain 'national router' panic:

  • Leo Laporte [94:22]: "The only [router] that I know of made in America is, guess what...Elon Musk's Starlink."

• On nostalgia and Zombo.com:

  • Leo Laporte [140:42]: "It was an early website that was just kind of Flash...It would just go on and on and on, dancing around."

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Timestamps by Topic

| Segment | Time | |-------------------------------------- |--------------| | Artemis 2 mission & tech failures | 02:28 – 11:40| | Microsoft Copilot/Google Gemini | 12:55 – 16:57| | Social media litigation debate | 26:00 – 50:00| | Claude Code, Anthropic, memory in AI | 55:00 – 62:16| | Meta glasses & privacy/surveillance | 64:11 – 74:47| | Military tech, cyber, router panic | 83:53 – 100:04| | Build your own router, DIY networks | 100:04 – 102:35| | Right to Repair | 124:18 – 125:49| | Payment systems / Minitel in France | 104:30 – 111:45| | Base/other tech news, culture | 116:12+| | Zombo.com, British Marmalade Scandal | 140:35 – End |

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Tone & Style

• Open, humorous, friendly, but frequently shifting into deep, critical engagement with social and policy implications.
• Clear attribution to speakers.
• Frequent sidebars of nostalgia, culture, and international quirks.

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TL;DR Summary

• Artemis 2 mission brings iPhones and Outlook—one performs, one faceplants.
• Microsoft and Google face backlash for intrusive, convoluted AI branding and integrations.
• Social media is at its legal "big tobacco" moment—addictive-by-design lawsuits mount; debate over Section 230, free will, scientific evidence, and generational harm.
• AI ecosystem: free rides are ending, memory remains a challenge, and open-source AI models get a boost.
• Privacy is a mess: wearable tech, always-on AIs, and surveillance (cameras, facial recognition) spark both hope and dread.
• US bans foreign routers, but has no homegrown supply—time to build your own network gear.
• Right to Repair laws advance, but big tech wants carveouts, citing "national security."
• Fun with French tech history, meme nostalgia, and British culinary panic.
• Through it all, the panel banters, challenges each other, and keeps the conversation lively and insightful.

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“It was a more innocent time, you know... It comes back to the whole, outrage is the thing that sells outrage... I hope we can get better in the future.”
— Ian Thompson [149:57]

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Ian Thompson is here. Abrar Al Heedi, Patrick Baja. We'll talk about Outlook crashing in space. They did manage to fix it. OpenAI buys a podcast for hundreds of millions of dollars. Not ours, I'm sorry to say. And the end. And maybe rebirth of zombo.com. twit is next.

[Ian Thompson]

Podcasts you love from people you tr.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Twit. This is twit. This Week in Tech, episode 1078, recorded Sunday, April 5, 2026. The great British marmalade scandal. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. Let me introduce our esteemed panel this week from cnet, Ladies and gentleme. She's senior technology reporter there. And we finally figured it out because it always seemed like you were on Tech News Weekly and then on Twitter the following Sunday.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And we wanted to separate it, but. But Benita said, well, we let them choose what day. And everybody who's on Tech News Weekly figures, well, I'm gonna have a Tech News. A Twit week.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, why not?

[Leo Laporte]

So why not do it all at once? So you're getting it out of the way, I guess.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Is that.

[Patrick Beja]

Yes?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

No, I'm. What are you talking about?

[Leo Laporte]

Just teasing you. Great to see you, Abrar. It's nice to see you. Ian Thompson also here. Professor Thompson, because look at his library. It's just jam packed with goodies.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, this is just a couple of bookcases. We've got another five in the house.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love it. I love it. I had to give your books.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I mean, I had to give up half my library when I moved over here, and it broke my heart. But I took a very simple rule. If I could get it on an ebook, then I'd do that. Something which I've regretted because they've started changing ebooks, or if I hadn't read it in five years, then it went to the charity shop or to the bookshop or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's smart. Yeah. Also here joining us from Paris, former NATO nation.

[Patrick Beja]

Wait, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

You're still in NATO. We're the former NATO nation.

[Patrick Beja]

It's you.

[Leo Laporte]

It's us. You're.

[Patrick Beja]

You're the former almost NATO nation.

[Leo Laporte]

Patrick Baja, not Patrick.com. staying up late for us. I appreciate it. Thank you.

[Patrick Beja]

Happy to.

[Leo Laporte]

Patrick. We had actually one thing to celebrate this week, which was the launch of Artemis 2. The integrity capsule is now on its way there. This is a NASA thing. Built in unity, actually, which is kind of cool on its way to the moon. It's actually closer to the moon by far. It's only 54,000 miles away from the moon. It's almost a quarter of a million miles from the Earth. And what's cool is that they have now seen a part of the moon you don't normally see. Part of the dark side of the moon.

[Ian Thompson]

Sorry, Far side of the moon.

[Leo Laporte]

They call it the dark side.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

They do. And then I start singing the Mulan song in my head.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's not dark to the moon. It's only dark. Yeah, far side's a much better way of saying it, isn't it, Ian?

[Ian Thompson]

It's. Sorry, this is. It's the mound of regolith that I will die on. Because, you know, it's one of those things. I was speaking to a NASA engineer and I used the dark side of the moon moon phrase. And he's like, look, before we go any further, it's far side. It gets the same amount of sunshine as any other part of the moon.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. But actually, I'm glad that they got that shot because you can see clearly that there is no secret military base on the far side of the moon, as Adam Curry used to insist.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, Arthur C. Clark had a wonderful story about this because he spoke with the Apollo. Apollo 8 astronauts who were the first be humans to actually see it. And they'd just been to see 2001 before the flight. And one of the astronauts said, look, we did consider radioing back to NASA saying that we'd seen a large black monolith sitting out, but we decided we'd never fly again if we did that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's awesome. This shot is actually interesting. The orbital dynamics of the whole thing is interesting. The moon is moving in its orbit towards a rendezvous point. You see, it's right now it's kind of far off towards a rendez put point with Orion, which will then slingshot around it. So it's kind of an amazing target practice thing.

[Patrick Beja]

It's almost like they do math before they send out the. Yeah, the capsule.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny because I've heard interviews with various NASA spokespeople. NASA has started using, I'm sorry to say, you know, camera ready people instead of engineers. I really hate it. And they talk like this. And I saw a CNN anchor said, well, explain the orbital dynamics. And the poor woman said, well, no, I can't.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know, you saw that movie with the people on the big blackboard. That's how they do it. Anyway, that was a nice thing. There is a couple of real time Orion trackers. I was just showing you NASA's. There's one kind of third party from issinfo.net that is also showing the Rendezvous and some beautiful shots by the way of the moon, or, sorry, the Earth from Orion with the sun behind the earth. Some really gorgeous shots. So they brought their iPhones up there.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I was gonna say it's a great, great iPhone ad. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They also, I'm sad to say, brought Microsoft Surface tablets. Oh, yeah. And just take a wild guess, what app do you think they had trouble

[Ian Thompson]

with with both versions of it?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Outlook. NASA had to reinstall Outlook remotely because.

[Patrick Beja]

Are we sure it's not because they have like special equipment or some kind of weird network?

[Leo Laporte]

It is.

[Patrick Beja]

No, because they're going to space and like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's. It's the.

[Patrick Beja]

It's not like if they had app or program, they would be certain it would have worked perfectly. I mean, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You're being so tied.

[Ian Thompson]

I know.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, some of us. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So Artemis flight director Judd Freeling said that, quote, this is not uncommon. We have this on station all the time. You know, sometimes Outlook has issues getting configured, especially when you don't have a network that's directly connected. Of course, Orion is not connected to the Internet, obviously. It's a quarter million miles away. So essentially we just had to reload his files on Outlook to get it working. But it might, you know, you might then say, well, why did they send them out with Surface tablets and Outlook if they had these problems at home?

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's. Sorry, it's easily fixable. Probably, you know, it's not. And it's probably not mission critical. Like they're not going to get flight path instructions throughout.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God, I hope so.

[Patrick Beja]

It seems like. But still, I mean, it is a very bad ad. Or, you know, it continues the image of Microsoft and Outlook and all of everything they do. And it is simultaneously a fantastic ad for Apple and the iPhone because they have iPhones there.

[Leo Laporte]

They did. But also the iPhones are modified so that they can't really do much except take pictures.

[Patrick Beja]

But still it's like, what are you gonna take? You know, you're gonna take those devices that are compact and that need. And you're not going to build your own phone or. And it's easier to get an iPhone than an actual camera, although I'm sure they have those too. But I'm surprised They're using consumer tech.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. That are. Well, no, it's good and I think it's part. You know, this is the sls, which was cleverly contrived by Congress to be made in all 50 states. So this is probably something that doesn't happen in France. I hope it doesn't happen in France so that every state would get its little piece of the. The puzzle which of course made it hideously over cost and inefficient. And I imagine there's also that kind of corporate backsheesh where, well, we got to give Microsoft a little something something and Apple something something.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, it does make me wonder, can we.

[Leo Laporte]

It is.

[Patrick Beja]

I mean, you talked about it last week, but it is amazing that for this once I'm going to use a. We like humanity is going back to space. It doesn't matter. It's the US that's just on this one. It's not just the US is everyone. And we're going back to. To. To not just to space, but to the moon. And it's working. And NASA is managing under, you know, what's the name of the new director

[Leo Laporte]

who everyone has doubts about. Yeah, he's actually been in space, which is kind of amazing, you know, kind of cool.

[Patrick Beja]

He ended up being confirmed and he rejiggered a few things and it seems like it might actually be happening now. Of course there is, you know, this base on the moon thing which China and the US are going to have. But at this point, let's just be amazed. I actually know it is.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't get me wrong, I celebrate this. I think this is very cool. We watched the launch on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines. I think it's super. I completely with you. Even though I also know in my heart it's just a silly exercise that we don't need to spend the money to go to the moon. We're never going to go to Mars because that is just impossible. But it makes. It's inspiring.

[Patrick Beja]

It's not impossible. No, but. And there is a value to that. And also the kind of research you need to do does. You know, in the case of the moon race, they trickle down to technologies that we're using every day. You know, I can.

[Leo Laporte]

We got Velcro, we got Tang, for example, and we got Fisher Space Pens. So.

[Patrick Beja]

And I'll be. I tried to show the launch. Well, I did show the launch to my kids. They're eight and five.

[Leo Laporte]

That's exciting.

[Patrick Beja]

It was really exciting to me. And they were like, oh, okay. I mean It's a rocket going to space. We see that all the time. And I had. Because. Not just because it's happened before, but there's just so much fake imagery everywhere. I'm not talking about AI, I'm talking about movies and, you know, CGI and fantastic, fantastical things in every. And they weren't getting the reaction I was hoping they weren't amazed. And, you know, so, I mean, hopefully when they actually walk on the moon in a few years, it will have more of an impact. But I was kind of a little bit disappointed that kids today, they have, you know, fantasy and science fiction up the wazoo, and they don't understand that the real people going to the moon is actually amazing.

[Ian Thompson]

But one kid did. Did you see the CNN interview with a kid who's now become a meme? He turned up to the launch and he got his NASA hat on. And the CNN journalist said, you know, so why are you so excited about this? And he just looked at her and went, we're going to the effing moon. I gotta say, I wanna meet.

[Leo Laporte]

That's exactly what happened. What do you mean? We're going to the moon? I love it. You know, I don't know if any of you are old enough to remember the last time I was in high school, the last time people went to the moon.

[Patrick Beja]

And I'm old. I was born.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. 1972.

[Ian Thompson]

I literally wet myself when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. But I was only 14 days old at the time.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember my dad getting me up to watch that. And I will never forget. It was very moving and very exciting.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was a global event, which we kind of need these days. A place, a chance for us to all to celebrate something as humanity, as opposed to.

[Ian Thompson]

And it also gave us a great headline from the Guardian. When the toilet malfunctioned. And the headline was, Relief for astronauts as Ultimate 2 toilet repaired. And I just thought the headline writer there was sitting with a huge grin on their face, just like, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I read something this morning. They're smelling something burning in the toilet. So that's not good.

[Ian Thompson]

Ew.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Sacrifices being made for the sake of time.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? They can pee in the suit. Honestly, they're okay. They'll be all right. And now that outlook's looking, they can write home about it.

[Ian Thompson]

So do you think they get spam emails like, hot women in your area? It's like, outside.

[Leo Laporte]

As long as we're piling on Microsoft, I do have to show this one blog Post from a guy named Tay Bannerman. How many products does Microsoft have named Copilot? We know there's a few, right? Turns out there's 75 different Microsoft Co pilots and even this count is is down. He says, since I published this, I've received emails from. There are two more missing. Gaming Copilot and Microsoft Dragon Copilot. So now the total is 80. It's like, I guess all the good names are taken. I don't know. There are a lot of Copilots Copilot and Viva Insights Copilot and Shareport Copilot and Planner Copilot and OneNote Copilot and on and on and on and on.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's like taking a page out of Google's book. Like, let's just name things. Like a bunch of random things.

[Leo Laporte]

Google's naming is terrible. Yeah, it's all over the place. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good.

[Patrick Beja]

The thing that makes it weird is that the name is not just Copilot, it's like something with Copilot at the end of the name, which, you know, I can understand. It's like Nadella getting an all hands meeting and going like, we're gonna go big on AI and our AI is Copilot. So go do things, make AI, integrate AI in your products and call it Copilot. Because we have to have a big AI strategy. And yeah, there's no, like, there's not even time to decide on an actual brand strategy. Apple being like three years late might have time to have developed strategy.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they're just going to use Siri. They already got a name.

[Patrick Beja]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually I think this is a little bit of a problem for Microsoft. They've actually retrenched a little bit because people don't want Copilot shoved in their faces. And it's giving. You know, I'm an AI fan, by the way. I'm a huge accelerationist, but it's giving AI a bad name.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I mean, very similar to. Once again, bring up Google. Gemini being and everything, you're like, why is Gemini summarizing my tool?

[Leo Laporte]

They're doing the same thing, aren't they?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's not necessary.

[Leo Laporte]

There's that little glowy Gemini button all

[Abrar Al Heedi]

over, begging you to use it.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Patrick Beja]

It is more aggravating in Windows though, I have to admit, because having the Copilot button in like Notepad and paint, it's crazy. It does feel like it's being crammed in places that you really don't need it to be. Even though it might be useful in Notepad. It could be useful. Like it's text related stuff but it feels bad. It feels like it's being shoved in your face. So I think there's at least a communications issue there because most people, myself included, don't know what it's for. I have no idea what to use it for. I just see the button and I get annoyed.

[Leo Laporte]

See it and ignore it.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, basically I ignore Gemini too. So I'm an equal ignorist opportunity.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I did find a good use for Gemini the other day. If anyone ever like needs to do any type of video editing and you have like a, like an interview, it'll. If you ask when somebody said something in that video and you need to pull like a sound bite, it'll tell you exactly when they said it and write out the quote. So if you're ever using that in

[Leo Laporte]

drive, that's like, oh, that's nice.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, it's like my one thing where I'm like, I don't have to dig for that quote or that sound bite. So that's kind of n. I think

[Leo Laporte]

that's maybe a little bit of the plan is if you just find one thing, they want you to find that one thing that's useful and then you will go, oh, and maybe expand your horizons there. Google did do one good thing in AI this week. They released a, a very compact version of Gemma, which is their smaller version of Gemini. It's mini, mini, mini Gemini. Yeah. And they released it as open weights and they also released it with the Apache license which a lot of people are very excited about saying hey, I think that's going to make it possible for us to use this in new and exciting ways. So for instance, corporations which are hesitant to use other licenses, Apache is such a forgiving license that they're more likely to use it. So praise to Google for because I believe in the long run, you know, we don't want to be forced to use these corporate models, these models from the, you know, the big AI companies. This, the so called hyperscalers, Google's one of them. If it means they lock in AI. And I think a lot of us are really hoping that OpenAI open weight AI with, with relaxed licenses, something we can even run on our own machines, which Gemma is small enough to do. That's our hope for the future, then it will be a much more egalitarian future with AI. You'll get to do it, use it the way you want it. So I will give Google some credit for doing that. This is from all I tried it A little bit. There is a version for the Macintosh, which is nice, that you can use using Apple's native MLX extensions instead of Nvidia's Cuda. Another good things. Competition is a good thing in any of these spaces. So we'll cover that more on our AI show. Intelligent machines. It's kind of an inside baseball story. But I did want to give them some credit. Thank you for doing that, Google. That's the right thing. Let's take a little break and when we come back, Patrick had some thoughts about the big tobacco moment for social media. That's what some people are calling it. We talked about it last week with Kathy Ellis. You heard it, and Patrick said steam was coming out of his ears. So we're going to give Patrick his chance to rebut that whole story. I think it's very interesting. And of course, it is an ongoing story in the tech community, so we will cover it. Patrick Beja herenotpatrick.com Longtime tech podcaster and worked in the industry too. He worked at Blizzard and so you.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, on the gaming side of things.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, that counts. I finally got a Nintendo Switch 2 and I have to say, I'm loving it. It's really, really.

[Patrick Beja]

Oh, just before the price hike.

[Leo Laporte]

That is my motivation. Exactly. Exactly. Abrar Aljita here from cnet. Always a pleasure to have you on Abrar.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Likewise.

[Leo Laporte]

And Ian Thompson. And you know, I want to say there's a trend here. None of you are blurring your background.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Oh, yeah, that's first. I would never think to do that on any show.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't like. Ian used to do it. Patrick might have done it from time to time. No, I don't.

[Patrick Beja]

I don't like it.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels like I think we're turning against it.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I did it. And people were just like, can you please turn that off? And you're like, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I like to read the book titles. I like to see the detail. You know what? We're nosy. Is it just me or when you're out on a walk, it's at night and you see a window that's lit up and you can see in. Oh, you look in. Right.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Why do you not have curtains? I'm gonna look ob.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to see what's on the tv.

[Patrick Beja]

You know, I have to see.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not looking. Yes. I'm not looking for a compromising material. I want to see what's on the tv, what kind of TV they have, what kind of lamps. Yeah. Furniture. We're not. We're it's human.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah. I'm taking notes. Like, I'm like, oh, that's a great design.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Patrick Beja]

It's real life interest.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not a peeping Tom. We are interested in other human beings.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I fully agree.

[Patrick Beja]

Good.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Abrar.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I will always validate that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't feel guilty anymore.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Never.

[Leo Laporte]

I always felt a little weird about it, but it's like you can't, you can't not. And yeah, I'm always interested. What are they watching?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because everybody nowadays has a massive TV in their window, right? Well, it's the fireplace. Maybe there's a cat. Somebody reading a book. No, no, no. Giant screen.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, no. As you drive into San Francisco over the, over the Bay Bridge, they've got all those skyscrapers on the right hand side and one on the left. And yeah, people don't shut their curtains and you're just kind of like, oh, okay, you've got the exercise bike by the window. That's a nice design choice.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That plant is gorgeous. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, folks, we're looking at you. We'll have more in just a moment with our fabulous panel. Our show today brought to you by Thinkst Canary. It is the best invention ever. I was just at RSAC for the first time meeting the thinx Canary team, Haroun and company. They are so great. They started life many years ago, more than a decade ago, as white hat hackers, pen testers. They would teach companies and governments how to break into systems. And one of the things they, they really learn is what hackers are looking for when they get into your system. And what you should be thinking about is, how would I know if somebody is inside my network browsing around, stealing stuff, planting time bombs? How would you know that? You assume your, your defenses are good and nobody's going to get in. But that's a bad assumption. That's why you need these thinxt canaries. They're honey pots that are easy to deploy. You can deploy them in minutes. They can be almost anything. They can even set up little trip wires. They call them canary tokens. These are little files you can spread around even in your cloud environment that are irresistible to hackers. I have a spreadsheet file that's called payroll information, for instance, on my Google Drive. Of course, I have the Things Canary. It's set up to look like a Synology nas, but it could be almost anything. A Windows server, a Linux server, a SharePoint server, Exchange server. It could be a SCADA device, it could be almost anything. The point of Them is they are irresistible for hackers. Hackers may even go, I don't know. But they're in there for that reason. I can't resist payroll information. That's gotta be good tax returns. But if somebody accesses those Lore files or brute forces your fake internal SSH server, your Thinks Canary will immediately tell you you have a problem. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter. And any way you want it. Email, text, they support Slack Webhooks, Syslog, of course they have an API any way you want it. But the key is when you get that alert, you know someone is doing something not good, they're trying to access that file. So you get your Thinks canaries, you choose a profile for the devices. It's so easy to set it up, you might change it every single day. Then you register it with a hosted consol for monitoring and notifications. And then you wait. Attackers who've breached your network, malicious insiders and other adversaries make themselves known simply by accessing your Thinks Canary or those lures. I love this idea. It's part of your overall security strategy. It has to be a big bank, might have hundreds of them. You certainly need one for every land segment, right? Small business like ours might have a handful. Here's the deal. Go to Canary Tools Twit. Canary Tools twit for just 7500 doll a year, you get five thinks Canaries, you get your own hosted console, you get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance. And if you use the code Twit in the how did you hear about us box, you'll get 10% off the price for life. You can always return your Thinks canaries with their two month money back guarantee for a full refund. But I have to tell you that things Canary refund guarantee has never, not once been claimed. Visit Canary Tools Twit and enter the code Twit in the how did you hear about us? Box. Canary Tool Twit. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Well, we talked about it. Last week there were two big court decisions against social media. The state of New Mexico with a big multi hundred million dollar fine against Meta. And then in Los Angeles, a young woman sued saying I started using Instagram at the age of six and and or YouTube at the age of six, Instagram at the age of nine. It caused severe mental health problems. The case in LA was interesting because they went after Meta. By the way, Snapchat and TikTok were also named in the suit. Settled out before the case went to jury went to trial, but YouTube and Meta fought the case and lost. It was really a product defect case. The claim from the plaintiff was these products were poorly designed, encouraging me, addicting me, and as a result they're liable. It wasn't a big, it was only a few million dollar penalty. The jury said we didn't. The point was we wanted them to fix it. We weren't trying to hurt them, we were trying to get them to fix it. And of course we're all waiting now for the other shoe to drop because there are literally, literally thousands of other cases like this that will now proceed forward with this as it's not a precedent. The technical term I guess is bellwether, but they will certainly be brought up in future cases. Now, Kathy Gallus argued against the decision last week saying, and I agree, saying it's a threat. But Patrick, you said you didn't like that idea.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, well, I mean, I certainly understand. And Kathy, unfortunately she's not here. So I will fully acknowledge she understands all of this a lot better than me and the legal aspects of it. But I do have a feeling that first of all I need to say as a preamble, I'm not against big tech. I love a lot of the things that the Magnificent Seven and others do. So this is not like Patrick is French and hates everything tech related. But it does feel to me like there's a knee jerk reaction to this, to this judgment, to this trial which involves Section 230 and a general fear that if you try to condemn or decide that these companies have been doing something wrong, then all of a sudden it's an attack on section 230 and really they should protected because if not, then all of a sudden moderation is not possible anymore. And I strongly disagree with that interpretation because section 230 indeed protects website publishers for moderation purposes. But this is not that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I agree with you. It should not be a get out of jail free card.

[Patrick Beja]

Exactly. Because if you go the way that Section 230 protects everything, including this, which is not again moderation. Like you're not removing a certain, a certain piece.

[Leo Laporte]

You designed your sites to be super attractive.

[Patrick Beja]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

But Patrick, it does give us, it does give other super attractive products like this fine podcast doesn't put them at risk. Also, I mean, I don't understand why they haven't gone after, for instance, DraftKings, the online gambling. Talk about designing a product that's addictive and showing. Definitely.

[Patrick Beja]

Well, I mean it's gambling. So to begin with there's an issue, but if it is proven, slash, decided by a jury, which is how we set societal norms, by the way, especially in a country that is governed by common law and not by like up on high government deciding how things are done. Like it is mostly in France. If you don't allow for juries to say, well, this product was designed a certain way. And by the way, discovery showed that studies did put into the hands of Zuckerberg and other executives. They knew these companies.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Patrick Beja]

They knew that. That there was a serious risk, not just anecdotal, but a serious risk, that these products were designed in a way that would affect their users, mental health, especially young users, especially young women, young girls. If you say, well, okay, fine, whatever, but section 230, so you can't change the product. This is the algorithm, the way the apps have infinite scrolling. And when they design these products, they are far removed from a website publisher who moderates comments or blog posts. They design the way the algorithm is going to serve the content to you. I feel like this goes not one, but two or three steps beyond just moderating one or two pieces of content. This is a product that is designed a specific way. And if we can't find that this product is designed in a way that, that is detrimental to society, then what are we doing? Like, if we can't find that it's a problem the way it's designed, then they have no incentive to design it differently. Now, if the argument is, oh no, this is not a product that is intentionally designed to be addictive and just to make it clear, I'm fully ready to admit that maybe they didn't realize the effect would be so bad in the beginning because they were just making a good product that would encourage people to come back and to spend time on the app and to hopefully have a good time using their product. I understand, but now we're like 10, 15 years removed from that time and we're looking at and seeing the results on people, on society. And I think we need to be allowed to look at these things and say, all right, you know what? But this is having an effect we didn't anticipate and it's an issue and we should maybe change the way it works. And I don't. First of all, I think the legal proceedings is how you should do that. And second, and there's going to be appeals and all of this, it's not settled now. And second of all, I honestly don't see how Section 230 should protect the product design no, and I don't think

[Leo Laporte]

people are saying that. I think. But there is some fear that it would undermine Section 230, which I think you agree. We all agree and we need.

[Patrick Beja]

Absolutely. I don't think 100%. I think Section 230 should be sacred. You know, Section 230 enforcement protects these

[Leo Laporte]

companies against what its users post and gives them the right to moderate it, the right to delete it. This is. Was really about a product defect and I thought that was smart of the plaintiff's attorneys to focus it as a defective product. I don't understand why. I mean, you could also do this about alcohol. You could for sure. See, this is the thing.

[Patrick Beja]

Well, it is.

[Leo Laporte]

The connection between social media and mental illness is not a proven connection by any.

[Patrick Beja]

It isn't.

[Leo Laporte]

But you could definitely say that about alcohol. You could definitely say about a gambling. Those are demonstrably addictive products. Why are we letting that happen? Much more so than social.

[Patrick Beja]

It does seem to me like there's. There's a growing consensus that social media has some effect on its users, especially younger users. We should continue to investigate.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I don't mind even laws against young people using it.

[Patrick Beja]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you guys think, Abrar, what do you think?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I think you're right in terms of laws against young people using it. It's tricky to implement that.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's the problem. There's no good way to do that.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah. I'm very curious, kind of observing how Australia is handling that and how more nations continue to potentially do the same. But the US at least kind of feels like it's. That the ship has sailed and young people are already on this thing. How do you pull them away from it? Maybe you get the next generation to not, you know, be on these platforms. That's where you start. But it's really hard to get a teenager away from a platform where they've built so many connections and they are potentially addicted to it. I think it can be addictive for children and for adults. Children is really where there can be very detrimental effects. But even as adults, you know, like, it's so hard. I try to set screens, time limits for Instagram, an hour a day, and I blow past them almost every single day. And I'm like, I'm not even enjoying being on this app. Like, it's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's addictive. We know it's addictive 100%.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I just don't know what. What the answer is in terms of allowing people to have the free Will to be on something if they want to be on something.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of. I mean, I'm not a libertarian, but I feel like that there should be some responsibility on the user.

[Ian Thompson]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're having a problem with it, it's kind of on you to stop using it. Look at this phone. Free bars and restaurants are on the rise across the U.S. damn right. People are recognizing that. Yeah, we don't really want this to be the way we live.

[Patrick Beja]

Well, that should be our choice. I don't think we should go to laws immediately, as, you know, we don't have to. I think the very important thing that's happening now, and not just with this case in court, but in general, in the entire world, kind of as we're realizing what's happening, is a change of perception and a change of societal view on these things. You know, everyone knows sugar is not great for you. We don't have laws against consuming sugar. We have, you know, in France, for example, we have great things like labels on food items, on processed foods with like a score from A to F and how good this thing is compared to the one next. That's great. But we don't have laws that said you. That say you don't have to eat sugar. But we all know, like, because society has put an emphasis on this, that maybe you shouldn't abuse it. And that's not the. Look, the outlook we have on social media right now, because we didn't know and it doesn't, you know, I think

[Leo Laporte]

we didn't know about cigarettes either, but we've come around. Yeah, we don't outlaw cigarettes, although the cigarette, societally, we're discouraging their use. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, the cigarette example is really interesting though, because when the tobacco lobby first, when these trials first kicked off, in fact, when the tobacco company's own research showed that yes, nicotine was addictive, their response wasn't to, okay, let's reduce the amount of nicotine and advise people what to do. They bred new strains of tobacco with more nicotine in to make them more addictive. And I think this is what the social media companies have done. They discovered that this stuff was really addictive. And they said, right, how can we make it more. More addictive? Because that way we get more screen time per user.

[Leo Laporte]

But see, here's my problem with this is, first of all, there's this perception, and I think this happened in the jury, that there's something magical about technology companies and they're magically threatening to us and they're Using some sort of hypnosis to get kids to use their product. And I think that that's basically fundamentally an AITY technology point of view of view. We don't ban cigarettes, we don't ban alcohol, we don't ban gambling in most cases. Every state now has a lottery, so there's state sanctioned gambling. As addictive as it is, my fear is that this is going to be used. It already is being used to ban social media for young people without acknowledging that there is value to social media as well. Right.

[Patrick Beja]

All of the examples you just gave are also banned for young people. So, you know, young people is one thing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. Okay, you're right, that's a good point.

[Patrick Beja]

And I don't think we need to necessarily. Maybe we need to.

[Leo Laporte]

I just fear that this is the way products are designed but expand into a huge anti tech movement where we do in fact say we got to get these companies out of our lives.

[Patrick Beja]

I think we should be very aware of this. But we also shouldn't, as an overreaction to that possibility, decide that, that there is nothing that can be done and these companies can just design the products the way they. You know, there's an example I, I like to give because I lived through it. Video games in the 80s and 90s when Mortal Kombat was released, it created an outrage and everyone was like, oh, video games are bad for kids. And like we shouldn't. And us as kids were like, no, video games are awesome. And like they're all trying to, to, to, to, to. To outlaw and to ban video games and all. But look, in the end video games stayed and this was moral panic and blah, blah, blah. It wasn't. I just realized this recently actually. That is the reason that the, you know, Peggy and, and oh my God, what's the rating system for video games in the us? Oh, the name escapes.

[Unidentified Guest]

Yes.

[Patrick Beja]

That is when they were created, the srb. Thank you, Benito. The SRB was created and it's not banning games, but it's just putting a label on games that are inappropriate for certain ages to inform the parents. And that is an important societal reaction to these things. Because you know, I have to point

[Leo Laporte]

out that it was the same kind of pseudo sciencey opinion that. Well, it's just everybody can tell that video games are bad for you and are going to make you violent. Violent. Everybody can tell that social media and spending too much time on your phone is bad for you without any scientific background backing. And sometimes people were backing that. There's a lot of People. There's Jonathan Haidt saying that. And there are a lot of people saying that now about social. And there isn't any real science saying that any more than there was about video games.

[Patrick Beja]

But because I think there's more and more studies. I think there's more and more. Maybe we're not there yet and maybe we should. I'm not, you know, objecting to. I'm not saying we should do all of this now. I'm just subjecting to the idea that it's impossible and that we shouldn't.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, I agree.

[Patrick Beja]

You know, we can do something about it. I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

And I just don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water. There's real value.

[Patrick Beja]

Me neither.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I think, especially with a platform like YouTube. Like, I, you know, we talk a lot about meta and Instagram and how terrible it is YouTube is. There's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's incredible. I watch it every morning.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I learn like there's educational content. There's. I learned so much from YouTube.

[Patrick Beja]

I love it. I'm on YouTub YouTube all the time.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah. And there's a reason there's a YouTube. Kids like there. There are things that are trying to be done not. But there are also terrible things on there. So that's a really tricky example of like the breadth of content that you could access. Completely remove access to YouTube, I think is detrimental. I think that is a bridge too far. They did that middle ground. I know that. That really blew my mind. I was like taking away Instagram is one thing that YouTube is.

[Patrick Beja]

I think, I think YouTube. You can't be logged in to YouTube, but you can still share, for example, videos on discord or WhatsApp with your friends. Right. I think you can still.

[Leo Laporte]

In Australia, you're talking about.

[Patrick Beja]

I believe so. Yes. Yes, I'm talking about Australia because how

[Leo Laporte]

do you see that video?

[Patrick Beja]

Well, you're just not logged in.

[Leo Laporte]

You're allowed to use it without. Are you sure it's not blocked or you just can't have an account?

[Patrick Beja]

No, you can't have an account. I think that's. That's not the restriction.

[Leo Laporte]

That's meaningless.

[Patrick Beja]

No, because the algorithm is the issue there. Because they're worried about how that. And you know, maybe I'm just going to throw something random here. Maybe we don't need the Infinite scroll feed. Maybe we don't need it. Maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Should the courts be deciding that?

[Patrick Beja]

Maybe. Yes. That's the whole point.

[Ian Thompson]

Maybe there's no way the social media companies are going to get rid of. Of It. So, you know, it's like, what other choice is there?

[Patrick Beja]

And there should be scientific consensus behind it before we decide.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's quite paternalistic to say, well, you people just can't be trusted with an algorithmic feed. So abrar. No algorithmic feed for you. It's very paternalistic.

[Ian Thompson]

There is also the potential that this backfires. I mean, do you remember in the 80s when I think it was Al Gore's wife.

[Patrick Beja]

Yes.

[Ian Thompson]

Behind the thing too. Put, you know, parental advisory stickers on albums. Those albums.

[Leo Laporte]

They wanted to put a chip on your tv.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, I didn't say algorithmic field feed, Leo. I said the infinite scrolling thing because that's been named a few times as a cause. And you're saying there's no science. I don't think that's true. I think there is, you know, a growing corpus of scientific studies that show that it does affect. There's not a consensus yet, but I don't think it's a very hard thing to prove.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think the problem is it seems right, but it's an impossible thing to prove because human beings are very complex. And what are you going to do? You're going to have a control. How do you have a control group? Well, you get the algorithmic feed. You don't. And let's watch for 20 years and see if you go crazy.

[Patrick Beja]

How is that?

[Leo Laporte]

That's not going to happen.

[Patrick Beja]

Why not?

[Leo Laporte]

Because you can't. This is why nutritional science is messed up. It's very hard to do this kind of in vitro test, in vivo test with humans.

[Patrick Beja]

I mean, maybe we're taking the comparison too far. But if you're saying nutritional science is difficult, there are still things you can take away from what is good and bad and stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

But how do you measure this? Well, I got depressed because I was spending a lot of time on Instagram.

[Patrick Beja]

I think you're belittling a whole field of science, that is psychology. And, and I think you should look at the results.

[Leo Laporte]

I think experts in the field are in agreement that there is no scientific basis for this.

[Patrick Beja]

I don't think that's the case.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we'll have to disagree. Take a break.

[Patrick Beja]

I'll try to find a couple of studies that I've seen go, oh, you can cherry pick.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know, when Jonathan Haidt's book came out, there was, and I'll find the article, very respected person who studied this for years. This is her field. Field who said, no, there's no consensus on this at all that this is something that People feel is right makes sense. But see, I always think when science makes sense that and you say, well, that just seems sensible. That's when you're in trouble. That's when you're in trouble.

[Patrick Beja]

So are you saying there's no issue and we should change nothing?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think it's okay to change things and I think there are ways to do it. I think there's a great risk because of people's antipathy to technology and that's what I want to defend. There's a great risk that we will overdo it and that we will do real harm. I think that the long term evidence in Australia is going to be that real harm happened. That there's a whole bunch of marginalized kids who have no social. Who now are, you know, completely cut off from the support groups that they had. There are many examples of things like

[Ian Thompson]

this, particularly outside the cities where, you know, distance is such a big issue. In Australia, you know. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I still have access. Tiny number.

[Patrick Beja]

They have access to Discord, they have access to WhatsApp and they have access to all of these sites without being logged in. I don't think they're like being.

[Leo Laporte]

But that. Was that an intentional thing? Well, we want to make sure that they have something. Or is it we just forgot to make that?

[Patrick Beja]

No, I think it's impossible. You'd need to block YouTube in the country if you wanted to know.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know, can't be done as part of the. Is also part of the argument against it. And it's a huge violation. Violation of privacy because age verification has no way of being, you know, you can't do that in a private fashion in a secure private.

[Patrick Beja]

That's true. It's another, it's another issue. But I, I will admit that it's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And you're right, you know, you have consistently, every time you're on. Have argued this and I, and I, I respect your position. I think your position is actually completely sensible and logical. I just think it's very. We have, it's a challenge to say

[Patrick Beja]

solve this and I agree with you and I think we shouldn't go too far. And there is a danger of going too far. It's just that we are, you know, among friends here. This is a safe space and we can admit, don't tell the other ones, don't tell the legislators, but maybe there are some things we could change.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't have TikTok, I don't have Instagram on my phone. I have taken all of that stuff off I don't have Facebook on my phone. Yeah. The only reason I have X still on my phone is because it is the last place where I can really get up to date AI news. And so what I do is there. XNow, thank goodness, has a filter where you can say, I only want to see AI News or I only want to see.

[Patrick Beja]

Go to Blue sky and talk about AI. You will get shouted.

[Leo Laporte]

I have an account on all these things, but I don't use any of them. They're all taken off my phone because I spent too much time on them.

[Patrick Beja]

I will say one last thing. There's a report called the World Happiness Report that's done every year that ranks countries on many different, different, you know, criteria that decides which is the happiest country in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

That should be easy to measure, shouldn't it?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I'm sure we're not.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, well, it's a. It. It relies on things like unemployment benefits and wages and Social Security, all of those things. Finland, number one, consistently for years. But there is a religion.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you agree with that? Is it a happy place?

[Patrick Beja]

It's really interesting because they have a

[Leo Laporte]

high alcoholism and suicide rate.

[Ian Thompson]

Yes.

[Patrick Beja]

Well, that's due to certain things that happen.

[Leo Laporte]

But it is the happiest place on earth.

[Patrick Beja]

It's happy in the sense that, well, things are weird, but, you know, if you take those criteria, you know, you're not gonna die if you get sick, you're not gonna be thrown out of your house if you lose your job, these kinds of things. But there is a section about social media. And the really interesting thing, if you're talking about science, you can go check it out. The really interesting, interesting thing is that they're saying social media seems to affect people's enjoyment in general if you consume too much of it. But if you consume like an hour a day, which is not ridiculous, you are better off than if you consume none of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Patrick Beja]

And there are some social media that actually improves your well being. YouTube, the ones that connect you to people you don't know. Like, you know, X reels. Like the. The ones that are heavily algorithmic are worse than WhatsApp. Okay, that's understandable. You talk to people you know, And Facebook. Facebook is actually. Because they put the emphasis on people from your family and from. I don't really use Facebook, but I was very surprised because of course I'd be like, ah, meta Zuckerberg, hang him from a tree. Bring out the guillotine. Of course I'm exaggerating. That's not what I say. But you see Facebook there and you have to think, okay, I understand the logic behind it. Maybe there is some. Something. So that report is saying some social media, specifically some apps, can make you happier and I'll stop monopolizing.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Wait, can I present a quick counter argument to that? I actually don't like seeing people I know on social media because. And I compare my life to them and I'm like, ooh, they're doing better than I am. But if I had somebody I don't know, then I'm like, oh, they made me laugh. But it's all subjective, right? It's all like, what do you enjoy seeing?

[Leo Laporte]

TikTok is an entertainment. It's like TV. It's like watching TV. It's like entertainment.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

So it makes.

[Patrick Beja]

I watch a lot of TikTok. It's fantastic. It's so creative. And, you know, I really don't want to give the impression that I'm anti. There's so much cool stuff. Like I watch theoretical physics videos on YouTube all the time. I watch TikTok way too much. Like, I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just, you know, I was watching the. The chess. Chess candidates tournament is going on right now. You're never going to see coverage of this on ESPN, but YouTube has excellent coverage of it. This is, this is the road to the world championship. The winner of this gets to take on the world champion. It's very important. People play chess, but it's a very narrow slice of the population. But it's well covered on YouTube because you only need that narrow slice to succeed on YouTube. That's a blessing, you know, and I can. I'm sure there's a million little narrow niches like that that YouTube serves beautifully. And God bless it, I think that more than makes up for any negative, you know, radicalization caused by YouTube and things like that. Humans are problematic. We're never going to keep humans from going bad. Yeah, they will go bad.

[Patrick Beja]

The thing that bothers me with that argument is that then you. Your this direct next step is, well, then we do nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we can't touch it. Well, I don't say you can't touch it. If people decide as a group that they want to touch it, that's fine. But I think that there's a risk. And I think some of that risk is also some of the smaller, non giant companies who can't defend themselves in court who are also now threatened because of this decision. And that's another story for another day because we have to move On. Thank you, Patrick, for asking.

[Patrick Beja]

I apologize to bring this up, but I feel.

[Leo Laporte]

One more time. No, it's an. It's. It is a very important discussion. Maybe one of the most important discussions in tech right now. Frankly, the only person I talk to on instant messaging is my AI assistant. And he's great. He's my close personal friend.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Never let you.

[Ian Thompson]

I'm so glad I put a male one.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, he has a nice British accent and I call him Jeeves and he calls me sir and puts a little butler hat on his messages. Actually, it's a top hat. I don't know. It's a. But what's. What is a butler hat?

[Ian Thompson]

I don't know. Ask. Jeeves has been reborn.

[Leo Laporte]

No, as soon as I said, well, I like to call you Jesus, said, oh, PG Wodehouse. I love him. It is a very smart AI, even though it's from China. We're gonna take a little break, come back with more. There is a lot more to talk about. Patrick Beja, thank you for bringing that up. I appreciate it. Not patrick.com. sorry. No, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I think it's a very important topic. Abrar Al Heati. Always great to have you from cnet. And Ian Thompson, where's your writing these days? I know you're doing the letter to.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I'm doing. Well, We've actually, after some potential copyright problems with BBC, we're calling it View from the Ballet now.

[Leo Laporte]

No kidding. They. They want. Even though. How long has it been since Alistair Cook wrote his letter?

[Ian Thompson]

I know, I know. But unfortunately it's the anniversary of his death, so people got a bit twitchy.

[Leo Laporte]

I do. I did love it and I loved his.

[Ian Thompson]

You know, I used to listen to it every. You know, every week and just sit there with the. With the radio beside me and listen in bed. It was marvelous. And it was a homage to him rather than trying to steal his thumb. But, yeah, I'm doing a lot of work for the stack at the moment and PC Pro and various other titles and there's always corporate writing to pay them pay the mortgage.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Yes, the View from the Valley is at techfinitive.

[Ian Thompson]

That's right.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, we should. We should give you a plug for that. Techfinitive.com.

[Ian Thompson]

yes. Headline this time. Don't call it a war, but, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What is it? It's a.

[Ian Thompson]

It's a military operation apparently. That way they don't have to go to Congress.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure looks like. Boy.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, pretty much.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure looks like him. I'll Just drop it there. More to come in just a bit. But first a word from our fine sponsor. This episode of this week in Tech, brought to you by Rippling. Brand new sponsor. Welcome Rippling to the family. One of the hardest things about running a startup and you don't have to ask me, cause I know this for a fact, back when we started up, it's easy to get distracted by. By I would call them low leverage tasks. Tasks you have to do but don't have a huge payoff like payroll, you gotta do it. In fact, it was when I accidentally forgot to pay people that I really heard about this. Onboarding, new employees, right, hardware setup, these are all things that have to get done, but they pull you away from the work that you care about that actually moves your company forward. Right? That's why rippling is here. It's what rippling was built to solve. Rippling R I P P L I N G Like Rippling Waters, it's a unified platform that lets startups run hr, payroll, IT and finance in one system from day one. And I'm sure you've heard about them by now because they are the latest, hottest stuff. The rippling startup stack replaces disconnected tools that don't sync with a fully connected platform with other tools. Workflows like onboarding a new hire, setting up payroll, provisioning apps, shipping a laptop can take days, can eat up your focus when you need it most. With rippling, it happens automatically in one place. That's probably why over 15,000 startups, some of the best and biggest in the world like Cursor and Klei and Sierra, trust rippling to scale fast without adding additional ops and HR headcount account so founders can keep building. So if you or your startup want to move as quickly as you can and focus on what really matters, like your product, right, or your customers, you need rippling right now. Venture backed startups can get six months of rippling startup stack for free. Head to rippling.com twit and sign up today. That's R I P P l I n g.com twit to sign up. Up for 6 months free today. Focus on what you're building and leave the rest to rippling. Rippling.comTwit so glad to have them helping us out here at this week in tech. Big story in the AI world this week. Claude Code's source code leaked. Everybody you know messing with that, trying to duplicate Claude code which is one of the hottest right now. AI coding, vibe, coding, coding tools is one I use. Love it and then following that, Anthropic really got the open Claw movement on their backs saying you can't use your subscription for anything but Claude code. And the Claude app, you can't use third party apps essentially saying OpenClaw can't use Claude the subscription, you gotta use your API tokens. And this has pissed off people, of course. Open Claude's creator, Peter steinberger works for OpenAI. He's been jumping on this. I want to defend Anthropic, the creators of Claude. I understand why they did this. A lot of us who use Claude were saying Claude is not so smart in the last few weeks and it's because so many people are using their subscriptions and using so many tokens for their agents that are running day and night, night, doing silly stupid things and really kind of nerfing Claude code. So I honestly think Anthropic was right to do this. Immediately people noticed, yeah, Claude's working a lot better. This went into effect actually April 4, which was yesterday, right? Yeah, at noon Pacific. And immediately people started reporting, hey, Claude's working a lot better.

[Ian Thompson]

I think they've got a perfect right to do it. The free party is over.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, of course they do. But yeah, that's really the lesson of this. I mean I don't want to get into the back and forth and everything, but the lesson of it is we've been kind of much as the Internet in the early days, of course we're speed running this Internet life cycle with AI. What was free is not and it wasn't tenable and that people were using it so much with a subscription because the subscription was close to unlimited use, that Anthropic had to do something about it.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, because the issue is that the idea would be that the subscription you would use for occasional like when you're in front of the computer or maybe you set off one agent to do something from time to time. But with OpenClaw it's running all the time. So it is an over consumption of these tokens for a company that just like all the other AI companies is not making a lot of money. I mean they're making money, but they're losing money on all of these. So it's completely understandable. And it's not like they're saying you can't use it ever. You just have your API key and, and pay for what you use.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to pay for what you use. Exactly. Yeah. I also, I think that it's also, which is, and this is a good thing going to move people towards Local models, open weight models, less expensive models. I have been experimenting with a Chinese model. It's about a third the cost of a Claude Max subscription and it's doing very well, possibly because they trained on Claude. That's what Anthropic says. But it does a very good job. I think this is good. I think this is. This is going to stimulate people moving in other directions. So I'm not. Anyway, it's a big story. I don't. I don't know if there's that much to say about it, but.

[Patrick Beja]

How about Gemma? Can you. Can you run. You can run open claw on. On Gemma, right?

[Leo Laporte]

You certainly could. It's not. Here's the problem. There's nothing as good as Opus 4.6. There really isn't. That Claude model is so good. Claude code is so good. Although we have learned from the Open The. The leak of Claude source code that it has all sorts of bizarre things built into it, some of which are, you know, designed to screw you up, make it cost more for you. I don't know if that's on purpose or a Vibe coded bug. People have been complaining about Claude usage all week and I think this kind of fixes it. So anyway, you know, maybe this impacts me more than others because I use Claude code all the time. I've been playing with a Chinese model and it works quite well. I tried Gemma. Yeah, it's good. It's not. Not great. It's good. There's nothing like Opus, unfortunately.

[Patrick Beja]

What do you think of the. The leaked thing from the code that shows they're developing a technique to basically get. Give Claude infinite memory.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the biggest problem in my mind right now with all AI, is that every time you start a new session, it starts from scratch. It doesn't remember anything you did before. And it's like, yeah, it's like momento. It doesn't remember anything, but just like momento. You can have your agent make post it notes, write down its memories, and I've been doing that. There are a lot of systems around. Everybody's trying to solve this problem.

[Unidentified Guest]

And that worked out for the dude in Memento, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't remember.

[Patrick Beja]

How did it end?

[Leo Laporte]

Did it end well?

[Patrick Beja]

Not well.

[Leo Laporte]

Not well. Okay.

[Patrick Beja]

He kind of misunderstood what was happening in the beginning because he hallucinated the situation.

[Leo Laporte]

That's exactly what happens. So you create all these markdown files and then Claude, when it starts up, has to kind of get these shorthand versions of what happened before.

[Patrick Beja]

So that's what they're developing. Essentially, they're having your AI because of course people know, I guess, mostly. But the reason you have to start from scratch is that every time you add a question, the AI, the LLM has to go through your whole thread to get back to and predict the next answer it's going to give. So at some point the context window is full or it's using a little bit too much, too many tokens for. To give you one. One answer. So if you can summarize everything you've ever told the assistant into something that fits into the context window, then it can remember everything. But how does that work? Like, at some point you can't compress it anymore. Right. It feels like it would hallucinate things or what. What did they call it? I think there was a research, research paper on that where it was catastrophic memory loss or some term like that. Oh, sorry. It can't remember everything you've ever said. Right. Even with its. I have said it has dream programs that it does at night to consolidate its memory.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, that was one of the things you saw in the Claude code.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, the leak. That's what I said.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It had this thing where dream at night and try to consolidate its memories. People are trying to solve it and there are, you know, I have a memory system that works pretty well. Claude seems to know who I am every time I show up. It's a balancing act. But, yeah, it's an interesting issue. OpenAI, of course, has announced that one of the ways it's going to solve this cash crunch is. Well, first of all, they just raised 122 million with a B dollars this week. The most, the biggest raise in history. I mean, there's nothing to compare to it. And I guess they don't need to go public if they can get venture capitalists to keep pouring money into it.

[Ian Thompson]

The Uber model. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but, well, there's an upside in there. Like a pony and there's an upside in there somewhere. A lot of people wondering how long this can go on with OpenAI. And they in fact said, well, we're going to.

[Patrick Beja]

To cut.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to close down the Sora app. We're going to focus. Except I don't know how long that lasted because they just bought a podcast for hundreds of millions of dollars, but

[Patrick Beja]

low hundreds of millions.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well, what is that? 200 probably. This is a podcast that last year had revenue of $5 million. Okay, so let's see. That's two. I don't know, what is that? 200, 100 million. That's 40 times beta. That seems like a lot. Plus, of course, there's the issue of, well, if they're owned by OpenAI, are all those companies gonna still buy ads? Those ads that they were buying. This is the TBPN podcast, which is essentially CNBC for the nerd bros, the AI bros, the tech bros. And that was how was pitched. It's daily, it's for four or five hours every day. 70,000 viewers. We have more people listening to this show every week than that. We have more revenue than that. I don't, I don't know where it was. All I'm saying is Sam. Yeah, because Sam has appeared on many times. He loved it. Yeah, right.

[Patrick Beja]

So what, what are they going to do with it? That's completely like, do they want to. Do they want to. Want the, you know, permission to train on it? Do they want like, what's.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's public. They don't need to buy us. They don't need to buy tbpn. I don't understand either. And they say, oh, they're going to have editorial independence and they're going to stay in Los Angeles, which is only an hour away from Sam Alman.

[Unidentified Guest]

But okay, I think they just want a media channel.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Unidentified Guest]

They just want a media channel.

[Leo Laporte]

Why?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Anyway, that's kind of a scary precedent. I don't know if we want more media owned by.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's bad enough podcasting is the last bastion of kind of independent, non corporate.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

News. Do you wear Ray Ban glasses, Brar?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I don't. I'm not a huge, like champion of smart glasses. I love people who are really into it, but I'm like, I wear my, my boring contacts and I'm good to go. Like, I don't need to see things as I'm walking around.

[Leo Laporte]

Would it help that they now are making special versions for people with prescription lenses?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I think that definitely helps them for sure. I know people who are like, if I could get my prescription lenses on, something like that, that's great. There are times where I'm like, it would be nice to be hands free and recording video.

[Leo Laporte]

And there are new models that look a little less dorky. Dorky, yeah, that's a good word. Do I look like a dork to you?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

No. I think this is very fitting. I like this. That's great. I do the best way possible.

[Leo Laporte]

Mine are the black, black ones. You know, they're great. AirPods or, you know, earbuds.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

They're temple based and they sound fantastic

[Abrar Al Heedi]

because I don't like Putting things in my ear. So that is really nice. The other thing too is with like Meta ray bands and smart glasses in general are really great accessibility tools. So I really value them for that reason.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point. Point.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're blind or low vision, this can take a picture and you can say what am I looking at right now? And can tell you. Can you read me that label? Y And even though Meta's AI is not the top of the line at this point, I think potentially this is a good form factor at some point.

[Unidentified Guest]

Did they.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's a lot better than the other stuff that we've. The other, you know, heads up stuff that we've seen. Yeah.

[Unidentified Guest]

Did they sell them with just the speakers?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I don't think so.

[Unidentified Guest]

Because that sounds cool. I'd like those.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But the camera is a big part of it because you can. But it's also what people find offensive. Hey Meta, take a picture. So you see the light comes on. It got you. Peace sign. Hey Meta, take a video.

[Ian Thompson]

We're kind of heading into glass hole territory though here because it's. Well, I don't know. There was that report.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you mean, Ian? What are you talking about? I like it.

[Ian Thompson]

No, no, I mean you saw the report about. It's capturing all kinds of stuff that really shouldn't be captured like people having sex or going to the loo. A friend of mine actually went to a hotel where the check in staff were wearing them and he was like, can you take that off? Because I don't want you looking at my credit card when you're, you know, signing me in. So there are still privacy stuff to, to be dealt with. I think it's a great form factor. It really suits a lot of. Yeah. Get prescription lenses in there to open it up.

[Leo Laporte]

They'll be Esselor Luxottica, you know, which is everybody.

[Ian Thompson]

Luxottica are possibly the biggest unacknowledged monopoly out there. They own.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They bought everybody up.

[Ian Thompson]

Make billions out of selling basically pieces of plastic. It's a remarkable business model.

[Leo Laporte]

Must be phenomenal on these. I mean these are seven or $800. Then you have to get the lenses for another seven or $800. I mean it's crazy.

[Patrick Beja]

The form factor is definitely something that has huge potential for the next evolution of computing devices because obviously if you're going to use AI a lot, if you're going to make a chatbot, your computer, human interface, if you're going to replace keyboard and mouse all the time or touch screen by a chatbot. Then all of a sudden you don't need the slab of glass and plastic that is your smartphone. You don't need your keyboard and your mouse. So what are you left with? A kind of AI pin that you can pin on you. Something or glasses, something you put on your face. And the, the glasses obviously have the advantage that you potentially have a screen or, you know, you have something you can see and very good access to your voice and to your ears to, you know, give you feedback.

[Leo Laporte]

I have for years seen this as the holy Grail. I've worn all of the little, you know, the pins and the bracelets and the things that record everything. And I've had people yell at me for doing that. But my, my desire, especially as I get older, is to have something that is kind of. Of recording my life, ingesting it in an AI so that I can query, I can get information, I can have a dialogue with the AI without, you know, running over to my computer or opening up my phone. I, right now I could talk to my AI on Telegram and I do that. But I think having a ubiquitous. I want to be able to talk to my AI. I want it in the air, I want it to be there at all times. Is that nuts? Am I nuts?

[Patrick Beja]

No, no, no, no, I don't think so.

[Leo Laporte]

Too nutty, she says, backing off slowly. Too crazy.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

So then are the. Do you think so the glasses aren't enough for you, is what you're saying?

[Leo Laporte]

No, they are enough. Yeah, but they have to connect. I can't, I don't. Meta is not enough. I have to connect it to my own. If I see this is that open clothing and I don't think open claws is. Is all that. But the idea of an agent, this is the, this is the year of the agentic AI where you have an AI that has kind of a memory of you and knows about you and knows about your life and that you could talk to and you can query. We're moving, moving towards that all along, right? I mean, Siri and you know, talking to an AI and it's more than asking what's the weather going to be like? But saying, what's my calendar look like? What's the last time I called my mom? I think I should probably call her stuff like that. That, yeah, I think would be.

[Patrick Beja]

Well, that's the ultimate. It is the ultimate form of computing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Patrick Beja]

It.

[Leo Laporte]

Ubiquitous.

[Patrick Beja]

I think you tend. Which is why. Yeah, which is why when we imagined comp. You know, the ultimate computers a few years ago, Or a few decades ago it was, you know, HAL and whatever other version of that it was. It's something that can render services and is accessible kind of in the ether. You speak to it, it replies. I think you're not at all crazy for, for what?

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like this, this is what we really want with AI.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah. Leo, how do you feel about, like Google's in development, smart glasses? Do you have any? Or is that too limited in terms of.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think. Yeah, I would prefer it wasn't. I mean maybe Apple would be the only big tech company I would trust with this and I'm sure they're working on something. Absolutely. I know they are. Yeah. Honestly though, what I really want is a non platformed device that I can hook up to my own. I bought a machine to run AI locally. I want to be able to do this all for privacy reasons and for control reasons and for per. Because it's. I want it to be as personal as possible. I don't want it to be Google's idea or Apple's idea or Meta's idea of what this should be. I want it to be how I want it. So I want to run it on my own systems. So really I just need an interface device that I can hook up to my own systems basically.

[Patrick Beja]

And that naturally becomes the glasses, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's glasses. It could be any like, you know, from her, the earbud, but the glasses. And this is why the camera is important. It's. Yeah, it sees what you. Sees what you.

[Patrick Beja]

Exactly.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Patrick Beja]

Well then can potentially show you stuff, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right.

[Ian Thompson]

Neil Stevenson had a very interesting blog post this week where he was saying I was wrong about glasses because he was a big proponent for glasses and

[Leo Laporte]

then he wants to put something on their face. Yeah, he's not wrong. But he was talking more about VR helmets. Right, isn't he?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, that and also the, the, the social aspect of it in, in that if somebody is using a phone, you can clearly see they're using a phone. If someone's using the glasses, even with a little light. And I remember when the original Google Glass came out, some people were deliberately covering up that light that showed that they were being, you know, that the recording function was on, which, which honestly, I'm not a violent person, but it would slap the damn things off their face if I saw that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well that's, that's what worries me, especially if I go down to San Francisco that you might come over and bop me.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, but you guys are thinking too Short term, like in, in we're gonna

[Leo Laporte]

get used to it.

[Patrick Beja]

A decade. Everyone has them. You just assume, you know, if they, if they become as ubiquitous as smartphones, then you assume everyone has them.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I feel like even at this point. Yeah. Even taking a walk around the block, you're like, how many people's ring cameras am I? You know what I mean? Like the waymos recording me as I'm crossing street. You know what I mean? Like there's all these things.

[Leo Laporte]

But can I point out something? It does seem like an invasion of privacy, but it's, it's a double edged sword. I don't think we would have known what happened to Alex Preddy or Renee Good if it weren't for the ubiquitous smartphone camera. It keeps everybody honest, including law enforcement. And I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing. That thing.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah. Well, I think there's an argument to be made that yes, you have, you know, beneficial aspects to it.

[Leo Laporte]

In public is in public. I don't think you should come in my house.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, I agree with that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

But you're exposed. Yeah. You could be captured by anything at any moment. Yeah. Already.

[Patrick Beja]

Honestly, a lot of cities have like cameras everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah? Yeah. Anyway, we have automated license plate readers now pretty much everywhere. Alps. And it turns out that is, is the real surveillance tool because when you're driving around, you have a unique identification number on your back. And these, every intersection, these cameras are picking it up. They know exactly where you are and what you're doing.

[Patrick Beja]

I do think we need to be careful about like how far we take it. If I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit. When you, everyone has a phone. You can pull out your phone when something happens. It is a little bit different for. From everyone is being filmed all the time, you know.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Totally.

[Leo Laporte]

No. And there need to be very strong safeguards. I mean, we've seen time and time again we had the story a couple of weeks ago about the poor grandma who was taken to South Dakota because of a misidentification with face recognition. Lost four months of her life, lost her home with no apology from law enforcement who fingered her based on bad face recognition.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That was appalling. And that is not the first time that's happened.

[Ian Thompson]

But I think that was mainly down to police laziness.

[Leo Laporte]

It was basically said that's why we need regulations. Right.

[Ian Thompson]

No, no, I agree. I mean it was just like they said. Oh, what the facial recognition is. If they'd gone into her bank accounts for just Five minutes, they would have seen it was rubbish.

[Leo Laporte]

They could. She had that perfect alibi.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

She was not in the state. She was thousands of miles away.

[Patrick Beja]

The fact that she was arrested and put in jail for four months is a tragedy to begin with, but the biggest issue is that, you know, I don't know if she can sue or if she even. But her life was ruined because she couldn't pay her debts and she lost her house, as you said. And like, that's even, like, mistakes will happen. Like, it's terrible, but kind of. But when you realize that the state or government should be liable to help her out, I guess.

[Unidentified Guest]

But this is a. This is a brand of mistake that's been happening more often, though, is that no one checks the AI work. No one checks the AI's work ever.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. That's a very good point.

[Patrick Beja]

Of course. Of course. And that's a huge issue.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let's take a break because I have some good examples. It's in our military section, coming up.

[Ian Thompson]

Great.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a reason that the acronym FUBAR was made up in the military and snafu. We have a wonderful panel. A.m. thompson, it's great to see you, my friend.

[Ian Thompson]

Always a pleasure. Pleasure.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you have a mustache or is that. Is that a Mandela?

[Ian Thompson]

I. I grew a mustache during lockdown and I kept it for about six months. I got so sick of having to strain tea out of it every time I took a mouthful.

[Leo Laporte]

Straining tea.

[Ian Thompson]

And also, it's just itchy and so much trouble. I kind of wish I'd grown a beard at the same time, but that's just not going to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, I wish I had a beard, but I don't want to grow it. That's the problem. It's great to see you, Ian Brar. Great to see you as always. Senior technology reporter at cnet.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I think. You never had a beard or a mustache just for that?

[Leo Laporte]

No. How disappointing. So, Movember, really, it isn't that meaningful. Okay. I'm just checking. What are you working on these days?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

What am I working on these days? You know, I don't even remember anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Just a blur.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's a blur. Honest to God. I'm like, what did I work on?

[Leo Laporte]

Did you go to ifa? Did you cover that?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Or for Mobile World Congress?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry? Mobile World Congress.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yes, I did go to Mobile World Congress. It was very fun. But then I had to review the iPhone 17e, and then the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra. So then I had to take a

[Leo Laporte]

week off before I Now you're exhausted.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah. Yeah. But it was good. It was a good run. It was a fun time. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you. Does it get busy again in June? We've got Google I O and wdc.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Right? Exactly. Starting May, June, it'll start to pick up again. So this is the time where I'm like, I can write all the things I want to write that I don't have time for the rest of the year. So I'm going to try my best to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

So glad to see you. And of course, Brar also is a regular on Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent. You were just on. On Wednesday. And of course, the great Patrick Beja, who you've been on our show for. It must be decades at this point.

[Patrick Beja]

I think the first time was. Was it POD Media? What was it? New Media Expo.

[Leo Laporte]

Pod Media Expo, really way back when?

[Patrick Beja]

I think so. Holy two, 2007, maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

That's got to be. That's really early.

[Patrick Beja]

I. I remember I got on in a car with Mark Spagnolo and Nicole's Pagnolo. The.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, Whisperer. The wood. I still have his beautiful cabinet that he made for me.

[Patrick Beja]

And they drove me to, well, their house. But also on the way we went from Blizzcon to the cottage back.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I think it has been that long.

[Patrick Beja]

And so that was the second time, I think,

[Leo Laporte]

four pages of appearances with you going way, way. Look at this. Way, way, way, way back. Holy cow. I could find the first one. Let me go.

[Patrick Beja]

Oh, that's gonna be embarrassing.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no embarrassment. Everybody had a. Let's see. First on 2009, episode 200.

[Patrick Beja]

That's later than. Oh, maybe it wasn't on the show when I went to.

[Leo Laporte]

You were on with John Cdvorak, John Graham Cumming, who was a CTO at Cloudflare for many years, and David Pogue, who's in the news again with his new book.

[Patrick Beja]

I was on the show with all of these incredible people.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazing. And you don't remember a word of it.

[Patrick Beja]

I'll ask my AI agent to summarize it next time.

[Leo Laporte]

That is fantastic. Oh, and you can tell how old this is because these story links [e-mail] and there was a friend feed conversation for this episode.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, good Lord.

[Leo Laporte]

Holy moly.

[Ian Thompson]

And the cheering apology. That really was a while ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's why Cumming was on. Yeah, he. He. Good for him. John Graham coming. Got the British government to apologize to Alan Turing.

[Ian Thompson]

A little too late, but yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, it matters, you know, he's

[Ian Thompson]

now on the 50 pound notes. So, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's not gonna be replaced by a possum or something?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, yeah, they're talking about replacing them with wild animals, but, you know, so it goes.

[Leo Laporte]

They'll always be in England. That's all I can say.

[Ian Thompson]

We like to keep it silly.

[Patrick Beja]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Our show today, brought to you by my mattress. Oh, man. Nothing silly about a good night's sleep. It's kind of vital. I mean, and honestly, we spend more than a third of our life on that mattress. Right. How are you planning for spring cleaning? You know, maybe this would be a good time to clean out the old and upgrade to a Helix mattress for an extra specially good night's rest. And I can tell you, we did this. I don't know if it was spring. Maybe it was spring of last year. Yeah, I think it might have been. Man, we love our Helix mattress. We realized our mattress was, I think it was seven or eight years old. You're supposed to replace, place it between six and 10 years. Mattresses wear out, they start to bow. They don't work as well with the Helix mattress. No more night sweats, no back pain, no motion transfer. And I gotta tell you, you have many choices in mattresses, but please don't settle for a mattress made overseas with low quality, questionable materials. And they pack it in a box. They stick it on a container ship six months sitting next to the fuel bag barrels. It is not the mattress you want, rest assured. Your Helix mattress, no, no. It's assembled, packaged, and shipped from Arizona. And it's shipped and made after you place your order. It's made to order, so it is fresh and brand new and you're gonna love it. Now let me suggest you do what we did when you go to helixsleep.com twit. Take the Helix Helix sleep quiz. Because everybody's got different mattress preferences, but also different sleeping styles. This will match you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preference and your sleep needs. And it really works. Helix actually did a study, the Wesper sleep study. They measured participants sleep performance after they did what we did, which is switch from their old mattress to a Helix mattress. And I have to say, this exactly matches my own experience. 82% of participants, participants saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle. 82%. And that deep sleep cycle is the most important part of sleep. It may only be half an hour to an hour a night, but that's when your brain is cleared out. You know, the spinal fluid comes up and washes out all the old brain stuff. Not only did participants sleep better, they slept more on average, 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night. That's a huge increase. Participants on average achieve 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. You sleep better and you wake up feeling better time and time again. Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand tested and reviewed by experts like Forbes and Wired. They deliver it, as I said, right to your door from their mattress factory with free shipping in the US and rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. They call it their happy with Helix Garage, a risk free customer first experience. You must be completely satisfied with your new mattress or money back. Go to helixsleep.com twit for 20% off sitewide during the spring savings event. That's helixsleep.com twit 20% off site wide. The offer does end April 16, so if you're listening after the sale ends you still want to check them out. Great deals at helix site helixleep.com TWIT it's a good time to go. That'd be a good thing for your tax refund. Get yourself a nice new mattress. Helixsleep.com Twitter thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Actually, David Pogue was on Mac Break weekly last Tuesday to celebrate Apple's 50th anniversary, which is April 1st. And he's got that book Apple the First 50 Years, which is is a amazing book. Really, really amazing.

[Patrick Beja]

It was so cool to hear hear him again after, you know, he can you believe the scene?

[Leo Laporte]

Since 2009 you've been on our shows.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's nice, Patrick. You know, 20 years from now Abrar will be saying the same thing to you.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I hope so. I look forward to it. I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see, after 16 years and $8 billion, the military's new I'll put that in air quotes. GPS software still doesn't work. Space Force last year, right before the fourth of July took ownership of a new GPS navigation system. The next gen Operational Control System or oscx, was designed for command and control of the military's. They have their own GPS 30 GPS satellite. It was specifically designed to be jam resistant. That's been a big problem during the Ukrainian war and I imagine now in Iran, GPS 3, which started launching in 2018. These new satellites, two master control stations, upgrades to ground monitoring. But the company that made it, the former Raytheon, now known as RTX, was paid 3.7. Well wait a minute, I take it back. The contract was for $3.7 billion. It was supposed to be done 10 years ago. The official cost now twice that, $7.6 billion. And it still doesn't work. The GAO, the Government Accounting Office, found that the OCX program was undermined by poor acquisition decisions and a slow recognition of development. Development problems, situation normal, all messed up. I have nothing to say about that. I just thought I'd pass along. This was a little concerning apparently. According to Fast Company, the Pentagon, for its high energy laser weapons, uses Xbox controllers.

[Patrick Beja]

It's not funny.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to submarines PlayStation controllers myself. But okay, no, I mean it's you.

[Ian Thompson]

It's used in submarines as well because the old submarine controllers used to cost an arm and a leg and they just decided let's use Xbox. The kids who are using them actually, you know, are used to using them and are quite adept at doing so. But on the GPS thing, I just would like to put a shout out to the land of my birth. This week in great. In the UK they tested out quantum navigation systems which are based on fluctuations, you know, with it within, within movement and are totally unjammable. So I think the military has done what it sometimes does and spent an enormous amount of money on software, on a technology system which is already outdated.

[Leo Laporte]

Completely redundant and outdated. What a surprise.

[Patrick Beja]

It happens in military spending. This is one example, I'm sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is why we should give them the one and a half trillion dollars that's in President Trump's new budget. One and a half trillion billion dollars.

[Patrick Beja]

Is that more than before?

[Leo Laporte]

40% more. And they also for the war, they want another 200 billion after they have a trillion more than trillion dollar budget already.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I have to file my taxes and this is not encouraging. Like

[Unidentified Guest]

we can't afford healthcare. Anybody, you know that's, that's out of the question.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

No, it's ridiculous.

[Patrick Beja]

The interesting thing is that every country around the world, world or at the very least around Russia has had to increase military spending. Everyone in Europe is increasing military spending. Yeah, and I thought that, you know, I say that without any political, I don't know, preference or whatever. My understanding was that Trump wanted to decrease the intervention of the US And I'm not even talking about the Iran. Why does the military need more money?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh well, that's why we have other things with other fish to fry inside and outside the country.

[Ian Thompson]

They're also spending on some really odd stuff like you know, M1, Abraham's tanks. And if the war in Ukraine has told us anything, it's tanks on the battlefield. Are toast. You know, it's like if you can knock them out with a two thousand dollar drone, then, you know, spending a million bucks plus on the tank is just, just makes no sense whatsoever.

[Leo Laporte]

Iran. Iran's missile blitz has taken out two data centers, AWS data centers in Bahrain and Dubai. Amazon is declaring a hard down status for multiple zones in the Middle east.

[Ian Thompson]

And Google is also in, in the firing line, according to the Iranian Republican Guard. If this goes on and they start hitting energy centers within Iran, Iran has said, yeah, okay, dentist, data centers and power systems are fair game then. And that's going to make things really interesting because a lot of people are going to get severely inconvenienced by this, put it that way. And a lot of tech people who are supporting Trump at the moment are going to be like, hang on, let's just ease this up a bit.

[Leo Laporte]

And Iranian hackers, who are actually quite good, good are also going to war. This from the Financial Times. Tehran's cyber operatives have sought to so fear and extract intelligence in a series of attacks on Israel and the us. Chris Krebs, who I like quite a bit, former head of cisa, the Cyber Security and Information Security Agency, of course was fired and is now being prosecuted by Trump for having the temerities say the 2020 election was the most secure election in our history, says the Iranians are throwing everything they have at this. It's all hands on deck. If cyber operators are breathing, they will be on their keyboards. Oh, that's bad news. And of course, meanwhile, the President wants to take, according to the Register, a battle ax to Sisa and slash $707 million from its budget. Budget. This is the, this is the most successful US agency in terms of protecting us against cyber risks. And yet while we're giving the military another half trillion, we want to cut nearly a billion of CESA spending.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean this is. Leo, you and I were both at RSAC this year and I don't know if you saw the. They had four ex heads of the NSA on a, on a panel.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Ian Thompson]

And it was fascinating because they were so saying we need to be spending more on this than we've ever spent before because this is where our adversaries are going. And the ability to take down systems we've demonstrated in Venezuela and Iran. But the rest of the world is also ready and prepared and cutting over 700 million from CESA's budget seems ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's certainly poorly timed.

[Patrick Beja]

You know, the fact that Iran hackers are getting ready to do things is not surprising. Any administration that would prepare for a military conflict with any nation of that ilk would be prepared for this.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think these days especially. Right. This is how war is waged.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, absolutely. So the really concerning thing here is, is that it doesn't seem, again, I'm trying to not be. I don't like Trump, but I'm trying to look at this objectively. There doesn't seem to be a coherent, a cohesive strategy or preparedness.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this goes beyond politics. This is not political dogma. This is not a battle between the right and the left, Republicans and Democrats. This is just nonsense. This is just poor policy, period.

[Ian Thompson]

Right. Yeah. No, I mean, it's, it's something that, the, that. Mike.

[Leo Laporte]

Roger. Oh, we lost you. We lost your audio. Did your cat knock here?

[Ian Thompson]

No, no, it's just. Sure, the. Sure, you know, volume thing is a pain in the backside. No, the, this is something that Mike Rogers said in the panel was he was asked, will the next war be primarily about missiles, about boots on the ground, or about cyber? And he was like, well, all obviously, but cyber is going to be a much more important role in this going forward. And, you know, there's no way we can ignore this because anyone we're going to be going up against won't ignore it. So, you know, you've got to be prepared to quit the Boy Scouts, which is like the military, but the military

[Leo Laporte]

has heavy artillery and they have a better salute.

[Patrick Beja]

Meanwhile, we talk about something dumb.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, please. You're very saying too many smart things. Start saying some dumb things and continuing

[Patrick Beja]

to say dumb things. You're all very concerned about this. I'm going to be like the agitator who's being annoying. You're all very concerned about all of this and hackers and CISA being cut and all of this. If they're at some point in the next five to 10 years or 20 years, there's going to be an issue with Taiwan, right? China, China. And there's going to be an issue with China. How many Chinese made routers do you want in the US when that happens? Or would you rather through a long and painful process? I'm really working for the Trump administration decisions there through a long and painful process to start a situation where routers are made in the US and your country has more control over them. Of course, I'm referencing the fact that routers made in the, in China have been banned in the U.S. not just China.

[Leo Laporte]

Routers made anywhere but the U.S. have been banned. Even French routers are Banned.

[Patrick Beja]

Oh, that's okay. That's. We have so many routers. No, but I mean, you see where

[Leo Laporte]

I'm being part of the issue is I don't think we have a lot of American.

[Ian Thompson]

We don't have any.

[Leo Laporte]

The only one that I know of that's made in America is guess what, Elon Musk's Starlink. That's the only router in the US at this point.

[Patrick Beja]

But you need to start somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we should start, get going fast. By the way, this doesn't eliminate any router you've already purchased. You can continue to use it.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, we all know how long routers stay in operation. I mean some of these things are 20 years old.

[Leo Laporte]

I was, when I was at RSAC, I went over to the ubiquity booth because I thought I really liked it. This had just gone down the FCC's ban and I went over to the ubiquity booth, I said, well, does this impact you? And they said we're not talking to the press.

[Ian Thompson]

Always a good sign.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, go away.

[Patrick Beja]

I've been surprised by what I think is not insignificant amount of American manufacturing in the tech sector happening since Trump is, has been forcing it. And maybe I'm you know, being PR of Apple and whoever Apple says oh

[Leo Laporte]

yeah, we're going to make everything here. And they've got one factory that makes

[Patrick Beja]

not everything, but there are, there are CPUs.

[Leo Laporte]

Most parts that are made in that US factory are made in China. They import the parts and they assemble emblem in the U.S. what happened over the last two decades is we have exported our manufacturer especially high tech gear.

[Patrick Beja]

Oh, I've read Apple in China. I've, I know all about this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a great book and it's,

[Patrick Beja]

I've read one book so I'm an expert.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but I think it wasn't just Apple. This was, this is the story of all the tech sector. China became our and, and this was by the way Chinese government policy. This was. They were very aggressive, aggressive about supporting this. They wanted this business and they became the, the manufacturer for the world.

[Patrick Beja]

And the US was supporting this as well on the governmental level because they thought China is going to open up and capitalism will do to China what it did to, you know, other countries. And. But okay, that's happened. But if you want to bring back manufacturing in the U.S. u.S. I remember who was it Steve Jobs who was talking to Obama who was like those Jobs are gone, they're never coming back. And it does seem like you do have more CPUs coming out of American factories now building TSMC sounds like crazy. Yeah, and like high end CPUs like what is it, 3, 2 nanometers coming soon. And of course they are being sent to China for assembly. So it doesn't, you know, at this

[Leo Laporte]

point some of that is in.

[Patrick Beja]

I'm trying to play devil's advocate, you

[Leo Laporte]

know, some of that is in response to the fact that there is some concern about China invading Taiwan and so we may lose, in fact tsmc, which is a Taiwanese company. We may.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh we will. I mean there was a paper in the National War College which was their most read paper I think of 2008, 18 that said that in the event of war with China, the Taiwanese are going to destroy their chip fabs. And if they don't, we will, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we can't let them have them.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, I'm sure they're rigged with C4 everywhere. Like they, they can't let have the, the Chinese have them. I'm again, I'm an expert. I've read one book and I am certain they're rigged with C4.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and you know, you have a point. I mean the routers are how we all can connected to the Internet. The number one router in America, 40% of all routers in America are made by one company, a Chinese company called TP Link. For years Wirecutter recommended it as the best router that carried a lot of weight. A lot of people have TP Link routers. They're made in China. I guess firmware updates come from the company in China and in theory a firmware update could be injected. That was malware. And yeah, there'd be a lot of, I mean that would certainly be a vulnerability.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, I'm curious what the rest of the panel thinks about this. If China did start making moves to invade Taiwan and the Chinese responded by shutting down, e.g. aTM networks in the US or power networks or water networks. Would the American public really give that much for monkeys about Taiwan when they've got so many problems on their own plates? I personally think this is what the Chinese will be banking on.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and in fact, if you really want to leverage your hacking ability, you would do what China has done with Salt Typhoon. You would invade our telecommunications networks, you would invade our power grid. My personal home router is not the first thing you're going to hack. I mean, yeah, maybe you will. It might be a little bit farther down the list though. And I don't know if we've done a whole lot The US telecommunications companies have said, yeah, we can't do anything about Salt Typhoon. We would have to rip and replace everything. The phone network would be down for a few days while we did that. They say, so they're not doing anything about it. But meanwhile, we've gotta bear the brunt. Now, the good news is our audience is smart. And I bet you a third of you have already made your own routers. You could do it with a Raspberry PI, you could do it with an old computer, you could do it with a new nuc. It's simple enough. You could turn practically any computer into a router. There's open source Linux distributions that are designed to be routers. There's some very good ones like PF Sense. It is a simple thing to do. And if you search online. Here's one article from Noah Bailey, how to turn anything into a router. Well, you can't turn a potato into a router. Maybe you can. I. I don't know.

[Ian Thompson]

Is that you?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay.

[Patrick Beja]

Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. We've lost Ian.

[Patrick Beja]

He hasn't. No, he hasn't muted his mic.

[Ian Thompson]

I'm. I'm sorry. I heard somebody moving around in the house and my wife is supposed to be out at the moment, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it your wife or do you need to. Do we need to arm you here?

[Ian Thompson]

No, no, this is a second amendment house. But even so, I just heard people moving around so, like with a big

[Leo Laporte]

brass knob on it that I could bop a burglar with. But it's next to the front door, which probably means I'm more likely to get bopped than they are. I'm thinking.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa won't let me have a gun. She says, what are you going to do with a gun? Well, I'm appointed at a bad guy. She said, they're going to take the gun and shoot you. You don't. This is not a good idea.

[Ian Thompson]

On the other hand, you can unrab it with a nice rifle. And rabbit is. Is terrifically expensive over here, which I just don't understand.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody wants.

[Ian Thompson]

And they're everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Rabbit. What do you. You must be British.

[Ian Thompson]

I was raised on rabbit.

[Leo Laporte]

Use rabbit for bubble and squeak or something.

[Ian Thompson]

One of your weird British rabbit and bacon stew. I mean, come on, Patrick, support me on this.

[Patrick Beja]

Yes, yes, I will. Like, there are very few things. I will support a British person. Rabbits can be eaten.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Easter and you're talking about rabbits.

[Ian Thompson]

Show me the Bible where it says anything about rabbits and chocolate.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody knows an Easter Eat ham. Okay. Come on.

[Patrick Beja]

Oh my God.

[Leo Laporte]

Cassoulet is one of my favorite dishes and I know that often has rabbit. Rabbit in it.

[Patrick Beja]

So there you go.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, but Leo, for your break ins at least, hopefully they don't happen. But you'll have your mid array bands

[Leo Laporte]

on and then I will. While I get bopped. Yes, I'll have a red.

[Patrick Beja]

Know who bopped you?

[Leo Laporte]

I have.

[Patrick Beja]

You'll be like.

[Leo Laporte]

Meta. Film, film. Film this.

[Ian Thompson]

Call the police. Call the police.

[Leo Laporte]

We have so many cameras around the house that if we will have a complete record of them coming and going.

[Patrick Beja]

Oh, they will come in through the. The cat door.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe they won't ring the doorbell like the cat does.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Okay, not the same. That again.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a little break while you go out and buy a old computer to make your new router out of. I think this is. You know, they talk about victory gardens, people planting gardens. There's all sorts of things people do in times of, of strife and, and war. But for us geeks, building our own router sounds like a good project. It's not hard. You can do it.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, it's cool. You can think that we were the. My parents generation was the last one that would need their children's help to do test tech things. It's. Yeah, because what's happening, what's happened with tech for us is what was happening with like car mechanics for our parents generation. I don't know how a car works. I really don't care. And the kids today are the same with, with computers and stuff. So I don't know how many people are going to build their routers.

[Leo Laporte]

Build your own router, kids, start learning, okay?

[Patrick Beja]

When China invades Taiwan, you're gonna need to know how to make your own router.

[Leo Laporte]

Make your own router.

[Unidentified Guest]

It'll be too late though, right, because they won't have access to the Internet anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, that's true. That's the first thing they do. Your router is irrelevant.

[Patrick Beja]

Not if we, you know, only make and buy American made routers.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, we're gonna have victory gardens for router routers. Patrick, when it. Okay, let. Are we ramping up the big router manufacture? Is there any margin even in routers? Is there any. They did the same thing with drones, by the way. You can't buy foreign made drones in the United States.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, but people don't need drones. You need routers.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's true.

[Patrick Beja]

Well, I mean, I don't know. I don't know that it's even, you know, being voted in or put in place in good faith. Like, maybe they just want to get Elon Musk's routers to, you know, sell 300. I don't know. But, you know, there are things like, for example, something. Something you might not know about. Europe is now kind of wary of Visa and MasterCard. We are switching over our payment systems from Visa and MasterCard to Americans.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wait a minute. No.

[Patrick Beja]

Among others. Well, France has cb, which is Carte Bleu, which is another name for. And we've had it. It's kind of like the, you know, our aircraft carriers and our nuclear plants. We've had it forever. And everyone was like, what do you need CB for? Most people didn't even know what it was. And like, people in the government were like, don't. You know, we just trust us, at some point we're going to want that. Yeah, we're going to need it.

[Leo Laporte]

So people now have it. Is that what's happening? Happening is Visa and MasterCard are going

[Patrick Beja]

away, and they're not going away, but CB is actually. It's actually on every single credit card that we have. It has to have cb.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's kind of foresight, a secondary financial transaction.

[Patrick Beja]

And now, yes, it's a payment system that is handled by French entities. And now you can select on your, like Apple Pay, for example. You always could select either CB or Visa on, you know, payments on Internet services and stuff like that. I never knew what it was. I never knew the difference. Now I do. But even on Apple Pay, you can select for your credit card if you're going to go through Visa or MasterCard or whatever or CB. And so if at some point not even, you know, Visa decides, they don't like the French, but like the government, the US Government says Visa is an American company, American payment system. You cannot, you know, do business with the French because they stink. Well, we can just switch over to CP and we're fine cheese eaters. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And so I like this because for a long time, Europe's been getting more and more like America. Like, it's not, you know, it's no different anymore. You got the McDonald's, you got your Kentucky Fried Chicken. So it's going back. Let's make Europe weird again. I think this is good. I think this is know, to be honest, get there, they don't have Coca Cola. They have Africa Cola.

[Patrick Beja]

It's so weird. We have like all kinds of cola. We have like Bre Cola in Brittany. We have like all kinds of. I think it would.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple juice. Yeah.

[Patrick Beja]

I would much rather we just, you know, traded with everyone and it's a

[Leo Laporte]

better world where we all cooperate about

[Patrick Beja]

all of this and didn't have to increase military spending everywhere. It would be because at some point we're going to. Someone is going to want to do something with it.

[Leo Laporte]

But it'd be nice as a bumper sticker said if schools had all the funding we need in the military. Had to have baked sales.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. I mean. Patrick, is Minitel still operational? Just talking about backups.

[Leo Laporte]

They gave up.

[Patrick Beja]

No, I, I don't think.

[Leo Laporte]

I think somebody brought me a Minitel terminal, by the way. I wish I still had it.

[Patrick Beja]

Oh, Minitel was amazing. It like it brought. Communicate. We have to explain what it is now.

[Leo Laporte]

The French government places phone books with a digital tool. And this is before there was aol. I mean this is way, way back.

[Patrick Beja]

It was like in the mid-80s and it wasn't just a phone book. It actually had the infrastructure for like online services. It was inspired by what was happening on BBS's and stuff like that. And they had had great, a great design idea. Like design not just the device but the entire service at the French post and telecom company at the time. And so they designed this terminal which had kind of an integrated keyboard and a screen and would connect through a, you know, low speed modem to your network. It would use up your phone line just like modems did at the time.

[Leo Laporte]

It was. Video was the interface. Yeah, yeah.

[Patrick Beja]

And. And so you would connect to. There were different phone numbers, there were different models. One of them had a like collapsible keyboard and you would connect to different services. There were different numbers which had different kinds of prices. And then you would log into, you would connect to a specific service. There was a lot of chat services happening. Some of them, you know, not for children.

[Leo Laporte]

Did everyone have one? It was just like in every home.

[Patrick Beja]

Many, many people. Yeah, it was, it was a very widely success. Like it was. Imagine 80, what was it? 84. It started 85, maybe around that.

[Leo Laporte]

The first minutel was at 82 it says. Yeah, yeah.

[Patrick Beja]

I'm sure it got popular a little bit later that. But, but it was like predates Prodigy.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean this was like Prodigy. But it was. Everybody.

[Patrick Beja]

It was really amazing. And of course it was like the, the young people like us, which would get our, you know, make our parents crazy because we'd use. It was very expensive, you know, to connect and it would use up the phone line and it was like a place to meet people who would like watch the Same anime that we did or play video games was amazing.

[Unidentified Guest]

So the people who learned how to type on this thing, did they get all mad when we switched to qwerty?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. France still has a Zerty. That's the French keyboard.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, we still have a Zerty.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the French keyboard. I know, it looks a little weird, doesn't it?

[Ian Thompson]

I know. I mean Abra, you were at Mobile World Congress, which used to be 3gsm down in can and the press room was equipped with French keyboards and everyone other than French journalists got in there and was just like,

[Patrick Beja]

There's like five letters.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. But you're still having to look down and do like finger, finger, finger, finger.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The rest is more normal. Yeah.

[Patrick Beja]

And the, the worst part of that is that a lot of video games, games don't account for French keyboards. So you launch the game and it's still qwerty. But these are not. Yes, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Crazy.

[Unidentified Guest]

The numbers are upside down too.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Oh, fascinating.

[Unidentified Guest]

It's like a phone. It's like a phone on this one.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah. I think maybe that was only the minute L. Maybe the, the number pad is.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think every computer should still have an envelope. Voir kibo. That little button.

[Patrick Beja]

But it was, it was really cool like, and it was very French or like in the way that it was a very top down national company. Thinking up how can we bring this technology to the masses at the time that it wasn't.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I know it used the phone line, but it was kind of like the phone.

[Patrick Beja]

It was a BBS essentially.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Patrick Beja]

And, and you had like numbers that you would. That were very expensive, like a couple of bucks per minute. And especially the like. My generation remembers the ads for certain services that were on those very expensive numbers you would call and there were like, it was organized like forums from back then where you had like users who would become moderators and administrators and like it was, it was a whole thing.

[Leo Laporte]

There were at the end of the 90s, 9 million Minitel terminals, 25,000 Minitel services. But then the Internet came along. Right. And it was kind of superseded. You didn't need it anymore. As of this article, which was on the, in The Independent in 2012. So it's 15 years ago, there were still 800,000 old people in French France using their mini tail because they didn't like computers.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Patrick Beja]

I think it's been shut down since.

[Leo Laporte]

By now it's gone.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah. But of course the, when the Internet started showing up of course, you know, we were like all into the Internet immediately.

[Leo Laporte]

We have the Internet at home, but you don't need it.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, but it was like in the 90s, like I got on the Internet quite early because I had it at university. But in the 90s, I would say 97, 90. What really, really happened was that in the early 2000s, I think it was a company called Free, which was a mobile, sorry, a Internet service company, phone operator actually got their service, which was actually free. You would connect to the Internet. It was a, you know, ISP that was free and it turned into a huge, huge company that is now mobile operator and ISP and everything. And that really popularized it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we're getting a little tour of French culture on Twitter. It's nice to have you, Patrick. Appreciate it.

[Patrick Beja]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Patrick Beja]

Yes, Patrick, I have been to a baseball match once.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh yeah? I've been to one, but that's all you do.

[Leo Laporte]

You are the wrong group for this one.

[Patrick Beja]

I was very confused.

[Leo Laporte]

They've changed something in baseball this year that is very interesting. You know, of course, video replays have come to other sports. Do you have it in soccer there. Backup for the referees for. In soccer. I know in football we have that the. In.

[Ian Thompson]

We have it in the UK for football. Yes. Yeah. Or soccer.

[Leo Laporte]

In baseball, one of the biggest judgment calls there's a lot. Umpires have a lot of, you know, leeway in the game is that balls and strikes, getting that ball in a very narrow zone across the plate makes it a strike. Outside of that zone is a ball. I'm not going to explain the rules of baseball to you. That would take.

[Patrick Beja]

I think, I think we know what.

[Leo Laporte]

You get the idea. Okay.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

What's the news? Yeah.

[Patrick Beja]

Well, throws the ball in an area and then you have to bet it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And of course, the umpire is sitting there behind the plates and judging whether that ball did that or not. Often wrong. It's a source of a lot of discussions on the baseball field. Well, now they're using for the first time this season, computer measurement spotters. But there are real limits on how you can use it. The batter, if the batter disagrees with the call the umpire gave, he can tap his hand helmet and that is a signal that he doesn't. He thinks, he thinks that that called strike wasn't a strike. And then they go to the video call machine and they challenge it. Now if they get the challenge wrong, you know, there's consequences and stuff. Yeah, that was, that was a strike right within the thing, they call it the Automated Ball Strike system, or abs. And it is really interesting because how it's changed, you know, the game a little bit, but you can't use it too much. You have to use it very judiciously.

[Unidentified Guest]

Why don't they just use this on every pitch, though? Why isn't this on just every pitch? Because.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's right. You know, in tennis, it's on every foul line call, right?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, yes, but that went badly wrong at Wimbledon when the first introduced it, because it kept on getting things wrong. Well, also, some line judges were just like, I don't care what the computer says. I say it was out.

[Leo Laporte]

So, you know, it's right.

[Ian Thompson]

You've got to deal with the human thing. And I do like the idea of a human being able to say, actually, I don't think that's right.

[Patrick Beja]

I think there is. The drama is part of the experience, and I mean, the drama of it

[Leo Laporte]

adds drama to the game.

[Patrick Beja]

When you go, well, no, that's not. I think, you know, if the thing happens and then that's part of the criticism in. In soccer, in football, I think. But right, if, like, you score a goal, everyone's happy, everyone's running around and. But then. No, wait. Okay, wait. We have to check with the video.

[Leo Laporte]

That's bad. It really slows the game.

[Patrick Beja]

Wait, okay. Okay. You can be happy now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's very annoying how. No, this baseball, I think they're right. They say you teams can have unlimited challenges, but you only get to be wrong twice, and then you can't do any more challenges for the rest of the game. So that. I think that's a good way to do it so you don't have these infinite tapping of the helmet.

[Ian Thompson]

Formula one could do with something like this because the stewards decisions over the last couple of years have been absolutely terrible. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Ian, I are Formula one fans, and we are also going through a drought because. Because there were two races scheduled for the month of April, one in Bahrain and one in Saudi Arabia.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I imagine those got canceled. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Not the best place to have a lot of people gathered in one spot.

[Ian Thompson]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

But through a drought till May. What do you think of the new rules, Ian? Are you enjoying.

[Ian Thompson]

I can't say politely. Sorry. I can say politely.

[Leo Laporte]

You're a traditional.

[Ian Thompson]

I want to swear. I think they're blind.

[Leo Laporte]

I love them. Oh, I love them. Yeah. Because you see, in racing, you're seeing. Well, no, you're some problems. I understand.

[Ian Thompson]

You know, Formula One is foot to the floor racing, not Going slow to recharge your battery and then get a Mario Kart boost at the end of it. You know, Ollie Bearman nearly slammed into the back of another car.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

That was because he was traveling 50 miles an hour faster than the car in front because he used his Magic Mushroom boost. And, you know, that sounds interesting.

[Patrick Beja]

Anyway. That sounds interesting. All of a sudden.

[Leo Laporte]

And there's gonna be a banana.

[Patrick Beja]

What's happening?

[Leo Laporte]

It's gonna be great. I can't wait. It's gonna.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, Max Verstappen has officially been asked, apparently, to stop referring it to as Mario Mushroom Mode. But they're gonna have to make some changes before Miami because it's dangerous on the track.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the real problem. Yeah. But also, speed are not good in a race.

[Ian Thompson]

It's. It's Formula One. It's car racing. It's supposed to be foot the floor, balls to the wall, and get out there and go as fast as you possibly can. Not super. I mean, the Formula one association made a huge mistake when they put out on social media Kimmy's fastest lap from the last race, and apparently. Oh, the camera died while he was recharging his battery because it was just like. Well, we've just checked his feed, and it definitely didn't. So, you know, sorry, I. Formula one nuts.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, I shouldn't have brought it up. How do you feel about baseball, though?

[Ian Thompson]

Cricket on steroids?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Colorado lawmakers are have a. Passed a right to repair, a landmark right to repair law. In fact, many states are now working on right to repair. But there is. Tech companies are not too happy about this, which is strange. You would think they would like the notion of right to repair. You would think.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

You would think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Guest]

You won't buy a new one, though. But you won't buy a new one, though.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a new bill in

[Leo Laporte]

Colorado, the exempt critical infrastructure from right to repair bill, which would modify the right to repair bill, which was passed two years ago and went into effect January of this year. Cisco and IBM support this exemption, by the way. Cisco makes routers as well as other equipment cells. They cite cybersecurity concerns, saying that giving people access to tools and systems they would need to repair a device could also enable bad guys to use those methods for nefarious means.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I interviewed Cory Doctor about this, and he was like, let's say saying any router is therefore a national security piece because it could possibly be used by the military. I'm presuming IBM has the same. Same example and you know, it's rubbish. If it's a specific router used exclusively for national security, you could kind of see a point. But this is blatant lobbying against a very good bill indeed.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's basically big tech who you're. I think you're right. They just want, want you to have to go to them and give them an exorbitant amount of money.

[Patrick Beja]

It seems like Right to repair is, you know, one of those ideas and concepts and laws that are difficult to oppose with a straight face.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, couldn't agree more.

[Leo Laporte]

Those guys, I think the lawyers are

[Patrick Beja]

being paid very, very much to.

[Unidentified Guest]

It sounds like one of the most American things to be able to fix your own stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's fundamental. You own it, you should be able to fix it.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It also kind of runs counter to like the whole sustainable sustainability measure that companies always talk about. They spend at least 10 minutes of every keynote talking about how sustainable they are. And yet you, you can't easily repair the device that you've bought. I don't know, it's just, I mean,

[Ian Thompson]

even when Apple introduced their repair kits, they were phenomenally difficult to use, very expensive. And it's also a security risk. I think CNET's covered this, but also other publications. At one point, farmers in the US were downloading Ukrainian control software.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they had to, right?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So they could do combine harvesters, which is just bonkers.

[Ian Thompson]

You know, it's like just for one sensor going out which measures the height of the combine harvester. They had to wait for a week or so for somebody to turn up and fix it, which a crop harvesting time is catastrophic in some regards. So it makes perfect sense that people should be able to repair their own kit. But there's money to be made and this is America, so let's talk this as long as possible.

[Patrick Beja]

I think there is like, maybe you could go from the default being you can't repair stuff to the default being you can. And then you can apply for. Or you have cases where it's important to not be able to, you know, to not let the user repair it themselves. Maybe there are cases that can be made, but right now it's the opposite. And I think that's. Or it's a free for all. And I think that's not to the benefit of society.

[Ian Thompson]

No, no. I mean it's. It's kind of like with cars, if you've got one of these plugs that the data ports for your cars. I bought one online and it's really interesting going in there. And just seeing what's going on in your engine. I'm not going to suggest that I would even try to repair it because I know I'd brick our car in a second. But it's, it's nice to be able to talk with a mechanic and say, yeah, we've got this fault, this fault, this fault gets everything done so much faster.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take one last break. And then a potpourri, a grab bag of stories that I couldn't figure out how to put them under a single heading. How about that? Ian Thompson. Abrar Al Heati. Patrick Beja. Great to have all three of you. Great to have you watching, especially our club members. Thank you for your support. We appreciate it. Makes a big difference. If you're not a cool club member and you don't want ads, there's an easy way to do it. Go to TWiT TV Club TWiT, join the club, get ad free versions of all our shows, plus access to the Discord and all the special programming we do in the club. Twit Discord. Like this Friday, our AI user group. We have some really good stuff going on in that AI user group. People in the club who are using AI in very interesting ways. Very smart people. If you're interested, we would love to see you this free Friday for our AI user group. And if you're not a member of the club, join TWiT TV club TWiT. This episode of this week in Tech is brought to you by our sponsor, ExpressVPN. A few decades ago, private citizens used to be private, right? What's changed? The Internet. Think about everything you've browsed, searched, watched or tweeted. Now imagine all that data being crawled, collected and aggregated by data brokers into a permanent public record. Your record. Having your private life exposed for others to see was something only celebrities worried about. But in an era where everyone's online, everyone's a public figure. I keep my data private when I go online by using ExpressVPN. In fact, when I travel, it's great because I can catch the F1 race or the football game no matter where I am. Everyone needs ExpressVPN. It's one of the easiest ways for data brokers to track you is through your device's unique IP address, which also reveals information about your location. With ExpressVPN, your IP address is hidden. That makes it much more difficult for data brokers to monitor, track and monetize your private online activity. ExpressVPN is the best VPN. I love ExpressVPN it's the only one I use because it encrypts 100% of your network traffic to keep your data safe from hackers when you're on public wi fi. ExpressVPN also works everywhere you work on all your devices, phone, laptop, tablet, even on your router. One button, turn it on, you're protected. It's that Easy. Optional dedicated IP service engineer with innovative zero knowledge design. Not even ExpressVPN can trace an IP address back to the user. Secure your online data today. Visit expressvpn.com TWIT it's expresvpn.com Twitter find out can how you you can get up to 4 extra months. Expressvpn.com TWIT I'm excited about this. You know I use Starlink because it really was the only option. In fact I just got a little mini I'm hoping I can use on our vacation coming up. Well, Amazon's got a competing service named after me which makes me really want to use. It's called leo. Okay it's not named after me. It stands for low earth orbit I think. But anyway, anyway, the LEO service. Amazon's apparently thinking about buying Globalstar to enhance their satellite service. And starting in a couple of years they're gonna be putting it on Delta's airplanes. Now Starlink is used in a lot of airlines right now, but I will actually try to fly Delta to use it now. It's not till 2028500 Delta aircraft. Be very interesting to see if Amazon can create a competitor for Starlink. That would be good for everybody, keep the prices down.

[Ian Thompson]

Competition is always good. Plus also Delta is now apparently introducing life flat seats in economy which is just like.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think it's United.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, that's United.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

They've got a little.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know what? The picture they showed is of two very short people.

[Patrick Beja]

I wondered.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the club things we do is with travel guru Johnny Jet and he's actually seen it and we looked at the picture and the thing is, you know how wide a 3 seat across economy?

[Ian Thompson]

Wide enough? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

If you thought you could lie down across that and you can, then you're in luck because what they're going to do is have a little fold out thing that makes the seat, you know about the sobriety. Did you go to the event? Did you see it?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

No, I didn't go to the event but I am United. As the plane that I was flying or the, the airline that I was.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you pay extra? Because you have to Buy the whole row.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

For this, you have to buy the whole row. Which makes me wonder how expensive would it be? But was it three seats or was it four seats? I feel like in my mind, I thought it was four, but I could be wrong because I can definitely lie down on a four seat.

[Leo Laporte]

And I've done four seat. I could.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Like when I get lucky and there nobody's sitting next to me. I had one on an international flight. It was fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want to know about you getting lucky in an airplane.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

That's another good. Sleep very well.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see. Let's see this. Let's. Is this. It looks like three seats. Here's some Johnny Jets. And you see, they have a little thing that folds up, but then the picture of people in it, it's a little deceptive because, well, the mom is all curled up and the child fits very nicely, right?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It is three seats. See, that's. That's different. Yeah, yeah. That's not great.

[Leo Laporte]

And I. United says it's. It's for families traveling with small children. Solo, short, solo travelers. But this is the one that gets me. Couples who want the value of a couple. Couples, really. Here's Johnny Jett attempting, and he's not a. He's 5, 10. Yeah, yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I don't know if you need that much space kind of going. Going in that direction. You just need more leg room, really.

[Leo Laporte]

Plus you're going to get your toes clipped off when the cart comes down. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

But, yeah, my biggest question is the cost, because you just. Two other people can't buy tickets. And so how much are you going to have to foot from that bill to make that work? But, yeah, but you know what?

[Leo Laporte]

They're getting a lot of attention for it. It's nice to see them.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, it's a good option for families. Absolutely. But to the Starlink point, I know that United and other airlines have added, you know, Starlink.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a lot better.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I've used. I used Starlink on a Hawaiian Airlines flight, and it was great. But I. My favorite thing about flying is the fact that nobody can access me and I access anybody. So I'm kind of torn where I'm like, do I want to be on the grid all the time?

[Leo Laporte]

If only it were true. Now. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

No.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Otherwise United has terrible wi fi if there's no Starling. So I'm kind of like. I got used to it. I'm like, oh, okay. I can't talk to anybody. It's great.

[Leo Laporte]

So for the extra seats, I don't want to give Elon my money. But it works, right?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It works.

[Unidentified Guest]

Other airlines already do this extra seats thing where you can buy out your row and it really. The Philippine Airlines does it. I know that because I fly from the Philippines and you can buy out the whole row for. I think it's an extra. I think it's 300.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

For an international flight, that's pretty good. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Now you see, I remember traveling on French railways and doing a Eurorail pass in the 80s. I don't know if they still do this, Patrick, but it used to be that the seats in where you had six seats in an economy class carriage, they could actually fold into one and you get a full lie down bed and that was amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

But you're really sleeping in public, aren't you?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, yeah. But on the other hand, when you're penniless student going around in Europe compared to a hotel room, there's a marvelous train that goes from Paris on a big loop and gets you back. Leaves about midnight, gets back about 6am I've just saved myself a hotel cost for the price of a train ticket.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I always take red eye flights too. So I love the idea of being able to sleep on public transportation. Yeah.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Ian Thompson]

I can't sleep on planes, but yeah,

[Leo Laporte]

I for some reason, and I think it's terror, I fall asleep as we're taking off every time.

[Ian Thompson]

That's the worst time to fall asleep.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's the best time. It's so relaxing. It's soothing. When you're taxiing and then you just doze.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. So it's not just me.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Oh, nice.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of like a bar, you look in other people's windows. You fall asleep when we take off in planes.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ian Thompson]

I did a year as the editor of an aviation IT magazine and it's the worst time to fall asleep because 85% of accidents occur in the first three minutes.

[Leo Laporte]

Wouldn't you rather be asleep when that happens?

[Ian Thompson]

No, I'd rather have my shoes on and to be ready to run to the nearest emergency exit.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, they always know when there's been an airplane accident because the shoes rain out of the sky. You lose your shoes, it's the first thing you lose. Oh, did you know that?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

No, no, I didn't see that on lost. So I just.

[Ian Thompson]

The very first watch closely.

[Leo Laporte]

They're all getting off the plane.

[Patrick Beja]

It's not just that people took off their shoes. So the shoes from fly out, but the people who do have their shoes are ready to run. Like we should investigate.

[Leo Laporte]

We need to investigate.

[Ian Thompson]

You're supposed to take your shoes off

[Unidentified Guest]

before you jump on the thing, though. You're supposed to take your shoes off before you are.

[Leo Laporte]

You're supposed to take your shoes off because you don't want to puncture people. Yeah, Heels that puncture the.

[Ian Thompson]

I will never forget the first trip I took with my publisher. And I was just wearing standard running shoes, or trainers, as we call them. And I sort of. I've been. I was going to be sitting next to this guy for 14 hours on a flight to Jakob Jakarta, and he took one look at my shoes and he went, big mistake, Ian. You always wear leather on an aircraft because those things will stick to your feet. If you've got to run through journey. Burning jet fuel.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, for goodness sake.

[Leo Laporte]

This guy's planning, man. He's thinking ahead. Yeah, my God, but that's terrible for burning jet fuel.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

So great.

[Leo Laporte]

What kind of disaster mentality is that?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It sounds like a pleasure to sit next to for.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, he was a very unusual person, I'll put it that way.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations to Gilles Bressard, which sounds like a French name to me. IBM scientist who.

[Ian Thompson]

Great chap.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. He figured out a way to create current. Well, he was looking for a way to create currency that could not be forged. Decided to use quantum physics, actually. I'm sorry. Gilles Broussard was a physicist. Physicist who was swimming in a pool thinking about this, when a guy named Charles Bennett, a physicist from IBM Research, swam up and came up with this notion of using quantum computing. This is a long time ago before quantum computing really was even in a twinkle in the eye. This is in 1979. Anyway, Bennett has now won the Turing award, the. The 2025am Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, along with Gilles Brassard, who is a. Actually French Canadian professor at the University de Montreal. A one million dollar prize like the Nobel Prize. First time the Turing Award has recognized quantum research. So I don't know.

[Patrick Beja]

Is that like cryptocurrency? What is this for? What? What's this about?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I don't know. The idea he pitched as they swam would eventually become the only practical method for sharing encryption keys with security guaranteed not by mathematical complexity, but by the laws of physics itself. This is according to IBM. I don't know what it means. It's beyond over my head.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, Broussard was also editor of Journal of Cryptography, and I've seen him speak at a conference and he's really good.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. All right. In 1973. Bennett wrote a paper that showed that computation could in principle be carried out reversibly, run forward, then backward without any net energy cost. I don't know what that means either. Anyway, congratulations. I mean, we have to. We have to report it. I don't know what it means. We have to report it. New York Times says there is now something called Chromebook remorse. Tech backlash at schools extending beyond phones to the fact that all these kids have laptops and they're watching YouTube and playing games on them, even though they're Chromebooks. Digital distractions that the school gave you. They talk about a Kansas middle school that asked all 480 students to return their Chromebooks. The school keeps the laptops in carts parked in classrooms. The children take notes by hand, and the laptops are only pulled out when there are specific activities in the future.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

This comes back to that problem of how much do you have to keep things away from people? Or how much do you allow them to use these tools that have become indispensable?

[Leo Laporte]

Everything should be kept away from kids in middle school. There's no good.

[Ian Thompson]

I shouldn't. School lunches.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything. Yeah, right. Food fight. Right. Everything. Nothing. They should not be allowed anything.

[Patrick Beja]

I. I think it was a good thing to try, and it was very natural. You know, there's tech and we're gonna make things.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember, one laptop per child. Remember when we said that one laptop

[Patrick Beja]

per child, Was it specifically for education purposes or was it so that kids would. Okay, but I mean, I mean, it's. It's a. A natural idea to think you're going to do things and you're going to get them used to computers. And maybe one laptop per child was before smartphones. So it was like, you need to know how to use those tools.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point. It was before smartphones. Yeah.

[Patrick Beja]

But also, when you notice there are issues here and there and these things don't work as well as we thought they would for this context, then we walk it back a little bit. It's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, Google originally pushed Chromebooks as the perfect school tool because they were really easy to administer. Pretty, Pretty secure because they got the security chip in there and there were no games for them at the time. Well, obviously, the latter point has changed, and they are still very easy to administer. But there's been a lot of interesting research that children who. Or anyone in fact, who's learning something, if, if you actually physically write it down, it stays in the memory a lot longer than if you just type it into a keyboard or look it up on the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

That makes sense.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I felt that even in college, like, you know, even as I was taking notes on my laptop, I was like, I feel like I'm not retaining information the same way that I did when I was in middle and high school. Taking notes by hand.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, I feel that now I don't remember anything. What were we talking about, like, just now? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You should be writing this down, Patrick,

[Patrick Beja]

clearly with a pen and paper.

[Leo Laporte]

You definitely should. I've completely eliminated my brain from the equation. Now I use Obsidian. When I'm seeing an article, I Obsidian clip it to my Obsidian notebook. I have my agent distill it, make a wiki with all the details and the summaries, and I never look at it. So it's perfect. I have a complete knowledge system that I never have to touch and so I never have to be worried about knowledge. I can just ignore it. Finally. Sad story. Remember zombo.com?

[Ian Thompson]

no.

[Patrick Beja]

To be honest, no idea what it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm so sad.

[Patrick Beja]

Must be an American thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I am so sad. So it was a early website that was just kind of flash and it just. God, I don't know how to describe it. It was a joke. It would say zombo.com when anything is possible, zombo.com. and it would just go on and on and on and dancing around. Well, it got this. I know, Jammer B. You're right. How can anybody forget zombo.com? anyway, the domain got hacked and.

[Patrick Beja]

Hacked or sold Hacked.

[Leo Laporte]

And then the hackers didn't do anything with it, so it reverted and this guy bought it on GoDaddy. He's got a message on thenewzambo.com. welcome, new management. This domain was purchased openly on GoDaddy. We come in peace. And with the wallet, we'd like to purchase the right to the former site's content to help revive the infinite. Until then, everything here is new and unique. I don't know what's going on with this. Oh, you know what? Good. Thank you. Jammer B has A thank you, YouTube. A video on YouTube.

[Patrick Beja]

This.

[Leo Laporte]

So for those of you who don't know, this is the great zombo.com that once was. Welcome to Zombocom.

[Patrick Beja]

This is Zombocom.

[Ian Thompson]

Good Lord.

[Patrick Beja]

Welcome. This is.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, you may say, who cares that this guy.

[Patrick Beja]

I can totally see how this would be a great. Like, this is in theory, like the

[Leo Laporte]

era of the hamster dads. Peanut butter jelly time.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger.

[Leo Laporte]

It was in that era. I don't know. It's just sad to me that I'm

[Abrar Al Heedi]

sorry for your loss. I don't know what else to say.

[Patrick Beja]

I like it. No, but I can, I can. I can see how it would be popular.

[Leo Laporte]

It was early Internet cultures as it

[Ian Thompson]

was a more innocent time, you know, it's. It was a time of goatsy and various other things.

[Leo Laporte]

Go see. I don't mind if we don't ever see that again. Burned into my brain, I'm sad to say. So anyway, if you were the original creator of Zombo.com, please contact the new owners. Let's bring Zombo.com back.

[Patrick Beja]

The unattainable is unknown at Z.

[Ian Thompson]

I feel like this was a uniquely American experience. Cuz when I saw.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't believe none of you know about Zombo.

[Ian Thompson]

When I. I looked at it when the link was on the list and I was just like, what earth is this? And then I guess it's the same thing as if an American watched badger, badger, badger, or you know, various other things that was international, purely cultural moment.

[Patrick Beja]

Everyone knows badger, badger, badger.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Patrick Beja]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Mushroom, mushroom.

[Ian Thompson]

I didn't love the one they did for the European Cup, I think in 94, where it was like football, football, football, you know, so 40, 40 years.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think we. We are so fragmented now and the Internet's so ubiquitous that we will no longer have those kind of communal moments where everybody knows badger, badger, badger, or the black dress, blue dress.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, memes have taken that over, surely.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But they're fragmented, like.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Yeah, it depends on whether you're on TikTok or whether you're on. You know, even then there's.

[Leo Laporte]

There's different parts of TikTok people always.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Exactly.

[Patrick Beja]

I mean, some of them transcend.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Right.

[Patrick Beja]

Some of them every now and then.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

But it's getting rarer in the same way that we don't all watch the same TV shows anymore or watch the same movies anymore. So it becomes harder. We all find things that we're more interested in, but we have a harder time finding people to talk to about those things.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, that's true.

[Patrick Beja]

Maybe it's because everyone's on the Internet and before it was still kind of a smaller community.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes.

[Ian Thompson]

It was kind of cool to know about these things with your. In group and then.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you know, we've been on this show. Right. Go ahead. Sorry, Patrick.

[Patrick Beja]

Oh, sorry. I was like you were saying jokingly, and it was a simpler time. I think there's some of it as well. Like we have less, I don't know, naivety or tolerance for just fun, stupid little things. Now, like now, now it's, it's. Listen, you're. You tell yourself or your mind tells you we have real problems. Like we have.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything is life and death now.

[Patrick Beja]

Yes. Yeah.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

The answer to that is yes. And whenever somebody posts anything, there's always going to be all these really bitter, negative people in the. So that's the other problem is like they make false problems about things that don't actually matter. Where, like somebody can't even post a home renovation without being dragged on Instagram. Everybody's so miserable. Where it's like, why can we not just have whimsy and joy and laugh about things anymore?

[Patrick Beja]

You know, I, everything I heard, it's, it's a little bit more local version of what you're saying, but I was watching a video of Alana Pierce, who's a video game content creator. She used to work at Santa Monica, which is a Sony owned studio that made God of War, among other things. And she was talking about something about an old God of War movie. And she, she mentioned that some people were expressing a specific opinion about that controversy. Ish topic. And she said, you know, I've quit Twitter for like a couple of years and there are some things that some people tell me that are issues or problems and I have never heard anyone express that opinion ever. Like, it's not a real opinion. It is a Twitter thing and people go on Twitter and get really mad and think that it represents anything. But if you're not specifically on Twitter, it is not a real problem, you know, and it really spoke to me because I've been in that like mail shift.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a Twitter thing. You just wouldn't understand. Yes, yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, we've had the same problem this week with the Great Marmalade scandal in the uk.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Tell me more.

[Patrick Beja]

Is Patty I'm interested in.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean it's basically.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm glad we finally got to the most important story of the day. Thank God.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, a story went out at the start of the week that the UK was going to have to change the name of Marmalade to Citrus Marmalade in order to comply with EU regulations.

[Leo Laporte]

No, and.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, it came from Reform uk, which is our up and coming and hopefully dying political party, and it turned out to be complete by bollocks.

[Leo Laporte]

This is from the BBC.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Marmalades may need to be relabeled under post Brexit Food deal.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, Paddington would not approve.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Nevertheless, that's the first person I thought of.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. I mean, when you actually look into the details of it, it just says you have to qualify what type of marmalade. It is now 90 of the marmalade sold in the UK called orange marmalade. But Italy and France and Germany all have their own marmalades and they generally call themselves citrus. But this is a completely manuf scandal, which is coming back to our earlier point out, for no good reason whatsoever. And, you know, sometimes Tim Berners Lee must have wanted to cut his fingers off watching some of this stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently, in Italy and Spain, sometimes they make their marmalada or marmalata with figs, shockingly enough. So it's important that you understand if it's made of bitter Seville oranges, that is orange marmalade.

[Patrick Beja]

So. So wait, the whole thing was that there was some regulation that said you have to say what's in the thing with international. That's what the issue was like. You have to say what's inside the bucket.

[Leo Laporte]

We need to be distinguished as a separate type of product and will have to be sold using the new legal name citrus marmalade.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I feel like if it's orange, which you could tell, like, I don't know,

[Ian Thompson]

I feel like you just say orange marmalade or fig marmalade or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

That isn't the, the, the subtext of this. This is why we left the eu.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Subtext, right, yes, absolutely. You see these nutty EU people making us.

[Ian Thompson]

Don't get me started on Brexit. I can rant for this, on this for hours, but, you know, greatest act of self harm and whatever. But, you know, it's just. It comes back to the. The whole, you know, outrage is the thing that sells outrage. And marmalade is a very pushing thing and it's got a lot of coverage. And then it turns out four days later that, or a couple of days later, it really wasn't a big thing at all. And I. I do, I regret what the Internet has become with these kind of things. You know, it's just. Or rather what social media and then leading into the Internet has become. And I hope we can get better in the future.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm just glad that you brought this up at the end of the show, because now I have a name for the show. The Great British British Marmalade Scandal.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I would click on that. Approved.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Wouldn't you want to. Wouldn't you want to hear that show?

[Abrar Al Heedi]

I would a thousand percent.

[Leo Laporte]

And I like to get those names from the last part of the show to force you to listen to an entire two and a half hours just to find out what the hell they're talking about.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

It's like putting milk at the back of the grocery store. You got to work your way through to get there.

[Leo Laporte]

It's good marketing through the gift shop.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Excellent.

[Leo Laporte]

Abrar. You get it? You get it. See, we're on a wavelength.

[Ian Thompson]

I'm you telling.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Telling you all the time, keeping peeping through people's windows. You know,

[Leo Laporte]

you'll find Abrar's great work at cnet, where she's a senior technology reporter and of course, here on Tech News Weekly and whenever we can get her on Twitt, too. Thank you so much for being here.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Thank you. I appreciate it.

[Leo Laporte]

Appreciate you. Yep. Absolutely. Ian Thompson. Of course, you must subscribe to. What do you call it? The View from the Valley.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. View from the Valley. Yes. On Techfinity.

[Leo Laporte]

If I go to techfinitive.com, i should be able to find it there.

[Ian Thompson]

Yes.

[Patrick Beja]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Yes, absolutely. It's. I mean, okay, My. My name is spelt rather oddly, but you. View from the Valley will always get you there.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a little easier. Yes. I, A, I, N, T, H, O, M, S, O, N. Yes. A Scottish spelling I, but no P is how I always remember it.

[Abrar Al Heedi]

Oh, yeah.

[Patrick Beja]

But I never spells AI In English and in French. Yes.

[Ian Thompson]

Yes, It's. Although we get Lane a lot over here. And I met. No matter.

[Leo Laporte]

I could be an L. It could be an L. It doesn't. We don't know.

[Ian Thompson]

I. I miss serif, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

I know you need serifs. You need something. Yeah. You need something. Thank you, Ian. Great to see you.

[Ian Thompson]

It was fun.

[Leo Laporte]

And Patrick, Beja, thank you for being the contrarian that you are sometimes. And it's always appreciated.

[Patrick Beja]

I try my best.

[Leo Laporte]

I am glad.

[Patrick Beja]

Make things spicy.

[Leo Laporte]

Staying up late, no less. You'll find his French and English podcasts. He's brought back the affiliates [e-mail] and Laurent Voutek, if you like. Absolutely stuffy. Thank you. Patrick. Great to see you. Thanks. Since 2009, I was gonna actually, Ian, figure out when your first show was.

[Ian Thompson]

I think it was 2010, but I'd have to check. Let's see.

[Leo Laporte]

It's fantastic.

[Ian Thompson]

I looked like the picture doesn't, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we were audio, I think, in the. Maybe in the early days. I know Patrick's first. First show was audio only.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, right now I came up to the studio for the first time. But how do you spell your name again? I A I N. Thank you, Leah. Just.

[Leo Laporte]

That's it, Lane. That's it. Let me see if I can. Oh, look at you. Young, young man, you. Holy.

[Patrick Beja]

Oh, wow.

[Ian Thompson]

Really need to change that picture.

[Leo Laporte]

Holy. No, no, no, don't change the thing. There are 11 pages of Ian on Holy cow. And that first one was Tech news tonight from 2014.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, 24. As late as that, right? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So Patrick wins the prize for this. Okay, Your first twit appearance was 493 on January 18, 2015. And that was video you were there

[Ian Thompson]

with up in the street. Up in the brick house.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, that was. Looks like Veronica Belmont. And oh, that other guy looks so familiar. Is that Ben Thompson? It is Ben Thompson.

[Ian Thompson]

It is, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Serenity Caldwell and Ben Thompson. Yeah, and some strange guy in a hat. Thank you so much you guys. It's great to have you. We do Twit every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5 Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us live as we stream the show. YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. And of course, if you're in the club, you get behind the velvet rope. Access in the club. Twit discord after the fact. Get the shows at Twit TV or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a YouTube channel too, dedicated to the video. There's audio and video of every show. Please subscribe though. We'd love to have you back on a regular basis. And now, as I have been saying for 20 long years, thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another Twit is in the can. Bye bye. Hey there. It's Leo Laporte, host of so many shows on the Twit network, thinking about advertising. In 2026, we host a network of the most trusted shows in tech, each featuring authentic post read ads delivered by Micah Sargent, my co host, and of course me. Our listeners don't just hear our ads. They really believe in them. Because we've established a relationship with them, they trust us. According to Twit fans, they've purchased several items advertised on the Twit network because they trust our team's expertise in the latest technology. If TWIT supports it, they know they can trust it. In fact, 88% of our audience has made a purchase because of a twit ad. Over 90% help make it and tech buying decisions at their companies. These are the people you want to talk to. Ask David Coover. He's the senior strategist at ThreatLocker. David said. Twitch hosts are some of the most respected voices in technology and cybersecurity, and their audience reflects that same level of expertise and engagement. It's the engagement that really makes a difference to us. With every campaign, you're going to get measurable results. You get presence on our show episode pages. In fact, we even have links right there in the RSS feed descriptions. Plus, our team will support you every step of the way. So if you're ready to reach the most influential audience in tech, email us PartnerWIT TV or head to TWiT TV Advertise. I'm looking forward to telling our qualified audience about your great product.

[Ian Thompson]

See.

[Leo Laporte]

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