This Week in Tech 1007 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. I have a great panel All daddies. Actually, it's kind of interesting. Patrick Beja is here, wesley Faulkner and Alex Wilhelm will talk about what some are calling the worst hack in our nation's history. There hasn't been a lot of press coverage and I think that's because there's not a lot we can do about it. The Supreme Court's going to decide the fate of America's low-income broadband fund, spirit Airlines files for bankruptcy, and then we'll talk about Mark Zuckerberg's plan to make the app stores do the age verification. We've got some good parenting advice along with that. It's all coming up next on TWIT

00:45 - TWiT.tv (None)
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00:49
This is TWIT.

00:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1007, recorded Sunday, november 24th 2024. All the hot dogs in the world, it's time for TWITit this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news, and it's daddy time. On the show, every single one of you has young children, except me. I have adult children, but we're all daddies here. It's so nice, alex Wilhelm, now with two. Count them two. Count them two babies. One girl, one boy, or what? Two girls, two girls both girls.

01:31 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yes, sir, how has that been? Uh, you know, everyone told me two under two is a lot, good luck. And I said we, we got this in the bag. No, we did not. Two under two is a lot. It's a lot, ladies and gentlemen, it's more than twice as much I will.

01:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will tell you that it is once they're out of diapers life. Life gets a little bit better, you just set that clock, leo, to zero.

01:52 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
You know, like, when you have a new baby, everything that you earned with the preceding child, like the ability to sit up, just gone, starting over, yeah, and when they're both cranked at the same time I so, right, right before this wesley I I went inside to go say hi to the spouse and say, hey, I'm gonna go record now, you know.

02:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then I went in the house and just both babies were going at it and I was like all right, well, have fun he says he feels alex was very guilty doing this show, but it's also a think of it as a respite. You don't do it that often once in a while wesley faulkner is also here. Your kids are a little bit older now. They were. When we first started working. They were, they were pretty young. Yeah, 12 and 9 now. Yeah, that's got to be interesting uh, so hi oliver, hi violet are they watching?

02:39 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
no, but last time they're like do you ever like shout us out when you're on the podcast?

02:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like, they're like oh, I typically avoid asking names because I don't know how people feel about outing their kids. It's not exactly national television or anything, but I don't know how you feel so I just, we just no.

03:00 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
But this is the audience that can dox you Like these guys have the skills, that's for sure.

03:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is patrick beja, who, uh, we've had on many, many years, for many, many years you're probably the longest running uh twit regular on the show.

03:15 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Wow, you were in finland, you are now back in france I am back in france, yes, and my uh superhero wife is taking care of the of the two kids also, um, this show we shouldn't say is the daddy show.

03:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a show where the wives are doing all the work and we get to play, although alex would rather be playing factorio look, I didn't want to make it seem like I don't want to be here. I've been looking forward to seeing everybody all I'm saying patrick would might rather be playing you know league of legends, but other than that are you. Do you play league of legends, patrick, or just watch?

03:53 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
yeah, so I play a little bit. Uh I. I mostly play the ipad version, which will get me like uh angry.

04:00
Looks from the actual uh pc players I did play that a little bit, but it's it's a little bit more. It's easier to get into, the games are shorter, so I play that to relax. And putting League of Legends and relax in the same sentence isn't really possible, but it is possible with Wild Rift. Nice, I play that. Wild Rift, is that what the? It's the name of that, that game? Um, they had huge ambitions when they first launched it. It seems there they didn't reach the goals they set for themselves and it's mostly popular in asia, but I, I, I keep it going here, so I, I, you don't know, I might be playing it right now.

04:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's possible I might be a viking in the other, on the other screen, right now building my little house. Uh, and wesley faulkner, what game do you play? We now have?

04:51 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
all of us have been outed uh ginseng impact most of the time oh nice kind of a classic there. Yes, it's, it's.

05:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've gotten into it recently and so I kind of started all over.

05:03 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I like that you can get a bunch of people together and just ask what game are you playing these days? Yeah, just like you know what TV show do you like? And it's like, oh what book you're reading.

05:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, exactly. What are those?

05:19 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I'm reading a good book right now.

05:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are you reading? I'm pulling up my audible account to to tell you I'm reading exodus by peter f hamilton, which is a thousand pages of hard sci-fi 50 000 years in the future. So it's very different.

05:36 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I like it he's a good writer though I'm reading. Empires of dust, a series by anna smith spark my first real dive into the grimdark genre.

05:45 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
And it's kind of Is it really the right time for that? Alex?

05:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's already grimdark out here, but see, that's why escapism is great, cause that's escapist grimdark.

05:55 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
It's just sad it's about. It's about an addict essentially doing bad things, and I'm like well, this is just my life, like what are we doing here?

06:02 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Why I listening to this? Who bought it?

06:03 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
oh, it was me.

06:04 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, I bought it yeah, all right all right, I'm reading, uh, thinking fast and slow, which explains a lot about the world.

06:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, really good, yeah very uh timely, I think. Uh, how about you, wesley, you got a book I'm reading the half-built garden.

06:21 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Oh, what's that about?

06:22 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
wait, I.

06:22 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I wrote that yeah, it's a sci-fi novel. I am writing in my own book and it you are suggested to me by my uh co podcast host that I do another show with uh, that that they read it first and they said that I should read it because it's nice, similar to what I'm writing oh, congratulations is this the book about the aliens come and the planet's being healed by the little community groups and then how they interact?

06:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
okay, yeah, again timely that book is so crunchy.

06:55 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
That book makes the corvallis oregon look look like hardcore right wing. It is such a hippie environmental riff it's great but that's wonderful, that's wonderful.

07:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, congratulations on the incipient book. That's great. Wesley, see, that's what happens when your kids get old enough that they can uh, you know go to the mall.

07:14 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
It's probably two, three years out.

07:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's it's very yeah, no hurry, I don't want to rush you, uh, but I guess we should get into the news after all. I'll start my timer now. We that that part can be just the just the settling in portion of the show. So nice to see moose bush. Yes, our moose bush. I like it. I like the chef has prepared a little something about gaming and books to begin your 28 course meal, because there's a lot this is.

07:43
It's so funny, uh, how sometimes there's a lot of news and sometimes there's nothing, and this week there's a lot of news. In fact, I want to cover what was what is, I think, maybe a very undercovered story that's now being called the worst hack in our nation's history. China has been taking advantage of the fact that our infrastructure is our phone infrastructure is antiquated. Plus, thanks to our law enforcement officials who decided about almost 20 years ago now that, wow, we're going digital, we better have a way to tap digital phones. They put a back door in the phones, in the, in the telecom infrastructure, so that they could tap it. Uh, unfortunately, when you put a back door in something, I think we now learned that, uh, that is hard to keep that a secret. And now the Chinese are in. I don't know how we get out or get them out. Salt Typhoon is what the Western intelligence agencies are calling the hackers First reported in October. I don't think we really talked about it for quite a while.

09:02
Mark Warner talked with the post and the times this week to say it is the worst telecom hack in our nation's history. He's the chairman of the us senate intelligence committee. Uh, and he's and I didn't realize this, but uh, warner's background he was a telecom executive in the 80s and 90s. My hair is on fire. He told the Washington Post not a problem if you're using signal, but it is a problem if you're just sending regular texts.

09:36
End-to-end encryption over text between Apple devices and Android devices, for instance. Until recently, until RCS actually no, is still not encrypted, because Apple doesn't support encryption with RCS. So those texts are interceptable. Um, the hackers breached the system, he said, not before, not for the election, but months earlier, in many cases as long as a year ago. So they've been sitting in there and listening. Now the post says fewer than 150 people have been identified as having their text messages or phone calls monitored. But let me tell you it's the right 150. They're all in the DC area uh, and they're very much involved in our national uh politics and our intelligence agencies and our law enforcement agencies. This is, I feel like maybe is it too complicated or maybe law enforcement is a little bit embarrassed that they asked for this back door in telecommunications and now it's been hacked.

10:41 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
You know, I think, the lack of response is a little bit like climate change and that it's a hacked. You know, I think the lack of response is a little bit like climate change and that it's a little hard to pin down how this impacts any individual person. Like, if I go to my friends here in town, I'm like, hey, you know, biggest telecom hack in american history. They're gonna blink at me twice and go like, okay, cool.

10:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, and what now we do? Yeah?

10:58 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
right. So I I think this is just too far removed from the average person to have the kind of like coverage that I think you think it deserves. But I do think that we should stop giving foreign hacking operations such awesome names salt typhoon absolutely brilliant. Why don't we call them, like you know, the idiot circus?

11:17 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
they should call it fancy offshore backup. That's what they should do so all of this?

11:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ron wyden pointed this out uh last month and I mentioned it, but we didn't really. You know, maybe, alex, you're right that it's just hard to kind of uh dig into this story. Uh, so back in 1994, see then fbi director louis free asked for backdoors and wiretaps to digital telecommunications. He says we can't get in. And CALEA was passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. That's now 20 years ago. Of course this is really an important, maybe this is the biggest takeaway from this Backdoors inevitably get hacked. You can't backdoor encryption safely period and we're seeing-.

12:13 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Law enforcement is always gonna push for access no matter what, even if it does compromise security. I think we're talking about the iPhones rebooting story later, but it's one of those things where, if they see a change or they see that it could influence their dominance in the space, they are going to fight back because that's their bread and butter. That's how they survive by just sopping up as much information as possible.

12:37 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, and that's their role, I mean. That's why you should have a balance of power in in most things. The law enforcement wants to get access to more information to do their job more effectively, and you need to have other people who are like well, wait a second.

12:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How can this I'm not gonna blame you, but you are in the country that arrested Pavel Dorov Because he wasn't giving French law enforcement back door to telegraph tell you no, that's not what he wasn't giving French law enforcement backdoor to telegraph telling no, that's not what he wasn't giving.

13:08 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
He wasn't giving the information that he was being that was being requested yeah it's not like they were asking. You know, we should be able to have access to all of the communication of telegram. They wanted information, most likely metadata, that he had access to, and he has no infrastructure to comply with regulation like this you're pretty sure that they weren't saying break end-to-end encryption.

13:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, actually, yeah, yeah, they didn't have to with telegram because their end-to-end encryption is terrible.

13:37 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
We just learned, uh last week actually, that uh there has been a series of arrests something like 20 people that were participating in a child exploitation ring just a week ago, and it would be surprising if those two weren't related. Since Durov and his team ended up cooperating. It wasn't like. I don't think like the principle of it. I can understand that people will be a little bit like cautious about what this means. I don't think like the principle of it. I can understand that people will be a little bit like cautious about what this means, but I don't think what the authorities were asking for was unreasonable and it certainly wasn't, you know, full backdoor, even though, of course, european authorities, just like they do in the US and everywhere, will push for that, although now, with Soul Typhoon, I think it gives fuel to the people who say see, maybe not, and just to be clear, it's only text messages that are intercepted. Right, like I messages is safe, uh, whatsapp and and end-to-end encrypted messaging, that's right, presumably phone calls right, right, presumably, although who makes phone calls?

14:48
anyway. Well, I mean the 150, 50 people who were targeted are probably in an age bracket where they do spend time on the phone, so it's not like you know, it's trivial. Uh, certainly it's a, it's a big deal, um, but it's not everything on your phone. It's surprising, though, that I didn't even know about that law and the fact that there was someone at a computer with a password going like OK, I log into the system and I can see everything in all of the telecommunication infrastructure in America. That's like crazy.

15:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's amazing and free at the time, promised There'll be no back door. We will protect this, it'll be safe, don't worry about it. And you know, maybe, maybe it took 20 years, so maybe it was sort of right.

15:32 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Leo, can I? Can I quibble about something that we're saying here with 150 people thing? Because I just pulled up a tweet from Jeff Rogan. He's a post contributor and he said that Senator Rounds said that China's salt typhoon hack gave the chinese communist party, the um, the ability to read your text and listen to your conversations. So to me that puts this a little bit more on the on the phone. They're in the phone network.

15:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean yeah, if it's not end-to-end encrypted. They got it, yeah, and our phone systems, because of kalia are are wide open, you know, um, because there's a back door.

16:07 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I'm assuming even the encrypted messages of their text messages. They could easily see where the source and the so they? They even know, like if, who's having conversations.

16:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff is uh is talking to you. Know, joan, I don't know who he's talking to. He's talking to uh somebody, then you know, you know who they're talking to.

16:31 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
You may not, but then that also talks to foreign endpoints, right? So if it goes off the network into another network, that's right they would if they had access to those networks as well. There's multiple layers of which that data can be.

16:43 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Oh. So essentially the chinese communist party now has better intelligence on tulsi gabbert than we do here exactly that's the example I should have given.

16:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If tulsi gabbert is calling vladimir putin, or donald trump is talking to vladimir putin, or, you know, elon musk is talking to vladimir putin, presumably now the chinese know that and that's valuable.

17:03 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Certainly that's something and they can see who that person calls next. Right, yeah, yeah and yeah, maybe match those things up, wow uh, yeah, you get that.

17:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You get the idea. You see why it's a problem. According to uh, the executive director of US Cyber Command, uh who, not Baron Trump, that's, that's next year. Morgan Adamski said that the Chinese-linked cyber operations are aimed at gaining an advantage in case of a major conflict with the US. They've compromised and, by the way, this is not just Salt Typhoon They've compromised our grid. They've compromised a lot of our infrastructure and IT networks so that they can, according to Adamski, carry out disruptive attacks in the event of a conflict. They're just sitting there. They have access to heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems and server rooms. They have access to the grid, the power grid, to water controls. This is all from US officials saying. They have this access.

18:09 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
So what do they do now? I mean, what does the American infrastructure do? Do they just change the password and use like a password manager? Like what happens next? Do they repeal the law? Do they remove the back door? I'm sure a lot of law enforcement agencies rely on it to.

18:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, according to the New York Times, they're concerned.

18:35 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I'm sure they're evaluating and deciding what to do. They're concerned.

18:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The problem is, of course, you need to know where they are and how deeply ingrained they are. And, yeah, I'm sure they're trying to do something about it.

18:47 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Think about telecoms, that they have infrastructure that they don't want to replace. They are. Security is expensive and that's hardware and software and the expertise of staff and in the maintenance they try to do these capital expenditures, build out these networks and then just ride them until they explode, patch of them and the modern security needs modern equipment and to be able to replace all of that equipment and make sure it's up to date is not something that they've been incentivized to do.

19:17
They want to try to take as much money off the top as they can.

19:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank goodness, we're banning TikTok. That's all I can say. That's what we're doing. We're banning TikTok. That's all I can say. That's what we're doing. We're banning.

19:28 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
TikTok, that'll fix it. But, wesley, do you think they don't have the ability to fix it, like they're just leaving it as is and the Chinese have access to it and that's it?

19:39 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I think if you can see what are the negative consequences that is imposed on them as of now, you can see that there is no incentives to fix it. They're not losing their license, there's no threatening of anything, it's just like business as usual, and so there's no incentive to change it.

19:55 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Am I insane that it's weird that we're doing business with China as a nation, like with trade and rules and ships and planes, while they perniciously undermine our national security day to day. What's?

20:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the alternative, Alex. What would you do instead?

20:12 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Well, I mean, we could collapse their economy overnight by stopping imports.

20:15 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Well, you collapse, yours at the same time.

20:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we might find out. I think that's on the table.

20:22 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I'm not trying to say that I, Alex Wilhelm, have the solution here. I just said it's very strange that we're sitting here going. China's going to attack Taiwan by 2027. They're in our systems, they're going to shut off our air conditioning.

20:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you go the other way.

20:33 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Personally, I think your best bet is to strengthen ties and to get more economically intertwined, so that there's less incentive for China to break to be a bull in the China shop, right make it so that it's date more dangerous for them, that is and this is I mean, this is the way it's worked since the end of World War II right, intertwine economically all the economies you can so that no one has an incentive to send bombs, uh, on one another. And we've seen time and time again that when the economies are not working together, then that's when the real issues start happening yeah.

21:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean I think it doesn't work. Russia feels free to operate. Uh, because they are kind of already a pariah right, they were, they've been a pariah, so they have less to risk and sanctions haven't slowed them down much, because I guess Well, it's starting to.

21:25 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, it's starting, I don't know yeah.

21:27 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I'm not an expert on this, but I mean like like I mean the other side of the coin here. The people that we're talking about being bad actors have essentially, to you know, break themselves off from the global internet and become technology islands. I just find it very strange that this is not just because there's not bullets leo.

21:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't tend to treat this stuff the same way like if no, I agree it's aggression, but the chinese have been doing this uh with everybody's been saying this with ip for at least 50 years. As soon as something is released in the united states, it's. I remember going in, going in beijing, going into the basement of a of a shopping mall, and every dvd, every book, every bit of uh content that was created in the united states was illegally, you know, was pirated there, and they've been nice pirate. They looked exactly like the real thing, you know, they had the album art and all that stuff. That's been going on forever. It's always bugged us but but yeah, but what would happen?

22:28
well, I this is not really for this show, because this is a technology sorry, my bad uh, well, you've been working with jason calacanis, like it's I knew that was gonna come in and uh it's understandable your mind, but the information we have is asymmetrical.

22:42 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
They are, if all of the breaches that they've discovered that we're doing, until they don't have their security, they're not going to have a view into them. Yeah, I doubt exactly I'm guessing that we're working on it and this is something that's probably. Yeah, I'm sure there are some things happening, but this is all.

22:55 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
This is far for the course and, as you were saying, leo, the alternative is like cut off relation, like trade relations, and it absolutely makes things worse. Absolutely like you have a reason to have a war, I mean then exactly then they have no incentive to not go into taiwan um this is from the new york times story.

23:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Us communications system is built ona mishmash of aging systems which made it far easier for the chinese to break into upward of 10 count them 10 telecommunications companies. Uh, at the white house meeting the message delivered by top american intelligence and national security officials was despite the aging technology, the telecommunication companies need to find, need help, need to help find a permanent way to keep them out of the systems. Doesn't sound like they're trying to do it and, by the way, making the necessary fixes could create painful network outages for customers. Uh, critical parts of the american telecom system are too old to upgrade with modern cyber security protections. This is it's interesting.

23:58
We've always, you know, we were the first cell network users. We, we, you know, we're the internet started here and often, when it's old in infrastructure, you're at a disadvantage to countries that just leapfrogged. You know, countries that didn't have a big telecommunications, a big phone system, went straight to cell phones and and leapfrogged us. I think that we've seen that again and again we have a disadvantage by being the first movers. We have a lot of old stuff. It's kind of like Windows. We got a lot of old stuff, old code in there, some parts of the system date to the late 70s or early 80s, when landlines, not cell phones, dominated the network.

24:41
One participant in the meeting, again from the New York Times, said the only solution to the problem was ripping and replacing whole sections of the network, the process the companies were slow to invest in. So brandon carr, who is the inbound uh chairman of the fcc, says one of the things he wants the federal government to do is provide more economic support for rip and replace, take. You know, that's what they did. That's what they did in uh in europe with the huawei equipment. They took it out I think that's smart.

25:13 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I mean, brendan carr is not going to be my favorite fcc chairperson, but I do think on china his hawkish positions at least match my own. Bringing up tiktok again, leo, I mean he's always been on the no side of that, which I've respected. I wonder if we have the national will to spend money on things, just given the current political climate, because it would take I don't know, wesley back me up here 10, 15, 20 billion to rip and replace a big chunk of the us uh wireless telecom system but it's not just that, it's just what's next right.

25:44 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
So it's removing old stuff and putting in new stuff, but it's the ongoing support. If you're familiar with all the revisions of iOS and Android, there are constant security threats, and some of those are built into the software, some of that's built into the hardware. So it needs to be not just let's rip and replace, but there needs to be something that causes an ongoing vigilance that's made to make sure that not only this is something that is done, but it's something that is a focus, meaning that there needs to be a czar, there needs to be some protocol, there needs to be some certification, there needs to be inspections. There needs to be some certification. There needs to be inspections. There needs to be some sort of ways to audit these systems. Has someone be able to prioritize those?

26:28
And it's going to cost money. It's either going to come from the subscriber or come from the federal government and, with Doge being enacted in terms of how we're spending our money, I don't know exactly if there's going to be an appetite to be able to spend money on these telecoms to to get up to speed. I think it'll be pushed into saying, well, let's just move over to satellite. Let's move over to whatever elon does to fix it, and then more abandoning what we have rather than actually reinforcing it.

26:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could bet elon saying right now you know who's, you know what they're not in? They're not in Starlink. Um, by the way, to answer your question, apparently we have been hacking them similarly, in fact. Um, they're, let's see this is again from the New York Times their limits to how far the United States can press its case with china. So far, the chinese hack appears to involve only surveillance. Well, yeah, I'm sorry. Okay, that's something the united states does regularly the chinese telecommunications company and is a form of espionage considered fair game as the two superpowers navigate a higher stakes era using spy technology, updated spy technology. So, in other words, we've done it too.

27:47
However, one senior american official said told the new york times I'd have to say the chinese have matched or exceeded what we can do and we didn't see this one coming. This, this was, uh. You may remember that biden and xi jinping of china met in lim, peru last weekend and this was, in fact, one of the topics of conversation at these high level meetings. I don't know. I always wonder what do you say? Knock it off? No, no, knock it off. No, please knock it off. No, I'm not going to knock it off.

28:18 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
What you do is that you may be, on principles, say, wow, that's, that's not really cool what you did, but really what you should do is upgrade your infrastructure, as we've been discussing, and it's fair game. You know, just like I was saying earlier, the uh law enforcement authority is going to push to get access to your encrypted data and there's someone that should be saying no, you can't do this because of this and that reason. In espionage, the spy agencies are gonna try to exploit every way they can to do their job, and I think that's expected, I think that's fair game, and your role is mostly to make sure that their job is really difficult, uh, and to secure your infrastructure. And you can't tell china, don't even try spying on us, like everyone does it. The us does it in europe everyone does it.

29:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What you do is you set some limits, you set some line. Look, we're going to spy on you, you're going to spy on us, but you can't break the grid or things like that. Remember that the office of personnel management was hacked by the chinese back in uh 2015 and at that time, uh, president xi promised to abide by a new limits on espionage. Obama went to him and said hey, man, that's too, that's not cool and no. And President Xi said okay, fine, okay, for a few months the Accord stuck, the volume of the attacks diminished, but by the time Obama left office, it was clear the Chinese hacking operations had shifted from military units to intelligence agencies, which work with greater stealth. Um, honestly, I think that's part of the problem is that we don't you you nailed it, wesley we don't know what to do. We've really got no Grand solution, so all we're going to say is well, okay, we'll limit our stuff to surveillance.

30:20 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
If you, limit your stuff to surveillance and just live with that, though, because it's China today, but it could be Russia tomorrow. Just live with it. You can't even do that, though, because it's China today, but it could be Russia tomorrow, or North Korea. We can't do it on their side. Well, we should fix stuff, obviously.

30:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We should just fix it on our side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's the question Can you really ever? Is there any such thing as a perfect protective net?

30:43 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Well, they don't even use anything perfect two-factor authentication in the us telecommunications it can't be perfect, but I'm sure you can make it. You can do it. So there isn't the back door that you know. If you have the password, you get access to everything.

30:56 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Like that's the lesson here, that unless we're talking about quantum entanglement or something well, and the chinese are working hard on quantum computing.

31:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Obviously the Biden administration again from the New York Times has said very little about the attack. Much of the resistance came from the Justice Department and the FBI, which oh, what a surprise didn't want to upend their own investigations. You can't close that back door. We need it same reason. We don't have uh privacy protections in the united states. Uh because intelligence agencies like it that the data brokers collect information about us and sell it to them.

31:33 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
That saves them a lot of time you saw that wired story about data tracking and us soldiers being tracked around to nuclear vaults and brothels yeah, yeah, yeah, oh it's.

31:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like this is out in the open. That is so strange. Um, yeah, I mean I it's a big story, I guess maybe there's nothing to say about it, except it's going on.

32:02 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think surely they they're gonna, they're working on a fix like surely they can't just leave it open and and let the china, the chinese, like, have you know, full visibility on the network. I don't know that it's going to be an easy fix, but they're going to try it, that's you.

32:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you would think you would think, but I but notice we don't have national federal data protection in this country, and this Wired story is a perfect example. More than 3 billion phone coordinates collected by a single US data broker exposed the detailed movements of US military and intelligence workers in Germany, and the Pentagon is powerless to stop it because it's legal to do this in the United States. And I have to say I think the only reason it's legal to do this in the United States is so this these data brokers can help and tell our intelligence agencies, gather information this is like one of those um cartoons where someone goes to hell and you're like oh, you like hot dogs, do you?

33:08 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Here's all the hot dogs in the world. So the only way we're fighting them is just giving them too much data, and so they have to find a way to store it and process it, and correlate it.

33:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we're all. We're all tasked now with burying the Chinese in hot dogs, everybody. Burying the Chinese in hot dogs, everybody.

33:31 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
So if we generated fake data and just like with the AI and poisoning the, well, if we can just make our own way of just flooding the zone with a whole bunch of just fake coordinates, fake data, fake people, fake all that stuff, then they would have to do the work of filtering that out as well. That's the only other way. Make our own data broker and just pollute the whole thing. What could go wrong?

33:53 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Well, that's Twitter's approach to management today with its own platform, and it's not going so good, wesley, so maybe it'll work in this case. I'm in favor of that. Also, synthetic data is something I keep hearing about from ai companies and I. I don't actually know how good it is, but I wonder if we could use that same system to do what you're saying.

34:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That'd be efficient well, the ftc's solution and, of course, remember, in two months everybody at the ftc is out, but for the next two months the ftc solution is to file lawsuits to make these data brokers not watch US military installations oh so give us a list of all the US military installations, including the secret ones?

34:33
yeah, that'd be great. That's the solution. Don't monitor that, don't look, you can't. No, you can't look. Uh, I don't know. I, you're right, I'm sorry I brought this Chinese thing up. There's nothing you can say about it. We're just. We're just kind of well, I mean, it's a, it's a new Cold War, it's a uh, and I'll tell you what, if I'm sorry, if John le Carre needs to start writing some novels about this, because this is the new spy game, isn't it?

35:04 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
it's not very sexy, it's not very exciting it's not for james bond. It's not very.

35:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know secret martinis and and if you can make a bunch of guys playing dota or league of legends interesting, a bunch of guys sitting there like a jaw down, like you can make this interesting not until they use it.

35:25 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
They actually have to use it. They have to, like, make some some. That's really the truth right now they're just sitting there, which is I think, super smart.

35:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're just sitting in the grids and, in a way, maybe this is them saying don't start anything with us, because you know we've got our hands around your neck, to which I hope we're responding. Well, guess what it's like a mexican stand-? We've got our hands around your neck, to which I hope we're responding. Well, guess what it's like a mexican stand-up? We got our hands around your neck assured destruction yeah, that kept us out of a nuclear war for almost a century. Yeah, but no one.

35:57 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
No average american is going to complain about this until our networks are down for a month or that's what they're worried about.

36:04
Yeah, yeah, yeah, a nuclear power plant uses containment or something like that that's the only thing that's going to cause them to say, oh yeah, this is a problem. It's not the precursor, it's not prevention that gets the attention, it's the aftermath and the response. And so if there's no incursion, there's no response that is going to be seen as important and that's why, if you look at cybersecurity across the board, it's all like that, because it all of it is theoretical until something happens. And even in a data breach, it's like well, they didn't do anything with the data or won't come back to us. Most people are like well, how do I spend the money on preventing something? Or making our quarterly numbers and raising our share price? Which one is going to? I'm the CEO, I'm in charge. Which one of the things is going to impact me immediately?

36:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I think it's also the price we pay for living in a free that uh will never be as secure as an authoritarian country like china. Because we believe in free speech and the and and freedom, and we're you know we're not gonna lock everything down the degree to which you'd have to lock things down, of course. If china can't even do it, I don't know who can no, but I mean you can.

37:22 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
There is a a middle ground, you, but I mean there is a middle ground. You could first of all not have a law that says you need to have a backdoor into your entire telecommunications?

37:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
infrastructure MARK MANDELMANN. That was a bad start 1994. That was a bad start.

37:33 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
FRANCESC CAMPOY FLORES yeah, and you can invest in your infrastructure and maybe even legislate to make sure that the infrastructure is more secure than the one that you have now, that you can't redirect the entirety of your profits to your shareholders and meet some cybersecurity standards at least. Because when I hear that the infrastructure hasn't been changed since the 70s, I'm pretty sure there was some opportunity at some point to evolve it slowly, to make it a little bit more modern and secure. So I don't think it's just oh well, it's either that or you live in communist China. I think there is a middle ground, which, by the way, is probably called Europe.

38:25 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
But probably called Europe. Oh, that sounds like a compromise.

38:27 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
There it is. Well, that's a very logical argument, Patrick, and I'm sure legislature will take that under advisement and do the right thing.

38:38 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
But you know, okay, do I get on my soapbox now, or do I wait a little bit later?

38:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to take a break. Save the soapbox. I will mention, uh, when we're talking about 70s technology, there's something called the signaling system 7 or ss7, which is in our phones systems. It's how the phones make calls and it has been. It is known to have serious flaws for more than 20 years and the problem is we can't take it out because everybody uses it's on your cell phone, it's on every telecommunication system everywhere and it's flawed and we can't fix it, and that's that, and we've known. Fix it and that's that. And we've known about this for a long time. So this is, in fact, this may well be how the Chinese got in. I don't know how they got in, but we've been talking about SS7 and security now for almost as long as security now has been going on, and I imagine there are better systems. But this is that same problem of you know you don't want to break everything in order to make it work better, more securely.

39:52
Let's take a little break. I'm sorry about that. I won't bring up anything that we can't fix anymore. Just you know, when I read this headline like the worst hack in the nation's history, and nobody's disagreeing with it uh, I wonder why we don't talk more about it. Maybe this is why there's not sorry, too bad, too bad nothing we can do about that. I hope you enjoy it, enjoy your, enjoy your freedom.

40:22
Uh, we got a great panel. I think we have a lot to talk about. And prepare yourselves, because Soapbox from Patrick Beja is coming. Patrick Beja is here, always a welcome guest, as are Wesley Faulkner and the wonderful Alex Wilhelm, great to see you all, all daddies, all daddies this week, and because of it, in every case, there's some poor woman taking care of the kids right now. So we thank the, we thank the mothers and the wives for making it, making this show possible in more ways than one. I think this episode of this week in tech, brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality experts, is 1985 Melissa's kind of an amazing company. Since 1985, they've been helping people keep their supplier lists, their customer lists, accurate up to date, and now Melissa is in. This is really good news.

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43:20
Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free. That's always that's a great offer. Now always a great offer in melissacom twit. One more great way you can use melissa now with stripe. You know they've got an api, they've got google and microsoft integration. That's, it's everywhere. Melissa m-e-l-i-s-s-a dot com slash twit. We thank melissa so much for supporting our shows for so many years. It's been a great relationship. Now, patrick, if you want to get on a soapbox now, you could. Or if you want, I can give you another story that will trigger a apoplectic fit and you can get excited again. We gotta, we gotta build up to it.

43:58 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I understand uh, no, let's go with the other story. I'm sure I will get riled up honesty.

44:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, as you know, uh google was sued by the department of justice. Uh lost. The judge ruled against them in august, saying google illegally monopolized the search market. Uh, and now it's up to the judge to decide on what remedies uh he will. He will rule on that. Judge ahmed meadow will rule on that in the next. When is it? Uh alex is a couple of months away, I think yeah, a couple of months away.

44:32
I'm just going through my personal notes of the actual um uh, yeah, so the doj will file a revised proposed final judgment on march 7th okay so expect a lot of back and forth between now and then so the DOJ is at this point lobbying, in effect, the judge, saying well, your honor, what you, what Google really should do, and and coming up with remedies, and of course, the judge will pick some and so forth. Some say this is just a negotiation, to kind of head towards a consent decree between Google and the DOJ. The clock is is ticking, I have to say, although it's unknown whether the new administration will be pro-Google or anti-Google. It could go both ways. So so far, the DOJ has come up with the most controversial proposal of all, saying Google should be forced to sell Chrome. Oh, and while you're at an android, okay, alex, okay.

45:32 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
So the so what do you think?

45:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just bloomberg says chrome's worth 20 billion dollars.

45:37 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I don't think chrome's worth a penny, but go ahead, tell us what you think so I just wanted to say on the android point, the proposed final judgment did say that chrome should be divested. It gave android a bit of a pass, but it did say that if google uh behaves poorly, then it should. Then you could say I've asked it as well, okay. So the question then becomes you know, how much of this do they expect to get, leo? And I do think this is a bargaining position. Yeah, I don't think chrome's going to get divested because I think you're dead on it doesn't have any value outside of being a search delivery and advertising delivery mechanism for well, that's that's the thing I mean.

46:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think the doj is saying let's cut off their legs by uh.

46:19 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
But every remedy they propose is worse for everybody else, for instance saying don't pay apple 20 billion dollars a year anymore so we I talked to um jp schmetz from brave brave has their own browser and also their own search engine based on chromium.

46:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I mean what are you gonna do? Well, that's part of my part of my question is isn't chrome open source? Can't anybody make a chrome browser, including opera, vivaldi, brave arc, and and and microsoft's edge all based on chrome? Yeah, so what happens if google sells chrome? What happens the open source project?

47:02 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
it doesn't make any sense to me do you think the open source product of chromium dies if chrome is divested from google?

47:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, no, well, right now go ahead. Wesley, you probably know more about this than I do.

47:13 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
You cover open source so the, the new owner, would be responsible for that open source problem and so right now it's mostly google engineers not all, but mostly google engineers and so the once again, if it's they need to know, if, if it's going to be profitable for them, it's depending on what their know.

47:30
If, if it's going to be profitable for them, it's depending on what their goals are, what they value. And you mentioned the other browsers that are based off Chromium, including edge. Um, that if, if it is sold off, Chromium could could go close source. Uh, because it does take maintenance to keep it up to date.

47:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But but the minute, but the second before they go close. Source Wesley, doesn somebody just fork it? In fact, are people forking it right now and saying here's the problem?

47:55 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
with that too. Yeah, the, the fork is going to be all the old stuff, yeah, and they're, they're gonna, they're gonna do whatever they want, but the number one browser will still be chrome, and so the. When they diverge in terms of the underlying things and how things work, then the forks themselves will then render pages and not work the way that they are expecting. The browser, and not only is Chromium both based on these other browsers, but Chromium is used for testing. A lot of automation platforms that do web testing use Chromium or Chrome to test websites for compatibility, to make sure that these are all automated, let's say Google sells Chrome TM, whatever that thing is, and Chromium is forked, microsoft Edge still going to be Chromium.

48:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'll be on the fork right. In fact, google, the only the only uh hardware that google's installed by default on chrome. The new chrome would be installed by default on. Well, there wouldn't be any, because who, well, who depends? Who buys it right? Does microsoft buy it, then maybe it is the number one browser still because it's Edge. If Apple buys it, maybe it stays a dominant browser because it's Safari.

49:17 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
It would be ironic One person that's going to uninstall Chrome as soon as it's purchased by someone else. I mean, that's not going to happen.

49:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All of these people are trained to download and install Chrome already. Okay, so how did Google get to be dominant? That's actually an interesting yeah you're.

49:33 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
You're all acting like, like there wasn't a different time, when chrome wasn't the dominant browser right, if it's first of all used to be first of all. I'm not sure that this solution, this remedy, is the smartest one, but let's set that aside for a second. The problem is not the dominance of Chrome. In this specific case, it's the link between Chrome and Google. So, even if Chrome stays dominant without the links the direct links to Google, then you've achieved the thing you wanted to achieve, which is reduce the synergy between the two, which gives Google more power. And if it doesn't, if it becomes less relevant and somehow after a few years, it's not as powerful as it is today, then it gives the opportunity. There's a vacuum and it gives the opportunity for another actor to take its place.

50:29
Or maybe you have a more fragmented browser market, which has its own challenges. Obviously, if you have different rendering engines, it's all like we've seen this situation in the past. It is more chaotic for websites, but it's not the end of the world. And again, the goal here is to sever or to remove the advantage that google has by also owning chrome. So all of this that you're discussing is not untrue, but it's in this discussion. It's a little bit besides the point. If you want to reduce google's power, you have to find ways to do that. If you think google doesn't have too much power, then you know that fine, they could keep everything they have. But if you think they do, then you have to find ways to get them to collect less data, to have less different levers to influence the way the web works, et cetera, et cetera, and I think maybe forcing them to divest Chrome could lead to that outcome, if it's desirable.

51:31 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
You have to think about the harm that will cause regular consumers, not just because, well, chrome right now is being used and all the benefits is going to Google. I think we can agree on that. So they are running Chrome as a loss leader to get this data and this access. As a loss leader to get this data and this access. If this is sold to another company, another player, their incentive is not to just keep it the way it is. Their incentive is now to find out how they can make that a profit center for them.

52:02
It needs to be worth it for them, which means that they are going to try to monetize that data to other people other than Google. So instead of all the information going to Google bad right, it's going to be like monetize that data to other people other than Google. So instead of all the information going to Google bad right, it's going to be like highest bidder. How can we make the most use of this data and who can we now sell it to? So it's either they sell the data or they're going to just find ways to make it Chrome Plus now in order to actually have secure browsing or to be able to turn off cookies the regular Chrome you could choose how much visibility, but now Chrome Plus is the only one that you can get these options to, so it's just the consumer itself could be harmed by the profit making that they'll need to make to make this something that they continue.

52:49 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
First of all, I think there would be solutions to those issues which you all are not going to like because you're American and you don't want the government to get involved in anything. The first step to my soapbox, leo. And secondly, those are again kind of besides the point, but what can happen there is that Chrome becomes less strong without the backing of Google. I believe that is one of the outcomes, and so you re-inject a little bit of competition in the browser market. I think that is not all. Everything you're all saying is true. I'm not saying it's not true, obviously you know. But you're only seeing the downsides of those changes, and there would be some upsides, not the least of which is fostering competition, which is a basic tenet of, you know, capitalism and a healthy free market. Currently, it's very difficult to compete with Chrome, not because it's Chrome and it's everywhere We've seen situations where there was one dominant browser before but because Google is pushing it so much, I think.

53:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
DAN MOREHEAD Actually, now that we're talking about it, you can understand how, by the tyranny of the default, people who use Apple products are using Safari. They're using WebKit as the engine at safari. Until microsoft abandoned internet explorer, that was dominant because that's what everybody used. Windows was using. If how did chrome not, I mean the only they have android. Are we counting android in the total install base?

54:27
that's no idea yeah, I mean, if we are, then that's then that's certainly a big, that's, you know, half of the cell phone market in the US and more than half 80% in the rest of the world. I and I don't understand. So you're selling what are you selling? You're selling the name and the current code base and perhaps you're selling the install base.

54:48 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That's what you're saying the install base project you can't sell chromium.

54:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How do you sell chromium?

54:55 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
um, no one's talking about chromium, they're talking that's the code base. So I don't understand you said the install base. You sell these.

55:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're selling the installed base, you're saying okay. So now, because you have chrome on your computer now you're going to keep getting it from, let's say, openai buys it. Now it's going to be OpenAI's Chrome and you just assume, because of the tyranny of the default or inertia in any way, that nobody's going to say oh, I don't want to use OpenAI Chrome and we'll go to Firefox or something.

55:26 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
No, I mean, some people might say that why is Chrome so dominant. Is it better than?

55:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
anything else?

55:32 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It was much better. I think it still is. Yeah, sorry, alex.

55:36 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
No, no, it was so much better. People forget this. When Chrome came out, they pitched it as the fastest browser.

55:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know why Google search is dominant because it was better than any other search. So Chrome also, it was better.

55:48 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
And then it got worse, much, much like google search, which used to be a magic answer service and is now a way to shove more ads into my life. Um, but I just did a search of the proposed final judgment from the d? Uh, from the doj. In this case, zero mentions of chromium.

56:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Eight mentions of chrome, just for reference yeah, I almost wonder, almost wonder do they know that there, that there is a?

56:11 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
source code is open.

56:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not what they're after Okay. So they're selling the. Now that helps Patrick. So they're selling the installed base, basically, and the name.

56:19 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
But also the code. I mean, if they aren't selling the code as well, then they can say oh yeah, we'll sell chromium or chrome to open ai. Now we have chrome 2 and you can still get that. Um, that it would. They would have to be banned from making browsers, which that is.

56:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of the concerns, is that they could be banned, but only for a limited time, so that google would 10 years have a browser the problem is not that google is making a browser.

56:47 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
The problem is that google's browser is dominant. So if you tell them, okay, you start again from scratch, and if, if you become dominant again, we'll address that at that point, right.

56:56 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
So the PFJ says very specifically that, following its divestiture of Chrome, google may not re-enter the browser market for five years and is banned from owning or acquiring any investment or interest in any search or search text provider. That might do brother. So so they have that written in, but it doesn't solve any of the issues we have about chrome itself. But at least google couldn't just dive back in with for five years the rechromening five years comes fast.

57:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the other issue uh, really, is the search right? Because the so? The problem is that there are there two dominant search and it seems like what the DOJ is trying to do is cut off the things that channel people into search. But what if, instead and they've talked about this too they forced Google the license search to say OK, here's the, here's the index, duck, duck, oh, you have full access to this.

57:52 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That seems like a much more severe attack into the core of what Google's business is, and I think that's a much more serious concern if you do that Currently, the things that are being talked about, including, you know, let's say, they can't pay apple to be the default uh search engine on ios.

58:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, obviously apple is not happy about not getting 20 billion euros, uh, dollars, uh but we put firefox out of business because the hundreds of millions of dollars they get yearly from google right now is the only thing keeping mozilla Foundation, or maybe, well, possibly so that would by the way, be the counter effect. That would be a negative consequence of this right.

58:37 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Well, maybe someone else would pay Firefox to be the default search engine. Maybe the new Chrome owners?

58:43 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
no, maybe Bing, maybe Microsoft you know, mozilla just did a huge layoff.

58:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't have money yeah, they didn't lay off people from the most from the firefox side, they laid off the mozilla foundation people, but still it is. They're on the edge and they're, and they're, and their share is shrinking and to me that's terrible because the worst thing we could have is a browser monoculture like bananas but it's not the search or even the browser, it's the ads, right.

59:11 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
So if if the money is still coming into google through ads, no matter if other people have a better search or others. Yeah, maybe force google to sell the ad business. It's the ads that's causing them to have this chest full of money to be able to throw at people.

59:26 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, but that is google. If you take away the search ads, you take away most google's business, and then what's left? Youtube and cloud, and youtube is just ad.

59:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they should be forced to sell youtube because I think that's a real conflict of interest.

59:37 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
But okay, that would also that. That's more of a penalty, though, I feel, than a uh, a remedy to the issues that were raised.

59:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My well, yeah, I don't. I'm not the judge, but my opinion. The problem with Google is that it's compromised its search results by having all these other sidelines like ad sales. It is both the buyer, the seller and the market maker. It's in every bit of that because their ad results are inevitably going to be full of YouTube ads, so they're, in effect, search results are promoting YouTube. I mean, there's all sorts of conflicts of interest. Google started with a very pure, excellent search engine which has gone downhill as it has slowly allowed these other interests to change its search results. Don't you think?

01:00:29 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yes.

01:00:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does anyone deny that? No, nothing. But it's become very profitable as a result.

01:00:35 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
This is the classic cory, dr rowe and shitification yeah, exactly oh, please go ahead, edx I just wanted to bring up one element from the proposed judgment that we might all like, which is that it might require google, to quote make its search index available at marginal cost and on an ongoing basis to rivals potential rivals. So would that ameliorate enough of their search advantage to make the ads point less salient?

01:01:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, I just you just said that that kills google, because that's what that's google. Right there is the search results. Yeah.

01:01:11 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Well search index available at marginal cost.

01:01:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does that just mean the?

01:01:15 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
data that they didn't train on. I think what that means is-.

01:01:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The problem we're seeing here is that, yeah, google has gotten too big and there's definitely an antitrust action here. It's almost impossible to know what the remedy is. Isn't that the case that there really is no fix for this? It's just like the Chinese hacking. It's just basically. It's like the Microsoft DOJ case at the end of the 90s. There was no good remedy.

01:01:45 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I don't think there's no remedy. Yeah, there's no perfect remedy, but there are. I mean, google is a gargantuan business with a lot of different activities that all feed into one another. If you want to say you know, I feel YouTube is a slightly different issue, a different beast, and maybe you could break them up. It's not impossible, but it's not, it doesn't address the same. You could break them up, it's not impossible, but it doesn't address the same problem, I feel. But I'm not in Google's books, but I feel like Chrome probably gives them a significant advantage as a search engine because it is More than Android or less than Android, oh, I don't know, but Android as well.

01:02:29
That's why they're both. Even if Android is less mentioned, it's also the same kind of thing. I don't think divesting Google of Chrome is as ludicrous an idea as people are saying it is currently. Again, I'm not saying it's perfect, but I think it could chip away a little bit at that power and I don't think it's ridiculous to consider it.

01:02:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Should antitrust regulators consider the cost to users of a punishment to the?

01:03:05 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
company, yes, but not only the direct cost. As Wesley pointed out, there are obviously issues that this creates for the consumer, but I think the main problem of a monopoly and of anti-competitive behavior is that a lot of the time it does not all the time, but a lot of the time it does benefit the consumer to an extent, but then it also smothers competition, which would benefit the consumer, hopefully, but in a less certain way, hopefully down the line. This is what the United States was built on competition, the free market, freedom of enterprise, and the problem of uh, monopolies that we've seen in in the tech industry is that they make this a lot more difficult, right, um. So down the line, a more healthy, competitive browser market could benefit the the consumer at some point.

01:04:08 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Um I think that's dead on, but I think it's much easier to point out the near-term concrete harms versus understanding the long-term benefits. This goes back to our climate change point about the hack story. Here's the thing that I wonder, leo, to your point of can we do anything about this? Now that we've let these companies the Magnificent Seven, as they're often called get so big and become so large and enmeshed, I wonder if we've missed the boat on on on reasonable antitrust activity apart from fines yeah, well, certainly it would have been better to stop facebook from buying instagram and whatsapp.

01:04:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would have been better to stop google from buying youtube. I mean it had. But the problem is we were in the the post reagan era, where antitrust action was anemic and government wasn't willing to do that.

01:04:55 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Honestly, I also think it's very easy to rewrite history now you know Instagram. Yes, it was probably a play to buy out a competitor, a potential future competitor.

01:05:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They tried to buy Snapchat. They couldn't, but at least they could buy Instagram.

01:05:11 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, but you see the success now of that move. It wasn't a given back then.

01:05:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I don't think there were a lot of competitors to Instagram and, of course, with the power of Facebook it grew and the know-how of Facebook it grew more historically, since Reagan we haven't really done much to stop mergers right up until Lenaena khan yeah, until until lena khan and maybe I have a feeling this, lena khan inter interregnum is brief and we're going to go back to uh an era where uh companies are allowed to grow so I think I have a possible solution for this discussion about chrome and google.

01:05:49 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
What if Google is no longer allowed to have exclusive contracts with anyone, internally or externally, which means that Google Chrome could stay with Google? But anything that is offered in Chrome that advantages Google Chrome needs to offer it to everyone else. I like that.

01:06:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good.

01:06:07 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
That's a good structural solution google needs to pay for whatever that they're doing for search results or but they have to make it open and they have to be competitive to other uh actors who want to be and go in the search part of chrome but also it looked like you can't you.

01:06:26 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Is that a browser ballot screen type thing, wesley? No, no, no In terms of the business.

01:06:32 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Chrome needs to operate as a business internally to Google, meaning that they can't just have their only client be Google. They have to now be able to say, oh, you want this search box, who wants to buy it, and how often do you want it to show up? And then, just like the apple, chose google to be their exclusive search box. Google needed charts like pay chrome to have that advantage.

01:07:00 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
But that's the same as divestion divesting it, but making it more difficult because they still have the offices inside google, right it's?

01:07:08 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
It would operate as a separate entity.

01:07:11
It changes the economics of why they do Chrome. If they're doing it for the data, then they need to also then sell the data to all the other people who are interested into that data stream. If they're interested in placements, that needs to be available for everyone else to be able to put it in there. So it changes the economics for running the browser to the point where, if it is the best browser, it still continues to do so. But the advantages of having the best browser in terms of the way that it sends the telemetry back to someone, you have to be able to sell that and make that open. If there's something that says, well, we don't really want anyone else to have the telemetry, that means Google can't have it either, right? So it's either opening it up to everyone or making it so that no one else can have it.

01:08:00 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think that would work, but it's the same as making it a separate entity but making it much more difficult to make sure they're doing that fairly because it's still inside.

01:08:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a precedent and that's what microsoft. That's why there was an ombudsman inside microsoft after the consent decree with the doj. Uh, what is it now, 20 years ago? Uh, for a long time. There's an ombudsman in there watching and making sure that microsoft was a failure, and I think you can look back at the DOJ's action against Microsoft and say that that had actually the browser ballot aside that had a positive outcome and Microsoft became much less rapacious in the marketplace and it did allow frankly allowed Google and other companies to rise up. So maybe that is the solution. Maybe that's where they're headed. I've heard people say this is just all negotiation, uh, prior to a consent decree. The real problem is this is going to go on for years. The new administration is going to come in with different priorities. That not that they like google. Uh, it's kind of hard to predict what the new administration is going to do, because a DJ Vance is a big fan of Lena Khan.

01:09:11 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
That is my favorite DJ Vance is his alter ego, jd. I'm gonna call him DJ but anyway, vance, yeah the VP. Or is he a PV? I don't know.

01:09:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, uh, I don't know what his role will be in the administration. As it is, it seems like he's fading fast into the into no.

01:09:28 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I, I my, my conspiracy theory is that quite a lot of the support for trump um peter teal and technology.

01:09:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, yeah, is setting up no, it's ending up 2028.

01:09:39 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I think they want to put vance in for eight years, so I think that's that's the lever here. Uh, did anyone read google's response, by the way to?

01:09:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the doj they said they were putting their thumb on the scale. Does anybody know what that means? Am I the only one old enough to know?

01:09:56 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
No, I've used actual physical scales, but I just liked that they said the DOJ had a chance to propose remedies related to the issue. In this case, Instead, DOJ chose to push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans, and I'm like you can just feel the corporate spittle flying out of their mouth as they type this hate memo like how dare you? Come for us. We are google, we are mountain view. You shall not. You shall leave us alone. We shall make your browser even. You're over time, ha ha that's why some people?

01:10:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
still have butchers who weigh your meat when you get it, instead of just going in pre-wrapped. Is that? What? Is that what you're telling me?

01:10:30 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
yes, I. What I'm saying is the the, the scales have been thumbed they're thumbing on the scales.

01:10:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Go ahead, patrick.

01:10:37 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I'm sorry there was a time not so long ago where, when the conversation about we call them in france, uh, gaffam, which is google, apple, facebook, amazon, microsoft yeah, we call it FANG here, yes, it's the equivalent the conversation was do they have so much power that they are unstoppable? You know, they have more power than governments and we cannot do anything about it. That was maybe five years ago, yeah, and since then, things like you know, rgpd, what's?

01:11:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the-.

01:11:13 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
GDPR, gdpr, sorry, yes, I'm using the French acronym and the DSA and DMA came into effect. That's why I call him DJ.

01:11:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Vance, I was using the French initials.

01:11:23 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Right? I hope you understand Absolutely. Yeah, so they came into effect and they are far from perfect I will be the first one to agree with everyone on that but it did change the conversation. It did show that if you have the political will to break up, or not break up, but curb what is essentially a series of monopolies that are harmful to the tenants of capitalism Capitalism is one of the main elements of it is a fair market. If you can't compete, if you can't be an entrepreneur and have enterprise, you're not in a proper capitalistic market, and the entity that is supposed to help when one of the private enterprises amasses too much power is the government. There is no one else. There's no one else to help out there. And I feel like a lot of the conversation in the US is a lot of people going like, oh, somebody should do something. And then you're like, yes, there's someone that is there to do something, oh, but not you. It's like you know that story. This is my soapbox.

01:12:45 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
You know that story.

01:12:48 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That story of the guy, the religious person's, uh, stuck on a roof in a flood, yes, and there's a boat that shows up and, uh, he's like you all know the story right. The boat shows up and he's like, oh, you can come with us. He's like, no, no, no, the lord will save me. And the boat goes away. And then there's a helicopter and he's like, no, no, and and in the end he drowns and he goes to the pearly gates and he meets God and he's like, well, you were supposed to take me in. And God is like I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter.

01:13:18
What the hell? Man? And and so I feel like a lot of this is that, and there is an entity which is whose role is to do that. And when they try to, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You say no, you shouldn't do it. No, you're not able to do it because you focus on the issues of what the remedies or proposals are, which of course, there are. But the alternative is that these monopolistic companies are amassing more power and nothing is stopping them and the market is not fair. That's an accurate description.

01:13:56 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yes, but this is why I wrote an essay back in early 2023 entitled If you Like Startups, you Should Love Antitrust.

01:14:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because I would say it's the same point you're making.

01:14:05 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
It supports innovation, right A free market that is not ruled by three people will be more competitive, dynamic over the long term, even if, back to our short term, long term dichotomy, there will be some pain in the near term. So, patrick, I have to say hard agree. Didn't expect to hear that from our resident Frenchman today, coming from the EU.

01:14:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, everybody knows Frenchmen are socialists, so it's OK.

01:14:28 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
No, I'm, I'm very. I'm considered a horrible capitalist in France, I'm sure you are, but I sense a deep friendship growing.

01:14:37 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Alex, we agree on a lot of things I know, but don't worry, a deep capitalist in France means that you're only slightly center left in the United States.

01:14:45 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Probably far to the left in the US. But I mean, this situation currently that we have with these big monopolies is advantageous to a lot of us. I'm not saying, you know, I do love having the ease of use of iOS. I think having a forced opening of the US so that you can install a lot of different third party apps or even app stores makes the experience worse. I think the user experience is worse and I understand that Apple is not happy about it. But the flip side of that is that you force a little bit of competition into that dominant platform. Is it gonna succeed? I don't know, maybe not. Maybe it's just gonna in to incentivize everything even more. But you need to try and force it by legislation when the market is not working because one company was too successful and they were very successful because they offered superior products in some ways that some customers wanted. It doesn't mean that it's not a problem now that they've achieved the size they have and someone should do something about it. Guess who can do something about it.

01:15:58 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
It's not legislation, though. It is the economics of enforcement. So the downside of doing the wrong thing needs to override the upside of doing the wrong thing. And so, even though that we have these laws, since they're not enforced equally or the downside does not override the upside, meaning that they can still be massively profitable or they can still take the money off the top and just pay the fine as a tax and just pay the fine as a tax, until that system, in terms of really enforcing and making the downside economics a motivator for not doing the wrong thing, no matter what legislation's passed, as long as the penalties don't overweigh the advantages, it'll still continue well in in in the eu.

01:16:46 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
The penalties do over like they. They are compliant ten percent. The penalties do over like they are compliant 10% of the penalties are like 7% of global income.

01:16:54
Like it's insane maximum. Of course, no one's ever going to enforce it that much, but it scares them because it is a lot of money and the main part, the most important part, is they can't afford to not operate in the EU, because it does make them a lot of money. Right, it's 450 million customers or potential customers. So they have to operate in the? U, so they have to follow eu rules, and I love that they're making a lot of money again. Capitalism is awesome.

01:17:21 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
It's given us a lot of cool stuff and a lot of uh productivity and and well-being, but at some point you need to protect capitalism yes, but I think it's really interesting the way you set that up, patrick, because you're essentially saying that Europe will show a different way to approach digital regulation, antitrust and innovation. Because they're so important economically, they can have their own norms that are then kind of like forced onto US tech companies to some degree. What's interesting about that is it's essentially an argument for a more dynamic Europe, because the stronger economically Europe is, the more influence it will have, ergo how much it can help us with our antitrust work, because we don't pass legislation in this country anymore, so we can't really do anything. So essentially, what I'm saying is can you fix the European economy to bring less chaos to the American?

01:18:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
digital to the. We have been relying on gdpr, on europe, for our at least, for privacy regulations. Maybe it should I you know there's also a case to be made that there's a certain amount of stagnation that happens in europe. Uh, because it doesn't have the go-go mentality, the free-for-all capitalism that the united states has. You don't have as many startups, you don't have as much innovation. Um, you don't have as many startups, you don't have as much innovation, you don't have the venture capital infrastructure that we have in the united states.

01:18:35 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Right, absolutely, and I would even go farther. I would say that if we did have as dynamic a startup ethos as you guys do in the us, maybe there would be too much lobbying for us to pass those laws that I just talked about. Maybe it wouldn't be possible. So you know, the world is what it is. It is, you know, the the we have to do the best we can with what we have, and the fact that we are so crappy at making billion dollar companies, or thousands of billions of dollar companies, means that we can enact those laws and maybe that's not such a bad thing.

01:19:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's your job. No, no, no, no. In other words, we'll throw stuff up against the wall. It's your job to clean it up.

01:19:19 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I don't think Patrick's being fair to Europe, so I'm gonna go ahead and get on my American soapbox here. We gotta take a break.

01:19:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're way past and you gotta charge your jewels. So hold on, we got to take a break. But uh, I do want to give you a plug, mr alex wilhelm, because you did write this article in your newsletter, which everyone should subscribe to cautiousoptimismnews if you like it. As startups, you should love antitrust. This is your bread and butter now, right, this is this is. You've left tech crunch. You're. You're now on your own uh, yes, so I run.

01:19:51 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
This is my blog. I now have a corporation with a friend of mine that you do yeah, an s corp. Uh, it's a, it's an llc okay, but we have corporate bank accounts now, so um it's a good feeling isn't it. I have a small bit. No, it's the worst feeling of all time. Do you know what you don't have when you work for yourself?

01:20:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
401k matching patrick, that's like social insurance over in your.

01:20:11 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I know we do that for our employees but we don't do it for ourselves uh, no, just don't.

01:20:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And can I advise you something? And anthony nielsen, who is filling in for benito gonzalez today as our technical director and uh producer, cover your ears, you don't want any. Take, he's taking the headphones up. You don't want employees, alex, whatever you do, no employees. Okay, I'm just saying.

01:20:37 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I, I've been a manager enough times to not want to do that again and, uh, the whole idea is to do more independent work versus uh good, forced uh corporate work.

01:20:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So look, journalism is struggling right now and we're we're all trying to find new ways to succeed in a market that is completely disintegrating. So, yeah, I, I honor you for doing that.

01:20:57 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
That's great thank you very much, leo.

01:20:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Much appreciate it yeah, yeah, well, you know it's pretty much who's on these shows these days. You guys are all independent, uh, and I think that that's really the future, uh, but the problem is you gotta eat, you gotta pay the rent and it's. It can be very challenging, very difficult. So keep up the good work and everybody support alex, because he's a great writer and it has lots of insight, cautious optimism, dot news. There you go, little heart, go charge your jewel. The app of this episode of this week in tech, brought to you by he thought I'm not joking. There he goes by shopify. Okay, you can put your headphones back on anthony. And actually, in all seriousness, I love our employees. I really do, and starting a small business is actually a great thing. It's been 20 years now. Our 20th anniversary is next year in april and it's been an amazing ride.

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01:24:24 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, you guys, if you're right, if you're lucky I wonder if we'll still have an economy by the time my kids are not.

01:24:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I know how that feels. I know, I know it's a little scary. You know, science fiction always talks about so much. Science fiction talks about a future where corporations run the world right, where conglomerates run the world, and it feels like maybe those sci-fi authors had an insight that we're kind of heading in that direction. Is that a bad thing or a good thing? I feel like democracy is starting to. Is it worse? Yeah, it feels like democracy is starting to fail us a little bit, though I don't know what we do. Wesley, did you not hear?

01:25:04 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
my, my soapbox segment oh yeah, all right.

01:25:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, let's see. Moving on windows 365 link microsoft is now selling a 350 computer that streams windows from the cloud. That's pretty an interesting solution to a security, an endless security nightmare. Right, microsoft keeps it up to date. It's sandboxed. You're not running win32 locally, it's all run in a protected environment in the cloud fanless, compact. And here's the interesting thing I don't know exactly how this is happening. These are co co-pilot PCs as well. So Microsoft has been selling this concept of co-pilot plus PCs. You're seeing the ads for it now, smarter, they're running Snapdragon, not Intel. Recall is coming out now. It's finally available to the Windows insiders in beta. Ai is everywhere, co-pilot is everywhere. Is this an interesting move? Does this mean that the desktop pc era really is dead and that everything will be streaming in the future?

01:26:19 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
uh, how old is everyone on the show today? Who's the? Who's the uh? Oldest person here?

01:26:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you perfectly well know that okay I think you know that, look at.

01:26:29 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I am not. I once got in trouble for an age-related comment, so I've learned my lesson, Leo. How many times have we had the thin client conversation?

01:26:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, it's funny because our good friend, gina Smith ran was CEO of a company that Larry Ellison of Oracle had founded. I think it was called, think it was exactly that. It was a. Uh, exactly that. It was a client, a thin pc client. The problem was the network hasn't, wasn't advanced enough. This is 30 years ago, it is now isn't it?

01:26:59 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
yeah, and the difference between, I think earlier, thin client uh, potential moments and now is the fact that a lot of ai processing just can't be done, I think, on device, and I know that the Copilot Plus PCs have Snapdragon chips and they can do some on-device AI processing, but even Apple's latest iPhone sends some of their AI queries to the secure compute environment. So my thought is that maybe this actually is the time for Linux on the desktop, but the Windows equivalent, which is thin clients, becoming mainstream. I'm optimistic.

01:27:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm surprised that this doesn't happen sooner. It's still going to be a problem because Microsoft charges a little too much, I think, for the windows in the cloud. It's pretty expensive. I I can't remember what it was, but it was a it was over a hundred dollars a month. It was a very expensive proposition. That's crazy. What are they on? Well, I mean, I think everybody would run it if you could get a $350 computer that's basically a Chromebook, isn't it and have all the work be done in the cloud.

01:28:00 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
One issue is that a Chromebook you can run offline.

01:28:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This one you can't. I guess you can sort of run it yeah you can store things locally.

01:28:08 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, you can store things locally, and this has somewhat like some processors and some storage and it also has some RAM, but it's really beefy, but it also doesn't seem like it's optimized.

01:28:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not designed to be a desktop.

01:28:27 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
It's really designed to be a. It's almost just a browser. They're repurposing old hardware to be able to do this, but there's no specific acceleration hardware compression that sort of thing.

01:28:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's all in the cloud.

01:28:35 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
That I would expect, but for the transmission though, in order to make those packets go a little smoother, the hardware acceleration in terms of the compression of the packets doesn't feel like it's built into this. So that's one thing that I'm like. Why do you need eight gigs of RAM for this? Why not just two? A Raspberry Pi, theoretically, could run what they're asking for. So I'm guessing the $349 is to cover the cost of maintenance and replacement. Also, it should have cost $365. That's a big branding.

01:29:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, it's Microsoft $365 and they're charging $395. Good Lord, they need to hire you. Yeah, it's Microsoft 365 and they're charging $395. Good Lord, they need to hire you, wes.

01:29:14 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
But the question is what is this for in terms of what makes this hardware unique and that they're charging so much for it? They're not releasing too much of the specs. But if this is supposed to be cloud connected, they really should talk more about security, talk more about the type of OS that's built into it, the type of secure connections that it can establish, but the optimizations to make sure those connections stay stable, or that the compression is highly optimized for talking to the server specifically so that when it's connected that it can get an advantage even on a slower connection. Is there a heartbeat that's created so that, even if the os is not local, still they can do some things in terms of the asynchronization that, the diff, so you don't have to keep sending all the information, but some of it, and you used to work at ibm, didn't you?

01:30:03
I'm just saying now I remember that's what they should be talking about why to buy this box and right and why this would be the best thing, because it's hardware-wise made to work on the server side to make sure that you get the optimal experience. You know.

01:30:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The problem I have is I'm answering all those questions in my head like this is what I would say. This is what I would do, and you're right. Microsoft has dropped the ball on this since they started offering Windows in the cloud. It's almost as if they don't want to. It feels like to me this should be the future of Windows.

01:30:35 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, it should be. It's a path to moving to a 100% subscription for Windows. Like I don't ever buy it, just subscribe to it.

01:30:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what they want. No, that's what they want. That's what they've always wanted, right, right I.

01:30:47 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think the the concept of cloud streaming isn't ready for main devices. We do it for gaming, don't we? Well, not as the main device. I think some people use it. Some people use it, uh, a lot, but they're also, uh, avid gamers that have local system as well. Um, I, I I mean, there are some Stadia fan people who are going to get on my case.

01:31:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And.

01:31:12 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Amazon has its system. Yeah, luna works well, but I think, for computer work, as for video games, at this point and for the foreseeable future, it's a technology that is a side thing for heavy users. That is a side thing for heavy users, and I don't see someone betting all of their or, or, you know, committing entirely to only a cloud system, and so I think the idea of the link uh, what is it? Windows 365 link is appealing, until you get into the nitty gritty and find all the cases where it will create issues for you, at which point you're you're like oh well, I would at least need, like, a laptop also, and if you have a laptop, then you don't need that thing. I think we're not in a, in a, in a situation maybe it will come, maybe it won't, but I think at this point it's not viable as your only uh solution would you guys?

01:32:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, related to this. They've announced that you can now install recall, which was microsoft's solution that was widely excoriated by uh, by security experts that records every few seconds a shot of your screen, saves it, indexes it using a variety of different ai models, so it does ocr on it, it analyzes the images and then makes it searchable. Experts said good, that's great, you're going to create a large ball of information on everybody's computer that hackers just can't wait to get a hold of. Microsoft responded by saying well, we got all this security and I think they probably reassured a lot of people. They are rolling it out now. Uh to windows insiders. Uh, wesley, are you going to install it the minute you?

01:33:03 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
it's available a hundred percent. I mean, if someone has local, local access to your system, you're screwed. Yeah, you're screwed.

01:33:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah. You're screwed anyway.

01:33:10 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Thank you, thank you. At last someone tells the truth. I mean initially, when they first rolled it out or tested it, the security was abysmal, which was the database was unencrypted. It was like horrendous. But if it's secured properly, then anything that it can give away, if someone can get to it, you're in trouble anyway.

01:33:36 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
so right and china has it already right, I think we started and we already.

01:33:39 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think that's the lesson from the first part of the show.

01:33:43 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
So, uh, you like the idea of having, like searchable, everything you've ever done I have a horrible memory and if this can help me, what are the yes, I? Why wouldn't I do this? I was on the computer when I found the information. The information is cached somewhere in a browser, stored in a directory it's, it's, it's already there, the it's, like I said, if if someone had local access, they would be able to find us forensically anyway. So this makes it easy for me to find. So, yes, yeah, I'm sure, like china is able to like, give me a copy of my backup if I asked for. That'd be great, but you're.

01:34:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're an advocate. I. I don't think I'm saying anything out of school, but I say you're an advocate. I don't think I'm saying anything out of school, but I say you're an advocate for neurodivergence and this. That's somebody I think would be very interested in this.

01:34:39 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
People who have ADD issues or are dyslexic or can't remember things or or it's the end of the quarter and you have to do your own review and you have to say, like, what did I do?

01:34:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like, like Alex is his own boss, yeah.

01:34:52 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, did I do like what did I?

01:34:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
like alex, who is his own boss. Yeah, yeah, yeah, what did I do? Where was that receipt? You played a lot of factorio.

01:34:56 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
That's, yeah, sadly that's not, that's not lucrative, yet I get paid no money from factorio. But I will say factorio uh, made by wu-bai software, which is polish, I believe, which is in europe. So shout out european entrepreneurs, leo valheim is uh swedish, yes and spotify is uh is swedish. There are some there are mistral is french.

01:35:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, there are some ai, yeah, yeah, which is a very good ai, yeah it's very, very, I think, common now amongst uh. Theoretically do we say mistral isn't that the uh, isn't that the wind that drove van gogh crazy? Yeah, okay, oh well, maybe I think there's several things that drove van gogh crazy, but it's a kind of wind in the south of france, correct, right, am I right? Yes, yes, go ahead.

01:35:41 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I'm sorry, I'm just I'm just saying that people I grew up in the toby keith post 9-11 america of freedom fries and the french are are jagoffs and it was wrong then and it's wrong now yes, I think you should give them more credit for trying something different, other than let's give elon musk all the money and hope it works how do we get to france?

01:36:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
wait a minute.

01:36:04 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I'm sorry, I'm confused because, before the last ad break, I was going to advocate for european competitiveness in the digital era.

01:36:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, okay, and you said no ad break. Oh, so you're finally getting around to that.

01:36:14 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
All right, I'll bring it back. We didn't. Oh sorry, Go ahead.

01:36:18 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I was going to say with the people leaving X. Now they have a lot of competition with Blue Sky Threads and Mastodon. It's hard to find where you posted something or where you saw something.

01:36:33 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
So if I had recall.

01:36:35 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I would be able to find it.

01:36:36 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
So now we're back to recall.

01:36:37 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Bringing it back around. Well done.

01:36:44 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
And and even though we do have a lot of theoretical and academic expertise and excellence, we do not have, you know, we're not the continent that birthed any of the fangs or you know any of those. But recall, I would install in a heartbeat as well.

01:36:58
I think it is a really interesting use of AI because you know, chatbots are cute, but the really interesting implementations are when you put these technologies to work for the consumer. For the user. And taking a photo, a screenshot of your computer every few seconds so you can then feed it to an ai, an rig, your, your, uh, you know your system into being useful for you, is a really clever idea and there are a ton of those. But I think ultimately and there are going to be edge cases where you know someone else used your computer to do something and the information is going to come out in those searches and it's going to be like, oh, security flaw in that thing If your coworker types something on your computer, yes, that is going to exist, but I think the benefits for user usability are going to far outweigh those, uh, those issues yeah this is go ahead, alex oh, I was just gonna say are you gonna?

01:38:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
use recall. Are you in? Are you in favor?

01:38:07 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
oh yeah, totally I, I just think, I think, I think it's wussy, I want, I want something a lot more you know, that's what I was going to say.

01:38:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not enough. It should be on all my devices.

01:38:16 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yes, it's because it should be listening to you all the time.

01:38:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, siri and alexa should index everything you say all the time gordon bell, who was one of the original uh digital equipment, uh, geniuses, uh. His wife, uh, gwen bell, got a severe alzheimer's. She's passed, if actually he just passed a couple of months ago, uh, and he was very keenly aware of losing memories and he wore. When I met him, he was wearing a camera around his neck this many 30 years ago recording stills from his life. He had this whole concept of you want to record everything that happens to you.

01:38:53
This was so far ahead of time there was no way to analyze it, no way to get it. You know, we didn't have ai like we have today. We don't have, as didn't have as much storage and all of that. But now we can do that and I want to do it. I think it's a great idea. I would record every moment because I know at some point I will lose my mind and then I will be able to, you know, relive those moments. I'll be able to ask questions of that data, uh, what are my children's name names? Again, things like that.

01:39:20 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
That would be very useful, especially if they're tied to some sort of that person.

01:39:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, dj guy you're never gonna. Let me live that down are you?

01:39:30 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
No, but Leo, I think you're dead on, and the thing that I want more than anything else is an AI that's mine. Maybe this is an instance of a model of Perseverance.

01:39:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's what's going to happen, isn't it? Yes, because it's going to be trained on your life.

01:39:44 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yes, but I need it to be on my iOS device and my gaming PC and my iMac and this, you know, whatever this is Macro Pro and I'm just terrified that we're going to end up with OS segregated personal AI agents.

01:39:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
More silos, yeah which is terrible.

01:40:03 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
So recall yes, we just need one company to buy everything.

01:40:05 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
We could call it total recall. Yeah, we could call it total recall.

01:40:09 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, or either one company buys everything or you force open the platforms and allow access, deeper access, to the OSs, including iOS, so that competitors can offer services like these and have those services on every device.

01:40:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This circles around to the Google problem. This is how you solve it. You make everybody license their knowledge, but how do we solve the security problem?

01:40:38 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
no, that's yeah. Everyone has everything. There's no security.

01:40:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's it, we're done that's why I don't I mean what's wrong with Tick Tock? So what if China knows where I am right now?

01:40:48 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
oh do you a serious question or rhetorical question? I'm serious okay, so my, my take on tiktok is that we should not allow a different country to steer our less informed population and I think they're doing it on facebook and x.

01:41:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are you talking about? They're doing it. Russia has a propaganda channel that's on cable, called RT. What are you talking about? And you know it's not.

01:41:15 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Leo, the answer is not what are you talking about? The answer is you do something about those two. And RT has been banned. I don't know what's happened in the US, but it has been banned in Europe because it is a propaganda machine from a state that we are kind of actively at war with and that is viewing disinformation. Um, the case of x is kind of a little bit peculiar because it's been used in certain ways, but it is still uh, controlled by an american citizen, right, so that does change things.

01:41:48
And, uh, I do understand I don't think now tiktok is probably not going to be banned, but the concern that the algorithm is so powerful and could be altered or directed by a foreign entity, not even adversary. Like you've said on this show multiple times, traditional media does have rules for those specific cases. Uh, uh, foreign, foreign, uh citizens cannot own, uh, some of the traditional media. Why? Because the power of information is great and you don't want that influence to be possible. I don't understand why people say, oh, but for TikTok, tiktok, it's different, it I think the same argument can be made and it's valid.

01:42:33 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I agree with that and I think the point that we're making about RT on another platform so, for example, rt on YouTube I think that's very different because one is the application layer of digital media and one is the root layer. So the algorithm is what I think steers the whole ship. And having that, having the rudder of what most people think, because everyone uses TikTok except for me, apparently in the hands of a company that is co owned, literally by the Chinese Communist Party, is a mistake, and I just I find it very odd that people that I talked to on the business side kind of foment and complain about capitalism and so forth, but I'm like no, this is this is international politics, this is this is, this is geopolitics, this is different. It's not just the profit motive that matters here.

01:43:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's take a break. Good stuff. You guys are changing my mind as we speak. I'm going to get recall on all my devices. I'm going to send the information to china, but I am not going to use tick tock. Oh, I use tick tock, huh well, I like you.

01:43:31 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, I like it too. I love it. You know the theoretical problem. Does alex you're?

01:43:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
missing something great.

01:43:37 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
You should just try tiktok no, my, my friend aaron, was on tiktok and I followed her and she was big on like lesbian talks and now whenever I fired up, it's just all like oh yeah, well, tiktok so that's really the best thing about tick tock the algorithm is super good and it knows what you see and it when we look at.

01:43:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But my son got his business started on tick tock salt hanks. You know uh has done very well. He had two and a half million followers on tick tock, moved most of them to instagram. Uh, he's doing youtube shorts just put out. Have I shown you his cookbook lately just put out a cookbook. It was the best-selling cookbook in the world for one week.

01:44:12 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
We hit the new york times bestseller list.

01:44:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and now he's opening a salt hanks deli in the in uh in new york city. So all right, I'm buying. Thank you tick tock. I don't you know. Maybe, maybe, maybe I'm gonna find out that my son is a Chinese spy.

01:44:28 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I don't know, but for now, Well, actually the real connection here, leo, is because your son used TikTok and helping grain it further into the American psyche, it boosted the company's business, which means that ByteDance is worth more, which means that Jeffrey Yass had more money as a ByteDance investor to give to the Trump campaign to get him back into the office. So essentially, it's a son's fault.

01:44:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was a rollercoaster ride.

01:44:51 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
That's Trump won, so don't buy Salt Hank.

01:44:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to buy this. No, no, that's not.

01:44:58 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
No, no, he's back on Instagram now and YouTube. He's back on Good American.

01:45:02 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Soil. I'm literally buying his book right now.

01:45:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We are streaming literally right now on tiktok.

01:45:10
I hope you don't mind, that did you know that you'll never see it should I have told you we stream now on eight different platforms. We stream in discord for our club members hello, club members. Thank you for your support. We stream on youtube. Thank you, google, for your support. We stream on twitch. Thank you, amazon, for your support. We stream on linkedin. Thank you, reed, for your support in microsoft, I guess. So that's the. We're getting the fangs here. We stream on uh facebook. There's meta. Thank you, facebook. We stream on uh tick tock. We stream on x thank you, elon and we stream on kick. I don't know who to thank for that yeah, that one.

01:45:48 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That one I'm not sure is the. I don't know who to thank for that.

01:45:51 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, that one, I'm not sure, is the. They're an F1 team.

01:45:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kick Sauber right, so shout out to them, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, they're a terrible F1 team, but they're Terrible, Terrible, terrible. Anyway, thank you to all of our streaming partners. Thank you mostly to our club members who make all of that possible. If you're not a member of the club and you want some of the exclusive access to exclusive shows, mikey just did his crafting corner. We've got stacy's book club coming up, our photo segment with chris marquardt. He's going to do an hour with us talking about photography, reviewing uh viewer photos as well. Um, lots of stuff coming up.

01:46:28
I hope you will join the club to be part of that, to enter the club to a discord and get ad free versions of all the shows. In fact, if you're not watching this live, if you're watching this recorded, you're not seeing this ad. If you're club excuse me, if you're a club member, seven bucks a month, that's all it costs. Uh, doesn't go into my pocket. It goes to support our many wonderful employees like anthony, uh and uh. Honestly, it's what's keeping us afloat. So, uh, please consider uh twittv, club twit, joining club twit. There are some other benefits. By the way, this is a lot of people have taken advantage of the two-week free trial offer, which is great. Please do see if you like it. Uh, and and I wish more people were doing this you will get a referral code when you join. Spread that around, put it on all your socials, cause you'll get a free month for everybody who joins club to it because of you and your referral code. So take advantage of that. Thank you, club twit members. Twittv slash club twit. Hello, doug, and he's watching on X. Hello, there's somebody watching on Kik right now Kazindo, hi, kazindo. I can see all the people watching on all the platforms. Our show today brought to you by Veeam.

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01:49:57 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I was just excited to be here. I just like, I just like to it this show is so I love having you on you.

01:50:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you're great, you're great.

01:50:05 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Most podcasts are, like you know, stressy and stuff, but twit is just like I don't know. It feels like hanging on the backyard you do, you still do.

01:50:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, this weekend startups yeah, yeah, yeah co-host. That's a great show and you talk to really important people on that show yeah, it's been interesting to be jason's co-host as american politics has changed I wonder, yeah, does he disappear a lot?

01:50:29 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
uh, no, I mean he's, he's, I. I have only so much visibility into into his schedule and so forth, because we just kind of do the show together right.

01:50:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, but I've never had a co-worker who had friends who were so involved yeah running to the country no kidding, well, he does the all-in podcast with david sacks uh, I do not approve of well, jason's politics I, I suspect, have swung a little bit. Of course he's elon. He's best buddy to the president's elect's best buddy, right yeah?

01:51:02 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
elon musk jason to his credit, while his other all-in co-hosts all kind of veered into the trump camp, stayed independent in the middle. Oh good yeah, so I would give him actual, real points for pushing off pressure from his friends, I would think for staying independent.

01:51:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I imagine yeah.

01:51:22 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
You know, politics and technology do seem to be, right now, inextricably linked.

01:51:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which is unfortunate because I honestly don't want to talk about politics at all anymore, and which is unfortunate because I honestly don't want to talk about politics at all anymore. I feel like that that show is over, but maybe not because you're right. I mean half the things we talked about here have a political element.

01:51:39 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Well, the fcc is political, the, the, the hacks are political.

01:51:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everything is in politics, because it's policy that got us here you know I read, uh, brendan, you know I read Brendan Carr's chapter in the 2025 project 2025 document and actually I had to agree with like a lot of the things he said which really frosted me. I didn't want to agree, but let me give you some of the things that Brendan Carr, who will be the chairman of the FCC he's been a commissioner for a long time. He's been a commissioner for a long time. He is one of a number of Project 2025 contributors joining the Trump administration. He wants to rein in big tech. He says that meta alphabet use content moderation techniques, including shadow banning and demonetization, to censor conservatives on their platforms without offering detailed reasoning for their motives. Now, I understand that that is a stalking horse for, uh, the right wing. However, I you know, I kind of like his his idea of saying that there should be a transparent appeals process so that if a user's accounts are being demonetized or banned, they can ask why and they can appeal it.

01:52:56 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I think that's not a bad idea, you agree depends on the level of information of the party, like, for instance, if they're harassing someone, yeah, so that they're showing that this person reported you could. That's potentially problematic, more in danger. That's a good point. There should be some level of transparency, some level of appeal, all right. But there's also we've seen with open comments or writing comments people, that that itself, like the appeals process, can be spammed as well. So there's other problems related to that. Mandating that they can is one thing, mandating how they do it is another. So I agree that there should be one, but the heavy hand of how they can do it and what data is shared with them is the, the sticky point where in some cases it makes sense and some it doesn't. And so a blanket mandate maybe, even though on its face sounds great, but, uh, it may not make sense in all cases, and just the, the, the one size fits all, all kind of approach.

01:54:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is something that doesn't sound like maybe a strong recommendation, but a mandate is different fcc has no, by the way, I don't think has any uh mandate to deal with this at all.

01:54:23 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
This would have to come from congress right, especially after the chevron deference and right being overturned.

01:54:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the fcc doesn't regulate internet traffic at all, so uh, but he does think section 230 needs to be modified. I disagree with him on that point. Yeah, um, he, he, you know.

01:54:40 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think that's the. That's the issue, even with what he's saying. What you were mentioning earlier about the uh information for people who are, you know, banned or moderated, which, taken in isolation, I believe is a good you know seems like a good policy. It's good intent, like you should have more transparency on why, like we've all had some experience with a platform that has imposed a penalty on us and we're like why? What happened? How do I get in touch with a real human about something like that? So, in isolation, that's good.

01:55:19
The problem is, this declaration of intent from him is aligned with a desire from the political, from from the right, to essentially be allowed to not be moderated, which is related to the section 230 thing, which I think is a problem. The reason and we've seen, you know, academic studies on this multiple times the reason the right is more moderated than the left is that they say things that are more subject to moderation than the left in in. You know and I'm not gonna gonna go into specifics because the people who are for it understand it the people who are against this or on the right don't want to hear it, but the the the reality of it is that the right is now on a warpath to say you are not allowed to moderate anything. We say You're not allowed to label disinformation or misinformation, and I think that's detrimental to the democratic process which requires the citizens to be well informed, and I think that's a big problem.

01:56:32 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
And think about it, leo. You run your own Mastodon server. You don't allow everyone to join.

01:56:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What if?

01:56:40 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
every person that you don't allow or get cooked off. What if they wanted to do an appeal process?

01:56:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What if it's like- no, I'd shut down the server. Exactly, right, so?

01:56:50 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
it's prohibitive for you. So that's why the one one size fits all for everyone doesn't necessarily work and could be detrimental to you even being able to continue.

01:57:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wonder how Elon would feel about this, because it cuts both ways. You know, elon may not want to reveal why he's shadow banned quite a few people actually on the on on x. So it cuts both ways. All right, let's throw that one out. How about this? One car takes a hard line against chinese tech companies. He says, as we know, they're affiliated with the ccp, they're a threat to national security, supports banning tick tock because it provides beijing with an opportunity to run a foreign influence campaign in the uS. He supports, as we mentioned earlier, increased federal funding to a rip and replace program for network infrastructure containing insecure Chinese technologies and he's in favor of closing loopholes and further regulating Chinese tech firms to prevent them from accessing American markets.

01:57:48 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Yep, I know the administration's been yelling for more regulation. Right that's been. Isn't that ironic it used to be.

01:57:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Reagan's republicans wanted government out of everything, and this is quite the opposite chinese technology is not specific enough um good point is and I thought it was chinese technology, isn't it?

01:58:06 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
you also have to define taiwan as china and think about the implications there. So, if that means that it would have to be funded, right, you would have to pay for all of this. And this is are we sending money to private companies to find, to buy chips here that don't exist, to replace these chips that they want to replace? There's no step two that makes sense, right, you get rid of this. You stop it then, all right. Well, what about?

01:58:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this one okay, you're right, I don't like this guy anymore, uh, he says he wants a series of moves to allow the private sector to develop network infrastructure. He specifically mentions elon starlink, which, by the way, we use as backup here. Last week, because of the heavy rains in northern california, comcast went out and I was using starlink for uh, the show on wednesday for this week in google. So I've got elon is on my roof right now. Uh, aiming, the aiming the satellite. He does say the fcc should increase the pace. It reviews and approves satellite launch applications for both starlink and amazon's nascent kuiper, which is I don't even think out yet but the thing is we haven't been slowing it down.

01:59:23 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
You. They supply the paperwork. It gets reviewed. How many of those starlink satellites are in orbit right now? Right? How many of those Starlink satellites are in orbit right now? Right? Thousands, it hasn't been. They haven't been held up by regulations. It's just making sure they're safe. They can de-orbit all that stuff. There's a lot to do. How do you make that faster is unless you skip all the safety checks, which it sounds like an Elon thing to do. If you can pinpoint why they've been going so slow, do we need more staff do? If you can pinpoint why they've been going so slow, do we need more staff? Do we need better ways of handling and modeling the data to make sure it's safe? There's all that can be done without a mandate externally in terms of getting rid of like regulations.

02:00:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is pretty ironic that he believes federal government should take a more hands-off approach to allow the private sector to innovate and compete in the communications sector. Except for use guys that are shadow banning conservatives. No, you guys, we're gonna put hands on you right.

02:00:18 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Speaking of ironies, there is a free speech argument to be made that corporations being allowed to moderate as they want their own platforms is a form of speech, and so by telling them what they can't do, there is speech infringement yeah it's essentially so. People can post what. What had nazi memes on your on x? I mean, it just blows my mind it's right, I would.

02:00:39 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I would argue, I mean, I think, uh, this would not. I I have no idea, but I think it would not pass the supreme court test because companies have a right to speech as well, according to right first amendment. That's right, yeah, I. I would suspect it wouldn't work out, but they've been trying. You know, several states have been trying to uh put this into into place and I suspect it's gonna that we're gonna see it happening. I mean, the legislation might go, might be voted in, and we'll see if it survives challenges.

02:01:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Supreme Court's first decision speaking of the Supreme Court, came out on Friday dismissing Facebook's appeal. A lower court had revived a shareholder lawsuit. Shareholders were upset that Cambridge Analytica got Facebook user data and sued. Supreme Court did not give them certiorari so they said basically we're not going to get involved. The decision the lower court made was accurate. The decision the lower court made was accurate. Uh, the us court of appeals for the ninth circuit ruled in favor of a class action lawsuit from facebook shareholders excuse me, I'm gonna say territories

02:02:05 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
yeah, for for this case, it makes sense to me that meta's right actually looking at this. What they said is that the cambridge analytica release was, let's say, a previous year, then three years later, that's when it was used for the Trump campaign and then that hurt the shareholders. The release was public information at the time, where it was then used and then politicized and it was in the news during the Trump win. So they disclosed that data. What they didn't say is they give a forecast of saying how it could be used in the future to be detrimental. There's no way they'd have a crystal ball, and if they needed to say every different way that things could go in the future, that could hurt them. That doesn't really make sense and it doesn't really help with uh shareholders making adequate judgment about what they invest in, what problems can happen in the future. So being able to predict the future should not be a crime especially if you do it right.

02:03:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, um, supreme court also, uh, getting involved in the fate of America's low-income broadband fund. They said the FCC. This is since Chevron, the Chevron ruling, the FCC overstepped its bounds in creating this broadband subsidy program, the Universal Service Fund, which you probably notice on your phone bill a little ding for that. That money has been going to provide, uh, uh, internet connectivity to low-income people and rural areas that are underserved. Uh, I don't know, I like this fund, but I think that they maybe this is something they're right, that this is something Congress should have done, not the fcc. Of course, the people suing are the phone companies who don't want to be responsible. They don't want to take the money. You know I have to pay this fund. What do you think?

02:04:09 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I think we don't understand how much of the us is going to change now that the chevron yeah, this is just the beginning, yeah especially because, with the new administration coming in, I presume they'll have less interest in keeping up certain things that might now be suspect.

02:04:24
I just think it's pretty sad that as a nation, we pay a tiny tax to help other people access the internet, and the moment we can tear that down, it appears that we're going to. I sometimes I bemoan the fact that we don't seem to have a lot of collective will to help one another, even though, much like Patrick, I am a capitalist. I just I don't know why capitalism can't have a heart.

02:04:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This has been going on for decades this Universal Service Fund.

02:04:51 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I? I could talk about health care I won't but it's not even about having a heart. I think obviously that's part of the question. But it's about infrastructure. You need decent infrastructure in your country, in the entire country, in order for it to run properly, or you actually disenfranchise parts of it. And there have been programs infrastructure programs in the US that were ambitious and they weren't incompatible with the spirit of enterprise and capitalism I wouldn't go so far as to say perversion but a new idea that you can't do anything. That is in the realm of gathering resources from everyone to do something that individual actors can't do on their own.

02:05:56
Um, I don't know if in this case, you know, maybe it wasn't the fcc's role and maybe it should have been congress, or but it's a general, it seems to be a general uh trend that you know that goes in that direction and I think it's not just detrimental. Or, you know, you could argue about the morals of it, but I think infrastructure in a country is important. You could talk about transport. You could argue about the morals of it, but I think infrastructure in a country is important. You could talk about transport, you could talk about electricity, the internet is part of that and you need good internet for the economy. It's not just about you know Google doing this and Apple doing that and Silicon Valley doing startups. It's about you being able to uh get Netflix in your backwater. You know, play part of your County in that state. It's about your uh business being able to charge with this new tool from whatever company uh does with the cash register connected to the internet. It's about important stuff.

02:06:57 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, but what if we stopped trying to put wires in the ground when we have satellite internet? That's now faster. Because you started that riff with it's about infrastructure and I think that's, up until Starlink, a very solid point. We had to go out and put wires in the ground. Leo made a point that he did a show on Starlink. That's how good it is now. Nixon Kuiper from Amazon and hopefully one more from a non-fang company, that would be lovely. But to me, if we could just take this money and just buy everyone Starlink terminals and just turn them on, yes, that would funnel money to someone that I think we all have interesting views on, but it'd probably be faster, patrick.

02:07:36 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
So why not just do that? And because there's not enough competition there. Yet again, capitalism, free market. You can't put all of this power into the hand of one entity, and it doesn't matter if it's, you know, elon musk or anyone else, and I think there is nothing as reliable as fiber in the ground. Uh, and you need that in order for the country. You know, pretty soon we're not going to have phone lines, we're not going to have, uh, tv signal, uh, it's all over the top.

02:08:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's all over the internet, yeah, yeah. I should point out that the Supreme Court has not ruled. This is just at a. They're giving cert to a pair of cases so that they they can rule. They may very well say no, no, this is good. The universal service fund's a good thing. I doubt it's not a good thing or a bad thing.

02:08:20 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I think we're talking about whether we should be investing in people getting internet access. I think that's something we can that's a good thing but the problem.

02:08:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe this isn't the question, is it?

02:08:30 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
legal. Is it legal? So the?

02:08:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so that's what they're going to determine whether the case is with, according to the verge center around whether congress inappropriately dedicated law making function. Again, this goes to chevron deference to the fcc by letting it set contribution rates for telecommunications companies to pay into the non-profit us uh a, the universal service administration company, which manages the USF. It also asked whether the FCC delegated too much authority to a private entity. Maybe they did, by letting USAC manage the subsidy program.

02:09:05 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I think we all will be grateful for this case. It should go to trial, it should be adjudicated and hopefully we can now understand more and have more clarity about these agencies and what power they should have. Um this with tossing out the chevron deference, it made it like what's what? Everything is a giant question mark. We've seen this way.

02:09:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'd feel better about it west if we had a effective congress yes, but the thing is what?

02:09:32 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
what are the lines? And they're still fuzzy. It's like free speech. What is considered fair use? Uh, when?

02:09:38 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
when I think it should be congress's job, not the fcc's job yeah, I mean, gerrymandering has turned congress into literally a circus, so we don't have a functioning way to actually pass laws in this country, let alone, you know, big, ambitious laws, yeah, and it's unfortunate that the courts are jumping in um and and maybe uh.

02:10:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Deregulation isn't a bad thing, but Congress has to then step up and make regulations if they're not going to let the regulations.

02:10:07 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I don't know the, the makeup of the US Congress, or the, the, what they do and don't do.

02:10:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Obviously, as well as I know, You're not alone.

02:10:15 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Patrick. But I do have a feeling that every country has, like every citizen of every country have, you know, mixed feelings about their legislative bodies, and I wonder how much of it is again kind of a little bit self-fulfilling, Like surely there are people in Congress who are wanting to do the right thing and it's not helping that everyone, including the people who are progressive, are like, oh, but no, Congress can't do anything. It's like like, again this somebody should do something, but then you refuse that somebody is doing something. I don't know. That's outside the I agree.

02:11:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, I agree. I don't know what the answer, though, is. I mean, well, this is why democracy. I'm just stating the fact that we have an ineffective congress. They passed fewer laws last session than I think ever in history. Yeah, let's fix it. We just had an election. I don't think it fixed it.

02:11:22 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, this is the China hack all over again, right? Unless something bad breaks, then it will not capitalize people to say we need to fix it, and that includes democracy itself and um, and so, if there, if it's, if, if you remove these regulations because regulation equal bad, and then we have all this and people like, why are things so bad? Oh, remember the regulation, and then it will come back and so it's.

02:11:46
It's cyclical. We're going to go through this phase where we go to things that are broken things maybe the epa shouldn't regulate water safety, but somebody better yeah exactly.

02:11:57 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I'm sure there'll be a new oil lobbyist in charge of that, but this is just the the um, this is the battlestar galactica quote.

02:12:03
This is all. This has happened before, will happen again, right, right, okay, so science fiction is predictive of our future. I just I worry, though, in this new cycle of deregulation leading to chaos, leading to more regulation, I just I worry about the people who are going to die, because the way that I always like to think about regulations is that they're written in blood, especially in industrial terms, so it's going to be really hard on the people actually with a wrench in their hands well said, well said yeah, let's take a break.

02:12:28 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
That's. That's the consequences elections have consequences.

02:12:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Elections have consequences. That's exactly right. Um, let's take a break. We will have more with our wonderful panel. Wesley faulkner is here. Wesley, what's, what's the plug? Go to wesley83.com and look at all the things he's up to.

02:12:45 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah my plug is to say hi to darren cohen. Uh, I said I would give him a shout out. Uh, on blue sky. He said that, uh, he watches the show, and so I want to say hi, derrick yeah, are you all over blue sky these days?

02:12:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is that like your new uh, your new twitter?

02:13:01 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I hop around. I'm a little social slutty right now.

02:13:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yes, same social, socially slutty you're on macedon threads, blue sky, you got. All of this is at your um wesley83.com link, github, github, I got a github. You know, my my thing lately is um, I moved my blog to micro dot blog and it's uh, the whole idea is posse post once and then syndicate everywhere, so post their go to mastinon and threads and blue sky, not to twitter, because their api isn't, isn't open. But uh, I like that idea. That way, you know, I'm everywhere and conversations and all those platforms get looped back into the blog and I think that's to me that's the right way to do it.

02:13:46 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
But that's just me yeah, I just don't want to pay the money. I guess I'm cheap, uh the monthly fee is is the prohibitive for me to like. Well, I do this often enough to make it make sense.

02:13:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, exactly.

02:13:58 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
So it's a great service. I've looked into it.

02:14:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Five bucks a month.

02:14:02 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Wesley, I'm not, I'm unemployed right now. Okay, oh, okay.

02:14:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry. We'll send you some money. We'll get you set up on micro. Yeah, that's what I should be plugging is my yeah, your gofundme, get him on microblog. Uh, are you you are looking for work? Yeah, always so jobs. This guy, if you don't hire him, you, this is the one of the greatest guys out there. It's a mistake, it's just, he's awesome. Wesley faulkner wesley83.com, hire him. Uh, our show today. I'll give you a plug in a bit, patrick. I'm working my way through my shows are in french.

02:14:38
I don't think you know you don't do the english one anymore. No, I had to stop.

02:14:49 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I had too much work and then the kids.

02:14:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But uh, but we'll, we'll get back to it. I think all shows should be in french. I've, I can't wait till ai's smart enough to translate this into french, and then it'll sound so much sexier and so much more intelligent. It'll be so much better in French. Our show today time for a little capitalism. Our show today, brought to you by Lookout.

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02:16:43
And if they ask, you say I heard it on Twit, I heard it on Twit. So this is, boy, mark Zuckerberg's clever Zuckerberg's clever. He says you know, we shouldn't have to worry about verifying ages on Instagram and Facebook. That should be the job of the app stores. They should verify the ages. They have all the data. Why are you lawmakers trying to get us to do it? This is a big campaign to get federal and state lawmakers to tell the app stores. Hey, you guys, you know how old these people are. You ought to make them do it.

02:17:31
Two congressional Republicans preparing a new age verification bill that will do exactly that. Mike Lee of Utah, john James of Michigan, should be introducing legislation, according to the Washington Post, any day now. It would be the first of its kind. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers have called for expanding guardrails for children and about the risks of social media. And about the risks of social media. The measure would give parents the right to sue an app store if their child is exposed to certain content. It's not facebook's fault, it's not instagram's fault, it's not even tick tock's fault.

02:18:06 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
It's apple's fault the biggest flaw with this that I see immediately is that I can go to facebookcom and that's not mediated through an app store, and it's probably gonna be a little tricky to tell where a person signed up for a service, right, am I crazy?

02:18:20 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
also, you can sideload apps now, especially on apple and android devices, and so centralizing it in the app store to do that check means that people can sideload apps and still get around it, not just using the website, and what it also does is makes the app store is the arbiter of truth for these services.

02:18:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's what Mark wants. It makes it easier for them.

02:18:47 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Mark doesn't want to be responsible, but the thing is the app store should allow this, but it should be a service. The Google Play Store should do this, but it should be a service. It the the google play store should be able to, should do this, but it should be a service. Yeah, you should. The people should be able to opt into that service. That'd be something that should supply to, but they should be able to use another service if that is at all possible. So pushing the blame on the app stores in one way makes sense. But, like what alex was saying, there's other ways to get to the site, into this content.

02:19:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But, like what Alex was saying, there's other ways to get to the site and to this content. Age verification is, of course, a huge problem because it's a privacy issue. I mean, not only do kids have to verify, but adults do. Everybody does right Prove that you're an adult. I guess the argument is well, the App Store has more ways of knowing that. They might have your credit card, for instance. They might, you know, there might be other information.

02:19:38 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Apple they know the person. But if a parent hands a phone to their kid, you could already lock down apps. You, if you can say they don't, they don't get to install any apps without my say so I agree with you.

02:19:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it should always be the parent that does the age verification right.

02:19:52 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, you know there are limits to that. I think, yes, theoretically, yes, but you also can uh, uh give the. The parents need tools in order to be able to, to implement those uh choices in moderation. But this is isn't even about that. And you, your points, all all of your points are well taken, alex and wesley, I think obviously there are, as in everything, instances where it doesn't work, and, setting aside the interest of Zuckerberg himself and the interest of the app stores, I'm wondering if there isn't something there that indeed, the, the, the stores or the platforms really that's what we're talking about have could have a easier way uh, implementing those age verifications, which are incredibly, incredibly difficult to do, because you're talking about credit cards, leo, the age verification is not just are you, uh, you know, over 18 or not, or it could be 13, 16.

02:21:03
It's very difficult to do. I don't know that it would be easy for the app stores, um, but it seems to me that maybe they would have more like we are, I think, maybe especially with apple, but we are more readily, we're, I think, maybe especially with Apple, but we are more readily, we're more ready to give them information, private information, than we would be to Facebook and also you centralize it. Yes, there are third party app stores and all of those issues, but you centralize it and then you just get like a token or something that says, yes, you are that age that you are claiming to be with the service and you don't need to exchange that private information. I don't know how it would work technically, but my gut says it could be easier for Apple or Google to verify it than it would be for Facebook and a million other services.

02:21:51 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
That would Okay, but do we want to give them that power? I mean, here's a quote from that post story that the congressman shares the concerns of many parents across michigan and the country who believe app stores are not doing enough to protect our kids on social media. What a strange sentence, patrick the freezing is weird yes, app stores are not doing enough to protect our children on social media.

02:22:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, wait a minute. That's like if you're a shopkeeper and you sell magazines of an adult nature, isn't it your responsibility to keep the kids from buying it? You're not allowed to sell it. But the issue is that's type on the.

02:22:26 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
App Store but the the magazine is also available in on the street and right it's not perfect but but the the.

02:22:34
They are shirking the responsibility from where the content lies. They're moving it further away from the center of where the blame is. If that is something where the vendor needs to protect their user base, the vendor needs to protect their user base. From your same analogy, what if that shopkeeper was your best friend who's selling door-to-door magazines? They could do it. If they're a small vendor going to door-to-door and saying, hey, I'm just selling magazines, they're not the big store. So just because they're a smaller operation, do they still not have the same burden to make sure that that's protected? If you centralize where the responsibility lies to only these two app stores and the content is in?

02:23:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
other ways of getting it? Yeah, but how would Playboy know if somebody under the age of 21 or 18 is buying a Playboy? Only the shopkeeper would know that. There's a practical issue there If there's only two shopkeepers, but they're not well no, but, but there is, by the way, that's how it works, that's, that's yes kind of how it works if every app and every app website has to.

02:23:45 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
You were talking earlier about the, the, the risks and the practicalities of things. If every website has to verify your or every app has to verify your or every app has to verify your age, it's a bigger deal than if you can centralize it somehow and give the information only to the entity that you trust, maybe a little bit more than you know, whatever app that's developed in whatever country, by whoever that you need to send your, you know.

02:24:14 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
ID card copy no. But Patrick, you're saying, okay, look, here's two cups of poison. One will kill you faster, Don't you want the one that will kill you slower? I?

02:24:22 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
don't. Yes, Obviously yes.

02:24:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want the one that will kill you slower, but there's a third cup. Is it more painful, though? That's the question.

02:24:30 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
There's a third cup that's empty entitled we empty entitled.

02:24:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't centralize age verification rules, but we do internet Schlitz. It's not Schlitz responsibility to see if you're 21 or 18 to buy my beer.

02:24:42 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
It's the shopkeeper's responsibility but on Schlitzcom I just have to scroll a little wheel and say yes, I'm 21. I think, I think the other.

02:24:51 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think the other part of that conversation and maybe it's different in Europe and the new US, but the other part of that conversation is that we're starting to realize we need and I hate to say it like this, but we need to give parents the I'll say it like that. We need to give parents the tools to help the children, to help them moderate what the children can see.

02:25:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But isn't it ultimately your job, patrick, as a father, to say to your child you're not old enough to install Instagram?

02:25:26 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I'm not going to let you have Instagram, yet I mean you know better than anybody.

02:25:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not about age, by the way. Some 13-year-olds would be old enough, some wouldn't. It's really about the maturity of the child and only the parent knows that. I think the parent really is the ultimate gatekeeper and should be. And I agree with you tools, whatever tools you need. If you need a tool to tell how old your kid is, okay, but whatever tools you need. But really the tool is the phone should have parental controls, which they do, and the parent has the ultimate responsibility of deciding whether even to give the kid a phone or not.

02:26:01 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Uh, yes, I agree, I agree, but I think there are limits to that. Not every parent is super tech savvy and that goes into other things as well, I know but kids are, and kids are also going to go in and get a beer, sometimes at the, of course convenience store absolutely.

02:26:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't.

02:26:17 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Nothing's perfect, but I think parents are the are really the ones who should make these decisions yes, and I'm not against giving them tools, but parental controls are tools I think we agree, uh, but I think currently in our, in our uh world of tech and internet, the tools are maybe a little bit lacking, and that's Maybe they could be better.

02:26:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do you think, wesley, cause you've got a 12 year old, so you're right in the middle of this right now.

02:26:42 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
So the phone's locked down, they can't use it outside of our view and so it stays home. They can't take it, it doesn't leave the house and we have the parental control, so I know what apps on there and they can't install new apps without, uh, talking to us first. They're, they have no social media access.

02:27:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um and what is their reaction to, especially the 12 year old?

02:27:05 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
it's. They don't know what they're missing because they don't know, experience it so I'm not taking anything away from them. It's normal. This is your job first place you also, don't you know?

02:27:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
let them have a beer. I mean, it's just, it's your job there.

02:27:17 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
There's a big group, there's this great. There's a big conversation happening here about porn, I guess all over the world about porn sites, and I think we are a little bit on. We don't realize the damages this is making and and I wouldn't realize if I hadn't been educated about it a little bit by people who are saying you know, doctors and experts who are saying it is changing the relationship kids, very young teenagers, sometimes have with sexuality and sexual partners, and so the idea that you need to lock down porn sites and to have them do age verification properly is not as ridiculous as we would think it would be. Because, wesley, you're saying the phones are locked down. Do they not have access to the internet?

02:28:16 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
maybe they don't and maybe no that's the way they have the browsers. But right, no browser. The cry of like these companies aren't doing the same thing. Coming from the same party that says we can't teach sex education in schools, it, you can't. You can't shrug your responsibility, you can't just say, on one hand they can't be exposed, but on the other hand, we can't give them the tools so that they can even understand what can and cannot be done. Absolutely removing. Removing something and just saying let's just act like it doesn't exist is not a solution I know I think no one will argue.

02:28:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, no one on this panel would argue with that. That's obviously something you have to do, I, I, I do. I mean, gosh you gotta. My kids are old enough that I didn't really have to worry about this when they were, uh, that age it's. It's a tough thing to do. I think you were smart to draw the line when you did. You're right, some parents won't, but I don't want the government or facebook or any company to tell me what my kids can and can't do.

02:29:16 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That's my job patrick, please uh, just, you know, the government tells your kids what to do all the time about a lot of things, and it is a very slippery slope to be saying, oh, I don't want the government to to to tell me about this or that, because then you, you generalize it and you again go to someone should do something, but not the government. When that someone is the government, your, the government, tells your kids what to do all the time about a lot of things. Uh, I don't think the internet I mean, obviously there are things that would not make sense, but I don't think the internet is completely. It should have nothing to do about the internet just because it's the internet and we know it and we're comfortable in it.

02:30:06 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I just find it very strange that right now we're discussing, earlier on the show, the idea that the Republican Party wants to do away with Section 230 to limit corporations' ability to filter trash from their platforms.

02:30:18
But at the same time the same party is saying that we must protect the children and we must have age gated verification for lewd content. Good luck sorting out what that means. So my thought here is that I think that having this land on the government side, patrick, in an american context, means handing over control of what we can say and see and hear and read to people who are very socially conservative, to the point in which we're going to end up with the amish internet. I say with a lot of love to people who are less technology savvy, but the point is it's just, it's just maddening drives me nuts how they talk into both sides of their mouth. That's my point.

02:30:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry, I just wanted to shout but but we could talk out of one side of our mouth so we can say, we can at least on this show say what should happen and, uh, and, and whether we get it, we, we or not I think the government, the government says things like you have to wear seat belts, you have to wear a helmet if you're under 18, things like that. Those are, I think, reasonable laws. Is it a public safety issue? Maybe it is, patrick. Maybe it really is a public safety issue.

02:31:26 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think we don't see as much, because of our age and our comfort with the internet, the real issues that it can create. You know, pornography is one but social media is another. But I'm curious I'll ask this question to sort of recenter the question about tech stuff, like pure tech stuff. Let's say there was a way and maybe there isn't. Let's say there was a way to determine someone's age, uh, without compromising private data. Um, would that be okay to implement in various apps? Would you be okay with that?

02:32:09 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I don't want to get the government.

02:32:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I don't forget about the government like each let's say, let's say, let's say there is a new technique, a facial recognition technique, that with absolute accuracy, the camera on your phone can say how old you are and then give you access to age-appropriate stuff. Would that be okay? Is that okay, patrick?

02:32:28 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, I think that's the way I would phrase it better.

02:32:32 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
As long as I'm the one deciding what is and what is not okay, then I'm fine with that yes, but the government says you can't drink or smoke before a certain age oh, I don't agree with that either oh okay.

02:32:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I mean, I've heard that in france you give your kids wine, sometimes water down a little bit.

02:32:49 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I've heard that well, a long time ago probably, yes, but not so much nowadays.

02:32:54 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Wesley makes a really good point I want to go back to wes's point about sexual education in the united states, because it's. It might sound odd to our foreign audiences, but in the us what counts as lewd has various interpretations across the political spectrum, based on religion mostly and in different states, by the way states, and so what we're saying here is we're framing this around parents taking care of children, and I think it's going to be very hard to argue against that.

02:33:18
But the way this would be implemented I think, patrick in the us, in a practical sense, about leo's magical machine that knows my age perfectly every time is that we're going to have people who are very, very opposed to any discussion of human sexuality at all trying to ban that from anyone over the age of 18 or let's say you're gay, or you think you might be gay and you want, and you're 12 years old and you want to know.

02:33:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What does that mean? What am I? That could be. That would very likely by uh count as lewd in Oklahoma.

02:33:46 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Yeah, and so.

02:33:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But and Louisiana. It's really very hypothetical, because there is no way of of a certain ascertaining somebody's age without violating every user's privacy In the UK. For a while they talked about oh, you just go into a pub and the pub will give you a certificate saying what your age is. So they literally floated this as an idea.

02:34:13 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Actually, in France currently, the law has passed and is in effect that uh porn sites have to verify the age of their users and how do they do that?

02:34:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's true. Nobody knows, nobody knows. Well, and and and to their is it to their?

02:34:29 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
is a gallery that has new art. Is that a porn site like?

02:34:32 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
what is well, I remember national geographics.

02:34:35 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
When I was a kid, that was my porn site. Like yeah, like how do you define this so that it applies to the places that matter?

02:34:43 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think. I think maybe you can get someone to make a list and it works well enough for the. You know, in the united states, where some states have done that.

02:34:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are states that have done that in the united states and those states most reputable porn companies withdraw.

02:34:58 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
So to speak because that's what's happening here as well.

02:34:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because they don't want responsibility, and they're and it.

02:35:04 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
What you get, though, is the as the non-reputable companies, but um, I I yeah, it's complicated, but I see where you're coming from and I understand that that concern. It's intractable, it's really yeah, it's, it's really difficult and no matter what you do, there are going to be like negatives to it which are serious and concerning All right.

02:35:30 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Since this is the pop-up podcast, I'm just going to say this to all the other parents listening One a bit of advice that I got was that the world is a very large place and your job is not to keep the world out, because that's an impossible task. Your job is to give your kids the tool to take on all the things that they're going to experience, because you don't have control about what they'll eventually run into. So giving them the tools mentally and emotionally, and understanding how they can navigate the world that is not under your control, that is your primary role, because if your role or your thinking is that I'm just going to keep the world out, that's not going to happen.

02:36:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bingo, well said, well said.

02:36:13 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Wesley, yes, but Don't call me, but well said, well said, wesley.

02:36:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yes but no, I think that that's that's absolutely true. It's true, but I raised my kids. I was a very laissez-faire parent. I let them play video games as long as they wanted and whatever. But I did what you said, which is, I tried to instill in them and it's not, you know, as a parent, you're really our role model trying to instill in them and it's not you know, as a parent, you really are a role model uh, try to instill in them the values and the judgment to navigate the world that I knew, that I couldn't control, even when, frankly, even when they were young, uh, you know, after about 10, the peers, the peer group, becomes much more important than the parent parenting group. So you want to, you want to make sure they're prepared for that. I agree with you, wesley, I think that's true.

02:36:57 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
You don't like this though, guys, it's not, no, it's not like you're making it seem a little. The subtext is so laws don't matter and I know that's not what you mean, wesley, obviously, uh no, but but there are still. There are still laws and still things that collect the laws you know it's a bad word, I think in the US it's things that we collectively decide. Okay, this we should agree. All of us kids shouldn't do, and so we'll do what we can to make sure they don't do it right. And and we're okay with it on in the physical world, and it seems that when we're talking about it in the, in the uh digital world.

02:37:35
all of a sudden it becomes, oh, but they want to do this because of that and they want to, which is not wrong, I understand, but it doesn't mean that there shouldn't be any rule for anything, ever, because there are issues that are real on the internet as well.

02:37:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, we're going to move on. Stand by last segment coming up, then you all can go have a beer if you're over age, over the age of 21.

02:38:02 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
or root beer or root beer what is the age of?

02:38:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what is the drinking age in France? 18.

02:38:10 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
similarly well kept as the United States 21 year old rule, or is it a little bit porous?

02:38:14 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
oh yeah, I I I was drinking a little bit. I never drank a lot, but yes, kids drink and do other things before they're 18. Of course, you know there are rules and laws that are there, that you know there are going to be broken, but it's still important to have them.

02:38:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah I have to say the ballpoint I learned as my kids became adults and started telling me what they did when they were little. I was dismayed, shocked. I went you were doing what you were.

02:38:47 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Oh my god, I had no idea and now they're new york times best-selling authors yeah, so there.

02:38:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I don't. I don, I have no idea how to parent as nobody does Right, nobody does. You got to figure it out on your own.

02:39:05 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I still remember the moment I realized that parenting is not a thing you do, it's just no, it's not like a specific act, it's how you interact with the child at all, all moments. Yes, and that scared the pants. I thought you could like go parent and then live. No, no, no. Parenting is how you live. You have to be good all the time.

02:39:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you are no. And let me tell you this I don't know if it'll help or hurt you are going to traumatize your children.

02:39:32 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
My newest daughter's, two and a half months old, and you already told me that I I'm going to.

02:39:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you can't help it when they are non-verbal, when they're little, and you're in the room with them and you leave. They don't know that you're coming back. They, they go. Oh my god, I'm all on my own. They have no idea. You have traumatized them merely by leaving the room. So.

02:39:55 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think Wesley has a pretty good handle on all of this. I want him to be my coach.

02:40:00 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
The goal is when they inevitably go to counseling, you want to make sure they talk about your partner more than you. It's her fault, she did it All.

02:40:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, let's take we really have to take a break Last break. This is a great panel the daddy panel. I like it, I like it, and if you are a new parent, god bless you. That is a difficult and challenging job, and the most important thing we'll do this Week in Tech is brought to you by Bitwarden. Look, if there's one thing I told my kids, they didn't listen. By the way, you need a password manager, kids, you need and I tell you now, you need a password manager.

02:40:41
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02:45:31
Bitwarden twit. Consider this a public service announcement. Get Bitwarden, you need it. Bitwardencom slash twit. You know what you should be talking about on Thanksgiving, on Thursday. Hey mom, how do you keep track of your passwords? Oh, hey, dad, do you have a password manager? Do you know what that is? You know what? Bring a USB key to Thanksgiving. Bring a little USB key with thanksgiving. Bring a little usb key with bit warden on it. Give it to all of them. Make them all sign up. That would be your gift for thanksgiving. Uh, all right, quickly, we'll just do a few more because I know you guys gotta get back to spanking your kids and stuff. Um, amazon's Echo, it was supposed to get AI Not working so well. Apparently, part of the problem is it takes forever to you go, hey Echo, and it goes. What, what time is it? Wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me think. Apparently it's very high, very high latency with his ai, which actually, if you think about it, makes sense yeah, but it sounds like a moody teenager leo hi, yeah, what?

02:46:45
what do you want? No, no, come on man. So, uh, here's the solution. They say, well, okay, so maybe we aren't going to have, you know, an ai chatbot in this thing. But what if we partner? This is actually what the rabbit r1 did, right? We partner with uber and ticketmaster and instacart, and so it's not a skill. Remember, they used to have skills in amazon's echo, it's. It's built in. So the things that you might have turned on skills for in the past, it's built in. What do you think? Is this a good way to go? It's the only way to use these huh like.

02:47:26 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Does anyone actually keep using any of their amazon hardware devices?

02:47:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, I'm not.

02:47:30 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
I'm not even facetious ions losing money I think you're also missing the thing is this enhanced echo. I'll just say echo is supposedly supposed to be a subscription on top of that, yeah five dollars for uh, what do they call it?

02:47:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
pro, echo, pro or something like yes yes.

02:47:49 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
So this, this new version, it will not be free, and so it's not just will you still use it, but will you pay? You pay for it you know, what delayed answers?

02:47:59 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
ever since they put. They decided to make prime worse by putting ads in the prime shows. I just don't think I need to give amazon any more money because they've decided that I'm a schmuck and then I'm just going to take it, so it's called in shitification and we've seen this.

02:48:14 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
We've seen this before it's a couple of bucks. I mean I I don't love the fact that they added ads, but they they've been offering this thing for, not for free, but amazon prime gives. How much is prime in in france?

02:48:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, 70 euros, so like 80 bucks. So it's much more here in the us, is it? How much is it? No one knows 120, right?

02:48:39 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
yeah, it's over it's over. I've been paying for prime for so long.

02:48:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like I literally don't know what I I pay for it and I don't know what it costs. Yeah, that's.

02:48:46 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That's an example of yeah, stupidity but I mean, yeah, okay, maybe, maybe if it's that much you you want to get more out of it, but here it's so cheap, it's like I they give you like the gaming stuff and the music and they just haven't unified europe as as fast as they did. Oh, it's in unified. It's just cheap.

02:49:05 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Uh, cheaper to get certified do you notice, not paying for prime, that your amazon shipping is slower amazon shipping to me only comes in two varieties it'll be here this afternoon or it'll be here whenever the hell they decide to say yes, that's the same as if you're prime, by the way yeah, no, that's my point. Like prime used to be defined like if I, if it was prime, it was two days now. Amazon's like well, do you want this afternoon? I'm like sure, or do you want it two thursdays?

02:49:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
whenever, maybe whatever we get yeah.

02:49:35 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Also, on the point about prime differential between the two countries and the cost of their life. Just keep in mind that in 2023, france's GDP per capita was 44K and in the US it's like 86. So we can afford it man, and that's not a diss. Keep in mind, earlier I was making the point for European dynamism. I'm just saying that there is a ppp or purchasing price parity differential here to keep in mind.

02:49:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Prime is 139 a year in the us, so it's twice what it is, yeah, in france and I do want to comment go, go, no, oh, just what's the ad free version cost?

02:50:08 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
because isn't there a way to pay more now for prime to not?

02:50:11 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
get. Yes, you can pay a couple of bucks extra per month. I press that button immediately. How much, how much? I want to know patrick, pay a couple of bucks extra per month to get rid of the ads.

02:50:15 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I pressed that button immediately. I want to know. Patrick says a couple of bucks, leo, you pay it. How much is it?

02:50:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know Gotcha. This is how.

02:50:22 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Andy Jassy gets away with it.

02:50:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Get my rocket money here and just I'll tell you the reality is, I don't watch Amazon Prime all that much.

02:50:37 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
There was a show about the French big brother, like the reality TV thing, the first one, which was really well done. Actually it's a French show and and I watched that. I was surprised at the amount of ads, to be honest, there was a lot, but only because I'm used to having no ads anywhere ever. But but yeah it, to me it seems acceptable.

02:50:55 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
But well, I just I find it so funny that we have a European on the show today and I say that with nothing but love who is arguing in favor of more American-style capitalism than I am. I feel like we should just trade citizenships.

02:51:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why we have Patrick on.

02:51:09 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I will not take that trade, Alex. I'm sorry. I'm very fine here.

02:51:14 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Go back to. Finland.

02:51:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Alex, I'm sorry, I'm very fine here. Go back to Finland. So I think it was the UK that invented these super low-cost Airlines like Ryanair. Right, yeah, it was like five dollars to fly to France, but if you want to use the toilet that'll be a couple of bucks more if you want to bring me. So we that inspired something called Spirit Airlines in the United States. Have any of you ever flown those big yellow, lemon colored planes? What do you think, wesley?

02:51:42 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
you like spirit. It was the worst experience ever, um, because worse is, even if you have to have a connection, because the connections could be like I don't know a day apart, be like I don't know a day apart, um, so it's just not very convenient and uh, yeah, and there's very little one and only time one.

02:52:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And yeah, I did it once and I and I told lisa we're never doing this again. There's the leg rooms like this, so your knees are guarantee you. I don't care how tall or short you are. Up against the seat in front of you, you pay for everything. Bags. You do get to go to the bathroom for free, but bags water anything. You gotta give them extra money for um. Anyway, they just filed for a reorganization, chapter 11 bankruptcy, which is not that much of a surprise. They've lost more than two and a.5 billion in the last four years.

02:52:36 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Do you remember how to make $100 million? Leo, Start with $10 billion and build an airline.

02:52:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Buy an airline Used to be a winery, but now we have an airline hey can.

02:52:48 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I go back to Alexa for just a second. Yeah, sure, there's one thing which I think is really interesting that's happening in the AI space about now, which is companies are figuring out ways to make the AIs do stuff and because until now they've basically been the most impressive aspects have been chatbots, so they can give you information, but they can't really do much. And Anthropic has unveiled their tool that basically you install a program on your computer and then it takes a screenshot, sends it up to the Anthropic servers and then sends back the information to do stuff with your mouse and keyboard, and so you can ask it to do stuff and it will actually do it on your computer. Same thing with alexa, uh, which with with those partnerships, potentially with uber and others, ios is also working on actions. Um, apple is working on actions for ios, for apple intelligence or whatever.

02:53:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this is going to be open. Ai also announced that they you know it's a rumor, it's a.

02:54:01 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It's a, it's a rumor, and we don't know how it's going to work. Probably it's going to be like entropic. Uh, what's it called, director? I can't remember the code name. Computer you've seen it makes me nervous operator, it's operator, I think.

02:54:10
Operator, I think yeah, um, but but I think this is going to be a really interesting shift if it does work out and it's not, like you know, 15 seconds of delay between each screenshot and action instruction relay. It's really interesting because this is when AI shifts from yeah, as I was saying, just giving you information in the form of pictures or chat bots or music into actually doing stuff for you, which would be amazing if it can do it we talked about this on windows weekly on wednesday, microsoft at ignite said ai is going to be agentic, that's the phrase they use.

02:54:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's going to be an agent. It's going to be your you know representative out in the real world. Um, which is I'm okay with, as long as you don't give it nuclear weapons.

02:54:59 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
That never ends well the talk about using echo um to do that for you in terms of that's exactly what they're doing, right?

02:55:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah?

02:55:09 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
but the every service that you mentioned is not free. Um, those are costs, so they're trying to actually train people to spend money using these devices, and so it's making people more accustomed to having this done on behalf, with not just doing a task, but charging you money and making sure that they profit off of that. So I do think it's-.

02:55:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're a capitalist society. We've established that.

02:55:35 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
Well, we also established that amazon is losing money on their voice assistants and 10 billion dollars. This is the way that they're trying to make it more sustainable in the future you know they can afford it, though.

02:55:47 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I mean 10 billion dollars. We all kind of look at that number and go, oh gosh, that's a lot of money. But then what is meta spending on reality labs every quarter? What three? Yeah, yeah and a half yeah. So I mean, maybe it's just worth it, maybe they just don't care it seems like a big baby, but I find it very funny.

02:56:03
They're willing to piss away 10 billion dollars on stupid little gadgets. No one really wants. But it cost me 2.99 more a month to get free prime. I looked it up three bucks a month.

02:56:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why don't they just stop losing money on echo and give me back my ad free prime genius you know, what somebody told me, I think it was last week on the show is that the companies make more money on the advertising than they do on the fee that you might pay to get rid of the advertising.

02:56:29 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
So they actually want you to do the advertising they like I just want to watch the expanse without insurance commercials piping in going hi, have you switched especially?

02:56:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because the Expanse was not made for commercial interruptions, right, or was it? When you have a show that doesn't pause. It's problematic also.

02:56:47 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
They're just so disruptive and terrible and I just want one surface in my life to be ad free and I find it very frustrating that I keep having just pay for it.

02:56:55 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Three, two, what did we say? Two, ninety, nine, alex, pay for it.

02:56:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's, that's it's called. Look, we charge people seven bucks a a month not to get ads in our shows, because leo, you're leo laporte.

02:57:09 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
You're a legend. We all like you. We're here because we think you're handsome. You know, you're not. You're not the parent company of aws that also owns whole foods. No, you know what. Know what I mean. Like.

02:57:18 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I don't so wait. Alex, are you saying that because Amazon is successful, they should give away a Prime video for free?

02:57:27 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
No, I'm saying that I pay a hundred and apparently $30 a year for a service and have for a very long time. I'm an early customer, I'm an early adopter of Amazon Prime. You're welcome Seattle.

02:57:37 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
So they should maybe break out the different services that they offer with Amazon Prime and let you pay for that one or not, if you want it or not, like if it was 20 bucks.

02:57:47 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Well, all technology is bundling and unbundling. So yes, I'll take that. But when a corporation says we've had an agreement and now I'm gonna make it worse and tough, I just don't think that my role in capitalism is to go oh damn, there's something I can do. No, it's, it's to foment and to complain and to use.

02:58:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I should have warned you all. Uh, I forgot. Usually I tell people this ahead of time. Alex Wilhelm is a young man in an old man, in a young man's body, and he is. He is just yelling at the clouds all the time yelling out the cloud, duh aws and I'm also not that young anymore I'm just old and cranky now, leo, like that's what's happened.

02:58:24 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
You've known me too long. Anyway, it's like it's not that he needs to pay to get rid of ads. Is that some people should pay alex to not to hear him complain?

02:58:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, no, no, no, I would pay to hear him complain at least 3.99a month.

02:58:38 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
That's 3.99 a month well spent I will shut up for 3.99 a month per person, to be clear. I will go away if enough people pay for that I want to go write novels.

02:58:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How much is your newsletter?

02:58:50 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
ten dollars a month there you go no, it's free, it's mostly free but you can't support it if you want, yeah there's, I do, very few paywalls. I want to keep it as free as possible for everybody but you want to make.

02:59:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You got to pay the rent. You got two little mouths to feed no, I married a doctor oh yeah, you could just live in your little house behind the house and yeah, I'm in the shed right now.

02:59:10
Yeah his shed, by the way, is where I used to play as a 12 year old people. People know this, I've said it before, but alex lives in my childhood home, which is weird as hell and completely coincidental, but true, yes but the next time you come over all the 55 inch samsung frame set up so you can, you can see how cool.

02:59:30 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
Where's the?

02:59:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
frame going in your little in your study.

02:59:33 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
No, no, no it's replacing our horrible curved tv we've hated for a thousand all those Samsung curves.

02:59:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was a bad idea.

02:59:39 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I had a curve, yeah yeah, we got it for free from my father-in-law and we just kept it, so there's no reason a screen should curve, unless it's so wide that it wraps around you. I do have an ultra wide gaming monitor now from Dell yes, same thing, I have a Patrick we're back to being friends again, good oh, and well how wide is it?

03:00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
49 inches, is it that wide?

03:00:03 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
no 34.

03:00:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, 34 alien wear lisa has a 49 inch predator that wraps around, but she does spreadsheets on it. It's like, girl, what you doing?

03:00:16 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I have a 55 inch oled that's what I play valheim on and I think no but 49 is essentially 227 inch, I think it's the super old thing together, right so it's 227, which makes sense because you many people have two monitors anyway yeah, that's what she does.

03:00:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, she has a third monitor too, so she's got the 49 inches plus a 27 inch monitor now I see where you guys get along she likes she.

03:00:43
She was so mad because I I bought the 55 inch OLED and then she said, well, I want a giant screen too. I said, well, you don't really need it. And she was so pissed off, probably rightly so, right, yeah, so where where do we get your? Uh, your newsletter, mr alex wilhelm? Optimum, what is it? Cautious optimism, cautious optimum, awesome. Cautious optimismnews. Yes, yes, the robotessens going to my head, I'm sorry.

03:01:14 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I'm cautious optimism a balance between people who think that technology companies are the devil incarnate and people think that they are going to bring us into a rapturous utopia instead.

03:01:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like to be optimistic about business and technology, but reasonably skeptical as well also listen to him on this week in startups every week and, uh, we love having you on. Thank you and thank, please, thank your lovely wife Liza for letting us have you all evening.

03:01:41 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I? I will indeed, leo, and, as always, the next time you're in town, please come over, we will look for you.

03:01:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I popped by the the about two years ago I was in town. I was walking by his house and he came out the door and I said Alex, and he looked at me out the door and I said alex, and he looked at me. It was like do I know you? I said it's me, leo, and he said I've never seen you outside the studio.

03:02:04 - Alex Wilhelm (Guest)
I can't you were wearing one of those british like racing driver hats from like the 30s and you didn't look like leo laporte.

03:02:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You looked like man visiting child in college environment yes, exactly, that's exactly what I was anyway, thank you, alex. Thanks so much. Thank you, wesley faulkner. Wesley 83.com is the link tree. What kind of job would you? What would be the perfect job for a wesley faulkner?

03:02:30 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
um to be a kept man where money just flows um, independently wealthy. I would love that if that's possible. It's not all, it's cracked up to be though yeah, you gotta labor involved yeah, it's a weird, weird time in tech to get a job right now because, yeah, yeah, it's especially as we get closer to the holidays. Why hire someone when the people who would train them or the work they're going to do is not going to be super impactful?

03:02:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so you know, fourth quarter.

03:03:00 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
The fourth quarter right now is just like you need to lean in. People are leaning their books to make it their fourth quarter look good, so it's really really hard to find out right now.

03:03:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, never mind, then don't hire this guy, but in two years come back and we'll talk about your novel, you mean?

03:03:16 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
two months, two months, come back and hire me, or hire me now, I'll take, I'll hire.

03:03:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean if you're looking for anyone. Wesley is one of the greatest guys ever.

03:03:23 - Wesley Faulkner (Guest)
He's so good Community management or developer relations. That's kind of my jam, but I'm very flexible.

03:03:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he's adorable Wesley83.com. Thank you, wesley. Adorable Wesley 83.com. Thank you, wesley, always a pleasure to see you. We'll have you back real soon. No, I'm not waiting two years and Patrick beijot's been a year. I'm glad we've I. I don't know how you fell off the list, but I'm glad to have you back. We'll have you back again soon. Um, his website is not patrickcom. That's the home of Laurent de Voutek. Com. That's the home of the rendezvous tech.

03:03:58 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
You'll find the links to everything I do on uh. No, I need to update it because there are.

03:04:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I see the phillies club. Still, you should do yeah yeah, yeah, but super laser punch, is that in french?

03:04:18 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
yeah, it is in french, it's a. It's a just a side project. We have fun with it. We do, uh, marvel stuff. Uh, we just reviewed the agatha, agatha all along oh yeah that was good. It was pretty good I was surprised her a lot. She's. She's very good. Catherine, one of my favorite actors.

03:04:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he's good yeah blizzard, did you celebrate the 20th? This week was the 20th anniversary of world of warcraft.

03:04:37 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Oh man my well, yes, obviously. Uh, 30 years of warcraft, 30 years of world of warcraft, uh, 10 years of hearthstone. I was at the company when we launched hearthstone. It was a fun, weird time. Wow. Um, I, I did celebrate I have a kind of a weird relationship with Blizzard because of all the stuff that's come to light in the in recent years and I was watching the celebration. I don't know anyone at that company anymore and, like there's maybe one person who I had met, um, but it's, it's a bit, but you know it's. It's a special game for a lot of people and for me as well. That's how I got my start. I, I was doing a podcast about World of Warcraft in French in 2006.

03:05:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, yeah just when you touch an orc in on Warcraft in France. What does it say? I play in English oh, because it goes, stop touching me yeah, that's that's yeah, it's translated, but I don't know.

03:05:43 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I play in in english, I love my games.

03:05:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's one of the. That was one of my favorite games. Work, work work work?

03:05:50 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
yeah, absolutely probably probably, that's absolutely probably probably.

03:05:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Patrick, a pleasure also. This is a. This is so fun for me to get together with the three of you. Thank you for being here thanks for having you. Thanks to our wonderful audience who puts up with us for three hours every Sunday we do twit 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2200 UTC, which means Patrick's up late. Uh, yikes, I forgot that's two. Yeah, middle of the night now.

03:06:21 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Uh, you can watch us yeah, no kidding right, which is probably why I haven't been on for for a little while like it's well, but we will call more often.

03:06:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I love getting you on. It's just great. It's really nice to get the European perspective uh as well. I really appreciate that because it's it's easy for us to get very us centric uh on the show and I I think it's important to remember that we have 30 of our audiences outside the us. We've got to, we've got to broaden our knowledge.

03:06:50
Uh, if you want to watch live, as I mentioned, we're on eight different streams youtube, twitch, tick tock, xcom linkedin, facebook kick uh, and, of course, for our club members in the club, twitch discord, but af. But most people don't watch live. I mean, who has time to you know, settle down every sunday evening for a show. So what you should do is download it. You can get a copy at our website, twittv. There's audio and video uh, you can. Also, if you go to twittv and you go to the this weekend tech page, you'll see a link to a youtube channel. It's all video all the time. Great way to share clips. If you had a, you know, like, if you want to share wesley's parenting advice, which I thought was really good, you can clip that out. Youtube makes it easy send it to somebody. It helps promote the show too. We appreciate that, uh, and, of course course, easiest thing to do, as with all podcasts, is get a podcast client Subscribe. That way you'll get it.

03:07:40
We have been doing this show for 20 years. Our 20th anniversary will be in April. It's kind of an amazing. We've crossed a thousand show mark. It's kind of an amazing thing, and it's really a tribute to all of you for putting up with us for so very long. Thanks, especially to those employees that I mocked earlier. If you do have employees, alex, have our employees. They're the best. They are really, really great.

03:08:05
Anthony Nielsen, stepping in for Benito Gonzalez for the next few weeks. Thank you, anthony, for the job you do. He's amazing. Editor, producer, technical director. He's technically our creative director, uh, but benito gonzalez, who's the normal producer of the show. Kevin king uh, john ashley we've got great people in our studio, uh, crew, uh, who's basically one person now? Burke mcquinn and, of course, the ceo of twit, uh, lisa laporte, my wonderful wife, who is now mourning a 49ers loss to her son's favorite team, the Green Bay Packers. I'm not anxious to go downstairs right now. Thanks for everything, everybody. We'll see you next week and, as I've said for 20 years, another twit is in the can. Bye-bye, amazing.