This Week in Tech 986 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 love this panel. Kathy Gellis is back. There are some Supreme Court decisions we got to talk about. Doc Rock is here from Ecamm and Ryan Shrout, former host of this Week in Computer Hardware. Ryan's going to talk about the new Snapdragon X Elite. He's got all the benchmarks to explain it. We'll also talk about a big bust. Kathy says how do you arrest 4,000 people in one day? The answers may surprise you. It's all coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

00:37
This is TWIT. This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 986, recorded Sunday, june 30th 2024. Our dope GPS. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the, the show we talk about the week's tech news. I like to this is the one show on the whole network where we have different people on every week, but that gives me a chance to kind of fine-tune the show to the news of the week. Our attorney at large counselor, kathy gellis, is back because the Supreme Court was busy this week and finally answered a few questions we had.

01:27 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
They answered, yeah, one or two questions, but not as many as we needed them to answer.

01:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you could talk about that too. What's still pending? We also have Ryan Shrout here, our hardware guru. He's at Signal65.com, but you may remember him from his time as host of this Week in Computer, computer hardware on our network and of course he was at intel for a long time and I am very curious on his take on the co-pilot plus pcs and intel versus snapdragon. I think you might have something to say about that. So it's great to see you again, right? Yeah, good to be here, welcome back. Is that a subway map of new york on the wall behind you?

02:03 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
it is a subway map of disney world. It is, uh, all the transportation systems. That's awesome, disney world, that's awesome mapped out in a subway format. Yeah, yeah my daughter got it for me for father's day a couple years ago. That is wonderful that's great.

02:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good to see you, ryan, also with us, our good friend, doc rock. He is director of strategic partnerships at ecam, but also a YouTuber in his own right. You know he's a YouTuber because he's got a sign that says On the Air behind him Hello Doc.

02:37 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yes, I do. That was a gift from a viewer who wanted me to help her do some stuff for the studio, and then she sent it to me as a gift.

02:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a great thing. Oh, you need that I never turn it off, though.

02:48 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I really wish I had a button to turn it on and off. I could tell my neighbors to stop playing drums next door.

02:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what it is. See, you need like a bat signal when you turn on the microphone. It goes in the sky. It says variety of on the air signs. My favorite one is when I got in the many years ago. Can you get it? It's it's not attached, um, and this I'm definitely taking with me. I've been taken with me from studio to studio.

03:22
I got it in 1984 when I was a DJ for a new station called Clock FM K-L-O-K and we were taking over the broadcast facilities of an old San Francisco rock station. I've been there since the 60s, very famous San Francisco rock station, and I think the DJ played Don't Fear the Reaper and walked out the door and I said hey, man, don't you want your on-air sign? He said no, you can keep it. So I did, but wait till you see it. It was from KSFX was the name of the station, it was a hippie station and it says not just on the air, it says right of the station. It was a hippie station and it says not just on the air, it says right on the air and it is kind of one of my favorite little pieces.

04:10 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
That wasn't a sign that was going to survive genres, was it?

04:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess yeah, because we went Clock FM. The whole theory of Clock FM, the new radio station, was well, we even have a jingle Build your own radio station. You always wanted to build your own radio station. You always wanted to build your own radio station. Clock fm is you. And the whole idea this was the worst idea was we would start just playing neil diamond non-stop, 24 7. The idea is to get a lot of newspaper coverage because there were still newspapers and then each day the audience would call in and vote in a new artist.

04:44 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Oh.

04:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So in day two we had Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand, and in day three we had Neil Diamond, barbra Streisand and the captain and Tennille, and it went on. I would say downhill, like that.

04:57 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm not sure that sort of playlist could survive the DMCA. It made some rules about how much you could play from any particular album consecutively.

05:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's a good point. Yeah Well, this was, I guess in those days.

05:09 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
You were being creative.

05:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's my sign oh my gosh, the fontography. Isn't that great. It says right on the air in that classic hippie. Oh look, it lights up. Look at that.

05:20 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
That is so good, so that will be my on-the-air sign.

05:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that great.

05:22 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I bet that's an incandescent bulb. On the inside too, LEDs, oh we actually rehabbed it.

05:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We rehabbed it. It had some old funky stuff. In fact, it didn't have anything. I think I ripped it off the wall. It was just this plaque.

05:38 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Oh okay, oh okay, man, you've got to trace that and turn it into a merch and throw it up.

05:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, would you buy it? Okay, absent, freaking loose.

05:47 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Always thinking.

05:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Always thinking Isn't that cool? Right on the air From KSFX San Francisco 1984. I felt a little guilty going from Don't Fear the Reaper to Neil Diamond Holly holy, not really capitalizing on currently entrusted audience behaviors.

06:06 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Don't touch that dial.

06:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And now morning in Diamond, 56 degrees in the city.

06:14 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Don't touch that mouse button. It does not have the same flick.

06:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't click, Don't click. I really am an old timer. That was, what is that? 40 years ago?

06:23 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well so, you took your slogan to heart with the go start your own radio station. So you basically did.

06:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did, and I'm pretty happy with the outcome Get to talk to people like you. So, kathy, what happened this week in the Supreme Court?

06:38 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, we can start with what didn't happen, which is we are still waiting for them to decide the result in what we're referring to as the net choice cases. These are the cases where Florida tried to regulate social media, texas tried to regulate social media. Their attempts eventually got put on hold via a variety of mechanisms and that went up to the Supreme Court. The fundamental question there is whether some First Amendment doctrine that applies to newspapers applies to platforms, and that question is there's a case called Miami Herald versus Tornillo and that case says that the government cannot tell a newspaper what it can or cannot run on its pages. That's an important thing that the newspaper has editorial discretion.

07:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a good thing.

07:25 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's a good thing that's from the 70s where the Supreme Court said the First Amendment means that there's editorial discretion that belongs to the newspapers, that the government can't interfere with. They get to decide what expression they carry.

07:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it's authoritarian states like Hitler's Germany, where they tell the newspaper what to publish.

07:42 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well they were telling the newspaper in Florida back then because that was they wanted the newspapers to carry op-eds that if they carried an editorial in favor of one political candidate they had to do the other one.

07:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now we had that. The FCC had the fair.

07:55 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
That was spectrum, so that was different. Because, you're using the public's airwaves, you have an obligation. That's why the First Amendment didn't necessarily say no uh to the fairness doctrine. Now there may be other other concerns with the fairness doctrine and it's since gone away, but that's kind of how the government got to regulate over the air broadcasting because it was using spectrum and that was the foothold.

08:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That said, the rules are different so florida wanted the fairness doctrine for newspapers, which doesn't make any sense, and the first amendment says no.

08:24 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Now florida and texas and a variety of other states, including blue states, want to be able to pressure platforms in what speech? They either facilitate or moderate away from their sites. And the big question in these cases before the Supreme Court is can they do that, or does the rule for Miami Herald versus Tornillo apply to online platforms, including social media platforms? I think the answer has to be yes. I think you run into real big problems if the answer is no, because you're going to get Governor DeSantis and Governor Abbott deciding how social media needs to be moderated needs to be moderated. It did sound like from oral argument which I had attended, that the judges seem to think that, yes, there is a First Amendment right and platforms and how they choose to moderate their platforms, but we don't have a decision yet. So we don't know. Yes but no, but we have no idea.

09:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is the NetChoice case.

09:20 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Those are the NetChoice cases.

09:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
NetChoice representing the tech industry. It's Netchoice representing the tech industry.

09:25 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's Netchoice and CCIA together. They're two trade associations and they sued Florida, they sued Texas and we have no decision and we have no decision, although both those laws are stayed right now.

09:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're both stayed right now, so they're not in effect, because the courts in both those states said, yeah, wait a minute.

09:41 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Fortunately not, although technically that's not completely true. There's a couple of provisions that didn't get challenged or didn't get stayed, so technically a few are enforced, but by and large the big bad stuff is not enforced but there were decisions this week we did get one good one, yes uh, you said, there's one good one and one doozy oh, the at the time that I wrote the tectured post. Oh no, let me not say there's only one doozy that came out of the Supreme Court that day. That was Wednesday.

10:08
I think I wrote, and on Wednesday there was one good one and one doozy. The one that we're happy about is the case called Murty v Missouri, and this case actually got heard after the Net Choice cases, and this case was about a bunch of people who had been online users whose expression got moderated away or their accounts got deleted, being very unhappy that the platforms had moderated them away from their sites. So they sued and then two states Missouri and Louisiana decided to also sue on their behalf and behalf of themselves and behalf of any other speakers who had been moderated away from social media, and they decided that that was a First Amendment violation because they thought what was happening and technically there were conversations.

11:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They thought the government was telling these platforms take these guys down, as they did. I thought the government was telling these platforms take these guys down, as they did.

11:11 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean, even Donald Trump said oh yeah, that was the government forcing Twitter to take me down. On January 7th, Social media platforms were having conversations with various government agencies about various topics, Not necessarily the same conversation. Covid cybersecurity.

11:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Attempts to influence the election For security, yeah, attempts to influence the election. Attempts to influence. They saw. Some of the accounts on Twitter, for instance, seem to be run by the Russian military.

11:30 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, there's intelligence that the. So a couple of things you had. Like you know, the CDC and the Surgeon General had some expertise in vaccines and when the companies were developing their moderation policies to figure out, well, what kinds of vaccine discussion should we enable and what kind is dangerous, they were consulting with government experts to figure out what the policy should be. So they were having those conversations. They were having conversations in the cybersecurity realm because they wanted access to some of the intelligence of what is dangerous and how are we getting manipulated. So there were a variety of conversations the platforms were voluntarily having with the government. It ended up producing a very, very large and convoluted record because you had a number of plaintiffs individual plaintiffs, state plaintiffs suing a whole bunch of government agencies and involving multiple platforms who weren't even part of the litigation and it turned into a big record, and because some of the correspondence from the government to the platforms was a little bit aggressive.

12:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were pushy.

12:28 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
They were pushy, take that down. But some of the context of what they were being pushy about was not necessarily unreasonable, like somebody was masquerading as a Biden account or something like that.

12:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think anybody would question the informational flow from, let say, the fbi to twitter. That account is run by the russian military intelligence. Do with it as you please, but you deserve this information and the platforms may have been asking for that information.

12:57 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think they did want that, so they did so. All the this is the record.

13:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a very large, voluminous nobody wants to be able to say you must take right.

13:05 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So there's a couple things. So the allegation is that, by the government having talked to the platforms, it somehow forced the platforms into making decisions.

13:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess that's not unreasonable because it is the, it's the government, it's the fbi, it's the cia, it's.

13:18 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean that has some clout well, that was one of the plaintiff's arguments, but the the response to that was not that the there was implicit in their argument that the government was basically saying moderate this or else, but they never substantiated what the or else is and it also tended to presume too much from the record, including that the platforms were seeing the hackers as the threat, not the fbi they were seeing the fbi.

13:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They wanted the help.

13:43 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
They wanted the help they were seeing the FBI, as they wanted the help. They wanted the help. They weren't seeing them.

13:45
So what did the court say so the court basically said, kind of the way I'm telling the story is, your record is too much of a blob and you didn't draw enough of a line to say that those conversations to those platforms forced the platforms to do something they weren't independently going to exercise their own judgment to do, to exercise their own judgment to do. You haven't drawn a line between the thing you're complaining about and the federal government has either been the agent of anything that happened to you in the past and especially not drawn a line to say that and, if not enjoined, they're going to keep doing it. They just said you have a pledgy record, you didn't plead very carefully and you therefore you don't have standing, you haven't shown an injury or in the likelihood of injury, so you don't have standing. You haven't shown an injury or a likelihood of injury, so you don't get to bring this complaint.

14:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Justice Alito, who did in fact, vote against the majority decision, in his dissent said that, for some reason, Internet platforms are more vulnerable to government pressure.

14:38 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
He's accidentally right about something, but I don't think he realizes he's right and is kind of irrelevant for this case.

14:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He says Section 230 protects them, them which we know it does.

14:50 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
He brings up section 230 and says this is the stick the government wields is well, if you don't do what we say, you know we might take away your protection under section 230 one of the reasons I brought up the net choice cases before getting into the one we have the decision about is we still don't have that answer of does the First Amendment protect the editorial discretion of the platforms?

15:10
We don't have an official decision that says yes, but there's a lot of language in this decision, including from Alito's dissent, that really sort of suggests the answer is yes, which I think bodes well. I think it's useful to lawyers. Yes, which I think bodes well. I think it's useful to lawyers. Even Alito indicates it because, prefacing the remarks that you just pointed to, he talks about, ok, the newspapers do have the editorial discretion, and then he comments that the platforms are more susceptible to government pressure. I think that's an interesting observation, but it really only matters if you think that that might be a problem because they actually have their own editorial discretion. And the points he raises about, uh, antitrust policy are quite valid. We've made the same points before, like with a lot of the antitrust reform that gets kicked around in congress particularly by democrats both sides of the of the case.

16:01
He's blundering into correct answers without realizing it, I wouldn't put too much credit. But it is a point that, for instance, jim Jordan has raised with a lot of the Democrats' antitrust reform that, essentially, if you tell Facebook, moderate this way, or we're going to break you up as a trust, that looks like jawboning, because that looks like the or else and the type of government pressure that's forcing them to give up their editorial discretion and do it the government's way. In those instances, yes, I think there could potentially be a very real jawboning problem, but in terms of what these particular plaintiffs were alleging and the garbage of their states alleging it on their behalf, no, there needed to be something specific to show that these people were hurt and that they're getting kicked off. These sites was not the choice of the sites that they could have made.

16:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sometimes what we see in a Supreme Court decision we've actually seen it this week is it's almost a procedural rejection, like well, you didn't, you didn't have standing or you didn't do it right, or, in this case, it was a tar ball of accusations instead of a clear case. When the Supreme Court says that, that isn't really a very strong precedent because it's really rejecting the case for procedural reasons, right.

17:14 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Was this one of those?

17:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I think you think this is going to stand there is a. Is this a precedent?

17:19 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
There's a fallacy and we sometimes refer to it as coming in with the eerie doctrine that some things are procedural and some things are substantive and that we can tell the difference. And really that's garbage, because the effects of procedure has huge substantive effects.

17:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is one where it was sort of— but if somebody made a good case it wasn't a tar ball of a bunch of stuff would it be more likely to be approved?

17:44 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, I mean some people have raised the concern with this decision. I think it's a good decision, but the concern got raised that well. Did they just make it harder to bring a challenge in the event that true job owning has actually happened? And I don't think so. I think some of the more mature and excuse me for saying so, the non-magaluriering does tend to know how to draw a line between here's the injury and here's what happened, and here's why it's this fault and here's why it's redressable. There's some standards for finding the standing that Justice Barrett was pointing to. I don't particularly know offhand why any of those were wrong and she didn't change any of them. So I think her point was she actually seemed to have done a pretty thorough look at the record and pointed out, a majority she wrote the majority opinion.

18:27
She looked at the record and actually pointed out you know a lot of the conclusions that the Fifth throw up their hands and say well, if you all agree on that, this must be a good case. They were searching for a. Well, this looks bad. Something bad must have happened, so therefore, we support you Now at the standing stage.

19:02
you don't necessarily have to prove that the bad thing is. So the issue here is she's kind of deciding on the merits that they had no complaint. Standing really isn't supposed to determine the merits Standing is really supposed to be. Do you have an injury that makes you bringing?

19:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this challenge to court. Do you have a right to pursue this Do?

19:20 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
you have a right to pursue because you have an injury where judicial process is going to potentially redress it.

19:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's to keep people who have no dog in the hunt from just filing frivolous lawsuits.

19:30 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And this matters because, especially as you get all these government things you know passing you know, just on the First Amendment front, for instance, there's a lot of garbage that's getting passed and you need, you know, a pretty wide latitude to have people able to challenge it. You know a pretty wide latitude to have people able to challenge it. But this came up in the 303 Creative case, where a lot of people are critical of it because the website designer in particular had not actually been injured and they're like well, they just took her case because they really want to take the case.

19:59
But I don't think that's actually bad because, particularly with these civil liberties type challenges, you want to be able to forestall the injury before it happens. We're not better off if you get censorship and then you complain about the harm that the censorship caused. Better off if this law is just careening into an unjust result. You challenge it and get it off the book so it can never hurt anybody. So we want standing to be liberally drawn, and some people are worried that this case might have narrowed how it could be drawn. I think good lawyering can probably handle it. I'm not. I don't want to poo poo all the concerns, but I am. This was not well litigated. It was just throwing an awful lot at the wall, hoping it looked bad and basically fishing from for exactly what they got from exactly the courts.

20:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So on Wednesday the Supreme Court said no, the government did not force these social networks to take these posts down. Everything's fine. We and they threw that one out, but that was Murty versus Missouri.

20:52 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Right and chances are. One of the upshots of that is they threw it out, but it's really been remanded, so they sent it back down to the fifth.

20:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think so.

20:59 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think it's just remanded. So they did talk about how one of the plaintiffs had a better argument. They didn't buy it now.

21:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they kind of separated out some of the others.

21:07 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So there's probably going to be further. I mean, we'll see how it comes out.

21:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't give them a big like I'm scared, and the Fifth Circuit was the one that approved this in the first place.

21:15 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
The Fifth Circuit makes a lot of stuff up and I think what's interesting is our Supreme Court is crazy and not respectful of precedent and a variety of its own procedures, but it has no patience for the Fifth Circuit to do what it's doing. If anybody's going to be the kangaroo court, it's going to be the Supreme Court. So it's sort of interesting that they're shutting down this sort of renegade court and at the same time kind of pulling off the same hijinks themselves.

21:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You call the doozy Snyder versus US. What was Snyder all about?

21:45 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
What was Snyder all about? There's been too much this week.

21:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can tell you oh, it says error file or directory not found. Good, well, we don't have to worry about it anymore. The Supreme. Court has apparently lost that case.

21:57 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Snyder was, oh, the one where you can tip your, tip your government official after the fact.

22:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tip them yeah, as opposed to bribe them.

22:06 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yes, you can't bribe your government official, but you can give them money afterwards, but you can give them a gratuity afterwards and apparently that doesn't violate the anti-corruption statute.

22:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you so much for your excellent service. I'd like to just give you a boat, do you mind? Thank you very much.

22:21 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think in the case in question it was $15,000.

22:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whoa, that's a big tip.

22:28 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, look, that was the first of the doozy. And then they kept issuing decisions other than the Net Choice one and they got even doozier in many fronts.

22:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And some have made the case that Chevron, which was really about the right of the administrative government, like the EPA, to enforce regulations and, more importantly, maybe interpret regulations Something at present that had been around for a long time and threw it out. It does have a tech angle on it, because the FCC is one of those agencies and they're the ones who are about to return us to net neutrality. Would this undermine their ability to do that?

23:05 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm going to go with, maybe, although it did dawn on me today that one of the other things that it would ruin was President Trump was trying to get the FCC to somehow adjudicate via Section 230, even though Section 230 doesn't even empower the agency to speak to it. So I think that's the sort of thing where this case would really actually hurt those.

23:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Verge wrote that it does impact not only net neutrality but the right to repair.

23:35 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's going to impact any agency. I think the question and I have to read the decision more closely and we also have to see how things shake out is how does it affect all the agencies? So, if we take a step back and we think about this a little bit more globally, there is some wisdom, uh, in being a little concerned about the chevron doctrine, which is the constitution sets up that the legislation happens via congress, not the executive branch. On the other hand, it's a modern world, it's complex, we do. The constitution doesn't allow agencies to exist and they give, and they got to be able to do something because we can't actually practically have everything go back to Congress. Congress doesn't necessarily expertise, but agencies can. We give too much power to the legislature? That's unconstitutional, because now the executive branch is in the legislative business.

24:30
There's probably a way to draw this line, and what a lot of these things with the Chevron doctrine has to do with is where is that line drawn? What is acceptable for Congress to have said via statute that the agency can do and what is not acceptable for the for Congress to have told the agency it's acceptable to do? The problem I think with this decision is I think it was so indifferent to the effects of the decision that it's probably drawn the line in a crazy, not particularly useful way. But I don't think it completely said that agencies can't do a lot of what they're doing. But a lot of this doctrine is in case of some tension where the statute's unclear, can the agencies gap fill that will defer to them? Uh, for the things that were not particularly, were not specifically clear from the statute of what they can do or not, and at this point the answer says no if it's not specific so it sounds like my hair should not yet be on fire, but it's just smoldering a little bit no, let me say.

25:27
A lot of credible people say your hair should be on fire. So let me not completely, um, pull away from that, but I'm trying to also think pragmatically and, um, I mean, this is going to be a mess. I don't entirely know. I've heard it said.

25:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if this is the case. You sound like you're less, uh, adamant about it, but really this was a power grab by the courts to say no. No, we should be deciding, not federal agencies.

25:50 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, it has the effect of OK. So.

25:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Neither Congress nor agencies. It's our job.

25:56 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So what's going to happen to a dispute? An agency does something and somebody is unhappy with what the agency did. It's going to get, there's going to be a lawsuit. Chevron Deference said yeah, we'll probably kind of default to the agency unless they did something. You know really crazy. Now I think they can't really have that same default, but that means that it's the courts that are deciding that that default isn't wiring in the effects of what the. Now the courts are going to have the most effect. For what is the rule going to be? What is the?

26:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
regulatory effect going to be. This isn't a 180 degree change. This has been slowly eroded over the last 20 years.

26:31 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So I think one of the sense was talking about yes, like even just since 2016 or this year, the court has been chipping away at various things agencies have been doing and saying no, no, no, you shouldn't have been able to do that, you shouldn't have been able to do that. And now this is very clear language, saying that Chevron deference, which you thought was a thing, it's not a thing anymore. So now there's a vacuum and the question is what, if anything, will fill the vacuum? But it's probably going to be, and one of the reasons the hair is on fire is it's probably going to be a lot of chaos. It's probably going to take out a lot of good rules. It's probably going to make agencies very confused. It's going to make regulatory efforts much more expensive and, to the extent that they provide protection to the public, it is going to be a lot harder for the public to actually be protected.

27:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And also from the tech sector. There are, for instance, one of the weird little niches this affects is H-1B visas and, as you know, the tech industry has been saying we need more. And, as you know, the tech industry has been saying we need more immigrants using H-1B visas working in our companies because we can't find Americans to do the job. The H-1B visas are issued by, obviously, an administrative agency, a federal agency. Now, if employers want to overturn the narrow H-1B choices that these agencies have made, it's easier for them to say no, no, no, we want these guys and the agency shouldn't be able to overturn that visa.

27:58 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, I'm thinking very much like you asked me. I seem to be a little bit sanguine and you're asking me why. Like is that because it's not that dangerous or not. And I'm thinking about it as a lawyer where, ok, you've got a problem and I'm kind of like trying to think about well, how do you litigate around it? What are your?

28:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
options here's what a professor of immigration law practice at Cornell told the Verge. In the past, employers have had a hard time overturning narrow interpretations of h1b issues because of chevron deference. Now, however, people who feel that the agency is too stingy in its interpretation of various visa categories may be more likely to seek court review. Now, that doesn't mean that they're going to win, but they but they at least don't have to bow down to the agency immediately so there's a couple that there's an irony to this, which is um.

28:42 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Chevron deference was originally criticized by non-conservatives when it first came out like justice scalia was like the leading light, who was like we need chevron deference. It was unpopular when it came out. Doing away with it in theory actually opens up to some good results.

28:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That depends where you are well, in theory what court has jurisdiction?

29:02 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
well, we can't explain the fifth circuit, but let's presume that the Fifth Circuit isn't just doing their fifth circuiting things for all the other reasonable circuits. You know, there actually could be some upsides to doing away with Chevron deference, which I don't think we should ignore. But there's a lot of cynicism and I don't think it's misplaced to suggest that. Well, what essentially happens is the courts are going to call it as they see it or as they want it where. Okay, great. So Chevron deference being done away with is going to help both the good causes and the bad causes.

29:32
It's now a patchwork system, and this was the concern people had with 303 Creative. They're like, you know, I was arguing with people because I'm like it's a good doctrinal decision and people are like, yeah, right.

29:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The courts will stick with it when they like the result and they'll, you know, ignore it when they don't. You really can't say that Mark Zuckerberg or Google would be celebrating this decision, because it really just depends on the court that they're going to go to.

29:56 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Actually, I think one argument is no business. So in theory, businesses are cheering and the argument is the businesses shouldn't be cheering because it's made the businesses do better when regulation is predictable, they don't like regulation but they like. But if there's going to be any predictable regulation is better than less regulation but total confusion this was the argument uh you made, uh about the, the privacy, the federal privacy statute better to have a federal privacy statute than a bunch of patchwork state statutes.

30:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This moves us back to that.

30:29 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So this puts. It's a little confusing what the business environment that everyone is going forward in.

30:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you're Google and you're doing it in Mountain View, that might be easier than if you're Chevron and you're doing it in Texas. I mean, it's just really gonna vary.

30:42 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, every business, in every sector affected, by every agency. It is now open season on what will happen?

30:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't know what's going to happen.

30:50 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And you know, some businesses are like well, we'll get less regulation that way, and if we get regulation we don't like, we can challenge it more easily. But like you've just walked into chaos, you are better off not having chaos, chaos. Exactly, and I think you know that's the why the hair should be on fire thing too. We've lost a lot of predictability and we don't know. It is kind of scary to look at tomorrow and have any idea what tomorrow is going to look like.

31:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I want to thank you all for watching the Kathy Gellis show. We are now going to adjourn the class and bring in Doc Rock and Ryan Stroud. I appreciate you guys letting me To me it was so good, it's good to have this time.

31:26 - Doc Rock (Guest)
To me it was so good, yeah, yeah, because I want to hear from somebody that's being sensible and a lot of the reactions so far online are extremely knee jerky or you know people just like people tend to talk about how does it affect me? Right, and I understand that reaction, but I want to hear what the overall picture is like. So it was almost like Kathy just gave us a pretty dope GPS on the whole situation. That's why we love her and we still might be lost, but at least we have some directions we can kind of follow.

32:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually that's my pet name for Kathy's dope GPS. So we're so glad you're here. We can kind of follow. Actually that's my pet name for Kathy's dope GPS. We're so glad you're here.

32:13 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I was going to say something, and now I'm just stunned. I mean I think everybody cares from it, from how is it going to affect them. But I'm not entirely sure people necessarily understand what that answer is going to be, for the same reason that some businesses were cheering, and probably is they- think it's good for them, but if they thought a little harder or looked at it from the right perspective, maybe they'd realize this isn't good for them well, there, kathy is not done for the day.

32:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Our dope gps will return in a moment because we have lots of other stuff. Court action, uh, going on the Internet Archive fighting its appeal over the publishers. The Internet Archive says that we had to pull 500,000 titles off of our site because of the publisher's court victory, but they're appealing and we'll talk about that and a lot more. And, of course, we're going to talk about the Copilot Plus PCs and I want to get Ryan Shrout's take on the new Snapdragon Elite, now that we've had it for a week or so. Doc Rock is also here. He is with Ecamm and a YouTuber in his own right and has the most purple background of any of our guests on the show, not just today, but any day. It's nice to have you, doc. Did you say before the show that you used to be a male stripper, or is that?

33:27 - Doc Rock (Guest)
just did I mishear you? No, I was joking, but I did used to have to DJ those nights at the club Because somebody got to do it.

33:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Somebody's got to play the bass.

33:35 - Doc Rock (Guest)
We would junk and pull, or what you guys call Kaibai Bo or whatever, roshim Bo or whatever. It's the same thing. Rock paper scissors. I lost way too many times.

33:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, doc, you got to go out to the bada bing tonight and play for the people. Anyway, good to have you. I'm glad you don't have to do that anymore. That's a good thing, thank you, and we're so glad you're all watching this week in tech, this week brought to you this time by Lookout.

34:03
Today, every company is a data company, and that means every company is at risk, right? Cyber threats, breaches, leaks this is the new norm, and cyber criminals are growing more sophisticated by the minute. Here's the problem Boundaries no longer exist for your data, right? What it means for your data to be secure has fundamentally changed, because your data is everywhere. Enter Lookout, from the first phishing text to the final data grab. Lookout stops modern breaches as swiftly as they unfold, whether on a device in the cloud, across networks or working remotely at the local coffee shop. Lookout gives you clear visibility into all your data, at rest and in motion. You can monitor it, assess it and protect it without sacrificing productivity for security, because your employees want to be on the move. Your data wants to be on the move, but you can still secure it no matter where you are and, I have to say, with a single, unified cloud platform. Lookout simplifies, strengthens, reimagines security for the world that we'll be today. Visit Lookoutcom today to learn how to safeguard your data, secure hybrid work and reduce IT complexity. Lookoutcom. We thank them so much for their support of the show Lookoutcom. We appreciate it.

35:28
Speaking of security, there was a very, very good news story today Interpol making major arrests all over the world. Get ready for this number. Major arrests all over the world. Get ready for this number. They arrested, according to interpol, 4 000 scammers, people who are pursuing online scam networks. 3 900 suspects arrested 257 million dollars in illegally obtained assets. This was operation first light in 61 countries. Uh targeting phishing, investment fraud, fake online shopping sites, romance scams and impersonation scams. And you know, I I mentioned this on ask the tech guy because that's a show for normal people, the show for the people who are, of course course, the victims of these scams them, their families, their parents, their elders.

36:29
Police intercepted $135 million in fiat currency that's regular money and $2 million in cryptocurrency. Other assets worth over $120 million were seized Real estate, high-end vehicles. There's a picture here of the watches they confiscated. This is in Brazil Expensive jewelry and other high-value items in the collection. There's some nice watches there. This is all ill-gotten gain.

37:03
These are people who called your grandma and impersonated the bank or sent a text saying hi, you've all gotten those texts. They often end up in a big scam. Authorities in Australia recovered 5.5 million Australian dollars on behalf of an impersonation scam victim that's one victim after the funds were fraudulently transferred to bank accounts in Malaysia and Hong Kong. I mean, the numbers are staggering 163 computer sees, 350 mobile phones the data all handed over to Inter. Singapore's uh any scam center and hong kong's anti-deception coordination center prevented a tech support scam. You've you've gotten those pop up on your computer screens as call it, you've got a virus. Call 873 scam. A 70 year old victim was saved from losing 281 000 worth of her life savings in one of those scams. So, I think, good news. I wonder, though, doc Rock, if this means the end of these online scams.

38:15 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Well, I want to hope so, but they'll come back soon. There's so many crazy ones out there now and I legit just got sent one yesterday. That was almost good, but I like to check them right. So I have this kind of like dummy browser thing that I go into and check to see where these links go. And it was a Hawaiian Airlines page. That's like, for our 95th anniversary, we're going to give you a round-trip tip to Bora Bora. All right, all expensive, all exclusive, paid, whatever.

38:48
And the Facebook group was called Hawaiian Airlines Fans. Oh, and they did such a good job setting that page up that I can see a lot of people who paid less attention in school might fall for this. A lot of people who paid less attention in school might fall for this. And then it's the thing that they did. Is you know how you could have a mini chat bot or some of these other bots where, if you put in a hashtag or an at something in a Facebook group message, it will send you a message directly to your Facebook messenger? Right In IG there's a really cool app by my friend, jeff, called Stampede Social. It does the same thing. If you put like hashtag, leo, it would send links to the next shows that are going to be in the club.

39:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I like that.

39:35 - Doc Rock (Guest)
They did is they set this type of bot up so that you would put in this hashtag that you need to put in in order to win and it would basically send you a direct message to messenger. Well, anybody who starts commenting with that person back and forth and what you can do with web trackers, you immediately start sending them all the info about you. Right, because there's apps like group grabber that if you answer this, it automatically sends your name, your address, like all of the things that you don't have because you don't use ghostory or something of that nature to make sure these trackers are following you. So, in a very simple page, I'd literally watch hundreds of people that I personally know answering this thing and I'm like don't answer that what are you doing?

40:16
delete that right away. Do not do not conversate with them in messenger. Just delete that right away. We had an advertiser, the url page. It was clean. You really thought it was them for a second. And then I started to notice design problems, because I know the designers of the actual hawaiian website and I'm like, yeah, this is not.

40:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is that you have to have an eagle eye. That's the problem, right? Yes, that's the problem, and I feel like I don't know what's true or not anymore in my email on the web. Let's see if we can hear ryan try your, uh, try your audio. Nope, nope, nothing. I heard you at the beginning of the show, ryan all right.

40:55
Maybe you just need to reconnect ryan why don't you just try yeah, drop us and connect again? I mean, I don't know if that's gonna fix. It's like the equivalent of the IT crowd. Have you rebooted your computer lately? So here's one too. 88 local youths in Namibia were rescued by the police. They were slaves, basically forced into conducting scams, and this we know is true. You've seen the piece that the New York Times did a few months ago. There there are a lot of the scammers. The people you're getting these texts from are actually trapped I have some concerns.

41:31 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I followed into the press release and I'm being cynical, but I'll tell you what set me off 3 900 arrests yeah that's a lot of people no kidding. And so I want to prompt the question.

41:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Remember, that's 61 countries.

41:46 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's 61 countries. Over what time period Distributed across what countries? Do we fully trust the governments that are doing?

41:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that? What are they putting all these people In fact, this was led by the Chinese Communist Party. This was out of China.

42:03 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean, I think the thing that is probably significant to possibly effective is it looks like they broke up a network and it's also that they've probably found some several networks, several networks I mean, some of that is probably going to be good, but it's hard to say yay, go go. Policing efforts of countries that are really not known for due process and their policing efforts and it's a ton of people it says first this is the interpol press release.

42:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
First light operations are funded by china's ministry of public security. So that is you're right. You see what I'm saying. You never know, I know, I feel like I don't know anymore what's true or good. Well, I don't. Can you hear me? I can hear you now, through now great all I all I wanted.

42:40 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
All I wanted to say the whole time was I'm glad for me seeing the government go after and accomplish something that I really needed to get done was prevent all this fraud stuff, and I'm sure you saw the news I don't know if you talked about it prior about, like Mark Cuban having his Gmail account hacked.

42:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I didn't see that.

42:57 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
What? Yeah, yeah, he had his Gmail account hacked and he was like on Twitter asking for Google to help get it back. That's terrible.

43:06 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So now that's the Maverick's excuse Go sell.

43:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's why the Mavs lost, so no he says he was hacked after receiving a call from a fake Google rep.

43:16 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Yeah, and see, I'm trying to say it's not just like he's technologically aware. Right, he's not an 80-year-old man. This isn't something that just catches those that aren't technically capable, right, I get messages. I bet I get two or three a week of a text message. Hey, how's it going right.

43:36 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yes, I was just stuttering out.

43:38 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
And I stare at the phone number and I go do I recognize this phone number? What area code is this?

43:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
even from All, the time they're all awful All the time. Yep yeah. Yeah, you can't believe anything anymore.

43:53 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I'm so good at guessing area codes because I have to keep checking all the time. Now I'm starting to remember them. Some of them are more than just high.

44:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean time. Now I'm starting to remember them. Some of them are more than just high. I mean a lot of them are just high. Some of this is, by the way, these scams are called the pig butchering scams. They're often perpetrated by crime rings that are you that are holding people against their will. They take their passports, they put them in dorms and they're in. You know they're responsible for scamming you. They're real people on the other end, but usually it starts with hi.

44:25
Actually, I get more sophisticated ones like hey, I can't come into work today, so I'm sorry. Can you ask George if he can take my shift? And then I'm supposed to feel bad and say, oh, you know what, I'm not your boss, you got somebody. And then what they say is oh, I'm sorry. Hey, what's your name? Leo? Oh gosh, leo, I'm so sorry. I thought I was. I'll text my work. Where are you? I'm in Petaluma, oh, that's a nice area. I'm in Taiwan or Singapore or whatever. And you get in this conversation Eventually. They get you there. Usually they want you to buy crypto fake crypto, which you send real money to buy, and then you never hear from them again. So this is the tweet. This is hysterical From Mark Cuban.

45:16
Hey, google, it's kind of nice if you're a billionaire and you can just go. Hey, sundar Pichai. Hey, I just got hacked at my mcuban at gmailcom because someone named Noah at your and he gave a phone number, 650-203-0000, called Mark. Do I have to explain how this works to you, mark? And said I had an intruder and spoofed Google's recovery methods. If anyone gets anything from mcuban at gmailcom after 3.30 pm BSD, it's not me. But it's really ironic that Mark Cuban accuses them of calling from Google's 605 number. 650 number. The phone number that Cuban received a call from is the same one associated with google assistant, but google says on its account recovery page it doesn't ask for passwords or verification codes over the phone, email or messages. No one does anymore and no one should, and if they do, you should not give it to them I'm concerned.

46:17 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
There's actually a number of companies whose security paradigms actually involve you giving too much information over the phone.

46:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um are there really still?

46:26 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm not happy with united airlines and the way they authenticate and and I hate secret questions they do secret questions, but anything where you're looking for something where, if you confirm it, it means it's not hashed and it's sitting there on plain text, like some of these things of the way they authenticate are with. I mean, you always have this tension between what is practical and what is secure, but some of these are really poorly designed. I'm like did you hire somebody who knew what they were doing to set up your protocol? Because I don't. I'm not even that expert and I think there's problems with it.

46:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've changed banks, but for a long time my bank, my former bank, would send me a text message to verify my account, and I always thought you know, we can do better, can't we? The problem is that, oh man, I know right.

47:09 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Amazon still does text messages and I'm like, please do not do that. I know the only one time I've ever been spoofed was Amazon and someone bought like eight grand worth of Xbox cardsbox cards, you know, to get xbox live, and so the agent and I are on the phone for like an hour, keep resetting the password and the charges are going through to the point where they almost blame me, saying no, you're still buying these things. And I was like listen, and we looked at all the stuff we're going over and over, we're trying to figure it out, and we finally figured out that the country code instead, instead of being just one, was 6-1 or 9-1. Whatever the heck Pakistan is, it wasn't here, and so they had spoofed my phone number, which is why phone number is the worst way, and if someone stole your device and has it open and you use that to authenticate the bank, hello that's super stupid, I got to say people.

48:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mark cuban knows what he's doing, but I'm not completely convinced. That tweet alone shook my confidence in him and it turns out last september he lost 850 000 from his crypto wallet because he quote pretty sure he accidentally downloaded a version of MetaMask which contained malware.

48:27 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, I think some of it in his position is Google does have, I think, a different regime for certain targets.

48:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, he got his account back. I got to point out.

48:36 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, I think for certain targets, google may have different relationships with certain users. For certain targets, google may have different relationships with certain users, and it's possible that he was more easily spoofed because he really thought it was a conversation, vis-a-vis the particular type of relationship he had with Google.

48:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This has been my position all along. You never want to be rich and famous because you get hurt more. You fly in private planes and helicopters.

48:58 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's my excuse, Leo.

49:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You really don't want to be rich and famous.

49:03 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's nothing but ignominy.

49:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
for me it's enigmy, say it again I think it was wrong.

49:12 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Enigmy for me.

49:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Enigmy or nothing. That's my motto. Yeah, I like it. Alright, that was a good sidebar, by the way. Thank you, ryan. I did not know that. He got hacked.

49:26 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Can you hear me still?

49:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you're on your laptop, Mike. I guess your other mic died.

49:31 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
No, I'm on these AirPods now because whatever microphone I'm using I guess is cutting out the software still says it was working fine.

49:39 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
The software lied.

49:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's talk about Julian Assange. How about that? So this was boy. This has gone on for a long time and I don't know how I feel about this. I didn't know really how I felt about Edward Snowden, and it doesn't help, by the way, that Edward Snowden is now living in Russia, happily.

49:58
But Assange is now a free man. He did a plea deal, pled guilty one count of espionage in court on Wednesday and they said the five years that you've been in detention in the UK counts and you're free. But he did have to plead guilty to this one count of espionage. His followers and friends, you know he was the guy who ran wikileaks, uh, and the reason he got in trouble was wikileaks published what turns out probably was a russian hack of the democratic national committee's email, and it looks like, in fact, his cutout was guccifer, who has since been identified as a high-level operative in the Russian military intelligence, who gave him this information, and there's even some question about whether he solicited this information. He's been trying to avoid extradition from the UK. This is one of the longest-running national security investigations in US history. Assange, despite playing guilty, denies the accusations. Wikileaks wrote in a statement posted to X. Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of June 24th, having spent 1,901 days there.

51:28
The case centers around publishing more than 750,000 stolen US documents by WikiLeaks between 2009 and 2011. Organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists have warned for years that prosecution of assange could imperil the ability of journalists to obtain and publish classified information, and you may remember that, uh, just before this email release, wikileaks published video that showed that the united states had targeted civilians with its drone attacks. I think that was. Was that Reality Winner's material that she handed over? I can't remember. Both Donald Trump, hillary Clinton have attacked Assange. Wikileaks published a trove of emails in 2016, stolen from the DNC. It won Assange praise. I'm reading from a Wired story on this from right-wing figures later revealed to be the work of notorious Russian hacking group Cozy Bear, affiliated with Moscow's GRU military intelligence. What do you guys think Assange a legitimate journalist pursuing journalism and persecuted, not prosecuted, by the United States government for doing so? Or a willing or unwilling, witting or unwitting dupe of Russian intelligence?

52:58 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Possibly both or both, because. So the journalists are concerned because it depends what he was doing. There's this old case and it's actually not that old. There's a case that currently exists called Bartnicki versus Vopper, and that is a case that stands for the proposition that you can report on information even if that information was wrongly obtained, but it wasn't wrongly obtained by you.

53:27
So one of the open questions with what was going on with Assange was is what he published something he was publishing entirely as a journalistic function of information he was provided to where he had nothing to do with its sourcing, or was he too direct with the sourcing and, having engaged in illegal behavior that generated the information?

53:48
Then he reported on and it is possible that in the course of his career both things have happened. So the journalist concerns are completely valid. For when he's just a neutral and he's legitimately doing reporting and he had nothing to do with illegally sourcing material, you don't want prosecutions to happen to punish that sort of reporting. With his record it was a little less clear that all of the reporting he did he truly did as a neutral intermediary who happened to have somebody else sourced it and just gave it to him with no you know, no conspiratorial contribution by him? I don't think we know. I guess we'll never know, but that's sort of the tipping point of whether we don't know how we feel about Assange, because some of it it depends depends on what the facts are.

54:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and I don't know. If we know the facts, it's perfectly possible that the US government scapegoated him.

54:40 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think both things have happened. But it that the US government scapegoated him? I think both things have happened. But there's also the argument that the government scapegoated him just because it was so embarrassed and so upset. And I guess my question is how legitimate was the scapegoating Like? Was it pure scapegoating, or did they actually have a leg to stand on to actually complain? And I'm not 100% confident in my own government's zealous pursuit of him, but on the other hand, I'm not entirely confident with how Assange has comported himself. So there's a part of me that thinks maybe the government did have a leg to stand on. I don't know, it's probably going to be completely dissatisfying for both parties. So in a sense this is just as well, because otherwise it was. Now it's resolved, Now we can move on. But yeah, it's resolved, Now we can move on. But yeah, it's hard to get a feel-good out of any of this.

55:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The video and I got it wrong a little bit from 2009,. Wikileaks called it Collateral Murder showed a crew of an Apache helicopter shooting a wounded Reuters journalist. An anonymous US military official confirmed the authenticity of the footage. So that was legit, right, that was something, that that was a war crime in effect admittedly a war crime that the United States committed, but I'm not such a patriot that I think, oh, that's fine, so I think that was legitimate journalism.

56:03 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think he definitely has engaged in some legitimate journalism that has been unfairly targeted. I just don't know if all of the quote unquote journalism he did falls into that category or if there are allegations that have sounded reasonable about him being just a little bit too close. But on the other hand, maybe it's also something that we don't really know and I think if we had to have a tipping point, I'd rather have journalists have a freer hand, even in sort of the gray areas, than what happens if the journalists don't have as free a hand. I think journalism takes a hit, the free press takes a hit. The First Amendment takes a hit. I'm always going to go on team. I'd rather have too much protected than not enough protected.

56:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Any thoughts you guys?

56:47 - Doc Rock (Guest)
When you talk about law enforcement in general. Right, this is something that I was talking about just yesterday. Sometimes you have a law enforcement thing in any particular case where the person jumps to conclusions based off of their experience. There's other times where that person just jumps these conclusions because there's just a heavy-handed, like you know, hang them high type, you know judge dread type person. They just want to take everything out.

57:16
And this the the horrible parts is when a case fits in a situation where everything lines up directly in the middle of that. It could easily be said with pure accuracy this person that's in the Leo is not you. The board is jumping to conclusions and making assessments and just want to hurry up and wrap this case up for optics. But then the person who's, you know, quote unquote did something wrong. They did enough shady stuff to deserve somewhat of a heavy hand. So it's hard when that sits sort of right in the middle and there's not a key case of over enforcing and there's not a key case of caught red-handed and handed and those always are the worst cases. But I do think it's better to, even if he was scapegoated, it's better to at least put light on some of this stuff.

58:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, I kind of sit with Kath like I'm deeply conflicted also I want to correct myself that video was not leaked by reality winner. That was the Chelsea Manning leak and of course she served time for that. And her correct myself that video was not leaked by Reality Winner. That was the Chelsea Manning leak and of course she served time for that. And her charge, her sentence, was commuted, I think by President.

58:31 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Obama, I'm sitting here trying to. It's hard to imagine that this was all that long ago. First of all, I know, back then I would say you know, I of all I know, this all took place back then 15 years ago.

58:43
I would say you know, I agree with you. Know, as somebody who was a journalist for a long time myself, I obviously kind of err on the side of protection of that side of the world. Also, the idea that, hey, maybe we did all these bad things, but you attained the documents illegally, doesn't really hold a lot of water for me. Like you can get, you can both, uh, uh, break the law, uh, and he can be held responsible for that, but also it doesn't, um, you know, take away from the severity of any of the actions that were taken, right, right and so I think that that needs to be considered as part of an example from my own youth is the pentagon papers.

59:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Daniel ellsberg leaked those to the New York Times, revealing what the United States had been doing in Vietnam. Ellsberg may have committed a crime in leaking them. Chelsea Manning may have committed a crime in leaking that video. She served time, but that doesn't if the journalist. It's my understanding the rule is if the journalist doesn't suborn that crime on the part of Chelsea Manning, doesn't go to Chelsea Manning and say hey, can you get me that, but does receive the information and publishes it. The New York Times was never prosecuted for the Pentagon Papers, even though Nixon wanted them to be.

59:54 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think there's two levels of what do we do about situations like these. One is the situation of what you just described, that some intermediary has sourced the information and then handed it to somebody else who had nothing to do with the sourcing of the information and just published it. And I think in those instances it should be clear that the journalists who publish it really shouldn't end up in trouble for it.

01:00:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that's not a crime.

01:00:20 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
But then there's a second question of well, what about the people who are sourcing this information, liberating this information, acquiring it in other ways, because to some degree, they may be doing a public service, because it may be revealing bad things that the public needs to know about, and I think that's a tougher call. Yeah. I agree, because in some of these instances. I'm very glad it did get exposed.

01:00:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think Chelsea Manning did the right thing.

01:00:41 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
But what is the principle that scales, where we don't have just everybody going to lunch or going to town and then Same?

01:00:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
thing with Edward Snowden. I mean, he revealed a lot of stuff that was very embarrassing to the NSA. Was he a hero or a goat? There's still debate over that.

01:00:56 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, one of the issues that did come up with Edward Snowden is that releasing it wasn't his first choice. It issues that did come up with Edward Snowden is that releasing it wasn't his first choice.

01:01:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It turned out he had no other avenue. He tried.

01:01:06 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think really hard to do the right thing. So I think, from a policy standpoint, you know, if you don't want everybody independently, sort of taking everything into their own hands and imposing their own judgment which may be wrong you do kind of need a mechanism for well, what do you want people to do instead? And I don't know if we'll ever be able to have a perfect one, but I don't think at the moment we have any. We don't seem to have any sort of framework for this or any coherent response to these types of issues.

01:01:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was the assertion of the government that and there were chat logs indicating that Assange had actually had a conversation with Chelsea Manning and actually showed her how to exfiltrate the data asked for. That data so was somewhat this was the government's position was he was complicit because he provided her with the information she needed to get the information out.

01:01:52 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think I'd also want to see that the government had a coherent framework for why it would be okay to go after Assange, but don't worry, it wouldn't translate into going after any other journalist, and I don't think it was none was getting articulated in a way that the public could be confident in.

01:02:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I think your first point is still the best point we don't know the whole story and we probably never will know the whole story.

01:02:15 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Unless somebody leaks it.

01:02:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could leak it to me.

01:02:18 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm not asking you to, I'm not asking you to.

01:02:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not saying you should, I'm not telling you how, but if you wanted to, I'd be here for you. Actually, we do that all the time. A number of our panelists give out their signal number or ask for tips. Paris Martineau has her signal number in her lower third so that people can give her tips, and she says she gets quite a few tips from the Twit crowd. You guys know stuff, don't you? In fact, I know we have a lot of people in intelligence who listen to our show, and a lot of intelligent people as well. Kathy Gellis, speaking of intelligence, is here, attorney, and she is admitted to the Supreme Court, so she can go, she can write briefs.

01:02:58
You can write briefs. She does, in fact, for the Cop institute, which is a bridge, an arm of the uh tech dirt. Uh and uh does some very good work. We're really glad to have you here explaining what's going on in the court system. Doc rock, the purplest of them all, he uh, actually, you know we should give you credit because you served, uh, our nation as a, uh um, medic medic, yeah and uh, and was it afghanistan or iraq? I can't remember our nation as a medic Medic? Yeah, was it Afghanistan or Iraq? I can't remember.

01:03:28 - Doc Rock (Guest)
No, no, I'm older than that, Leo.

01:03:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was Korea? Was it Vietnam? Germany?

01:03:35 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Not that old either, I'm the mid-80s. So I went to Grenada, but not fight, but I went there and I went to Kuwait. But yeah, kuwait, there you go. The purple is because of Alzheimer's Nice Support that I deal with. Yeah, so that's my. That's the reason why I have purple everything and I love Prince.

01:03:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We walk in the Alzheimer's walkathon. My mother-in-law passed from Alzheimer's. My mom now has been diagnosed with it and I know it's on my list of things to do. So I appreciate the purple and I think you're absolutely right. Let's support research, because this is one I think we can beat. Youtubecom, slash DocRock and thank you for your service, of course and Ryan Shroud, who is now airpods, much to his dismay. Yes, very much so. Signal 65 is the new job. What do you do at signal 65?

01:04:32 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
um, so a lot of what I was doing before I went to go work at intel, right?

01:04:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so kind of independent third-party testing and validation of pcs, data center products, software services, things like that I think that this is such a skill and it's so you see so many YouTubers putting their laptops in the freezer to see if it's fast, or things like that that really knowing how to do these benchmarks, really knowing how to test hardware and software, is so important and so valuable, and that really is the stuff.

01:05:05 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Your laptop will be faster if you put it in the freezer, it will. It is it's harder to type on, but it is faster, yes it's faster, but the keys don't work as well.

01:05:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you know, yeah, signal65.com, great to have you on board A show today brought to you by One Password. And, by the way, this is such a cool story because you may remember Collide, which is an authentication, a hardware and software authentication tool used with Okta for many years, was on our network advertising. They were acquired by One Password and now One Password has a new product they call extended access management. In a perfect world, end users would only work on managed devices with IT-approved apps. Oh, yeah, right. But every day, personal devices, unapproved apps that aren't protected by MDM, iam or any other security tool, enter your network. Not much you can do about it, right? Well, there is a giant gap between the security tools we have and not much you can do about it right.

01:06:01
Well, there is a giant gap between the security tools we have and the way we actually work. 1password calls it the access trust gap, but they have found and created the first ever solution to fill it 1Password extended access management. It secures every sign in for every app on every device. Of course, it starts with a password manager. You know and love 1Password and the device trust solution we've talked about so often before Collide with a K. 1password extended access management cares about user experience and privacy, which means it can go places other tools can't, like personal and contractor devices. It ensures that every device is known and healthy and every login is protected. So stop trying to ban BYOD or shadow IT. Start protecting them with 1Password Extended Access Management. This is a marriage made in heaven. Check it out at 1passwordcom slash twit. We're so happy for the Collide team and the 1Password team. That's 1, the number 1, p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d 1passwordcom slash twit and we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech.

01:07:20
Uh, oh, look at this. Maybe, maybe, uh, this supreme court decision will get this out of the out of the uh, ftc, microsoft's. Oh, I'm sorry, it's not the ftc, it's europe. Can't do anything about that, one scotus. The european commission says I don't get this. Microsoft bundling teams with Office breaks antitrust rules. It's abusive, says the EU. This is one day after they took aim against Apple, in fact, by the way I should mention. Well, I'll get to that story, we'll do the Apple story in a bit. It's gone after Microsoft for tying. This is what they got in trouble for with the internet explorer back in the 90s, tying internet explorer to windows. The european commission tuesday said its preliminary investigation had determined that microsoft breached the 27 member blocks antitrust rules by abusing its position in the market for productivity software, including teams in the microsoft 365 suite, even if customers don't have a plan for the service, or by providing a free one-year trial on the Office 365 service. Microsoft is hurting competition.

01:08:34 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
I'm sorry Is there competition for Office today.

01:08:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think, Teams, Google Docs I guess I have to think Slack is behind this, because Slack has notoriously been pissed off about Teams and Microsoft Teams.

01:08:49 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, but I'm pissed off at Teams just having to use it. Teams is awful, thank you, there's a point of it's an inferior product in the market. But is there?

01:08:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
anything wrong? Yes, it does. Oh, and now I'm reading the story from Quartz. The commission's inquiry began after it received complaints from Slack, which has been acquired by Salesforce and a German video conferencing provider, AlphaView. I am sorry, Bundling teams with Office is not any competitive. It doesn't change anything. I don't get it.

01:09:22 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It's a slight against humanity, if anything.

01:09:24 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, that's about it, I mean it does have some shades of oh, and you've also bundled your browser.

01:09:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, but I always question. I mean look, every operating system bundles a browser. Even Linux comes with a browser because you can't use an operating system without a browser.

01:09:41 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, don't decide from now we're talking about in the 90s, when it was first getting bundled. So, at that point it was a bit more using some leverage to tie you in Because, also at that point, the browser was proprietary and not necessarily adhering to standards. And it was going to skew so much of the open web by kind of killing the open web and making it do it Microsoft's way open web by kind of killing the open web and making it do it microsoft's way.

01:10:04 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, at that time, to your browser, you had to go get a magazine and get the disc off the front or buy some random book at barnes and noble to get it, because you couldn't use a browser to get a browser at that point. So you had to have something right. In a lot of cases you legit went to go get a magazine or a book that had a disc on the front when you're sending them somebody's computer, until you figured it out yeah, so as uh as trust.

01:10:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No one in our um uh club discord says the anti-competitive part is that every computer that comes with windows comes with teams as well as an office trial. But I mean what about? Notepad what about?

01:10:41 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
is the bundling complaint for windows or is the bundling complaint with Office?

01:10:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They say Office.

01:10:45 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Yeah, I think it's Office and Teams in Windows. So it's part of that that Office is preloaded, Teams is preloaded. You get a free trial for X number of days.

01:10:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right. They say the free one-year trial is the problem. Yeah, yeah.

01:11:02 - Doc Rock (Guest)
But you know why this is so weird now? Because, yes, they're giving you the free one-year trial this, that and the other thing. But you know what's a free forever, your life trial, LibreOffice or Google Docs or all these other things? That's true Now. The browser is built in. If you have a problem with it, open up the browser and get something else. There's so much free stuff out there. You can do Zoho Office or whatever. That's true.

01:11:31
So, this is a really stupid case but in a way, a lot of the stuff that the EU has done in these situations has been, I don't know, like complaining about being wet and you live in the tropics, Like it's just really silly.

01:11:49 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So there's the articulation of the complaint has some similarities to the browser tying, where you are distributing one product and you're tying another product to it. So therefore your presence in the market is different because?

01:12:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But all operating systems are bundled with some application software. So I think that can't be, so the question is which software is okay to bundle and which isn't.

01:12:11 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well. So I think the question is the inquiry can't end at the fact that it just got distributed with something else. You have to look at other effects on the market.

01:12:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What about the Minesweeper folks?

01:12:24 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean all the competitive Minesweeper games. You can't get that anymore. It's not pre-bundled in it, but I was disappointed.

01:12:29 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Solitaire.

01:12:30 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
What about Solitaire?

01:12:31 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Or Grandmaster 3000 versus the built-in chess.

01:12:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we accept that some software can be bundled without that being any competitive.

01:12:41 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
What is the effect on the market? The effect on the market the. The effect on the market is I mean there was a third party here. Like it's not preventing anybody from using slack, it's not preventing anybody from using the third parties, it's not pretending preventing gives them a leg up because you have teams I guess.

01:12:54
So I mean, then we were all joking at it, because you have teams and you're so miserable that you immediately want to go find a competitor, but um, leo, leo, you said like uh, uh, what software is bundled with the operating system?

01:13:06 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
I think the more important question is like when does it become a part of the operating system versus when is it not?

01:13:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can take Minesweeper or Klondike off and you still have Windows, but you can't have a browser.

01:13:18 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
You can't not have a browser and be functioning right and.

01:13:21
I think you're pretty close to a day and age where you can't not have a communications utility of some kind and have an operating, functioning PC experience, and that, to me, is where I think the big debate has to happen. When you start to look at all the different AI integrations and things like that, I bet this comes up again, right, because you'll have open AI, or maybe you have open AI integrations or co-pilot integration and you want to have your own third-party integrations as well, and you're going to have third-party AI companies that want to make that same kind of argument.

01:13:56 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, but I think you'd still have to go beyond that, because I don't think that is enough. First of all, I'm not quite sure that you have to have some sort of chat service bundled into it. But then I want to look at what's the difference between a proprietary chat service versus a protocol based chat service. What's the effect on other competitors? Is this really undermining them? Are they still able to compete Like? You have to look at a lot more other than we put another piece of soft, we gave you another piece of software when you got the piece of software you were looking for, because if that's where we're drawing the line, I think you do kind of got a lot of these operating systems or even you know any sort of fancier software, and that would be bad too. I think european regulators don't care and they're perfectly happy to slice and dice any piece of software they don't like.

01:14:45 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Does Apple get criticized for bundling iMessage or Safari?

01:14:51 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yes, yeah, we have a whole green bubble fight once a week. I like Ken's comment. Ken's comment in the club is very, very, very well taken. What browser can you install in your Chromebook?

01:15:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right, just Chromebook. That's the only one. That's a good point.

01:15:10 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It's like EU picks the fights. Well, there is a difference.

01:15:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chromebooks do not have market dominance. Microsoft has market dominance. You can't have an antitrust action against a minority. So does lenovo right so does lenovo.

01:15:27 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So why can't slack just pull up their pants and be like hey, lenovo, can you, uh, can you drop slack in every one of these machines and we'll pay you for? Oh gosh, just like apple paid google to be in.

01:15:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know google to be the search engine microsoft, by the way says, when the commission began this inquiry because this is the result of an inquiry. This is how the commission works they do an inquiry, announce an inquiry, and then they say yo, our inquiry produced this result, which in this case is yeah, we think it's an antitrust violation. When they opened the inquiry last July, almost a year ago, microsoft responded by offering, it says, some suites without including teams. How about that? Regulators say the changes are insufficient. Brad Smith said in a statement. Having unbundled teams and taking initial interoperability steps, we appreciate the additional clarity provided today and will work to find solutions to address the commission's remaining concerns. So that's the ideal situation where the commission says, no, this is not, and Microsoft says, all right, fine, we will do something. We won't unbuttle.

01:16:34
That's what happened with Apple. You may remember, the EU went after Apple saying you know your restriction to developers from saying you know you could buy this Kindle book at Amazoncom. They won't let you say that that's a violation of antitrust. Apple responded by saying oh, okay, well, we'll allow a third-party store, but we're going to still charge you 27% instead of 30% and oh, by the way, there's a 50 cent per user fee and to which the EU said no, to which Apple's response was okay, fine. Well then, you can't have any of the AI stuff that we announced to wwdc. Well, we've heard now from the eu apple's decisions not to launch its own artificial intelligence features. In the eu is that me?

01:17:35 - Doc Rock (Guest)
sorry? No, that was me. Accident man, I was boogieing. That's I was. I told you. I got a script tonight, man. Getting ready for the club. Okay, I get it.

01:17:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I get it. Marguerite Vestager said on Thursday it is a stunning declaration of Apple's anti-competitive behavior. She says this confirms what we've said all along, that Apple is anti-competitive. The short version of the DMA that is to operate in Europe. Companies have to be open for competition, says Vestager. This is a stunning open declaration that Apple already knew 100% that this is a way of disabling competition where they have a stronghold already. She's saying now the European competition commissioner is saying actually she was formerly competition commissioner, now she's just a commission vice president. She says this just proves what we've been saying all along. Now, remember, there is a pretty big stick that goes with this. The DMA has fines of 10% of annual global revenue. That would be over 30 billion euros.

01:18:45 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I have a problem with global revenue because that's out of jurisdiction.

01:18:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree, but that's what they do. It seems very, but you know you have to fine these guys a lot because you know, when they give you a measly billion-dollar fine, it's like, well, I'll pay.

01:19:02 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
The problem is everyone here is wrong. I mean, I think Apple's position is a little ew, but I'm not going to take the side of the European regulators, who's also kind of ew. So there's nobody to root for here. What's kind of weird is we just?

01:19:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me just I mean, I understand Apple's point of view, but why do you think that there's no merit in what the EU is saying about Apple's store, about NFC and about the developer fee?

01:19:31 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, I wouldn't say that there's necessarily no merit in specific complaints that they've got, but they've got a really large regulatory hammer that isn't necessarily well-tuned to reality.

01:19:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think they have standing?

01:19:45 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, I don't like the 10% global, but they might have standing within their own market Within their own market, and that's what Apple's saying.

01:19:50
I don't know if they have something coherent in terms of like okay, using you as legal analysis, you know I'm not entirely sure that everything Apple is trying to do is actually healthy for markets. But I'm not entirely sure the Europeans, or even the Americans for that matter, have any sort of coherent policy answer for why ew is illegal, and I think they should have one if they want to like have the regulatory hammer to come and hurt Apple for doing something that's ew Right. So nothing is everything is bad, but I don't trust the fixes.

01:20:19 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Right. Well then, there's a thing about the market, though, and I just want to I mean, I just want to ask, because somebody's smart here. The thing about the market is if you're the dominant person in the market, you get to control the market, so you are quote unquote inventing the market. All the other people that have come up and said, well, they did this and they're stopping the market, you know what you could have did, you that have come up and said, well, they did this and they're stopping the market. You know what you could have did. You could have made a similar product before they did, but you didn't. Now you're chasing and you're mad because they're winning. It's like losing and being like oh, we lost because the other team dominated the game.

01:20:57 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Maybe. Yeah, that's how it works, maybe. But you do get situations where the big tech company didn't necessarily innovate the thing. Somebody was out there pioneering something and then got bought, and so that got the leg up.

01:21:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there is a difference between antitrust law in the US and in the EU, and this is we say this a lot and I think it's maybe oversimplification, but it is said that in the US they're protecting consumers by making sure that there's competition and that helps consumers, but in the EU they're protecting innovation by protecting competitive companies, competing companies like Slack, like Spotify. That EU actions are really designed and they're often, frankly, precipitated by complaints from other companies. They're designed to protect competition company to company as opposed to protect consumers. I mean, they have the same outcome ultimately right, because if you have innovation and competition, the consumers benefit.

01:21:51 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Things do flip-flop over the years. I took a class on German law in 2005 and it was just a brief overview of German competition law and they sort of pointed out that it used to be oriented in one way. And then at some point it just kind of evolved and flip-flopped and it's gone another way.

01:22:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Same thing in the US. Same thing yeah.

01:22:11 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean, the US is a little. I don't know if we flip-flopped as opposed to just been really inconsistent, but I think the EU paradigm has flip-flopped in what was the purpose, and what was the purpose and what they're trying to vindicate.

01:22:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Under Lena Kahn. I think she has said look, we also want to protect other companies. We don't want monopsonies.

01:22:27 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
We don't want as well as monopolies. Well, you can tie most of what they might say for the company terrain to why this would be better for consumers.

01:22:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In the long run, it's all better for consumers. Microsoft says hey, that content on the web, it's okay for our AIs to read them Now. Hey, that content on the web, it's okay for our AIs to read them Now. I wanted to ask you about this, kathy, because you have defended the right to read. Microsoft's CEO of AI.

01:22:52
Mustafa Suleiman says that content put on the web is freeware and can be copied and used to create new content. He was speaking with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week. He says all content shared on the web is available to be used for AI training, unless a content producer says otherwise. Specifically, does an AI have the right to read like humans? Certainly you can argue if you publish something on the web and I read it. Unless you put up a paywall or explicitly forbid me, I'm not breaking the law reading it.

01:23:28 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
He's demonstrating how you can be right and hugely wrong all at the same time. Yes, I think his basic point is correct. I think that AI, just as a human, can read as much as they want on the web. You can deploy software to read on your behalf on the web and there should not be any sort of legal limitation to doing that. I don't think he's trying to make that pure doctrinal argument. I think he doesn't necessarily understand that pure doctrinal argument and I think what he also wants is actually to go a little bit farther than that. Where he doesn't just want to train his AI, then he also wants the law to let go and let him do stuff with what has been trained, and to some extent it should. But it's a separate question, separate from the training. So one of the things I've been advocating is right to read should not obstruct the training of AI no-transcript train on our content.

01:24:53
We'll honor that I think they could do that that would be sufficient I think they could. I think there is an argument that you do weaken the final product, that the more uh language it can consume, the better the well yeah, I agree.

01:25:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's in the societal interest that ais be allowed to train on everything. If they're only trained on public domain content or content that's, you know, bought by the ai, that's not going to be as good right.

01:25:16 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I bet the what the law lets him do. Antagonizing the public and politicians and courts and stuff like that is really not a good strategy. It's just drawing your lines, you know, digging your heels in and saying you can't touch me, somebody will find a way to touch you. It's just why be obnoxious? It's just making everyone unhappy and out to get you.

01:25:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As sean indicato's, writing for windows central, said, he opened a can of worms I mean just the way he's been quote oh, go ahead.

01:25:39 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Yeah, I was just. We're all content creators on here, right, and we all make a living doing this, and the idea that you know, a CEO, cto of the Microsoft AI group would just come out and say it's all actually free and we can go take it and go use whatever we want is very counterintuitive to kind of how we have been building business models. Right, you know, they can consume all the text I write. They can consume all the videos that you make, leo. They can consume all the audio. They can provide all the summaries for us.

01:26:14
I think this has been simmering for a while. We don't know what the monetization methodology is going to be. We don't know what kind of like the agreements with all of the content creators needs to look like. I'm totally, totally aligned that if you want AI to be good, it should have as much information as possible, but we never had a ground rule or level, even had this discussion about what information should it have access to or not. Right, you know the robotstech stuff is a good idea, but if it's already gone through all of my content that I've ever written in chat GPT-4.0, right, gpt-4.0, do I think in GPT-5, if I have this new robotstech that says, hey, you may not train on this data, then suddenly going to forget all of that? Have we already gone past the point where we can even have this discussion?

01:27:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We are Twit content. Is Creative Commons licensed non-commercial attribution? Is that in effect saying you can't eat? You can't eat all you can eat AI? I mean, I don't care if it does.

01:27:23 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm not sure. I know that Creative Commons is heavily thinking about all the implications of this, and also vis-a-vis its own licenses. I don't know if they've reached any conclusions about it, but I know that they're not sleeping on the question.

01:27:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In effect, we are saying you can use this, but not for commercial purposes, and if it's an AI from a company like Microsoft or Google or OpenAI that plans to make money on this, then that would be, in my opinion, against our license.

01:27:48 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
But it might be against your license, but they might not need your license because the right to read would allow it to do the slurping anyway, because the license wouldn't change that. The license really has more to do with the copying than with the consuming, and so that's one of the problems. One of the things I've been complaining about is everyone's muddling copyright, and if you use copyright to complain about this, you're distorting copyright from what it does and makes it bigger than it's actually supposed to be. However, I'm looking at this quote and I do not like this quote. This quote looks like somebody had a meeting with lawyers and walked away not understanding what they told them, because the they used, had a meeting with lawyers and walked away not understanding what he told.

01:28:27 - Doc Rock (Guest)
What?

01:28:28 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
they told them because the AI generated lawyer to come you're talking about, I'm pretty sure they're, they're in litigation and they're getting consulting and I know there's some really smart lawyers who are in the space and really trying to defend particularly the type of thing that I've been talking about. But to go and sort of he's talking about a lot more being part of fair use than necessarily is and the anyone can copy it. I'm not necessarily saying right to read affects your ability to copy, and now it may, fair use does apply. But well, here's an example.

01:28:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, on this windows central article they have a picture from suleiman's personal website of Suleiman and they republish it. They say this is a freeware image that's been reproduced. He said it was okay. Now, obviously the guy who took the picture might not agree In this case it was Suleiman himself but they're, in effect, they're calling his bluff. They're saying good, we're just going to take stuff from your site then and republish it.

01:29:21 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, a lot of people have sort of made that argument and reaction to it and I was looking at social media posts and a little cynical, like no, you know, they were making a right-to-read, fair-use type argument. People are overreacting.

01:29:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I'm looking at his quote and I can see why people are mad. He says, with respect to content that is already on the open web the social contract, social contract. That's an interesting choice.

01:29:42 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
I never signed it.

01:29:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where's my social contract? Since the 90s has been. It's fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding Is that the understanding.

01:29:59 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I would defend a lot of that, but I do not want to defend him because I don't think he really understands what the this is, and I think, for instance, if you go to my website where I publish writing or my podcast, obviously I've given you a license to read my writing. Well, arguably you didn't need to necessarily, but if you published it, you published it.

01:30:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's saying go ahead read it, necessarily, but if you published it, you published it. So that's saying go ahead read it, yeah, but it doesn't mean go ahead copy it and put it under your own name on a website that you haven't charged money for.

01:30:30 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
But that's more controlled by something um traditional one of the exclusives within copyright. Yeah, um, but arguably the training, the ai, is just on the reading aspect of it so that's interesting.

01:30:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not copying it in the sense that they're republishing it, although there is an AI that's in trouble now because people are using it to get around free paywalls and reading content. But assuming it doesn't do that, that it's chewing it up and mushing it up into its AI brain and doesn't regurgitate word for word what it read from my website. You're saying that's different.

01:31:05 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think the questions would be different Now. They could potentially be fair use, but you have to look at it more carefully. I don't like this quote because it's just sort of like you know same thing we were talking about in the Murty case you threw too big a wad of provocative stuff at the wall and you have to be careful. I'm on Team Nuance, you have to be careful and he's not making a careful argument, so it's really hard to. I think there's a point where he's talking about a sort of broad ethic of shareability, which I think is important and I would defend, but I think he's trying to make it in a way that is, he's making a defensible argument indefensibly and I think that's a problem.

01:31:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Summaryai removes paywalls, ads and pop ups from any Web site. This is their, their pitch, and they even have a list at the bottom. Hop over these paywalls. Financial Times, washington Post, cnn, bbc.

01:32:05 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean, every topic that we've talked about today is just I want to knock everyone's heads together on both sides of it, you have. You know, these are complicated, difficult issues and the people advocating on either side of them are terrible and the people advocating on either side of them are terrible, so it's really hard to tease out where is the actual reasonable thing we should think about and be careful about, because it's so easy to hate all the people who are advocating for any of these positions.

01:32:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
At the very least, this was a little tone deaf in this modern world of AI. Let's take a little time out. When we come back, I want to talk to you, ryan, about I tried to before, but you were muted about Snapdragon versus Intel. You're watching this Week in Tech. Ryan Shroud is here. Great to have you. As always, ryan from Signal65.com, doc Rock from YouTubecom, slash Doc Rock and, of course, ecamm and attorney at large. What does that mean as opposed to attorney in my own domain?

01:33:14 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think you're just saying it because it sounds nice.

01:33:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does sound good.

01:33:17 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't think it's actually mapping to anything.

01:33:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, attorney at law, that's what I was trying to say, yeah, and even that is sort of old school, whatever. It's like a little redundant.

01:33:27 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah. None of this is necessary in terms of describing my credential, but go with it if it sounds nice.

01:33:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just realized I was thinking attorney at law and I said attorney at large, which means kind of like your attorney for hire, like have law book, will travel kind of.

01:33:41 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, I mean, I'm limited to where I'm licensed and stuff like that, so I wouldn't advertise me that way. But, like you know, you have me as a legal voice.

01:33:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes.

01:33:49 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Indiscriminately to talk about whatever legal aspects show up.

01:33:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Always have you in whenever there's an important Supreme Court case or not or whenever we can. Cgcouncilcom. You're watching this Week in Tech. All right, Ryan Shroud, I'm going to put you on the spot. You used to work for Intel. Do you have any good allegiances to Intel?

01:34:12 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
No, no, I don't. No, look, I spent 22 years as an independent technology reviewer and analyst before I went to work at Intel. Left on good terms, but, no, no, I don't.

01:34:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You must feel I certainly do some sadness, because I feel like Intel's kind of lost the thread a little bit. That's funny.

01:34:41 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Get it the thread, the hyper thread Come on Leo. Get it, oh sorry.

01:34:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I feel like they have, and well, I mean Snapdragon. So Qualcomm has in the past said we're better than Intel and failed miserably last year, terrible but it looks like this time they actually delivered. Yes, this.

01:35:01 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
This time it's it's a. It's a much better part. It's like it was interesting having conversations with both microsoft and qualcomm and the build up to this release where they were very adamant that what they wanted to make sure people understood first was that it was a good pc. It was a good computer before they got into any of this kind of AI co-pilot plus discussion. That's why, when you saw Qualcomm start teasing out performance benchmarks and things like that, it was all pretty standard geek bench, cinebench type benchmarks that reviewers are used to seeing, that tech enthusiasts are used to paying attention to. And the truth is that the chip that they put together where those CPU cores were part of that Nuvia acquisition from years ago that brought over this new Orion CPU core, still based on ARM right. That gives them an automatic boost over anything that they had previously in terms of just pure CPU performance, while still maintaining a lot of that or almost all of that kind of performance efficiency that makes the ARM parts so attractive in a lot of ways.

01:36:13
Look, I mean, since the release of the Apple M1, I think the writing has been on the wall that things needed to change in the Windows PC ecosystem in order for them to keep up. And it wasn't just about raw benchmarks. It was about what are you trying to transform the device into? Is it just going to be a laptop that's going to run for six hours a day for the rest of your life, or is it going to be something different right, where it's going to run for two or three days at a time?

01:36:43
There's this terminology that somebody at Microsoft mentioned to me, where they say the PC is becoming a sensor for AI, which I really like. It kind of insinuates that this need for it to kind of always be on, always processing, always kind of looking at things, and so with that kind of M1, I kind of look at that as a bending point in the market. Right when Apple released the M1 chip, and the truth is that both Intel and AMD to some degree had been kind of sitting back and doing the same thing for many years. Higher performance power be damned right. We'll figure out ways to kind of throttle it where we need to, but if you look at both desktop and notebook parts, the the power consumption on those has been getting extreme 80, 90, 100 watts, tpu.

01:37:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's worse than a light bulb.

01:37:37 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I think what's good for everybody with stuff like the Snapdragon X, elite and X Plus processors is that it kind of like sparked everybody. It's kind of woken everybody up. So there's, you know, when I was at Intel, I remember very specifically the day that I learned that the next generation of Surface PCs were going to be based. The decision would get changed, but it kind of woke everybody up and said, hey, this is going to be a real fight that we have to go in.

01:38:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we talked to you at that time and you said this is going to be good for Intel because it's a wake-up call and everybody's going to work all the harder.

01:38:31 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Yeah, and if you look at Computex last month, no, it's still June. Earlier this month that they announced their Lunar Lake, which is their next generation part, will be out towards the end of the year and they're very bullish on performance, efficiency and single-threaded power efficiency, that they're going to have the same type of battery life that these laptops that are using the Qualcomm devices, the Qualcomm chips, will have. I think they have to prove it because, even if you look at things like Meteor Lake and Alder Lake and previous chip platforms before it, they've always made the promise of better power efficiency. It's why they went to big cores and little cores, or P cores and E cores. Right, it was this idea. Well, this is going to allow us to make more efficient chips and it didn't really turn into significant differences. Lunar Lake is unique in a couple of ways, because the CPU isn't built by Intel. The CPU is actually built at TSMC.

01:39:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, no kidding. Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. On which node?

01:39:38 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
I don't know if they've said specifically, it'll be 4 or 3, right, It'll be I think the Qualcomm one is on 4, the Apple stuff's on 3.

01:39:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that an admission that Intel never really could get down below 10 nanometers? That maybe we just can't fab it?

01:39:56 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
I don't see how you could see it any other way. Right, that has to be what the takeaway is. They knew what specs they wanted to build for this chip and they looked at their options and they went with an external foundry instead.

01:40:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why couldn't they? I mean, isn't this well-known how you do this, or is it something like EUV that they just didn't have access to? I mean, what was tsmc secret sauce?

01:40:21 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
tsmc. Um, here's what I think the secret for tsmc was is that their biggest customer was apple, yeah, and so they. They wanted to make apple happy, and so they built that process, targeting efficiency in smartphones and efficiency in kind of low power designs. Intel had to balance between building super high performance Xeon processors for data centers, desktop parts and mobile parts, and I still think what Pat Gelsinger, who came in as CEO and kind of revamped the manufacturing side, I think they'll get there.

01:41:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He wanted to kind of almost create two businesses a chip design business and a chip fabrication business.

01:41:08 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Which he's done Like even now, in kind of the business reporting. You'll see the Intel Products Division and Intel Foundry Division now see the intel products division and intel foundry.

01:41:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, division now, yeah, what's funny is that he said, as a foundry, we want to make chips for apple, but it's not. They didn't exactly steal tsmc's business, I mean that that's.

01:41:28 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
I still think it's the right business model for intel to focus on that right. With all of the geopolitical stuff happening as well as kind of just how how much more we're going to be requiring from a compute standpoint over the next decade, I think foundry can be very profitable, um, but you know they they wanted to be successful in the products business in the interim and so they made that decision to kind of go external. And that's all because of the pressure that the the snapdragon part really put on them to kind of make that change. I that's all because of the pressure that the Snapdragon part really put on them to kind of make that change.

01:42:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did not know that they were fabbing them at TSMC. That's actually kind of a shock. They also made some concessions to ARM and to Apple Silicon by adding efficiency cores. They've stopped hyper-threading. Adding efficiency cores, they've stopped hyper-threading.

01:42:24 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Their chips are looking a lot more like Apple.

01:42:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Silicon and Qualcomm chips.

01:42:27 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
It's not a surprise, right? They know that they need that power efficiency. Does that mean they took the wrong path.

01:42:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean Intel's done that before. I remember they had Obtainium. What is it Ultium?

01:42:40 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
I can't remember you said Obtainium and now it's gone. Now it's gone.

01:42:44 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I know it was on Obtainium, it was anyway, it died Itanium, itanium Because they couldn't really create those chips.

01:42:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were too hot, too power dependent, and they were fortunate because they had an Israeli kind of skunk works that gave them the core chips, the core, yeah, the core, yeah, the original core, yeah, the worst branded part.

01:43:11 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
I don't think like I look at it, as they had very broad goals when they were trying to design chips and manufacturing processes, and you can go all the way back to the days when you know they could have won the iPhone chip deal and they decided not to right.

01:43:30
They tried to get back into the mobile smartphone space for a long time and they just couldn't quite crack that, um, and they, you know, when you're battling against amd, it's all about high performance, right? Who's going to get the the biggest numbers quicker, right? Um? And when you're battling against apple, it's a totally different fight. The unfortunate part is that apple both gets really high performance scores and very efficient uh use cases out of it too, and that's what we've seen in the first handful of those Copilot Plus PCs that we've seen.

01:44:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So is it really? The advantage is that it's ARM, that it's an ARM architecture.

01:44:12 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
It's an interesting religious debate to have. It's not exactly.

01:44:16
Cisc versus risk, because I mean intel's been doing a lot of risk stuff really yeah, yeah, um, I think it'd be. My guess will be the answer is no, it's not a fundamental difference between arm and x86, but it is a fundamental difference of where are you focused and what is most important to you on this platform that you're building? Yeah, and intel seems to think that lunar lake is that focus point, and they've got you know further generations of stuff that are going to come out that are focused on that space, that don't have equivalents like these aren't going to be in 65 watt desktops, 150 watt desktops. These chips aren't going to be in data centers Right, and so, in theory, they can, they can build this in a way that's going to meet those goals.

01:45:04
And I'll give I'll give some credit to Microsoft for sticking to its guns and, you know, forcing these kinds of requirements on Intel and AMD, because it's a pretty big risk to kind of just go out with your new Surface devices and all of your Copilot Plus PC program based solely on a Qualcomm chip that nobody knows, that doesn't have the market share, that doesn't have the mind share that Intel and AMD will have. But the fact that Microsoft said no, you have to have this NPU performance, you have to have this power efficiency level in order to meet this standard and they kind of held strong to it. I think is forcing Intel and AMD to maybe do this even in a more aggressive timeline than they would have otherwise.

01:45:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really a fast. We're living in a time of change and this is often the case with the incumbent, the leader, for years, because they have such a big legacy. Market cannot be as nimble as a newcomer, and in fact, this is the evolution of technology and that's not a bad thing. It's a good thing for consumers, but it's got to be tough for Intel. One of the things that people, and the media especially, is paying a lot of attention to is uh ai performance, npus, neural processing units, and in particular, they've kind of fallen in love with this. Terra operations per second or tops number. Is this a good? Is that a good number? Is that worth paying any attention to? Because now that's the race.

01:46:32 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Used to be the megahertz wars, now it's the tops wars I think tops has probably already come close to wearing out its welcome as a, as a, as a metric of value.

01:46:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What I think is more important, although intel is saying we got more tops, we're gonna lunar lakes.

01:46:52 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Got more tops and and even microsoft. Microsoft has a 40 TOPS requirement to be qualified to be a co-pilot plus PC, so there's some value to it. But what is much more important is what we've started to call kind of like effective TOPS or ETOPS. Oh God, the reason that that's.

01:47:13
It's ETOPS we have another acronym for everybody but the idea is you can have all the compute power you want in a kind of theoretical best case scenario, but when you apply a specific workload to it, how many uh operations you're actually getting out of it in real time? It's the same way like um. In the GPU space you have flops, teraflops. Nvidia can have a GPU with less teraflops than AMD, but at the end of the day, because of drivers and software implementations and unique feature sets, the NVIDIA GPU will outperform them.

01:47:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Taking just one stat is really not telling you how the ecosystem behaves, and, frankly, it's even more than just the processor. It's the speeds of the drives. In fact, one of the things Intel's doing is building the RAM into the die, something Apple pioneered and you get. Apple calls it unified memory. That seems to be another big speed improvement. Is that so?

01:48:21 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Yeah, especially with kind of emerging workloads like AI, the access to memory memory speed becomes significantly more important. So this on-package memory that Intel has with its Lunar Lake project or Lunar Lake parts that will be out later this year adds a lot of performance. It also adds a lot of efficiency because now that memory is a little bit closer to the compute silicon so it doesn't have to use as much power to move things around.

01:48:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple users have, for a long time, not expected to be able to upgrade memory, but that's different, though. In the PC world. They expect to be able to add memory. You can't with this.

01:49:05 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
No, no, no, no, no. And uh, it's also interesting when you think about it, because mac, you always have like three processor options, right, like you don't have a ton of skews, right to choose from. Intel and its market is used to lots. You know 10, 20, 15 different kind of processor SKUs. Now, memory capacity will be one of the primary determining factors of what SKU CPU you pick, because you can't you know, even an OEM can't just like go in and I want to make a 64 gig version of this laptop or something like that. They won't be able to do that. It'll have to come from Intel all as one device.

01:49:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How interesting.

01:49:36 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Do the manufacturers like that? Are they losing capacity to design their own products tailored to the markets as they understand them? Because now it's the my way or the highway?

01:49:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's less differentiation.

01:49:46 - Doc Rock (Guest)
yeah, that's exactly right. And again, the market has slightly changed because one of the biggest challenges in the very beginning of going to in-processors was explaining to people that, yes, you're going to buy a machine with only eight you know RAM in it versus 16, but it will absolutely run our program. I deal with this all the time with you know customer support. Right, it's like are you sure it's going to run on eight gigs? Absolutely, but you're doing like 4K streaming. Understand, it's not the eight gigs your daddy grew up with. This is different and I've held entire conferences with you know 3,000 people on a call on an eight gig Mac mini running Ecamm and Zoom.

01:50:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then I'll pull Final Cut open in the middle of it and they're like wait that's the weakest machine I got to point out, even Apple is no longer going to offer eight gig machines.

01:50:36 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
No no, no. By the way, that's because of AI. Even Apple is no longer going to offer 8 gig machines. No, no, no. By the way.

01:50:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's because of AI. That's because of AI, which needs a lot of RAM, right Even the phones now are going to start at 16.

01:50:48 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Are these chips engineered in a way where you can't just mount them on a motherboard and the motherboard itself has more capacity to install more RAM that you could, then that's the point.

01:50:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The RAM is in the chip. Well, I could see some RAM, but you can't have additional RAM.

01:50:57 - Doc Rock (Guest)
No, that's it.

01:50:58 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
That's all I can process.

01:50:58 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Well, that's where you're going to lose speed too when you have to leave from the chip to run across a bus to talk to a memory bank and then come back. That has always somewhat been the bottleneck, and you know really strange.

01:51:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Back in the days of being a genius, people would come in all the time and I was like he was an apple genius, by the way.

01:51:20 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I just should make that clear. I think I classify as both as but people would buy this ram off of like amazon and they would come in and swear that it was us and I was like no, our machines are just very picky because the ram has to be very very fast, and it has to be a match set.

01:51:39
If any one person in that is slow, kind of like my brother-in-law, it breaks everything. That was always the fight with people. It's like well, no, apple just wants you to buy their Ram. And I was like no, they're match set. An Indy driver can't go get his tires from Goodyear. They are not a match set. It will kill him.

01:51:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, like it has to be, although it is still DDR5, isn't it? Or LPDDR5 in these?

01:52:05 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, it's the same.

01:52:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just, it's on die.

01:52:08 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So what's the other application? What else in the ecosystem? Does this now change, where you've got this embedding and you can't get away from the embedding? Does this change anybody involved with the motherboard production?

01:52:23 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Does this change if the manufacturers are unhappy? Keep in mind, this is laptops only Laptops yeah, Right, so you were never able to kind of have that much flexibility in the laptop space. If you're building a desktop machine, it's still a socketed processor slots and socketed memory. How long is that going to?

01:52:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
survive, though. Do you think people really want that kind of upgradability or?

01:52:44 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
I think there's, there will always be a segment that does just like.

01:52:47
There's always a pro they'll want to work on their car and they want, they want to, they want to do things like that. I do think it continues to be a smaller and smaller segment. Uh, especially as now it used to be, the desktop parts always had the leading capabilities and features. Now, in the last couple of generations we've seen the notebook parts have had kind of the leading edge features. The NPUs, the acceleration, the highest performance integrated graphics have all come on these, on these notebook chips. Isn't that interesting?

01:53:16 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Pretty soon computer shopper would be a 9x6 postcard.

01:53:21 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
What does this do? Also vis-a-vis the right of repair, because that's an entire community and an ethos that is well, if something breaks, I can fix it. And the more you embed kind of almost getting back to our tying discussion the more you embed and you can't make some of the functionality separable. And the more you embed and you can't make some of the functionality separable, you have impacts. I mean, you actually do have a tying effect on the market here in the hardware instead of the software. But if your computer goes kablooey can you fix your computer, because now it's one chip to rule it all.

01:53:56 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
And also aren't there some makers that really sort of have a market based on the modularity? So yes, I think there are some implications there, but I think most people probably drastically overestimate, on new laptops already in market today, what you can fix or repair or upgrade. Right, the vast majority of laptops that you're buying today have soldered down memory, so they might be on the motherboard but it's soldered to the motherboard.

01:54:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yes, yes, but that's what the right to repair advocates are not happy with and are trying to have some regulation help pry away and so there's a lot of regulation should not get regulatory momentum has is now going in the direction of wait a minute.

01:54:33 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Maybe soldering it down is not a thing that we should just turn a blind eye to. So the right of repair people?

01:54:39 - Doc Rock (Guest)
are sort of, but the disadvantage.

01:54:41
Sorry, no, no, the disadvantage comes from speed, right, if you keep. The reason why things have to be soldered down or whatever, is to get the performance necessary to do the things that we want to do. Even as the chat is sort of side-winding over here talking about games, I want to play Genshin Impact at the fastest speed possible. I need a machine with this kind of chip with everything soldered down so that it can go at the speed it needs to go. A rocket ship can't get parts from NASA. It needs to be very particular for the performance and that's the catch-22.

01:55:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are areas where government regulation really should not intrude. You know, government shouldn't tell a doctor what health care decisions its patients should be making, nor should they tell manufacturers how to make their PCs. The market needs to decide.

01:55:30 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I agree that there's a right to repair, but if the market says we want this kind of performance and this kind of you kind of balanced power use, Well, the market has been upset because the market has wanted to repair and is being told, no, you can't repair, not based on the physical comport, not because of the physical design and having legitimate reasons for the physical design.

01:55:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But this is a gratuitous one. This is not gratuitous.

01:55:55 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
This is legitimate.

01:55:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually Daniel Rubino, who's just on a couple of weeks ago, calls it the great PC reset. I mean, we're really seeing a whole new way of thinking about it.

01:56:05 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Oh, I love that computer shopper comment that really sort of boils it down to what Actually?

01:56:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hate to tell you. It's not even a postcard anymore, it's just. Yeah but it was just.

01:56:15 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You know, remember we lived for that gigantic.

01:56:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that thing was huge. You could make furniture out of it.

01:56:21 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It really drove home.

01:56:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the point which I guess is the overall point, but it hasn't been a magazine in quite a long while, a long time, yeah, let alone a postcard, I think it's. I don't even know, is it still a website? It's a tweet.

01:56:34 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's a tweet, now you can get it to 180 characters. It's a tweet.

01:56:39 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I have a very weird analysis to this, but it kind of makes sense. We have been just going to the store and buying bread forever, but the pandemic brought back out the artisanal sourdough people that was going psycho, making sourdough all the time. But once everybody got back to work that kind of just fizzled out I threw out my starter just a few months ago really I really do understand the right to repair people like I came from that.

01:57:11
But once you get to the cool things that having some of this stuff bolted in does, I don't know if I would trade the performance that I'm getting right now out of this M4 iPad for the ability to open it up.

01:57:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's ask our performance guy, though I don't think you get any performance benefit from surface mounting RAM or surface mounting storage. No, you do, you do.

01:57:32 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
No, you can. Yeah, I mean, the whole reason you bring those memory chips on package is lower power, higher performance, Unified memory.

01:57:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I understand, yeah.

01:57:44 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Well, think of unified memory as a software decision. Unified memory basically means the GPU and the CPU share the same pool. They make software decisions based on it. What I'm talking about is how the memory is kind of physically installed into the system on package, just basically meaning you know, one piece of substrate it's a big soc, a big system on a chip with everything.

01:58:05
Yeah, yeah and and even soldering it down. Uh, on kind of you know, not on package. Uh allows you to get the memory in closer. Okay, it allows you to remove an extra pcb, right? As part of a so dim or something. It also allows you to do other things, like make it thinner, make it more dense, so you can have extra batteries, so you can have bigger screens like there's.

01:58:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's other advantages that come to it, yeah so you have, you tested uh any of these new uh uh, snapdragon, elite pcs?

01:58:35 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
yeah, I'm actually. Yeah, I've Dragon Elite PCs. Yeah, I've looked at the Surface device, both the tablet and the laptop. We've looked at the HP, the Lenovo, the Samsung.

01:58:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've looked at a lot of them and do they live up to the hype, the Qualcomm hype?

01:58:51 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
I think they do right. I think the performance is very, very good. I think if Qualcomm did anything wrong in its launch, it was that they everybody wants to do. They talk about the absolute highest performance benchmark numbers you're going to get, and the reality is that when you started to get the notebooks out into the real world, they weren't using the top-end SKU. A lot of them are using, like one-step down or two-step down, the 80 SKU or the 78 SKU, if you want to look those up. But the performance numbers are there. The battery life is absolutely there. The performance efficiency is there. This is something I think Leo, you and I might have talked about forever ago. Um, you know, this is something I think Leo, you and I might've talked about like forever ago the this un, uh, unsexy benefit of being able to close your laptop and come back in three days and like it's, it's drained like five percent.

01:59:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's still there. And not only that, but it's instant on right. You don't have to wait for it to wake up, it's there. Yeah. Paul Ferrante has talked about that.

01:59:57 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
These are have to wait for it to wake up. It's there.

01:59:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, these are these, do notice about it immediately yeah yeah, now one thing that's missing is gpus and this is apple suffered a little bit as well with this apple silicon. They no longer support nvidia or radeon cards. That you're relying on apple for the gpu and that's the same for snapdragon. In fact, PC World says don't buy a Snapdragon X Elite laptop for gaming. It doesn't even compete well against Intel's Arc graphics.

02:00:26 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Yeah, is that?

02:00:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
your experience.

02:00:29 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
I would say yes. If you're looking at PC gaming, this should not be the top option on your list. It has a capable GPU, meaning that it is. We were talking about tops before, right, if you look at teraflops, flops as a rating, floating point operations per second, gpus that's kind of like the generic number that they throw out in the world. The GPU on the Snapdragon part is actually very strong.

02:00:55
Where it is behind everybody else in the market that's been doing this for decades, like intel and amd, is software. The drivers aren't as robust, the game compatibility isn't as as significant, um, and so those are the things that that stand out to me. You can you can go find five games that run really well. They're going to play great, uh. You can find five games that run really poorly, and you can probably find five games that won't run at all, right, uh, if you just kind of take a random sampling, and so that's that's the hurdle they have to get past. Some of the things, like fortnite, as an example, won't run at all, and that is not because of the gpu, it is because of the anti-cheat software implementation. Oh my God, that Epic uses. How frustrating is that these anti-cheats are very, very low-level pieces of software. They're kernel-level things, and so they have to be rewritten for each architecture, and they just haven't done that yet. Wow, so that'll happen.

02:01:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That'll come and they just haven't done that yet.

02:01:58 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Wow, so that'll happen.

02:01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That'll come. I notice Apple is now pitching itself as a gaming platform, because they wrote Metal, they wrote a low-level API for the GPU and now they're starting to get the performance. So it really is not so much that these hardware devices. I mean. You're getting 3.8 to 4.6 teraflops on the Snapdragon Elite X. Yep, that's good performance. It's just the software hasn't caught up. But it will, yes.

02:02:29 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
DirectX runs on it right yeah absolutely yeah, opengl, vulkan, all that stuff is supported on it. It's just a matter of like this is honestly. Intel went through the same thing when they launched Arc discrete graphics Right, it was not a muscle that they knew how to exercise. It took a good I mean, I was in it, right. It took us a good 12 months of software releases to get to a point where Intel Arc as a product was a competitive solution. And I don't think it'll take that long with Qualcomm, if only because they have Microsoft kind of as their primary partner and kind of leaning in to help. But we'll see. That's kind of the open that they need to solve.

02:03:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Signal 65 is also benchmarked battery life. In fact, you have a long tweet here with graphics as well. Oh yeah, tell me good.

02:03:25 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
It's really good. I mean, if you look at that chart, this is a simple kind of like web browsing.

02:03:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the blue line is the HP Omnibook X and the orange line is the Acer Swift. So this is Core Ultra, this is Snapdragon X Elite.

02:03:41 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Yep, yep, and they're both, you know, relatively.

02:03:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, eight hours ain't bad. The Swift is getting eight hours. That is not bad.

02:03:50 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
It's not bad, but the what's the? It gets like what? 16 and a half.

02:03:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think 16 hours for the yeah For the.

02:04:01 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Omnibook what's the? It gets like what? 16 and a half 16 hours for the, yeah, yeah for the. Again, this isn't like offline video playback, which everybody loves to use as a battery metric. I totally get it, but this is kind of like hey, we open up 20 tabs and we scroll through things and we play youtube video.

02:04:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is more realistic. This is more realistic, yeah.

02:04:16 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
And so far in all of our testing, all the Snapdragon machines have performed very well in that test Right, and that's the hurdle that the other Windows devices from Intel and AMD now have to struggle with.

02:04:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is remarkable.

02:04:32 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Double the battery life.

02:04:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now you might argue, hey, eight hours is enough for any human. But you know, if you're flying from here to Sydney, you might want that 16 hours battery life.

02:04:42 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's pretty amazing, I'm going to go on a plane tomorrow and it's 13 hours I'm in the air. I mean, actually in the air is about 12. And then, if you count the hour and a half to two hours before I got to go to Boston, to turn to go to Atlanta because there's no direct flight to Atlanta from here, Well, there is, but I don't fly Delta.

02:05:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And we should say Doc's in Honolulu, he's in Hawaii, so that's a long flight.

02:05:07 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So all these people with their flight times. I'm like man y'all just mad because I don't got no snow, I don't have any flights, I have zero flights under like six hours. I don't care.

02:05:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's worth it to be in Hawaii. I can just tell you it's worth it A hundred percent. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

02:05:23 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You're watching this week. I'm actually more impressed, Ryan, by the thermals. By the way, I saw your other tweet about the thermals. That's pretty impressive. Tell us about that. I think that goes on.

02:05:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's closely related to battery life really right.

02:05:36 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I mean. So what we did was we used a thermal imaging camera to take some stills of all the machines kind of running in different performance modes, and you get a sense of what you're really looking at is kind of like a surface temperature. I'm pointing at my laptop. You can't see it. You're looking at the surface temperature. Oh, it looks hot. It's hot, right. And what's interesting is that in a couple of instances, the Intel machine might have been cooler than the Snapdragon machine. Wow, but it was quite a bit louder, right. Because the MSI machine that I think we were using at the time for that testing decided that, hey, we needed to spin up the fans to expel the heat, and it all comes as part of it. Yeah, images like this.

02:06:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a FLIR image, so this is really cool. This is an infrared picture of where the heat is and what the redder it is, the hotter it is or the yellower.

02:06:45 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
The one on the right, the yellower and it would get even hotter and turn into white. But yeah, you can see that the top, the 37.4 celsius on the machine on the left, is the hottest hot spot that it sees and then, uh, 44.1, that's a big difference and these are both surface laptops.

02:06:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's huge, yeah, 40 is hot. Yeah.

02:06:57 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Yeah, and nobody wants you know sweaty hands when they're trying to do it.

02:07:04 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Well, and it ties directly to performance. If you look at my hands, I keep it in my lap.

02:07:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, you're sitting there with your. You know, if you lived in Minnesota maybe you might not mind it so much, but for Hawaii it's just too hot. It's so nice to have you, ryan. I appreciate it. President and GM. Signal 65. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be back with a couple of final stories as we continue with this week in tech. We did say we would talk about the Internet Archive, and so, kathy, I do want to make sure we we cover that. I am a, as you know, a big fan of the internet archive. I support them financially. Um, they're the people who do. Uh, the um a lot a lot.

02:07:49
I mean, besides storing our entire cultural history for the last 20, 30 years, they also have the uh, what is that? The name of the time machine? The?

02:07:59 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine.

02:08:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Go back and look at incriminating websites from my youth things like that Anything, anything.

02:08:08 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Our world needs an archive, or else we lose touch with our history.

02:08:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they got in a little bit of trouble because during COVID they created what's called an emergency library. They've always been scanning books, but they made a lending library of books that they hadn't bought the e-book rights to. Is that, basically, it?

02:08:26 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
They've had the library, the library they've had for ages. Right, but during at the beginning of COVID, they adapted a key term, a key attribute of the library to respond to the emergency of the time and it changed it a little bit. But basically what they do is libraries have books. If you have the physical book, you can hand it to somebody and they can walk away and read it, Right.

02:08:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they have a limited number of books and you have a limited number amount of time.

02:08:52 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, and you can't lend the way they, the way they developed. The original library uses something called controlled digital lending, and controlled digital lending is for every copy of the physical book. Instead of handing somebody the physical copy, you've handed them the electronic copy. You've only handed them. You can't hand more electronic copies than you've actually got physical books. It ties up the loan.

02:09:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And this is what Libby is and there's a number of programs that libraries in the united states use for digital lending.

02:09:21 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
libby's is probably the most common one I'm not sure if they use the same one, because one of the issues saying the internet archive does not, but libraries do.

02:09:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that really, and the publishers, cory doctor has said many times, if the publishers had their way, there would be no libraries at all. You have to buy every book, but they acknowledge that libraries exist and okay, so fine, you're going to lend the books. Well, a?

02:09:42 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
couple of key things. First of all, the way that the Internet Archive made its library was scanning its books. It made its own electronic copy. The publishers do not like this. They think that that unto itself is a violation of their copyrights, but I think the answer is no. And then once they have those copies, then instead of lending the physical, they will lend the electronic, and they can't lend more electronic copies than they have the physical. But this means that instead of the person being, it means you can have more readers, because you're not limited to readers who can physically get to the library to take the book off the shelf. You can have your readers everywhere, everywhere. So that's the basic functionality of controlled digital lending. Of um, we made an electronic version of it because we're just fulfilling our library purpose, which is to get books into readers hands. They borrow them, they give them back and we can't loan out more than what we have it's a compromise they had with the publishers to make everybody well it was.

02:10:37
It wasn't an official compromise, it's just the publishers left them alone, okay.

02:10:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But then that's interesting.

02:10:42 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, then when the when the pandemic happened, they did, they altered it to the national emergency library, I think they were calling it, and they took off the limits so it no longer was limited to how many physical copies they had, cause now, all of a sudden, nobody had books and everybody needed books and the only way to put hands in the books of people who needed it, including, like kids and students, was to basically just let them check it out and we'll solve this out.

02:11:07
You couldn't go to the library to get a book so the fair use analysis for that is unique to those particular circumstances because this was the national emergency Library and fair use is attached to the First Amendment, which has the right to read. And the point is we're creating all this stuff so it can benefit people and it was a very limited program. Whereas things started to ease, they turned off the National Emergency Library. But that seems to have poked the bear, because after the bear got poked then it sued not just over the National Emergency Library and whether that was fair use, but the publishers decided to complain that the entire program with controlled digital lending was not fair use. So there was a disappointing decision at the district court where the court got very confused and agreed with the publishers. So this is on appeal. So this is on appeal and oral argument was, I believe, on Friday and I hope it goes well.

02:12:11
It was argued by my friend, joe Gratz and he's an excellent advocate. But this is a copyright is complex and messy were listening to him may be confused because a lot of them there were some questions that did not seem to understand that this was limited, that this was. The principle is, if you bought the book, you could lend the book. So why did? Are you limited to only lending the physical book? Why can't you lend an electronic version of the book? And there's prior fair use cases that say you can. You can transform to take the physical and make it electronic.

02:12:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But if I only buy one copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and I lend it out a thousand times, I could see how the publishers might say well, you're eating, yeah, but you can do that as a library you can have one copy of the book. No, they have to buy a copy for each time they lend it out. There's limits on how many they can lend out. They have to have a copy for each time, even digital ones, right?

02:13:04 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
No, I mean, if you've got a physical book in your library shelf, you can have 1,000 readers. They just have to check it out one at a time. Oh well, no, I'm saying 1,000 at the same time.

02:13:13
Okay, so yes if you want to, to lend a thousand at a time, you do need a thousand copies, and nothing the internet archive has claimed other than during the period they scan one copy of and they were lending it out a million times no only during the national now they have before and since yeah for the most time of their library.

02:13:38
It was one copy. You couldn't have 1,000 copies lent out at a time if you only had one book. That is the basic. They were being sued because they were doing it one for one During a couple-month period in the National Emergency Library. Yeah, you could have, in theory, had 1,000 people with one book, but that was limited and just during the pandemic, but that was limited and just during the pandemic.

02:13:55
Otherwise, what the publishers seem to be arguing is that and I think this is a very confused way of looking at copyright is that there is a separate market for than the physical version, but still one for one, still connected to the single copy that the library purchased. That somehow they are competing in the e-book market and that this because they are now competing in the e-book market even though they didn't buy an e-book, that this is somehow copyright infringement, and this is a really distorted way of interpreting copyright law this copy of elvis presley's greatest movies, stories and photos.

02:14:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It says 25 cents on the front. They obviously bought this at a used bookstore for 25 cents no, they may have.

02:14:52 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Um uh scanned it from a contributing library oh, oh, okay.

02:14:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, or a library, yeah, although usually libraries don't leave the 25 cent mark on the cover.

02:15:01 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It depends.

02:15:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, they got it. Somehow. You're saying that I can only only one at a time can borrow this that I can't borrow if they only have one copy of this If it's already checked out, you go on a waiting list. And so they're acting just like a regular library, Exactly yes. Well, what are they in trouble for?

02:15:22 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
They're in trouble because this changes the paradigm. They have self-created an electronic version of the copy.

02:15:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They never bought the electronic version.

02:15:29 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
They never bought the electronic version.

02:15:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Had they bought the electronic version, this would be okay.

02:15:33 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, I'm sure the publishers would have complained in some other form.

02:15:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, this is getting back to what Corey said from the very beginning, which is publishers are going to look for any way to shut down libraries. They don't like libraries. So then there was some parts in the argument, but this seems like not an unreasonable behavior for a library.

02:15:47 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't think it sounds unreasonable. The library.

02:15:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Should they have given the 25 cents to the publisher?

02:15:52 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
They already did. They bought what kept getting dropped from. The argument is that every loan was predicated off of a purchase they had made. I did not like at the end that a judge dropped the word piracy and that's irrelevant.

02:16:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not. These are not pirated.

02:16:05 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's purchased, not pirated. So all you don't lend anything you haven't bought, and that's a fundamental principle behind controlled digital lending. If you want to lend two at a time, you have bought two copies. You have bought two copies. You have bought two copies and the publishers are just being extremely precious about what form you bought the copy in.

02:16:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what did Deke do? Well, I'll tell you, he did the only thing a man could do he grabbed her and he kissed her. But good, by the way, reading from the official copy that I have borrowed from Internet Archive of what turns out to be more like a romance Elvis Presley's Greatest Movies, Stories and Photos with Colored Pinups Now you have to check it back in because nobody else can check it out until you're done. I can keep this until 5.41 pm.

02:16:52 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Oh, you've done one of the short-term ones.

02:16:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, if you wanted to take it home.

02:16:56 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
You could do it for two weeks.

02:17:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You just have to log in and check it out.

02:17:02 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
By the way, they even have a link that says purchase this book. So that's an antagonist. The publishers don't like that either. Um, because they think, oh, you're making money, you've turned this into a whole commercial enterprise, and but it's just spinning off to, but you're buying it legitimately yeah, and I it's.

02:17:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there's not a ton of money, by the way they're asking $6.86 for this book, which was only a quarter just a minute ago.

02:17:23 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
I don't know that one has been defaced with a Sharpie marker on the cover.

02:17:30 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean you still have for sale. The libraries are also protected by a statute that addresses it.

02:17:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then the courts were kind of tying themselves into it. Is the issue really that the Internet Archive is not a library?

02:17:41 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
They assert that they are a library. I think they are.

02:17:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That says it on the front page.

02:17:45 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And yeah, I think if you're performing library functions, then you're also.

02:17:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They say digital library. Thank you, Brewster Kahle, and I am very happy to be a paying patron because I think the Internet Archive is doing a very important job and I hope the courts see the light on this. The publishers.

02:18:05 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
At one point I kind of wasn't paying as much attention to the publisher's argument because this was also happening during Supreme Court decision issuing time and they were talking about how, oh, the amici and I was an amicus in in this case and they're like the amici keep talking about the public interest. But this isn't about the public interest. This is about how copyright is supposed to provide incentives for the betterment of society. And I'm like by her own statement, it was about the public interest. The public interest is the vindicate you only have copyright up to and because of its ability to serve the public interest. So all of a sudden, if you've interpreted in a way that hurts the public interest, you have done this wrong.

02:18:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As Corey has always said, the problem with copyright is the only people who really make any money from it are the big companies who take advantage of the copyrights. Here's a final story, and it's all because of the Internet Archive. You ever borrow a dvd from red box no no, sure, sure you have.

02:19:03
Yeah, yeah, uh, red box was purchased, you may remember, by a company weirdly named chicken soup for the soul entertainment. Uh, just a few years ago. Uh, chicken soup for the soul entertainment has stopped paying its employees. It owes money, according to the Verge, according to the Yanko Rinkers, to almost everyone in Hollywood. That's a lot of people, and they are now filing for bankruptcy, debtor in possession. They're looking for a debtor in possession loan. They're looking for a debtor in possession loan, in other words, a loan to get them off the hook with employees and all the people they owe money to.

02:19:46 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
As Yanko points out, it seems unlikely that they're going to get that. I definitely sorry. I definitely didn't know that they were still around, though.

02:19:51 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's part of the problem. I mean neither If you had.

02:19:54 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
I ever had it or borrowed one, absolutely. I had a vacation. Sure, it's raining out. You take the kids out to the grocery store and pick out a movie or something like that. But yeah, I didn't know they were selling it.

02:20:04 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I think I borrowed one because I just wanted to use the machine. Yeah, it's cool. It was a limited selection.

02:20:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you know, and actually you know bodegas, smaller supermarkets all over the country have red boxes. There's plenty of places in Petaluma. There's no movie rental stores anymore, but there are red boxes in plenty of places in Petaluma. Chicken Soup took on $325 million in debt in 2022 to acquire Redbox. It has been sued over a dozen times over unpaid bills. Altogether, chicken Soup says it has 970 million dollars in debt. If anybody would like to lend them that money. I hear dvd rentals are going to be huge in the near future. It seems like this is probably the end of the line for red box.

02:20:56 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Well, if the streaming services keep jacking up their prices, maybe this makes sense. Maybe they'll be back.

02:21:01 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Right.

02:21:01 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
Yeah.

02:21:01 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, and they're not competing with Netflix anymore because Netflix gave up that part of the business.

02:21:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want to end on a sad note, but I guess that's where we are.

02:21:15 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Welcome to this Week in Tech.

02:21:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm trying to find something happy, but there's nothing. There's nothing, just more bad news all around. Thank you, kathy, for bringing the.

02:21:27 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Bad news no, bringing the legal intelligence. There was one good decision. There was Murdy, don't forget.

02:21:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll always have Murdy. For the moment, kathy Ellis is at cgcounselcom C-G-C-O-U-N-S-E-Lcom. That's the old English spelling, is it?

02:21:45 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
No, that's what you call a counselor. Yes, yes, as opposed to C-O-U-N-C-I-L, which is something else.

02:21:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As opposed to a school counselor, which Kathy is not, which is probably a good thing. She is an attorney. She also writes for the copia institute those briefs, those amici briefs, and writes a tech dirt as well. Thank you so much for being here, kathy. I appreciate it. At kathy gellis with a c on mastodon. Thank you, dr rochter, it's so good to see you. My friend, have a safe trip great. Travel well, director, travel well. Director of strategy. Are you doing this for Ecamm or for fun?

02:22:20 - Doc Rock (Guest)
A little bit of both. I'm going to go speak at a podcasting conference to just basically show people how easy it is to do podcasts using us. And yeah, Well, I hear Atlanta, they got good food.

02:22:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hear there's a big podcast network, one of the biggest and the oldest, that is going to be using Ecamm to do its podcasts real soon.

02:22:41 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I can't wait. I told Russell to get back to me and tell me like all the inner secret sauce, because I think his ideas are incredible right now.

02:22:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good, so you guys are you're jibing?

02:22:54 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Oh yeah, I told him, give me an excuse to fly out there so I can have to fix stuff. But don't tell Katie, I'm just coming to hang with you.

02:23:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll give you an excuse. We desperately need you to help us set up. Doc, it's always great to talk to you. Safe travels and have fun in Atlanta. Mahalo brother, Mahalo aloha as they say on Hawaiian Airlines, Not hawaiianairlinesfanscom, that's a different Hawaiian Airlines. Thank you, Ryan Shrout. So great to see you again. Longtime host of this Week in Computer Hardware, you were always my hardware guru and it's really fun to have that chat with you again. It's been too long, but come back soon. Anytime, Love to be here, it's great. Ceo, president and general manager at signal 65.com. Did I get all the titles in?

02:23:42 - Ryan Shrout (Guest)
it's fine. Yeah, all of those, that's. When they asked me, I said just put signal 65.com, that's all we need he's the boss, he's the guy, he's the man.

02:23:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So great to see you. Thanks to all of you, thanks also to our club twit members who make this show possible. Uh, as you probably noticed, uh add, support for podcasting in general and this one specifically dwindling. But we want to keep working. We want to keep helping you understand technology, keep entertaining you, keeping you company. If you like what we do and you want to support it, the best way to do that is to join the club.

02:24:15
Now we try to make this affordable. Seven bucks a month. Just for seven bucks a month, you get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get access to the discord in that great community of club twit members. They're wonderful. You also get special events like stacy's book club, uh, creative corner with micah sergeant. Uh, you get video for all the shows. We do audio only like uh mac. Uh, hands on macintosh, hands on windows. Micah does hands on macintosh, paul thorat does hands on windows, the untitled linux show, uh, home theater geeks with scott wilkinson, and on and on and on.

02:24:45
We love what we do and we think it's an important service, but unfortunately we're going to have to come to you for help. Please join the club. You can start at seven bucks a month. If you feel generous generous you can pay more. You don't have to Just go to twittv slash club twit to learn more. And thank you in advance for your support. We really appreciate it. We do this show every Sunday, 2 to 5 pm Pacific, that's 5 to 8 pm Eastern, that is 2100 UTC. You can watch us do it live at youtubecom slash twit, slash live Soon. By the way, thanks to Ecamm, we're going to be on. I believe we're going to be on more platforms and that'll be nice, but right now that's where we live.

02:25:28
After the fact, on-demand versions of the show available at the website. Of course, always twittv. There is a dedicated YouTube channel for the episodes of this Week in Tech. That's a great place to go. If you want to share a clip, you want to say hey, did you know that Doc Rock was a mail stripper? You could just share that clip with all your friends and family. No, he wasn't, he wasn't, he wasn't. He just spins the disks. Now I lost my thread. Oh, you can also subscribe. That's the best thing to do. Subscribe. That way you get Twit automatically. The minute we've got it all produced, finishes it up and then you can get a copy and you'll have it in time for your Monday morning commute. We really appreciate your being here. Thank you for joining us and we will see you next time. As I've been saying now for 90, we're now in our 20th year. Another Twit is in the can.