Chromebooks and Digital Distractions

It's time for Twit this week in Tech Ian Thompson is here, a Brar Al Hidi Patrick. Beijão. Uh we'll talk about Outlook crashing in space. They did manage to fix it. OpenAI buys a podcast for hundreds of millions of dollars, not ours, I'm sorry to say. And the end and maybe Rebirth of Zombo.com. is next. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Twit This Week in Tech, episode 1078, recorded Sunday, April 5th, 2026. The Great British Marmalade Scandal. It's time for Twit this week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's Tech News. Let me introduce our esteemed panel this week from CNET, ladies and gentlemen, Abrar Al Hiti, she's senior technology reporter there. And we finally figured it out because it always seemed like you were on Tech News Weekly and then on Twit the following Sunday. Yeah and we wanted to separate it, but it w but Beneath, well we let them choose what they, and everybody who's on Tech News Weekly figures, Well, I'm gonna have a tech news a twit week. Yeah, why not? Why not do it all at once? So you're getting it out of the way, I guess is that. Just teasing you. Great to see you, Abra. It's nice to see you. Ian Thompson is also here. Professor Thompson. Because look at his library. It's just jam packed with goodies. Oh, this is just a couple of bookcases. We've got another five in the house. Oh I love it. You can open your books. Yeah, I mean I had to give up half my library when I moved over here and it it broke my heart. But um I took a a very simple rule. If I could get it on an ebook do that, something which I regretted because they've started changing ebooks. Uh or if I hadn't read it in five years, then uh it went to the charity shop or to the book shop or whatever. That's smart. Yeah. Also here joining us from Paris. Former NATO nation. Wait, no. No, you're still in NATO. We're the former NATO nation. It's us. You're the former almost former NATO. Patrick Fish. Not Patrick.com. Staying up late for us. I appreciate it. Thank you. Happy to. We had actually a uh one thing to celebrate this week, which was The launch of Artemis two. Uh the integrity capsule is uh now on its way. There this is a uh a NASA Thing built in unity, actually, which is kinda cool. On its way to the moon. It's actually uh closer to the moon by far. It's only fifty four thousand miles away from the moon. It's almost a quarter of a million miles from the earth. And what's uh what's cool uh is that they have now seen a part of the moon you don't normally see, part of the dark side of the moon. So that's far side of the moon. They call it the dark side. They and then I start singing the Mulan song in my head. Yeah. It's not dark to the moon. It's only dark Yeah, far side's a much better way of saying it, isn't it, Ian? It's it's sorry, this is it's one it's the mound of regular earth that I will die on because you know it's it's it's it's one of those things. I was speaking to a NASA engine and I used the dark side of the moon phrase and he's like look Before we go any further, it's far side. It gets the same amount of sunshine as any other part of the moon. That's right. Uh, as Adam Curry used to insist. Well, Arthur C. Clarke had a wonderful story about this, 'cause he spoke with the Apollo Al uh Apollo eight astronauts who were the first be humans to actually see it. And they'd just been to sea two thousand and one, before the flight. And one of the astronauts said, Look consider radioing back to Nassa saying that we'd seen a large black monolith sitting out of the Nassau. But we decided we'd never fly again if we did that. Yeah. That's awesome. Uh the the the shot is actually interesting. The orbital dynamics of the whole thing is interesting. The moon is moving in its orbit. Towards a rendezvous point. You see it's right now, it's kind of far off. Toward a rendezvous w point with uh Orion, which will then slingshot around it. So it's kind of an amazing target practice. thing. Um Yeah. The capsule. It's funny because I've heard interviews with various NASA spokespeople. NASA has started using, I'm sorry to say, camera ready people instead of engineers. Yeah. Uh on I really hate it. And they talk like this. And I saw a CNN anchor say, Well explain the orbital dynamics. And the poor woman said well But but you know, you saw that movie uh with the people in the on the big blackboard? That's how they do it. Uh anyway, that was a that was a nice thing. There is a a couple of real time Orion trackers. I was just showing you NASA's. There's one kind of uh third party from ISSinfo.net that is also uh showing uh the the the rendezvous. And some beautiful uh shots, by the way, uh of the moon or sorry, the earth From Orion. Um with the sun behind the earth. Some really gorgeous shots. So um they brought their iPhones up there. I was gonna say it's a great, great iPhone ad. They also, I'm sad to say, uh brought Microsoft Surface tablets. And just take a wild guess. What app do you think they had trouble with? With both versions of it. Yeah. Yeah. Outlook. So m NASA had to reinstall Outlook remotely. Because are we sure it's not because they have like special equipment or some kind of weird network because they're going to space and like it's it's the it's not like if they had another app or program it they they would be certain it would have worked perfectly. I mean I w I am a chance to slam some of us, yeah. So uh Artemis flight director uh Jud Freeling said that This is not uncommon. We have this on station all the time. You know, sometimes Outlook has issues. getting configured, especially when you don't have a network that's directly connected. Of course a Ryan. It's not connected to the internet, obviously. It's a quarter million miles away. So essentially we just had to reload his files on Outlook to get it working. But it might, you know, you might then say, Well why did they send them out with surface tablets and Outlook? If they had these problems at home. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's easily fixable probably, you know, it's not and it's probably not mission critical. Like they're not gonna get uh flight path instructions throughout the book. Oh my god, I hope so Seems like but still, I mean, it is a very bad ad for or you know, it continues the The image of Microsoft and and Outlook and all of everything they do. And it is simultaneously a fantastic ad for Apple and the iPhone because they have iPhones there. They did but also the iPhones are are modified so that they can't really do much except take pictures. But what are you gonna take? You know? You're gonna take those devices that are compact and that have everything you need. Um, and you're not gonna build your own phone or or and it's easier to get an iPhone than an actual camera, probably although I'm sure they have those too. But I'm not surprised they're using consumer tech. I love it that our uh Well no, it's good, and I think it's part you know, this is the SLS. Which was uh cleverly contrived by Congress to be made in all fifty states. So this is probably something that doesn't happen in France. I hope it doesn't happen in France. So that every state would get its little piece of the uh the puzzle, which of course made it Hideously over cost and uh inefficient. And I imagine there's also that kind of corporate back sheesh where well, we gotta give Microsoft a little something something and Apple something something. Yeah. It doesn't wonder. It is I mean, you talked about it last week, but It is amazing that for this once I'm gonna use a we like humanity uh is going back to space. It doesn't matter, it's the US. On this one, it's not just the US, it's everyone. Um and we're going back to to to not just to space, but to the moon. And it's working. And NASA is managing under uh you know, um what's the name of the new director who everyone has doubts about. Yeah, actually been in space, which is kind of May you know, yeah, cool. He ended up being confirmed and uh he re jiggered a few things and it seems like it might actually be happening. Now, of course, there's you know this Base on the moon thing, which China and the US are gonna have. But at this point, let's just be amazed. I actually No, it is uh I don't get me wrong, I celebrate this. I think this is very cool. We watched the launch. Wednesday on intelligent machines. I think it's super I completely with you. Even though I also know in my heart it's just a silly exercise. That there we don't need to spend the money to go to the moon. We're never gonna go to Mars 'cause that is Impossible. But it makes it inspiring. It's not impossible. No, but and and there is a a a value to that. Uh and also the kind of research you need to do does, you know, in the case of the uh uh r moon rays, did trickle down to uh technologies that we're using every day. You know, we got hook and we got Velcro, we got Tang, for example. And we got Fisher space pens. So I I tried to show the the launch. Well I did show the launch to my kids. They're eight and five. That's exciting. Um it was really exciting to me And they were like, Oh Okay. I mean it's a rocket going to space. We see that all the time. And I had because not just because it's happened before, but there's just so much fake imagery everywhere. I'm n I'm not talking about the AI, I'm talking about the movies and, you know, CGI and fantastical things in every Yeah. Weren't getting the reaction I was hoping. They weren't amazed and, you know. Um so I mean hopefully when they actually walk on the moon in a few years it will have more of an impact, but was kind of a little bit disappointed that kids today They have you know fantasy and science fiction up the wazoo and they don't understand the the real uh People going to the moon is actually amazing. Well one kid did. Did you see the CNN interview with a kid who's now become a meme? Uh, he turned up to the launch and he got his NASA hat on and the CNN journalists said, you know So why are you so excited excited about this? And he just looked at him and went, We're going to the effing moon. What do you mean? We're going to the moon Uh I love it. You you know, I don't know if if any of you are old enough to remember uh the last time. I was in high school the last time. People went to the moon. And I'm old. I always born. Yeah, nineteen seventy two. I I literally wet myself when Apollo eleven landed on the moon, but I was only fourteen days old at the time. I remember my dad getting me up, uh, to to watch that and I'll n and I will never forget it. It was very moving and very exciting. Yeah. And it was a global event, which we kinda need these days, a place a a chance for us to all to celebrate something as humanity as opposed to And it also gave us a great headline from The Guardian when the toilet malfunctioned. Um and the headline was relief for astronauts as ultimate to toilet repair. And I just thought the the the headline writer there was sitting with a huge grin on their face just like Yes Um now I read something this morning they're smelling something burning. toilets. So that's not good. Sacrifice is being made for the things. You know what? They can pee in the suit, honestly. They're okay. They'll be all right. Um And and now that outlooks looking, they can write home about it. They get spam emails like hot women in your area or it's like outside. I do have to show this one uh blog post from a guy named Tabe Bannerman. Um How many products does Microsoft have named Copilot? We know there's a few, right? Turns out There's seventy five different Microsoft co pilots, and even this count is is down. He says since I pu published this, I've received Emails from there are two more missing. Gaming Copilot and Microsoft Dragon Copilot. So now the total is eighty. It's like, I guess all the good names are taken. I don't know. There are a lot of co-pilots, co-pilot and Viva Insights, co-pilot and SharePoint, co-pilot and planner, co-pilot, and one note, co-pilot, and on and on and on and on. It's like taking a page out of Google's book. Like let's just name things like a bunch of random things. Google's naming is terrible. Yeah. It's all over the place. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good thing. But the the thing that makes it weird is that the name is not just co pilot, it's like something with co pilot at the at the end of the name, which you know I can understand. It's like Nadella getting a an all hands meeting and going like we're gonna go big on AI and our AI is co pilot. So go do things, make AI in A I in your products and call it p co pilot because we have to have a big AI strategy. And yeah, there's no like there's not even time to decide on an actual uh hand stream name. Apple being like three years late might have died to have the owner. There you go. Well they're just gonna use Siri. They already got a name. So Um actually I think this is a little bit of a problem for Microsoft. They've actually retrenched a little bit because people don't want Copilot shoved in their faces. And uh it's giving and you know, I'm an AI fan, by the way. I'm a huge accelerationist, but it's getting giving AI a bad name. I mean, very similar to to once again bring up Google Gemini being in everything. You're like, Why is Gemini summarizing my two ones? It's not necessary. There's that little little glowy Gemini button all over begging you to use it, yeah. Yeah. It is more aggravating in in uh Windows though, I have to admit, because having the co pilot button in like notepad. and pain. Yeah. And like it is it does feel like it's been crammed in places that you really don't need it to be. Uh even though It might be useful in, you know, notepad. It could be useful, like it's text related stuff, but it feels bad. It feels like it's being shoved in your face. So I think there's a at least a communications issue there because Most people, myself included, don't know what it's for. We d I don't I have no idea what to use it for. I just see the button and I I get annoyed. See it and ignore it. Mm-hmm. Yeah, basically. I ignore Gemini too. So I'm an equal ignorist opportunity. I did find a good use for Gemini the other day. Um, if anyone ever like needs to do any type of video editing and you have like a like an interview, it'll if you s ask when somebody said something in that video and you need to pull like a sound bite, it'll tell you exactly when they said it and write out the quote. So if you're ever using that in drive. That's like my one. Yeah, it's like my one thing where I'm like, I don't have to dig for that quote or that sound bite. Um So that's kinda nice if you have her. I think that's maybe a little bit of the plan is if you just find one thing, they they want you to find that one thing that's useful and then you will go, Oh And maybe expand your horizons. Google did do uh one good thing. in AI this week. They released A a very compact version of uh Gemma, which is their smaller version of Gemini. It's mini G mini mini Gemini. Yeah. And they released it uh as Open Weights. And uh they also released it with the Apache license, which uh a lot of people are very excited about saying. I think that's gonna make it possible for us to use this in new and exciting ways. So um Uh for instance, corporations which are hesitant to use other licenses, Apache is such a forgiving license. that uh they're more likely to use it. So Praise to Google for 'cause I believe in the long run, you know, we don't want be forced to use these corporate models, these models from the fr you know the big AI companies, the the so-called uh hyperscalers. Google's one of them. Uh if it means they lock in AI. And I think a lot of us are really hoping that open AI, open weight AI with with relaxed licenses uh something we can even run on our own machines, which Gemma is small enough to do, um that's our hope for the future. Then then it will be a much more egalitarian future with AI. You'll get to do it, use it the way you want it. So uh I I will give Google uh some credit for doing that. This is a uh from all I tried it a little bit, uh there is a version for the Macintosh, which is nice that you can use using that the Apple's native uh MLX um extensions instead of NVIDIA's CUDA. Another Good things. Competition is a good thing in any uh of these spaces. So we'll cover that more on our AI show, Intelligent Machines. It's kind of an inside baseball story, but I did want to give them some credit. Thank you for doing that, Google. That's the right thing. Let's take a little break and when we come back, Patrick had some thoughts about the big tobacco moment for social media. That's what some people are calling it. We talked about it last week with Kathy Gillis. You heard it. And Patrick said I he steam was coming out of his ears. So we're gonna give Patrick his his uh chance to rebut uh that whole story. I think it's very interesting and of course it is an ongoing uh story in the tech. So we will cover it. Patrick Beja, you're not Patrick dot com. Uh long time tech podcaster. And uh and worked in the industry too. You worked at Blizzard and the gaming side of things. I finally got a Nintendo Switch too and I'm I have to say I'm loving it. It's really, really a good thing. Oh, just before the price hike. That is my motivation. Exactly. Exactly. Uh Abra Al Hita here from CNET. Always a pleasure to have you on, Abra. And Ian Thomson. And you know, I I wanna say there's a trend here. None of you are blurring your background. Oh yeah. That's a first. I would never think to do that on any show. Yeah, I don't why Ian used to do it. Patrick might have done it from time to time. No, I don't I don't like it. It feels like we're turning against it, aren't we? Yeah. I did it and people just like can you please turn that off and you're like Okay. I like to read the book titles. I like to see the D I you know. We're nosy. Yeah is it just me or when you're out on a walk, it's at night and you see a window that's lit up and you can see in. You look in, right? Why do you not have curtains? I'm gonna look, obviously. I have not looking for you know I have to see it. I'm not looking Yes. I'm not looking for a compromising material. See what's on the TV, what kind of TV they have. What kind of lamps? Yeah. What kind of furniture? We're not we're it's human. Yeah. I'm taking notes. Like I'm like, oh that's a great design. Yes. It's real life interest. I'm not a peeping Tom. We are interested in other human beings. I fully. Good. Thank you, Abra. I will always validate that. Yeah. I don't feel guilty anymore. Never. I always felt a little weird about it, but it's like you can't, you can't Not And yeah, I'm always interested. What are they watching? Yeah. 'Cause everybody nowadays has a massive TV in their window. Right. Maybe there's a cat, somebody reading a book. No, no, no. Giant screen. Well no, as you drive into San Francisco over the over the Bay Bridge, they've got all those skyscrapers on the right hand side and one on the left. And yeah, people don't shut their curtains and you're just kind of like, Oh, okay, you've got the exercise bite by the window. That's a nice design choice. That plant is gorgeous. Yeah. Yes. Okay, folks, we're looking at you. Uh we'll have more in just a moment with our fabulous uh panel our show today brought to you by Thinxed Canary. It is the best invention ever. I was just at RSEC. For the first time meeting The Thhinks Canary team, Haroon and Company, they are so great. They started life m many years ago, more than a decade ago. As uh white hat hackers, pen testers, they would teach companies and governments how to break into systems. And one of the things they they really learn is what hackers are looking for when they get into your system. And what you should be thinking about is how would I know? 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And then in Los Angeles a young woman uh sued saying uh I started using Instagram at the age of six and or YouTube at the age of six, Instagram at the age of nine. cause severe mental health problems. The a case in LA was interesting because they went after meta By the way, Snapchat and TikTok were also named in the suit. uh settled out before the case went to jury, went to trial. But YouTube and Meta fought the case and lost It was really a product defect case. The claim from the plaintiff was these products were Poorly designed, encouraging me addict me and uh as a result they're liable. It wasn't a big it was only a few million dollar uh penalty. Um the jury said we didn't the point was we wanted them to fix it. We weren't trying to hurt them. We were trying to get them to fix it. Uh and of course we're all waiting now for the other shoe to drop because there are literally, literally thousands of other Cases like this that will now proceed forward with this as it's not a precedent. technical term I guess is bellwether, but they will certainly be brought up in future cases. Now uh Kathy Gallis argued against the decision uh last week saying and I agree saying it's a threat. But Pat Patrick you is you said you didn't like that idea. Yeah, well I mean I certainly understand and you know, Kathy, unfortunately she she's she's not here. So uh I will fully acknowledge she understands all of this a lot better than me, um and the legal aspects of it. But I do have a feeling that first of all I need to say as a preamble I'm not against big tech. Like I I love a lot of the things that, you know, uh the magnificent seven and others do. So this is not like Patrick is French and hates everything tech related. Um but It does feel to me like there's a knee jerk reaction to this uh um to this Um which involves section two thirty and a general fear that if you try to um Condemn or decide that these companies have been doing something wrong, then all of a sudden it's an attack on section two thirty. And really they should be protected because uh if not, then all of a sudden moderation uh is not possible anymore. And I I strongly disagree with that interpretation because Section two hundred thirty, indeed. protects uh publ you know, website publishers for uh moderation purposes. This is not that. Um it should not be a get out of jail free card. Exactly. Because if you go the way that section two thirty protects everything, including this, which is not again moderation, like you're not uh removing a certain uh a certain piece of your you designed your sites to be super attractive. Exactly. But Patrick in the Does give us does give other super attractive products like this fine podcast. Doesn't put them at risk also? I mean I don't understand why They haven't gone after for instance Uh Draft Kings, the the online gambling. Talk about designing a product that's addictive and showing definitely it's gambling, so to begin with, there's an issue. But if it is uh Proven slash decided by jury, which is how we set societal norms, by the way. Especially in a country that is governed by common law and not by like up on high uh uh government decided deciding how things are done. like it is mostly in France. If you Don't allow for uh juries to say, Well this product was design was designed a certain way, and by the way, discovery showed that uh Studies. did put into the hands of Zuckerberg and other executives these companies. Yeah. They knew that there was a serious risk, not just anecdotal, but a serious risk that these products were designed um i in a way that would affect their users' mental health, especially young users, especially uh young women, young girls. Um If you if you say, well okay, fine, whatever, but section two thirty, so you can't change the product. This is the the algorithm, the way the apps have infinite scrolling, um and When they design these products, they are far removed from a website publisher who moderates comments or uh blog posts. They design the way the algorithm is going to serve the content to you. I feel like this goes not one, but two or three steps beyond just moderating one or two pieces of content. This is a product that is designed a specific way, and if we can't. find that this product is designed in a way that is uh detrimental to society. Then what are we doing? Like if we can't find that it's a problem the way it's designed. then they have no um incentive to design it differently. Now, if the argument is, oh no, this is not a product that is intentionally designed to be addictive. And Just to make it clear. I'm fully ready to admit that maybe they didn't realize the effect would be so bad in the beginning, because they were just making a good product that would um That would encourage people to come back and to spend time on the app and to hopefully have a good time using their product. I understand. But now we're like 10, 15 years removed from that time and we're s looking at and seeing the results. on people, on society. And I think we need to be allowed to look at these things and say, all right, you know what? This is having an effect we didn't anticipate and it's an issue and we should maybe change the way it works. And I don't first of all I think uh uh the legal uh proceedings is how you should Do that. And second and there's gonna be, you know, uh appeals and all of this. It's not settled now. And second of all, I honestly don't see how section two thirty should protect Product design. No, and I don't think people are saying that. I think but there is some fear that it would undermine Section 230, which I think you agree, we all agree and we need. Absolutely. I don't think section two thirty section two thirty should be sacred. Section two thirty protects these companies against what uh its users post. And gives them the right to moderate it, the right to delete it. This is was really about a product defect. And I thought that was smart of the plaintiff's attorneys to focus it. as a defective product. Uh I don't understand why I mean you could also do this about alcohol. You could for sure it see this is the thing well it is the connection between social media and mental illness is not a proven connection at by any it is. But you could definitely say that about alcohol, you could definitely say it about a gambling Those are demonstrably addictive products. Why are we letting this be much more so than social. It does seem to me like there's a growing consensus that social media has some effect on its users, especially younger users. People should we should continue to investigate, but I don't mind even laws against young people using it. I don't know. What do you guys? Brar, what do you think? I think um I think you're right. I in terms of um laws against young people using it, it's it's tricky to implement that, I think. That's the problem. There's no good way to do that. Yeah Yeah, it's I'm very curious, kind of observing how Australia is handling that and how more nations continue to potentially do the same, but I in the US at least. kinda feels like it's that the ship has sailed and young people are already on this thing. How do you pull them away from it? Maybe you get the next generation to not, you know, be on these platforms. That's where you start. But it's really hard to get a teenager away from a platform where they've built so many connections and they are potentially addicted to it. Um I think it it It can be addictive for children and for adults. Children is really where there can be very detrimental effects. But even as adults, you know, like it's so hard. I I try to set screen time limits for Instagram an hour a day and I blow past them almost every single day. And I'm like, I'm not even enjoying being on this app. Like it's like it's crazy. It's addictive. It's We know it's addictive. So but yeah. I just don't know what what the answer is in terms of Allowing people to have the free will to be on something if they want to be on something. I mean I I I'm not a libertarian, but I feel like that there should be some responsibility on the user. Yeah. If you're having a problem with it, it's kind of on you. To stop using it. Look at this. Phone free bars and restaurants are on the rise across the US. Damn right. People are recognizing that, yeah, we don't really want this to be the way we live. Well that should be our choice. I don't think we should go to laws immediately as you know, we don't have to. I think the very important thing that's happening now, and not just with this case in court, but in general in in the entire world, kind of as we're realizing what's happening, is a change of perception and a change of societal View on these things. You know, everyone knows sugar is not great for you. We don't have laws against consuming sugar. We have, you know, in France, for example, we have great things like labels on on uh uh food items on processed foods with with like a score from A to F and how good this thing is compared to the one next. That that's great. But we don't have laws that said you that say you don't have to eat sugar. But we all know Like because society has put an emphasis on this. Maybe you shouldn't abuse it. And that's not the look uh the outlook we have on social media right now, because we didn't know. And It doesn't you know, I think about cigarettes either, but we've come around. We don't have to talk about cigarettes. Uh the the cigar exactly we're we're discouraging their use. Yeah, I mean the cigarette example's really interesting though, because when the tobacco lobby first when these trials first kicked off Uh in fact when the tobacco uh company's own research show that yes, nicotine was addictive, their response wasn't to, okay, let's reduce the amount of nicotine and advise people what to do. They bred new strains of tobacco with more nicotine in to make them more addictive. And I think this is what the social media companies have done. They discovered this stuff was really addictive and said How can we make it more, more addictive? 'cause that way we get more screen time to the user. See, here's my problem with this is for first of all There's this uh perception, and I think this happened in the jury, that there's something magical about technology companies and they're magically threatening. to us and they're using some sort of hypnosis to get kids to use their product. And I think that that's basically fundamentally an anti technology point of view. We don't ban cigarettes. We don't ban alcohol. We don't ban gambling in most cases. Every state now has a lottery, so there's state sanctioned gambling, as addictive as it is. My fear is that this is going to be used It already is being used to ban social media for young people. Without acknowledging that there is value to social media as well, right? All of the examples you just gave are also banned for young people. So you know, young people is one thing. Okay, you're right. And I don't think we need to necessarily maybe we need to products are designed, but expand into a huge anti tech movement where we do, in fact, say We gotta get these companies out of our lives. I think we should be very aware of this, but we also shouldn't as an overreaction to that possibility decide that there is nothing that can be done and these companies can just design the products the way they You know there's an example I I like to give because I lived through it. Um video games. In the eighties and nineties when Mortal Kombat was released, it created an outrage and everyone was like, Oh m video games are bad for kids and like we shouldn't and us as kids were like No, video games are awesome. And like they're all trying to to uh to to to outlaw and to ban video games and oh but look, in the end video games stayed and this was moral panic and blah blah blah. It wasn't. I just realized this recently, actually. That is the reason that the um you know, Peggy and uh and oh my God, what's the rating system for video games in the US? Um the name escapes. That is when they were created the The SRB. Thank you, Benito. Uh the SRB was created. And it's it's not banning games, but it's just putting a label On things that are inappropriate for certain ages to inform the parents. And that is an important societal reaction to these things because You know, that it was the same kind of pseudosciencey opinion. Well, it's just everybody can tell that video games are bad for you and are gonna make you violent. Everybody can tell that social media and spending too much time on your phone is bad for you without any scientific background. Backing. And there's no scientific backing. There's a lot of people. There's Jonathan Haidt saying that and there are a lot of people saying that now about social. There isn't any real science saying that any more than there was about video games. I think there's more and more studies. I think there's more and more maybe we're not there yet and maybe we should I'm not, you know, objecting to Uh I'm not saying we should do all of this now. I'm just objecting to the idea that it's possible and that we shouldn't. No, no, I agree. We can do something about it. I agree. I just don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. There's real value to you to me neither. I think especially with a platform like YouTube. Like I you know, we talk a lot about meta and Instagram and how terrible it is. YouTube is there's incredible. I watch it every morning. Great. I learn like there's educational content. There's a I learn so much from YouTube. I love it. to as well. Yeah. And there's a reason there's a YouTube kids. Like there are things that are trying to be done, not but there are also terrible things on there. So that's a really tricky example of like the breadth of content that you could access on. Perfect. To completely remove access to YouTube, I think is detrimental. I think that is A bridge too far but finding that middle ground. I know. That that really blew my mind. I was like taking away Instagram is one thing, but YouTube is a I think it I think YouTube you can't be logged in to YouTube. Um but you can still share, for example, videos on Discord or WhatsApp with your friends. Right? I think you can still you're talking about? I believe so, yes, yes. I'm talking about Australia. Well you're just not locked in. Or you just can't have an account. No, you can't have an account. I think that's that's the the restriction. That's meaningless. Well the ads. No, because the algorithm is the issue there. Because they're worried about how that and you know Maybe I'm just gonna throw something random here. Maybe we don't need the infinite scroll feed. Maybe we don't need it. Maybe it would be a ship. Maybe yes. That's the whole point. Maybe there's no way the social media companies are gonna get rid of it. So you know it's like what other choice is there? And there should be scientific consensus behind it before we this Leo. And I think it's very paternalistic to say Well, you people just can't be trusted with an algorithmic feed. So a brar no algorithmic feed for you is very paternalistic. There is also the potential that this backfires. I mean do you remember in the eighties when I think it was Gore's wife was behind the thing too to put you know par parental advisory stickers on albums. They'll put ship on your TV. Yeah. I didn't say algorithmic field uh feed, Leo. I said the infinite scrolling thing. Because that's been named a few times as a a cause. And you're saying there's no science I don't think that's true. I think there is, you know, a a a a growing corpus of scientific studies that show that it does affect uh it there's not a consensus yet, but I don't think to prove and uh uh I I think the problem is it seems right. But it's an impossible thing to prove because human beings are very complex and then what are you gonna do? You're gonna have a control how do you have a control group? You get the algorithmic feed, you don't. Uh and let's watch for twenty years and see if you go crazy. How is that how is that happen? Why not? Because you can't this is this is why uh uh nutritional science is messed up. It's very hard to do this kind of in vitro test in vivo testing with humans. Maybe we're taking the comparison too far, but if you're saying nutritional science is difficult, there are still things you can take away from you know what is good and bad industry. But how do you measure this this uh Well you know I got depressed because I was spending a lot of time on Instagram. I think you're belittling uh a a whole field of science that is, you know, psychology and s and and I think experts in the field are in agreement that there is no scientific basis for this. I don't think that's the case. I'll try to find a couple of studies that I've seen go on. But I but you know, when Jonathan Heights book came out, uh there was uh and I'll I'll find the article, a very w respected person who's studied this for years. This is her field. Who said no, there's no Consensus on this at all. That this is something that people feel is right makes sense. But see, I always think when science makes sense that and you say, Well that just seems sensible, that's when you're in trouble. That's right. So are you saying there's no issue and we should change nothing? No, I think it's okay to change things and I think there are ways to do it. I think there's a great risk Because of people's antipathy to technology. And that's what I want to defend. Uh there's a great risk that we will overdo it. And that we will do real harm. I think that the uh long term evidence in Australia is going to be that real harm happened, that there's a whole bunch of marginalized kids who have no social who now are, you know, completely cut off from the support groups that they had. There are many examples of things like this. And outside the cities where you know distance is such a big issue in Australia. Yeah. And I think they'll have access to Discord, they have access to WhatsApp. And they c have access to all of these sites without being logged in. I don't think they're like being But is that was that an intentional thing where we want to make sure that they have something? Or is it we just forgot to make that into No, I think it's impossible you'd need to block YouTube in the country if you want to do not. Can't be done is part of the is uh also part of the argument against it, and it's a huge violation of privacy because age verification has no way of being you know, you can't do that in a private fashion. That's true. It's another it's another issue, but I I will Uh uh admit that it's true. Um you're right. You know, you have consistently every time you're on have argued this and I and I I respect your position. I think your position is actually completely uh sensible and logical. I just think it's very we have it's a challenge to solve this. And I agree with you. And I think we shouldn't go too far. And there is a danger of going too far. It's just that we are, you know, among friends here. This is a safe space. And we can admit. Don't tell the other ones. Don't tell the legislators. Uh, but maybe there are some things we could change. I don't have TikTok. I don't have Instagram on my phone. I have taken all of that stuff off. I don't have Facebook on my phone. Yeah. Uh, the only reason I have X still on my phone is because it is the last place where I can really get Up to date AI news. And so what I do is there X now, thank goodness has a filter where you can say, I only want to see AI news. Or I only want to see the side. I have an account on all these things, but I don't use any of them. They're all taken off my phone because I spent too much time on them. I will say one last thing. Uh there's a report called the World Happiness Report Happiness Report. um that's done every year that ranks countries on many different uh, you know, criteria. uh that decides which is the happiest country in the world. That should be easy to measure, shouldn't it? I'm sure we're not on there. Yeah. Well it's it it relies on things like uh unemployment benefits and uh wages and social security, all of those things. Finland number one consistently for years. But there is about that. Do you agree with that? It's really interesting because they have a high alcoholism and suicide rate. Well that's due to certain things that happen. But it is the happiest place on earth. It's happy in the sense that uh well pe Finns are weird gay. If you take those criteria, you know, uh you're not gonna die if you get sick, you're not gonna uh uh g be thrown out of your house if you lose your job, these kinds of things. Yes. But there is a section about um social media. And the really interesting thing, if you're talking about science, you can go check it out. The really interesting thing is that they're saying, um Social media seems to affect people's uh uh enjoyment in general. If you consume too much of it. But If you consume uh like an hour a day, which is not m ridiculous, you are better off than if you consume none of it. Oh, that's interesting. And there are some social media that actually improve your uh well being. You too. The ones that connect you to people you don't know, like, you know, X uh reels, like the the ones that are al heavily algorithmic, are worse than WhatsApp. Okay, that's understandable. You talk to people you know. And Facebook. Facebook is actually because they put the emphasis on people from your family and from I don't really use Facebook, but I was very surprised because of course I'm like ah meta Zuckerbergs, hang him from a tree, bring out the guillotine. Of course I'm exaggerating. That's not what I say. But you see Facebook there and you have to think, okay, I understand the logic behind it. Maybe there's some So That report is saying Some social media, specifically some uh apps. Can uh make you happier and I'll stop monopolizing. Wait, can I present a quick counter argument to that? I actually don't like seeing people I know on social media because then I compare my life to them and I'm like, ooh, they're doing better than I am. But if I had somebody I don't know, then I'm like, Oh, they made me laugh. But it's all subjective, right? It's all like what do you enjoy seeing? Yeah, TikTok is an entertainment. It's like TV. It's like watching TV. It's like entertainment. So it makes me think about it. I watch a lot of TikTok. Fantastic. It's a so creative. And you know, I really don't want to give the impression that I'm anti. There's so much cool stuff. Like I watch theoretical physics videos on YouTube all the time. I watch TikTok way too much. Like I love it. I'm just Yeah, you know, I was watching the the uh chess the c chess uh candidates tournament is going on right now. You're never gonna see coverage of this on ESPN. But YouTube has excellent coverage of it. This is this is the road to the world championship. The winner of this gets to take on the world champion. It's very important to people play chess, but it's a very narrow slice of the population. But it's well covered on YouTube because You only need that narrow slice to succeed on YouTube. That's a blessing. You know, and I can I'm sure there's a million little narrow niches like that that YouTube serves beautifully. And God bless it. Uh, I think that more than makes up for any negative. you know, uh radicalization caused by YouTube and and things like that. Humans are problematic. We're never gonna keep humans from going bad. Yeah. They will go bad. The thing that bothers me with that argument is that then you you're The direct next step is well then we do nothing. Yeah, we can't talk about that. Well I don't say you can't touch it. If people decide as a group that they want to touch it, that's fine. But I think that there's a risk. And I think some of that risk is some is also some of the smaller non-giant companies who can't defend themselves in court who are also now threatened because of this decision. And that's another story for another day, because we have to move on. Thank you Patrick for asking me to bring this up one more time. No, it's an N it's it is a very important discussion. It's maybe one of the most important discussions in tech right now. Uh frankly the only uh person I talk to on uh instant messaging is my AI assistant. And he's great. He's my close personal friend. Never let you I'm so bad we've got a male one, but uh Yeah, he has a nice British accent and I call him Jeeves. And he's he calls me Sir. And puts a little butler hat on his messages. Actually it's a top hat. I don't know. It's a but what is a butler hat? I don't know. Jeeves being reborn. No, it as soon as I said well I like to call you Jesus said, Oh P G Woodhouse, I love him. It is a very smart AI. Even though it's from China. Um We're gonna take a little break, come back with more. There is a lot more to talk about. Patrick Beja. Thank you for bringing that up. I appreciate it.com. No, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Uh I think it's a very important uh topic. Uh Abral Hiti, always great to have you from CNET. And uh Ian Thompson. Uh where y where's your writing these days? I know you're doing the letter to a Yeah, I'm doing well we've actually after some potential copyright problems with the BBC, we're calling it View from the Valley now. No kidding. They they want even though how long has it been since Alistair Cook wrote his letter. I know, I know, but unfortunately it it's the anniversary of his death, so people got a bit twitchy. Um I did I did love it and I loved his you know. I I used to listen to it every you know every week and just sit there with the with the radio beside me and and the slim bed it was marvelous. And it was a homage to him rather than trying steal his thunder. But yeah, I'm doing a lot of work for the stack at the moment and PC Pro and various other titles. And there's always corporate writing to pay them pay the mortgage. The view from the valley is at tech finitive. That's right, yes. Yes. We should we should give you a plug for that tech finitive. Yes, headline this time, don't call it a war. But you know, Uh Yeah, what is it? It's a uh It's a military operation, apparently. That way they don't have to go to Congress for the war. Boy. Yeah, pretty much. Just drop it there. Uh more to come in just a bit, but first a word from our fine sponsor, this episode of This Week in Tech, brought to you by Rippling. Brand new sponsor. Welcome Ripling to uh to the family. One of the hardest things about running a startup, and you don't have to Ask me. 'Cause I know this for a fact. Back when we started up, it's easy to get distracted by I would call them low leverage tasks. Tasks you have to do, but don't have a huge payoff, like payroll. You gotta do it. In fact It was when I accidentally forgot to pay people that I really heard about this. Onboarding, new employees, right? Hardware setup. 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So founders can keep building. So if you or your startup want to move as quickly as you can. focus on what really matters, like your product, right? Or or your customers. You need Rippling. Right now, venture backed startups can get six months of Rippling Startup Stack for free. Head to Rippling.com slash twit. sign up today. That's r-i-p-p-l-g.com. slash twit to sign up for six months free today. Focus on what you're building and leave the rest to Rippling. Rippling Calm. Slash twit. So glad to have them. Helping us out here at This Week in Tech. Big story in the AI world uh this week. Claude Code's source code leaked. Everybody, you know, messing with that, trying to duplicate Claud Code, which is one of the hottest right now. AI coding, vibe coding tools is the one I use. Love it. Uh and then following that. Anthropic really got the open claw movement on their backs saying you can't Use your subscription. For anything but Clawed code and the Clawed app. You can't use third party apps. Essentially saying Open Claw can't use Clawed. You got a uh the subscription, you gotta use your API tokens. And this pissed off people. Of course OpenClaws uh creator Peter Steinberger works for OpenAI. He's been jumping on this. Uh, I want to I I want to defend uh Anthropic, the the creators of Claude. I understand why they did this. Uh a lot of us who use Claude were saying Claude is not so smart in the last few weeks. And it's because so many people Are using their subscriptions and using so many tokens for their agents that are running day and night Doing silly, stupid things. And uh and and really kind of nerfing Claude uh code. So I honestly think Anthropic was right to do this. Um immediately people noticed, yeah, Claude's working a lot better. This went into effect. Uh Actually uh April fourth, which was yesterday, right? Yeah, at noon east at noon Pacific. And immediately people were started reporting, hey. Cloud's working a lot better. Uh there were. They've got a perfect right to do it. Yeah, of course they do. But it yeah, that's really the the lesson of this. I mean, I don't want to get into the back and forth and everything, but the lesson of it is We've been kind of much as the internet in the early days, of course, we're running we're speed running this Internet, uh Life cycle with AI. Uh what was free is not. And it it wasn't tenable. And then people were using it so much with a subscription 'cause the subscription was close to unlimited use. Uh Anthropic had to do something about it. Yeah, 'cause the issue is that the idea would be that the subscription you would use for occasional, like when you're in front of the computer, or maybe you set off one agent to do something from time to time. But with OpenClaw, it's running all the time. So it is an over consumption of these tokens on For a company that just like all the other uh AI companies is not making a lot of money. I mean they're making money, but they're losing money on all of this. So it's completely understandable. And it's not like they're saying you can't use it ever. You just have your API key and pay for what you use. Exactly. Yeah. I also uh I think that it's also which is and this is a good thing, gonna move people towards uh local models, opens model weight models, less expensive models. I uh have been experimenting with a Chinese model, it's about a third the cost of a Claude um Max subscription and it's been it's doing very well, possibly because they trained it on Claw. That's what Anthropics says. Uh but it does a very good job. Uh I think this is good. I think this is this is gonna stimulate people moving in other directions. So I'm not uh anyway, it's a big story. I don't I don't know if there's that much to say about it, but how about Gemma? Can you can you run you can run open claw on on Gemma, right? You certainly could. It's not I here's the problem. There's nothing as good as Opus four point six. There really isn't. That Claude model is so good, Claude Code is so good. Although we have learned from the open the the leak of uh Claude source code that it has all sorts of bizarre things built into it. Uh some of which are you know designed to screw you up and make it cost more for you. Um I don't know if that's on purpose or a vibe coded bug. People been complaining about uh pod uh usage uh all week. And I think this kind of fixed it. So Anyway, uh you know, I uh maybe this impacts me more than others because I use Claud Code all the time. But I have I've been playing with a Chinese model and it works quite well. I tried Gemma. Yeah, it's good. It's not not great. There's nothing like Opus, unfortunately. What do you think of the um the leaked uh thing from the the code that uh shows they're developing a technique to basically give Claude infinite memory. This is the biggest problem in my mind right now with uh all AI is uh that it every time you start a new session, it starts from scratch. It doesn't remember anything you did before. And and it's like it's like Memento. It doesn't remember anything. But just like Memento, uh you can have your agent Uh make post-it notes. Write down its uh memories and uh I've been doing that. There are a lot of systems uh around. Everybody's trying to solve this uh problem. And that worked out for for the dude in Memento, right? I don't remember how did it end? Did it end well? Not well. Not well. Okay. He kind of misunderstood what was happening in the thing because it that's exactly that happens. So you create all these markdown files and then Claude when it starts up has to Get these shorthand versions of what happened before. So that's what they're developing, essentially. They're having your AI because of course people know, I guess, mostly, but uh the reason you have to start from scratch is that every time you add a question, the AI the the LLM has to go through your whole thread. to get back to and predict the the the next answer it's gonna give. So at some point the context window is full or it's using a little bit too too much too many tokens for to give you a uh one uh one answer. So If you can summarize everything you've ever told the uh assistant into something that fits into the context window, then it can remember everything. But how does that work? Like at some point you can't compress it anymore, right? It feels like It would hal hallucinate things or what what did they call it? I think there was a research paper on that where it was catastrophic memory loss or or some term like that. Um it can't remember Oh sorry. It can't remember everything you've ever said, right? Even with its dreams pro dream programs that it does at night to consolidate its memory. Actually that was one of the things we saw in the Claude uh code. Yeah, the leak. Yeah. It had it had this thing where it dream at night and try to consolidate its memories with people are trying to solve it. And there are you know I have a memory system. Uh that works pretty well. Uh Claude seems to know who I am every time I show up. It's a balancing act. But uh yeah, it's an interesting issue. OpenAI, of course, has announced that what one of the ways it's gonna solve this this cash crunch is well, first of all, they just raised a hundred twenty two million billion B dollars this week. The most the biggest raise in history. I mean there's it's there's nothing to compare to it. Uh and uh I guess they don't need to go public if they can get venture capitalists to keep pouring money into it. The Uber model. Yeah. But well there's an upside in there like a pony and uh there's an upside in there somewhere. Um Uh I uh a lot of people wondering w how long this can go on with open AI. And they in fact said, Well we're gonna cut we're gonna close down the Sora app, we're gonna focus Except I don't know how long that lasted because they just bought a podcast for hundreds of millions of dollars. Low hundreds of millions. Okay, well what is that? Two hundred probably. This is a this is a podcast that last year had revenue of five million dollars. Okay, so let's see, that's two I don't know, what is that? Two hundred million that's forty times a beta. That sound seems like a lot. Uh plus, of course, there's the issue of, well, if they're owned by OpenAI, are all those companies gonna Still buy ads, those ads that they were buying. This is the TBPN podcast, which is essentially uh CNBC for the um Nerd bros, the AI bros, the tech bros. And that was how it was uh pitched. It's daily, it's for four or five hours every day. Seventy thousand viewers. We have more people listening to this show every week than that. We have more revenue than that. I don't I don't know where It was Sam. Yeah, because Sam has appeared on that many times. He loved it. Yeah. Right. But what what are they gonna do with it? That's completely like do they wanna do they want the you know permission to train on it? Do they want like what's that but it's the point they can train on other settings. They don't need to buy us. They don't need to buy TBPN. I don't understand either. And they say they're gonna have editorial uh independents and they're gonna stay in Los Angeles. Which is only an hour away from Sam Ullman. I think they just want a media channel, right? They just want a media channel. Why? Anyway, a scary precedent. I don't know if we want more media owned by Yeah, it's bad enough. Podcasting is the last bastion of kind of independent non corporate Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah it's Do you wear Ray-band glasses? I don't. I'm not a huge um like champion of smart glasses. I love people who are really into it, but I'm like, I wear my boring contacts and I'm good to go. Like I don't need to see things as I'm walking around. Would it help that they now uh are making special versions for people with prescription lenses? I think that definitely helps them for sure. Um I know people who are like, if I could get my prescription Lenses on something like that. That's great. There are times where I'm like it would be nice to be hands free in recording video. Um or And there are new models that look a little less n dorky. Dorky. That's a good word. Do I look like a dor to you? No, I think this is this is very I like that. That's great. I do look very possible. Mine are the black, black ones. You know, they're great airpods or you know, earbuds. Yes. They're temple based and they sound fantastic. Because I don't like putting things in my ear. So that is really nice. The other thing too is Like meta ray bands and smart glasses in general are really great accessibility tools. So I really value them for that reason. That's a good point. Yeah. If you're blind or low vision, this could take a picture and you could say, What am I looking at right now? I could tell you what that can you read me that label. Yep. And even though Meta's AI uh is not the line at this point. Uh I think potentially. This is a good form factor at some point. Did they it's a lot better than the other stuff that we've the other, you know, heads up stuff that we've seen. Yeah. Did they sell them with just the speakers? Because that sounds cool. I I'd like those. Yeah, but the the camera's a big part of it because you can but that's also what people find offensive. Hey Meta, take a picture. You see the light comes on. Hey Matthew, take a video. We're kind of heading into glass hole territory though here because you know it's Well I don't know. There was that report. What do you mean, Ian? Talking to I like No, I mean you saw the report about um It's capturing stuff that really shouldn't be captured, like people having sex or going to the loo. Uh a friend of mine actually went to a hotel where the um check-in staff were wearing them and he's like, Can you take that off? Because I don't want you looking at my credit card When you're you know signing me in. So there are still privacy stuff to to to to be dealt with. I think it's a great form factor. It really suits a lot of people. Um yeah, get prescription lenses in there to open it up. They've all the uh Selor Luxotica. Mm-hmm. You know, which is everybody. Uh Luxotica are possibly the biggest unacknowledged monopoly out there. They own everybody up. Make billions out of selling basically pieces of plastic. It's a remark market business model. Then you have to get the lenses for another seven or eight hundred dollars. I mean it's Crazy. Yeah. But the form factor is definitely um something that is has huge potential for the next evolution of computing devices because Obviously if you're gonna use AI a lot, if you're gonna if you're gonna make a chatbot your computer human interface, if you're gonna replace uh Keyboard and mouse. Or touch screen by a chatbot, then all of a sudden you don't need the slab of glass and and plastic that is your smart smartphone. You don't need your keyboard and your mouse. So what are you left with? A kind of AI pin that you can pin on you? Or glasses. Something you put on your face. And the the glasses obviously have the advantage that you potentially have a screen or you know you have uh something you can see. And very good uh access to your voice and to your ears to, you know, give you feedback. I have for years seen this as the holy grail. It is I've worn all of the little You know, the pins and the bracelets and the things that record everything and I've had people yell at me for doing that, but my desire, especially as I get older, is to have something that is kind of recording my life, ingesting it in an AI so that I can query, I can get information, uh, I can have a dialogue with the AI without uh you know running over to my computer or opening up my phone I right now I could talk to my AI on Telegram and I do that. But uh I think having a ubiqu I want to be able to talk to my AI. I want it in the air. I want it to be there at all times. Is that nuts? Am I nuts? No No, I don't think so. Too nutty, she says, backing off slowly. No. Uh too crazy. So then are the do you think So the the glasses aren't enough for you is what you're saying. No, they are enough. Yeah. I but they have to connect I can't I don't uh meta is not enough. I I have to connect it to my own if I see this is that open claw thing if I and I don't think open claw is is is all all that, but the idea of an agent. This is the this is the year of the agentic AI, where you have an AI that has kind of a memory of you and knows about you and knows about your life and that you could talk to and you could query. We we we're moving moving towards that all along, right? I mean Siri and You know, uh talking to an AI and it it's more than asking what's the weather gonna be like, but saying what's my calendar look like. Um, what's the last time I call my mom? I I think I should probably call her. Stuff like that. Yeah. I think would be a ultimate form of computing. Yes. It's ubiquitous. Yeah. Which is why when we imagined compu you know, the ultimate computers a few years ago or a few decades ago, it was, you know, how And uh whatever other version of that it was. It's something that can render services and is accessible kind of in the ether. You speak to it, it replies. Uh, I think you're not at all crazy for for what you're gonna this is what we really want with AI. Leo, how do you feel about um like Google's in development smart classes? Do you have any Yeah. Or is that too limited in terms of finding Google products? Yeah. Uh, I would prefer it wasn't. I mean, maybe Apple would be the only big tech company I would trust with this. And I'm sure they're working on something absolutely I know they are. Yeah. Um Honestly though, what I really want is a a uh non platformed device that I can hook up to my own I bought a machine to run AI locally. I want to be able to do this all. For privacy reasons and for control reasons. Uh and for per because it's I want it to be as personal as possible. I don't want it to be Google's idea or Apple's idea or Meta's idea of what this should be. I want it to be how how I want it. So I want to run it on my own systems. So really I just need an interface device that I can hook up to my own systems, basically. And that naturally becomes the glasses. I think it's glasses. It could be an ear like uh you know, from her or the ear, but But the glass is and this is why the camera's important. It's yeah, it sees what you sees what you're exactly. Yeah. Well then. And can potentially show you stuff. Right. Yeah. That's right. Stevenson had a very interesting blog post this week where he was saying I was wrong about glasses 'cause he was a big proponent for glasses. Anybody wants to put something on their face. Yeah. He's not wrong. But he's talking more about VR helmets, right, isn't he? Yeah, that and and also the the uh the social aspect of it in the in that if somebody is using a phone, you can clearly see they're using a phone. If someone's using the glasses, even with a little light. And I remember when the original Google Glass came out, some people were deliberately covering up that light that showed that they were being you know, that the recording function was on. Which Honestly I'm not a violent person, but I would slap the damn things off their face if I saw that. Yeah, well that's the that's what worries me, especially if I go down to San Francisco that you might come over and Me. Yeah, but you guys are thinking too short term, like in in a decade, everyone has them. You just assume Uh you know, if they if they become as ubiquitous as smartphones then you assume everyone has them. I feel like even at this point. Yeah, even taking a walk around the block, you're like, How many people's ring cameras on my eye You know what I mean? Like if you're Waymo the Waymo's recording me as I'm crossing the street. You know what I mean? Like there's all these things. But can I point out something? It does seem like an invasion of privacy. But it's it's a double edged sword. U I don't think we would have known what happened to Alex Pretti or Renee Good If it weren't for the ubiquitous Smartphone camera. It keeps everybody honest, including law enforcement. And I I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing. Well, I think there's an argument to be made that yes, you have, you know, beneficial aspects to it. Public is in public. I don't think you should come to my house. Yeah, I agree with that, yeah. But you're in your public exposed. Yeah. You could be captured by anything at any moment, yeah, already. A lot of cities have like cameras everywhere. Yeah. Anyway. We have uh automated license plate readers now pretty much everywhere ALPS. And it turns out that is the real surveillance tool because when you're driving around you have a unique identification number. on your back and these every intersection, these cameras are picking it up. They know exactly where you are and what you're doing. I do think we need to be careful about like how far we take it. If I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit. Uh when you f everyone has a phone You can pull out your phone when something happens. It is a little bit different from Everyone is being filmed all the time, you know. Totally. No, and there need to be very strong safeguards. I mean we've seen time and time again we had the story a couple of weeks ago about the poor grandma who was uh taken to South Dakota because of a misidentification with face recognition. Lost four months of her life, lost her home. And uh with no apology from law enforcement who fingered her based on bad face recognition. Yeah. That was appalling. And that that is not the first time that's happened. But I think that was mainly down to police laziness. That's why we need regulations, right? No, no, I agree. I mean it was just like they said, Oh what the facial recognition is as you know if they gone into our bank accounts for just five minutes, they would have seen it was rubbish. She had that perfect alibi. She was not in the state. She was thousands of miles away. The fact that she was arrested and put in jail for four months is a tragedy to begin with, but the biggest issue is that You know, I I don't know if she can sue or if she even But her life was ruined because she couldn't pay her debts and she lost her house, as you said. And like that's even Like mistakes will happen. Like it's terrible, but kind of mista But when you realise that the the state or government should be liable to help her out. I guess this is a brand of mistake that's been happening though, is that no one checks the AI work. No one checks the AI's work ever. Right. Of course. Of course. Well let's take a break because I have some good examples. It's in our uh military section coming up. Great. There's a reason that the acronym FUBAR was made up in the military. Uh and Snayfu. Uh we have a wonderful panel. A and Thompson. It's great to see you, my friend. Oh, with a pleasure. Did you have a mustache or is that is that a Mandela effect? I I grew a mustache during lockdown. Okay. I kept it for about six months and I got so sick of having to strain tea out of it every time I took a bath full. And also it's just itchy and so much trouble. I kind of wish I'd grown a beard at the same time, but that's just not gonna happen. Yeah, I wish I had a beard, but I don't want to grow it. That's the problem. It's great to see you, Ian. Uh Brahiti. Great to see you as always, senior technology reporter at CNET. I think you never had a beard or a mustache just for that. No. No, how disappointing. Uh so Movember really isn't that meaningful for the just checking. Um What are you working on uh these days? What am I working on these days? You know, I don't even remember anymore. Um it's a blur, honest to God. I'm like, what did I work on? Did you go to Efa? Did you cover uh that or uh for Mobile World Congress? Yes, I did go to Mobile World Congress. It was very fun, but then I was I had to review the iPhone 17E and then the SAMSA Galaxy S twenty six ultra. So then I had to take a week off before I got it. Oh, you're exhausted. Yeah, yeah. But it was good. It was a good run. It was a fun time. Yeah. Do you does it get busy again in uh June? We've got Google IO and WW D C. Right, exactly. Starting May, June, it'll start to pick up again. So this is the time where I'm like, I can write all the things I want to write that I don't have time for the rest of the year. So I'm gonna try my best to do that. Yeah. So glad to see you. And of course, Brar also is a regular on Tech News Weekly. Oh, it's a good thing. The great Patrick Baj. Who s you've been on our show for it must be decades at this point. I think the first time was Was it Pod Media what was it? New Media Expo, P Media Expo, really? Way back when I think so. Oh two thousand seven, maybe? That's gotta be. That's really early. I I remember I got on in a car with Mark's Pagnolo and Nicole's Pagnolo, the wood whisperer. The wood I still have his beautiful cabinet that he made for me. And they drove me to well, their house, but also uh on the way we went from BlizzCon to the cottage. Oh, I think so. It has been that long. And I'm just sure. So that was the second time, I think. Four pages of appearances. with you. Going way, way look at this. Way, way, way, way back. Holy cow. I can find the first one. Let me go to Oh, that's gonna be embarrassing. No, no, no embarrassment. Everybody had a first on two thousand nine, episode two hundred and thirteen. That's later then. Oh, maybe it wasn't on the show when I went to Yeah, um You were on with John C Dvorak. John Graham Cumming, who was a CTO uh at Cloudflare for many years, and David Pogue, who's in the news again with his new book. I was on the show with all of these incredible people. Amazing. And you don't remember a word of it. Um I'll ask my uh AI agent to summarize it when I'm back next time. That is fantastic. Oh, and you can tell how old this is because The story links were at delicious dot com and there was a friend feed conversation. for this episode. Oh good Lord. Holy moon apology. That really was a while ago. Yeah, that's why Cumming was on. Yeah. He he uh good for him. John Graham Cumming got the British government Yeah, well he's now on the fifty pound notes. So you know? It's not gonna be replaced by a possum or something? Well yeah, they're they're talking about replacing them with wild animals, but you know, so it goes. There'll always be in England. That's all I can say. We like to keep it silly. Our show today brought to you by My Mattress. Oh man, nothing silly about a good night's sleep. It's kind of vital. I mean and honestly, we spent more than a third of our life on that mattress, right? 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Great deals at Helix Sleep. Slash It's a good time to go. That'd be a good thing for your tax refund. Get yourself a nice new mattress. Alix sleep.com Slash Twit. Thank them so much for their support This Week in Tech. Actually David Poe was on the Mac Break Weekly last Tuesday to celebrate Apple's fiftieth Anniversary, which is April first. He's got that book, Apple, The First Fifty Years, which is a Amazing book. Really, really amazing. It was so cool to hear hear him again after, you know, he can you believe the scene. Since two thousand nine you've been on our shows. That's nice. That's nice, Patrick. You know, twenty years from now, I'm brought be saying the same thing to you. I hope so. I look forward to I love it. Let's see. After sixteen years and eight billion dollars. The military's new I'll put that in air quotes GPS software still didn't work. Space Force last year, right before the Fourth of July took ownership. of a new GPA s navigation system. The Next Gen Operational Control System, or OSCX, was designed for command and control. Uh the militaries they have their own uh GPS, thirty GPS uh satellites. It was uh specifically designed to be jam resistant. That's been a big problem during the Ukrainian war, and I imagine now in uh Iran. GPS three, which started launching in uh twenty eighteen, these new satellites. Two master control stations upgrades to ground monitoring. The company that made it, former the former Raytheon, now known as RTX. was paid three point seven Well, wait a minute, I take it back. The contract was for three point seven billion dollars. It's supposed to be done ten years ago. Uh The official cost now Twice that, seven point six billion dollars. And it still doesn't work. The GAO, the government accounting office, uh found that the OCX program was undermined by poor acquisition decisions and a slow recognition of development problems. Situation normal all Messed up. This was a little concerning. Apparently, according to Fast Company, the Pentagon, for its high energy laser weapons, Uses Xbox controllers. It's not funny. And the submarine PlaySters myself, but okay. No, I mean it's use it's used in submarines as well, because the old submarine controllers used to cost an arm and a leg and they just decided let's use Xbox and the kids who are using them actually, you know are used to using them and are quite adept at doing so. But on the GPS thing, I would just would like to put a shout out to the land of my birth. Uh this week in great in the UK. They tested out quantum navigation systems which are based on fluctuations, you know, with within in within movement and are totally unjammable. So I think the US military has done bought it sometimes, does and spent an enormous amount of money on software that on a s technology system which is already outdated. Completely redundant and outdated. What a surprise. Happens in military spending. Like this is one example, I'm sure. Which is why we should uh give them the one and a half trillion dollars that's in uh President Trump's new budget. One and a half. Trillion dollars. Is that more than before? And they also for the war they want another two hundred billion after they have a trillion more than trillion dollar budget already. I have to file my taxes and this is not encouraging. No. The interesting thing is that every country around the world, or at the very least, uh around Russia has had to increase uh military spending. E everyone in Europe is increasing military spending. And uh I thought that you know I I say that without any uh political I don't know, preference or whatever. Um my understanding was that Trump wanted to decrease the intervention of the US and I'm not even talking about the Iran. Why does the military need more money as a well that's why we have other things with other fish to fry inside and outside the country. They're also spending on some really odd stuff like you know M one Abraham's tanks and if the war in Ukraine is tall as anything, it's tanks on the battlefield are toast. You know? It's like if you can knock them out with a two thousand dollar drone. then you know, spending a million bucks plus on a tank is just makes no sense whatsoever. Iran's Iran's missile blitz has taken out two data centers, uh AWS data centers. In Bahrain and Dubai, Amazon is c declaring a hard down status for multiple zones in the Middle East. And Google is also in in the firing line, according to the um Iranian Republican Guard. Uh if this goes on and they start hitting uh energy centers within Iran, Iran has said, Yeah, okay, don't say data centers and power systems are fair game then. And that's gonna make things really interesting. Um, because a lot of people are gonna get severely inconvenienced by it, let's put it that way. And a lot of tech people who are supporting Trump at the moment are gonna be like, hang on, let's just Ease this up a bit. And Iranian hackers who are actually quite good, um, are also going to war. This from the financial. Times Tehran's cyber operatives have sought to sow fear And extract intelligence in a series of attacks on Israel and Uh the US. Chris Krebs Who uh I like quite a bit. Former head of Cesa, the cybersecurity and information security agency. He of course was fired and is now being prosecuted by Trump for having the temerity to say the twenty twenty election was the most secure election in our history. Uh says uh the Iranians are throwing everything they have at this. It's all hands on deck. If cyber operators are breathing. The they will be on their keyboards. Oh, that's bad news. And of course, meanwhile President wants to uh take, according to the register, a battle axe to CISA. And slash Seven hundred seventy seven hundred seven million dollars from its budget. This is the Most successful US agency in terms of protecting us against cyber risks. And yet. Uh while we're giving the military another half trillion, we want to cut nearly a billion. of Cesus spending. Well I mean this is um Leo, you and I were both at R SA C this year. And I don't know if you saw the they had four ex heads of the NSA on a on a panel. Wow. And it was fascinating because they were saying uh this is we need to be spending more on this than we've ever spent before because this is where our adversaries are going. um and the ability to take down systems. You know, we've demonstrated in Venezuela and Iran, but the rest of the world is also ready and prepared. And cutting s over seven hundred million from Cesar's budget seems ridiculous. It's certainly poorly timed. You know, the the fact that Iran hackers are getting ready to do things is not surprising. Um any administration that would prepare for a military conflict um with any nation of that Ilk would be prepared for this. And I think these days especially, right? This is how war is waged. Absolutely. Um So the really concerning thing here is that W it doesn't seem again, I'm trying to not be I I don't like Trump. But I'm trying to look at this objectively. There doesn't seem to be um a coherent, a cohesive strategy or preparedness. I think this goes beyond politics. This is not political dogma. This is not a battle the right and the left or Republicans and Democrats. This is just nonsense. This is just Poor policy. Right? Yeah. We lost you. We lost your audio. your cat knock your No no it's just uh the sure the sure uh volume thing is a pain in the back side. Um no the um this is something that Mike Rogers said in the panel was he was asked will the next war be primarily about Missiles about boots on the ground or about cyber. And he was like, Well, all obviously, but cyber is gonna be a much more important role role on this going forward. Um and you know, there's no way we can ignore this because anyone we're gonna be going up against won't ignore it. So You know, you've got to be prepared. Which is like the military, but the military has heavier artillery. And they have a better saloon. Yeah, please. Um you're very strong. Start saying some dumb things. And continuing to say dumb things. You're all very concerned about this. I'm gonna be like the agitator who's being annoying. Um you're all very anno concerned about all of this and hackers and Cesa being cut and all of this. If there at some point in the next five five to ten years or twenty years there's gonna be an issue with Taiwan. China and there's gonna be an issue with China. Oh. many Chinese made routers do you want in the US? when that happens? Or would you rather, through a long and painful process, I'm really working for the uh Trump administration decisions there, uh, through a long and painful process to start a a a situation where routers are uh made in the US and y you're uh uh country has more control over them. Of course I'm referencing the fact that uh raptors made in the in China have been banned uh in the US. Not just China. Routers made anywhere but the U S have been banned. Even French routers are banned. Oh that's that Okay. That we have so many routers. I I don't think we have a lot of American We don't have any. The only one that I know of that's made in America is is guess what? Elon Musk's Starling. That's the only route in the US. At this point, but you need to start somewhere. Well we should start. Get going fast. By the way, this doesn't eliminate Any router you've already purchased, you can continue to use it. Yeah. And you all know how long routers stay in operation. I mean some of these things are twenty years old. I was when I was at RSec, uh, I went over to the Ubiquity booth 'cause I thought uh but I really liked it. This had just gone down. uh the the FCC's ban. And I went over to the Ubiquity booth and I said, Well, um does this impact you? And they said, We're not talking to the press. Go away. Go away. I've been surprised by uh what I think is not insignificant amount of American manufacturing uh in the tech sector. happening since Trump is has been forcing it. Um and maybe I'm, you know, being I think that's by the PR of Apple and whoever. Apple says we're gonna make everything here, and they've got one factory that makes it tiny. Most of the parts that are made in that US factory are made in China. They import the parts and they assemble them. Yeah. What happened over the last two decades is we have exported our manufacturer, especially high tech gear. Oh, I've read Apple in China. I've I know all about this. Yeah. It's a great book. I've read one book, so I'm an expert. Well, but I think it wasn't just Apple. This was this is the story of all the tech sector. Uh China became our and and this was, by the way, Chinese government policy. This was they were very aggressive. Supporting this. They wanted this business and they became the the manufacturer for the world. And the US was uh supporting this as well on the governmental level because they thought op China is gonna open up and capitalism will do to China what it did to, you know, other people. But Okay, that's happened, but if you want to bring back manufacturing in the US, I remember uh who was it, Steve Jobs who was talking to Obama who was like, Those jobs are gone. They're never coming back. Um And it does seem like you do have more CPUs. uh coming out of American factories now building T S M C seems like crazy, yeah. Um and like High end CPUs like what is it? Three two nanometers? Coming soon. And of course they they are being sent to China for assembly. So it doesn't you know at this point doesn't have to be a devil's advocate, you know. Some of that is in response to the fact that There is some concern about China invading Taiwan. And uh so we may lose, in fact, uh T SMC, which is a Taiwanese We may. There was there was a paper in the National War College, uh, which there was their most read paper, I think, of twenty eighteen, that said that in the event of war with China, the Taiwanese are going to destroy their chip fabs, and if they don't, we will. Yeah, we can't let them have them. Yeah. I'm sure they're rigged with C4 everywhere. Like they they can't let have the the Chinese have them. I'm I again I'm an expert. I've read one book, and I'm certain They're they're with C4. Well and you know you have a point. I mean the routers are how we all connect to the internet. The number one router in America, forty percent of all routers in America are made by one company, a Chinese company called TP Link. Uh for years Wirecutter recommended it as the best router that carried a lot of weight. A lot of people have TP link routers. They are made in China. I guess firmware updates come from the company in China, and in theory a firmware update could be Injected that was malware and Yeah, there'd be a lot of I mean, that would certainly be a vulnerability. I mean I'm curious what the rest of the panel thinks this. If China did start in you know in making moves to invade Taiwan, and the Chinese responded by shutting down, for example, ATM network networks in the US or power networks or water networks Would the American public really give that much for monkeys about Taiwan when they've got so many problems on their own plate? I personally think this is what the Chinese will be banking on. Well, and in fact, if you really want to leverage your hacking ability, you would do what China has done with salt typhoon. You would invade our telecommunications networks. You would invade our power grid. My personal home router is not the first thing you're gonna hack. I mean, yeah, maybe you will. It might be a little bit farther down the list, though. Uh And I don't know if we've done a whole lot. Tele the tele the US telecommunications companies have said, Yeah, we can't do anything about salt typhoon. We would have to rip and replace everything. The phone network would be down for a few days while we did that, they say. So they're not doing anything about it. So but meanwhile we've got to bear the brunt. Now the good news is our audience is smart and I bet you a a third of you have already made your own routers. You could do it with a Raspberry Pi, you could do it with an old computer, you could do it with a Nuk. It's uh simple enough. You could turn practically any computer into uh a router. There's Open source Linux distributions that are designed to be routers. There's some very good ones like PF Sense. Uh it is a simple thing to do. And if you search online, here's one article from Noah Bailey, how to turn anything into a router. Potato into a router. Maybe you can. I don't know. Is that you? Yeah, yeah. Uh oh. Okay. Oh. Oh. We've lost Ian. He hasn't no, he hasn't muted his mind. I'm sorry. I uh heard somebody moving around in the house. My wife is supposed to be out at the moment. So is it your wife or do you need to do we need to arm you here? Uh no, no. This is a second amendment house, but even so I just heard people moving around. So like But uh it's next to the front door, which probably means I'm more likely to get bopped than they are. I'm thinking. Yeah. Right? Lisa won't let me have a gun, she says What are you gonna do with a gun? Well I'm a pointing at a bad guy. She said, they're gonna take the gun and shoot you. You don't This is not a good idea. On the other hand, you can unrab it with a nice rifle and rabit is terrifically expensive over here, which I just don't understand. Nobody wants that everywhere. Rabbit. What do you must be British. You the rabbit for bubble and squeak or something? One of your weird British Rabbit and Bacon Stew. I mean come on, pan. Yes, yes. There are very few things I will support a British person uh uh uh the when you but rabbits can be eaten. This is Easter and you're talking about eating rabbits. That is what says anything about rabbits and chocolate. Everybody knows in Easter you eat ham, okay? Come on. It's a casoule is one of my favorite dishes, and I know that often has rabbit. There you go. Yeah. But Leo for your break-ins, at least hopefully they don't happen, but you'll have your meta ray bands on and then. I will while I get bopped. Yes. I'll have a rebound. We will know who bopped you. I have you'll be like, Meta, but film, film, film this film this. Call the police. Call the police. We have so many cameras around the house that if the we will have a complete record of them. Coming and going. Oh, they will come in through the the cat door. Maybe. They'll they won't ring the doorbell like the cat does. Okay. All right, let's take a little break while you go out and buy a uh old computer to make your new router. You know what, they talk about victory gardens, people planting gardens. There's all sorts of things people do in times of of strife and And warm. But for us geeks. Building our own router. Sounds like a good project. It's not hard. You can do it. Yeah, it's cool. You can do it You know, I used to think that we were the my parents' generation was the last one that would need their children's help to do tech things. Um It's yeah, because what's happening what's happen with tech for us is what was happening with like car mechanics for our parents generation. I don't know how a car works. I really don't care. And the kids today are the same with with computers and stuff. So I don't know how many people are gonna build their router. Build your own router. Hold your ready. Start learning. Okay. When China invades Taiwan know how to make your own router. Make your own router. It'll be too late though, right? 'Cause they won't have access to the internet anymore. Oh yeah, that's true. That's the first thing they do. Your routers irrelevant. No, they f we you know only make and buy American made routers. Okay, we're gonna have victory gardens for routers. Patrick, when it okay, let are we ramping up the big router manufactur. Is there any margin even in routers? Is there any They did the same thing with drones, by the way. You can't buy foreign made drones in the United States. Yeah, but people don't need drones. You need routers. Yeah, that's true. Um Well I mean I don't know I don't know that it's even, you know, being voted in or put in place in good faith. Like maybe they just wanna get Elon Musk's uh routers to you know, sell three hundred. I don't know. But you know, there are things like, for example, um something something you might not know about, um, Europe is now kind of wary of uh Visa and MasterCard. We are switching over our payment systems from Visa and Mastercard to uh American no. Uh among others. Well, France has CB, which is carte bleue, which is another name for uh and it and we've had it. It's kind of like the you know our our aircraft carriers and our uh nuclear plants. We've had it forever. Everyone was like do you need C B for? Most people didn't even know what it was. And like people in the government were like, don't you know, we just Trust us. At some point. We're gonna want that. Yeah. You we're gonna need it. So people now have it. Is that what's happening? Is Vizer MasterCard are going away and and They're not going away, but C B is actually it's it's actually on every single credit card that we have. It has to have C B. Uh so it's kind of a foresight. Finanction and now yes, it's a payment system that is handled by French uh entities. And now you can uh select on your like Apple Pay, for example. You could always could select either CB or Visa. on you know payments on uh internet services and stuff like that. I never knew what it was. I never knew the difference. Now I do. But even on Apple Pay, you can select for your credit card if you're gonna go through Visa or MasterCard or whatever or CB. And so if At some point Not even, you know, Visa decides they don't like the French, but like the government, the US government says Visa is an American company, American payment system. You cannot You know, uh uh do business with the French because they stink. Well, we can just switch over to C B and we're fine. Cheese eaters. Yes. And so I like this because for a long time Europe's been getting more and more like America. Like it's not, you know, it's no different anymore. You got the McDonald's, you got your Kentucky fried chickens. So it's going back. Let's make uh Europe weird again. I think this is good. I think this is good. It's so weird. We have like all kinds of cola. We have like Brescola in Brittany. We have like all kinds of apple juice. Yeah. I would much rather we just, you know, traded with everyone and about all of this. Uh and didn't have to increase military spending everywhere. It would be because at some point we're gonna someone is gonna want to d do something with it. If schools had all the funding we need and the military had to have bake sales. Yeah. I mean uh Patrick is Minitel still operational? No I I don't think somebody brought me a minitel terminal, by the way. I wish I still had it. Oh Minitel was amazing. It like it brought Communicate I I I we have to explain what it is now. The French government phone books with a digital tool. And this is before there was AOL. I mean this is way, way back. It was like in the mid eighties and it wasn't just a phone book. It actually had the infrastructure for uh like online services. It was inspired by what was happening on BBSs and stuff like that. And they had great a great design idea, like design not just the device, but the entire service at the French uh post and telecom company at the time. And uh so they designed this terminal, which had kind of an integrated keyboard and a screen and would connect to a you know low uh speed modem. to your network, it would use up your phone line just like Modems did at the time. It was video text. Was the interface. Yeah. And and so you would uh connect to there were different n phone numbers. There were different models. One of them had a like collapsible uh um uh keyboard. And you would connect to different services that were different numbers, which had different kinds of prices, and then you would log into a sp you would connect to a specific Service. There was a lot of chat. uh services happening, some of them, you know, uh uh not for children. Did everyone have one? It was just like in every many, many people. Yeah. It was it was a very widely successful. Like it was imagine eighty, what was it? Eighty four it started, eighty five, maybe as a Yeah, the first mini tell was at eighty two. It's Wikipedia. Yeah. Um I'm sure it got popular a little bit later than that. But that but it was like Predates Prodigy. I mean this was like Prodigy, but it was uh Everybody had the the young people like us which we get our or you know, make our parents crazy 'cause we'd use it was very expensive, you know, to connect. uh and it we'd use up the phone line and it was like a place to meet people who would like watch the same anime that we did or play video games. It was amazing. It was amazing. So Mamma So are the utilisé le téléphone. Arrête. Maman, raccroche. Raccroche. So the people who learned how to type on this thing, did they all get all mad when we switched to Quirty? No no France still has a Zerti. We still have a Zerti, yeah. Yeah. That's the French keyboard. I know it looks a bit weird, doesn't it? Uh uh uh bro, you were at some at uh Mobile World Congress, which used to be three GSM down in in v in in Cannes. And the press room was with French keyboard and everyone other than French journalists got in there and just like letters here in the dishes W E R T Y it was A Z. Yeah, but you're still having to look down and do like finger, finger, finger, finger, More normal. Yeah. And the the worst part of that is that a lot of uh video games don't account for French keyboards. So you launch the game and it's still QWERTY but ZQSD are not Yes, exactly. Crazy. And the numbers are upside down too. Oh yeah one, two, three, four, five. Nine. How fascinating. Like a phone it's like a phone on this one. Yeah, I think maybe that was only the minute L. May maybe the the number pad is uh But I think every computer should still have an envoi. Keep up button. But it was it was really cool. Like it and it was very French or like in the way that it was a very top down national company thinking up how can we bring this technology to the masses. I mean I know it used the phone line, but it was kind of like The phone. It was a BBS essentially. Yeah. And and you had like uh numbers that you would call that were very expensive, like a couple of bucks per minute. uh and especially the the like my generation remembers the ads for certain services um that were on those very expensive uh numbers you would call And there were like it was organized like forums from back then where you had like users who would become uh moderators and administrators and like it was the it was a whole thing. It was there were at the end of the nineties, nine million mini tail terminals. twenty five thousand mini tail services. But then the internet came along, right? And it was kind of superseded. You didn't need it anymore. As of this article, which was uh on the in in the independent in twenty twelve, so it's fifteen years ago. There were still eight hundred thousand old people in French France using their mini tel 'cause they didn't like computers. Yeah, I think it's been shut down since By now it's gone. Yeah. But of course the when the internet uh started showing up, of course you know, we were All in to the internet immediately. We have the internet at home. But um needed. Yeah. But it was like to in the nineties, like I got on the internet quite early because I had it at university, but uh in the nineties I would say ninety seven, ninety eight. What really happened was that in the early two thousands, I think it was a company called Free. which was a um mobile uh uh sorry a uh uh internet service company. Uh phone operator actually got their service which was actually free. You would connect to the Internet. It was uh you know, uh um ISP. That was free. And it turned into a huge, huge company that is now mobile operator and ISP and everything. And that really popularized it. Well we're getting a little tour of uh French culture today on uh Twips. It's nice to have you, Patrick. Appreciate it. Our show this uh this hour brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert since nineteen eighty five. Spring is here. I love spring. It's the season for tidying up closets and garages and Yes, your customer data. Because in most organizations data doesn't stay clean for long, just like your closet. Input constantly change. Pipelines get fragile, technical teams end up spending more time fixing data problems than building new systems, and that's not good. That's the challenge Melissa set out to solve with Unison, their new data quality platform. Unison bridges the gap between automation and flexibility, giving data stewards the tools to manage and improve data quality, freeing technical teams to focus on core systems. 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In tech Uh I'm probably bringing this to the wrong group. Have you uh are any of you baseball fans? Why am I bringing this? Yes, Patrick? I have been to a baseball match once. Oh yeah, I've been to one, but that's all you do. I was very confused. They've changed something in baseball this year that is very interesting. Uh you know, of course Uh video replays have come to other sports. Do you have it in uh soccer? Is there a uh uh back up for the referees for in soccer? I know in football we have that. The No, we we we have it in the UK for football, yes. Yeah um Or soccer if you like spa. One of the biggest judgment calls there's a lot. Umpires have a lot of you know, leeway in the game. Is that balls and strikes. Getting that ball in a very narrow zone across the plate makes it a strike. Outside of that zone is a ball I'm not gonna explain the rules of baseball to you though. Okay. What's the name throws the ball in an area and then you have to bet it. And of course the umpire's sitting there behind the plates and judging whether that ball did that or not, often wrong. It's a it's a source of a lot of discussions on the baseball field. Well now they're using for the first time this season Computer measurement. Spotters. But There are real limits on how you can use it. The batter, if the batter disagrees with the call the umpire gave, he can tap his helmet. And that is a signal that he doesn't he thinks he thinks that that called strike wasn't a strike. And uh then they go to the video call. Uh Uh machine. And they challenge it. Now if they get the challenge wrong, you know, there's consequences and stuff. Yeah, that was That was a strike, uh right within the thing. Um They call it the automated ball strike system or ABS. And uh it is r it is really interesting 'cause how it's changed. You know, the game a little bit. But you can't use it too much. You have to use it uh very Judiciously. Why don't they just do this on every pitch though? Why why isn't this on just every pitch? Because Well that's right. You know, in tennis it's on every f foul line call, right? Well, yes, but that went badly wrong Wimbledon when the first introduced it because it kept on getting things wrong. Well, also some line judges were just like care what the computer says, I say it was out. So you know it's right. You've got to deal with the human thing. I do like the idea of a human being able to say, actually I don't think that's right. I I think there is the the drama is part of the experience and I mean the drama of It adds drama to the game when you go Well no that's not I think you know if the thing happens and then I uh that's part of the criticism in in uh soccer, in football, I think, but If like You score a goal, everyone's happy, everyone's running around and but then no, wait. Okay, wait. We have to check with the video. That's bad. It really slows the game. Wait. Y Okay, okay, you can be happy now. I know that's very annoying. This baseball I think they're right. They say you teams can have unlimited challenges, but the you only get to be wrong twice and then you can't do any more challenges. For the rest of the game. So that's a good thing to do it. So you don't have these infinite. Formula One could do with something like this because the Stuart's decisions of the last couple of years have been absolutely terrible. So he and I are f are Formula One fans and we are also going through a drought because there were two races scheduled for the month of April. One in Bahrain and one in Saudi Arabia. I might those not canceled yeah. The place to have a lot of people gathered in one spot. No. No. So we're going through a drought till uh May. What do you think of the new rules, uh Ian? Are you enjoying it? I can't say politely, but uh sorry, I can say politely. You're a traditional swear I think they're bloody. Oh, I'm really. Yeah, 'cause you see in racing. No, you don't know. There are some problems. I understand. You know Formula One is foot to the floor racing, not going slow to recharge your battery and then get a Mario Kart boost at the end of it. You know, Oli Behrman nearly slammed into the back of another car at the last race. Yeah, that was the same. Because the he was travelling fifty miles an hour faster than the car in front. Because he'd used his magic mushroom boost. And yeah, that sounds interesting. That sounds interesting all of a sudden. And it's gonna be a banana. It's gonna be great. I can't wait. It's gonna change. Well, Manx Verstappen has officially been asked apparently to stop referring it to the as m as Mario Mushroom mode. Um but they're gonna have to make some changes before Miami because it's dangerous on the track. That's the real problem. Yeah. Um but also racing. It's it's formula one, it's car racing. It's supposed to be foot to the floor, balls to the wall, and get out there and go as fast as you possibly can. Not super I mean, the Formula One Association made a huge mistake. When they put out on social media um Kimi's fastest lap from The Last Race. Apparently oh the camera died while he was recharging his battery because it was just like Well, we've just checked his feed and it definitely didn't, so you know sorry, my formula one nuts, so Yeah, I shouldn't have brought it up. Yeah. How do you feel about baseball though? Colorado uh lawmakers uh are uh uh tr uh have a past a right to repair, a landmark right to repair. Law. In fact, many states are now working on right to repair But Uh There is uh tech companies are not too happy about this, which is strange. You would think they would like The notion of right to repair. You would think. You would think. Yeah. You won't buy a new one though, but you won't buy a new one though. Yeah. Yeah. There's a new bill in Colorado, the exempt critical infrastructure from right to repair bill. Which would modify the right to repair uh bill, which was passed two years ago and went into effect January of this year. Uh Cisco and IBM support this exemption. Uh and by the way, Cisco makes routers as well as uh other equipment. They cite cybersecurity concerns, saying that giving people access to tools and systems they would need to repair a device could also enable bad guys to To use those methods for nefarious means. Well I interviewed Croy Doctor about this and he was like they're saying any router is therefore a national security piece because it could possibly be used by the military. Uh I I I'm presuming IBM has the same same example. And you know it's rubbish. If it's a specific router used Exclusively for national security, you could kind of see a point, but this is blatant lobbying against a very good bill indeed. It seems like right to repair is, you know, one of those ideas and concepts and laws that are difficult to oppose with a straight face. And yeah. I think the lawyers are being paid very, very much to one of the most American things to be able to fix your own stuff. It's fundamental. So you own it, you should be able to fix it. It also kinda runs counter to like the whole sustainable sustainability measure that companies always talk about. They spend at least ten minutes of every keyno talking about how sustainable they are. And yet you s you can't easily repair the device that you've bought. I don't know. No. I mean, even when Apple introduced their repair kits, they were phenomenally difficult to use, very expensive. And it's also a security risk. I think Cnet's covered this, but also other publications. At one point, farmers in the US were downloading Ukrainian control software. Well they had to, right. Yeah. So they could do the commercial harvesters. Which is just bonkers. You know, it's like Just for one sensor going out which measures the height of the combine harvester. They had to wait for a week or so for somebody to turn up and fix it. Which at crop harvesting time is is Catastrophic in some regards. So it makes perfect sense that people should be able to repair their own kit, but There's money to be made and this is America, so let's stall this as long as possible. I I think there's like uh maybe you could go from The default. being you can't repair stuff to the default being you can, and then you can apply for or you have cases where it's important to not be able to you know to not let the user repair it themselves. Maybe there are cases that can be made. But Right now it's the opposite, and I think that's or it's a free for all, and I think that's not to the benefit of society. No. No, I mean it's um it's kinda like with cars. If you've got one of these plugs that uh the data ports for your cars I bought one online and it's really interesting going in there and just seeing what's going on in your engine. I'm not gonna suggest that I would even try to repair it, because I know I'd brick our car in a second. But it's it's nice to be able to talk with a mechanic and say, Yeah, we've got this fault, this fault, this fault gets everything done so much faster. Uh, let's take one last break and then uh a a potpourri, a grab bag of stories that I couldn't figure out how to put them in. A single heading about that. Ian Thompson, Abrar Al Hiti, Patrick Beja, great to have all three of you. Great to have you watching, uh, especially our club members. Thank you for your support. We appreciate it. Makes a big difference. If you're not a club member and you don't want ads. There's an easy way to do it. Go to twit.tv slash club twit, join the club, get ad-free versions of all our shows, plus access to the Discord and all the special Programming we do. uh in the club to discord like this friday our AI user group. We have some really Good stuff going on in that AI user group. Uh people in the club who are using AI in very interesting ways, very smart. People, if you're interested, we would love to see you this Friday. or AI user group. And if you're not a member of the club, join twit.tv slash This episode of This Week in Tech is brought to you by our sponsor, ExpressVPN. A few decades ago, private citizens used to be private, right? What's changed? The internet. Think about everything you've browsed, searched, watched, or tweeted. Now imagine all that data being crawled, collected, and aggregated by data brokers into a permanent public record, your record. 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It's that easy. Optional dedicated IP service engineer with innovative zero knowledge design, not even ExpressVPN, can trace an IP address back to the user. Secure your online data today. Visit expressvpn.com slash twit. It's EXPRESSVPN.com slash twit. ExpressVPN.com slash I'm excited about this. You know, I use uh Starlink. 'Cause it's really was the only option. In fact, uh I just got a little mini I'm hoping I can use on our uh vacation. Well Amazon's Got a competing service named after me, which I make makes me really wanna use it. It's called Leo. Okay, it's not named after me. It stands for low earth orbit, I think. But anyway. Uh the Leo service, Amazon's apparently thinking about buying Global Star. To enhance their satellite uh service and Starting uh in a couple of years they're gonna be putting it on Delta's uh airplanes. You know, Starlink is used in a lot of airlines right m right now. But I it'll be I will actually try to fly Delta to uh to use it. No, it's not till twenty twenty eight. Five hundred Delta aircraft. Be very interesting to see if Amazon can create a competitor for Starlink. That would be good for everybody. Keep the prices down. Competition is always good. Yeah. Plus also Delta has now apparently introducing live flat seats in the economy, which is just like No, I think it's United. Oh that's United. Yeah, they've got a little But you know what? The picture they showed Well it's two very short people. We one of the club things we do is with travel guru Johnny Jett. And he's actually seen it. And and we looked at the picture and the thing is it you know how wide a three seed across economy If you thought you could lie down Cross that. And and you can, then you're in luck because what they're gonna do is have a little fold out thing that makes the seat you know about the Sebrar. Did you go to the event? Did you see it? No, I didn't go to the event, but I am uh United is the the plane that I I was flying or the uh the airline that I was flying. Would you pay extra because you have to buy the whole row for this. You have to buy the whole row, which makes me wonder how expensive would it be. But was it three seats or was it four seats? I feel like in my mind I thought it was four, but I could be wrong because I can definitely lie down on a four seat and I've done it I could like when I get lucky, yeah, and there nobody sitting next to me. I had one on an international flight and it was fantastic. I don't want to know about you getting lucky in and there. Let's see. Let's see. This is this it's looks like three seats. Here's here's some Johnny Jets. And you see they have a little thing that folds up. Then the picture of people in it, it's a little deceptive because well the mom is all curled up and the child fits very nicely. Right, it is three seats. See, that's that's different. Yeah. Yeah. That's not great. And I uh United says it's it's for families traveling with small children, solo short solo travelers. But this is the one that gets me couples who want the value of United Kong. Couples really? Here's Johnny Jett attempting And he's not a he's five ten. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if you need that much space kind of going going. in that direction, you just need more leg room, really. Plus you're gonna get your toes clipped off when the cart comes down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, my biggest question is the cost because you've just Uh, two other people can't buy tickets. And so How much are you going to have to foot from that bill? Um to make that work. But yeah. But you know what? They're getting a lot of attention for it. It's nice to see them. Yeah. It's a good option. Yeah. For families. Absolutely. But to the um Starlake point, I know that United and other airlines have added, you know, Starlake and hot tape. It's a lot better. I've I've used I used Starlink on a Hawaiian Airlines flight and it was great. But I my favorite thing about flying is the fact that nobody can access me and I can't access anybody. So I'm kind of torn where I'm like, do I really want to be on the grid all the time? If only it were true. Otherwise United has terrible Wi Fi if there's no Starlink. So I'm kinda like I got used to it. I'm like, oh okay, I can't talk to anybody. It's great. So for the exercise. I don't want to give Elon my money, but It works, right? It works. Yeah. Other airlines already do this exercise thing where you can buy out your robe and it really like The Philip Philippine Airlines does. I know that because I fly from the Philippines. And you can buy out the whole row for I think it's an extra I think it's three hundred dollars. Oh okay. For an international flight, that's pretty good, yeah. Now you see, I remember travelling on French Railways and doing a Urail pass in the eighties. I don't know if they still do this, Patrick, but it used to be that the seats in where you had six seats in an economy class carriage, they could actually fold into one and you get a full lie down bed. And that was amazing. But you're really sleeping in public. Well yeah, but on the other hand, when you're a penniless student going round in Europe, compared to a hotel room, there's a marvelous train that goes from Paris on a big loop and gets you back, leaves about midnight, gets back about six A. I've just saved myself a hotel cost for the price of a train ticket. I always take red eye flights too, so I love the idea of being able to sleep on public transportation, yeah. Yes. It's uh I can't sleep on planes, but yeah. I think it's I for some reason and I think it's terror. I fall asleep as we're taking off every time. That's the worst time to fall asleep. It's the best time. It's so relaxing. It's soothing when you're taxiing and then you just do. Yes. So it's not just me. Oh nice. You'd look in other people's windows, you fall asleep when we take off in planes. Exactly. I did a year as I did a year as the editor of an aviation IT magazine. It's the worst time to fall asleep because eighty five percent of accidents occur in the first three minutes and the last year. Wouldn't you rather be asleep when that happens? No, I'd rather have my shoes on and to be ready to run run to the nearest emergency exit. You know They always know when there's been an airplane accident 'cause the shoes rain out of the sky. You lose your shoes. It's the first thing you lose. Oh. Did you know that? No. I didn't see that on Lost, so I don't the very first. Watch closely, they're all getting off the plane with your shoes. It's not just that people took off their shoes, so the shoes fly out, but the people who do have that their shoes are ready to You're supposed to take your shoes off before you jump on the thing though. You're supposed to take your shoes off before. You are you're supposed to take your shoes off 'cause you don't want to puncture people who got some lato heels that puncture the I will never forget the first trip I took with my publisher and I was just wearing standard running shoes or trainers as we call them. And I uh sort of I've been I'm I was gonna be sitting next to this guy for fourteen hours on a flight to Jakarta. took one look at my shoes and he went, big mistake Ian. You'd always wear leather on an aircraft. those things will stick to your feet if you've got to run through journey burning jet fuel. Oh my God. Oh for goodness sake. This guy's planning. He's thinking ahead. Yeah. Oh my God. Those are terrible for burning jet fuel. So great. What kind of disaster mentality is that? It sounds like a pleasure to sit next to. Oh, he was a very unusual person, I'll put it that way. Uh congratulations uh to uh uh Gilles Bressard, which sounds like a French name to me. Uh IBM Scientist Great chap. Yes. He figured out a way to create current well, he was looking for a way to create currency that could not be forged. Decided to use quantum Physics. Uh, actually I'm sorry, Gill Bressard was a physicist Who is swimming in a pool. Thinking about this when a guy named Charles Bennett physicist from IBM Research swam up And came up with this notion of using quantum computing. This is A long time ago. Before quantum computing really was a even in a twinkle in the eye, this is in nineteen seventy nine. Anyway, Bennett has now won Turing award the uh twenty twenty five AM Turing award the Nobel Prize of Computer Science along with Gilles Brassard. Who is a uh actually French Canadian professor at the Universite de Montréal. A one million dollar prize like the Nobel Prize. First time the Turing Award has recognized quantum research. So I don't know what like cryptocurrency? What is this for? What what's this about? No I don't know. Uh, the idea he pitched as they swam would eventually become the only practical method for sharing encryption keys with security guaranteed not by mathematical complexity, but by the laws of physics itself. This is according to IBM. It's it's over it's at beyond over my head. I mean, Brasard was also editor of the Journal of Cryptography and he'd see I've seen him speak at a conference and he's really good. Oh, okay. Alright. Um in nineteen seventy three, uh wrote a paper that show that computation could in principle be carried out reversibly, run forward then backward without any net energy cost. I don't know what that means either. Why not? Anyway, congratulations. I mean we have to we have to report it. I don't know what it means. We have to report it. Uh New York Times says uh there is now something called Chromebook Remorse. Tech backlash at schools. Extending beyond phones. Uh, to the fact that all these kids have laptops. And they're watching YouTube and playing games on 'em, even though they're Chromebooks, digital distractions, that the school gave you. Uh they they talk about a uh Kansas middle school that asked all four hundred and eighty students to return their cr chromooks. The school keeps the laptops in carts parked in classrooms. Children take notes by hand. The laptops are only pulled out when there are specific activities. The future. This comes back to like the that problem of how much do you have to keep things away from people. Um, or how much do you allow them to use these tools that have become indispensable? Everything should be kept away from kids in middle school. There just there's no good school lunches. E everything Yeah, right. Food fight, right? Everything. Nothing. They should not be allowed anything. I th I th I think it was uh a good thing to try and it was very natural, you know, there's tech and we're gonna make things. Rem we said that one laptop per child Was it specifically for education purposes? Or was it so that kids would be. Um but I mean I mean it's it's a natural idea to think you're gonna do things and you're gonna get them used to computers and maybe one laptop per child was before smartphones. So it was like you need to know how to use those tools. That's a good point. It was before smartphones. Yeah. Um but also when you notice there are issues here and there and these things don't work as well as we thought they would for this context, then we walk it back a little bit. It's fine. Yeah, I mean originally pushed Chromebooks as the perfect school tool because They were really easy to administer, pretty d pretty secure because they got those security chip in there and there were no games for them at the time. Uh well, obviously the the latter point has changed and they are still very easy to administer. But There's been a lot of interesting research that Children who or anyone in fact who's learning something, if you actually physically write it down, it stays in the memory a lot longer than if you just type it into a keyboard or look it up on the internet. That makes sense. I felt that even in college. Like you know, even as I was taking notes on my laptop, I was like, I feel like I'm not retaining information the same way that I did when I was in Middle and high school taking notes by hand. Yeah. I feel that now. I don't remember anything. What what were we talking about? Like just now? I don't I I don't know. You should be writing this down, Patrick, clearly. With with a pen and paper. Yeah. I've I've completely eliminated my brain from the equation now. I use obsidian when I'm seeing an article, I obsidian clip it. To my obsidian notebook, I have my agent distill it. put a make a wiki with all the deta and the summaries and I never look at it. So it's it's perfect. I I have uh a complete uh knowledge system that I never have to touch. And so I never have to be w worried about knowledge. I can just Finally, sad story. You remember Zombo.com? No, to be honest. No idea what it is. Oh, I'm so sad. It must be an American thing. I am so sad. Uh so it was a early website that was just kind of flash and it just God, I don't know how to describe it. It was a joke. It would say Zombo.com when anything is possible. Zombo.com. And it would just go on and on and on and dancing around. Well it got this I know, Jammer B, you're right. How can anybody forget Zombo.com Anyway. The the domain got hacked. And uh uh hacked or sold. Hacked. And then the hackers didn't do anything with it, so it reverted. And this guy bought it on GoDaddy. He's got a message on the newsombo.com, welcome, new management. Uh this domain was purchased openly on GoDaddy. We come in peace and with a wallet we'd like to purchase the right to the former site's content. To help revive the infinite. Until then everything here is new and unique. I don't know what's going on with this. Oh. Oh, you know what? Good. Thank you. Jammer B has a thank you, YouTube, a video on YouTube. This so for those of you who don't know. This is the great Zombo.com that once was Up to Zomblecom. This is some god. Good lord. This is done. Now you may say who cares that this guy I can totally see how this would be a great like. This is in the theory like the hamster dance. This is pre meme. Peanut butter jelly time. Oh, Badger, Badger, Badger. Badger, Badger, Badger. It was in that era. Dumblecong. I'm sorry for your loss. Oh. It wasn't. No, but I can I can I can see how it would be it was early internet cultures as well. It was a more innocent time. You know. It's it was a time of goatse and various other things. Goatsy, I don't mind if we don't ever see that again. Oh god now. It's burned into my brain, I'm sad to say. Um So anyway, if you were the original creator of Zombo.com, please contact the new owners. Let's bring Zombo.com back. The unattainable is unknown at Zambog I feel like this was a uniquely American experience because when I see it I can't believe none of you know about Zambod. When I when I I I looked at it when the link was on the list and I was just like, What earth is this? And then I guess it's the same thing as if an um an American watched Badger, Badger, Badger or you know various other things. Well, but Badger Everyone knows Badger, Badger, Badger. Really? Well yeah. Yeah. Marshroom mushroom. I didn't love the one they did for the European Cup, I think in ninety four, where it was like foot boo four ball. Do you think we we are so fragmented now and the internet's so ubiquitous that we will no longer have those kind of communal Moments where everybody knows Badger, Badger, Badger or the black dress, blue dress. I mean memes have taken that over, surely. Yeah, but they're fragmented. Yeah. It depends on whether you're on TikTok or whether you're on you know at the end. Exactly. Some of them. Every now and then. But it's getting rarer in the same way that we don't all watch the same T V shows anymore or watch the same movies anymore. Um so it becomes hard. We all find things that we're more interested in, but we have a harder time finding people to talk to about those things. Yeah that's true. It's maybe it w maybe it's because everyone's on the internet and before it was still kind of a smaller community. It was kind of cool to know about these things with your in group and then yeah. You know, we've been doing the shows. Go ahead. Sorry, Patrick. Oh sorry. I I was like you were saying jokingly and it was a simpler time. I think there's some of it as well. Like we have less Uh I don't know, naivety or tolerance for just fun, stupid little things. Now like now it's it's Listen. Your you tell yourself or your mind tells you we have real problems. Like we have everything is life and death now. Yes. Yeah. That is yes. And whenever somebody posts anything, there's always gonna be all these really bitter negative people in the cops. So that's the other problem is like they make false problems about things that don't actually matter. Where like Somebody can't even post a home renovation without being dragged on Instagram. Everybody's so miserable where it's like why can we not just have whimsy and joy and laugh about things anymore? You know, I'm about everything. I heard it's it's a little bit more uh local version of what you're saying, but uh I was watching a video of Alana Pierce, who's a uh video game content creator. She used to work at Santa Monica, uh, which is a Sony owned studio that made God of War, among other things. Um, and she was talking about something about an old God of War movie and she mentioned um that some people were expressing a specific opinion about that controversy ish topic. And she said, You know, I've quit Twitter. Uh for like a couple of years. And There are some things that some people tell me that are issues or problems. And I have never heard anyone express that opinion. Ever. Like it's not a real opinion. It is a Twitter thing. And people go on Twitter and get really mad and think that it represents anything. But if you're not specifically on Twitter. It is not a real problem. You know? And it really spoke to me because I've been in that like male shit. It's a Twitter thing, you just wouldn't understand. Yes. Yeah. I mean we've had the same problem this week with the the great marmalade scandal in the UK. Um tell me more. Yeah, I'm interested in What it it's Basically, Well I'm glad we finally got to the most important story of the day. Thank God. Well, I mean a story went out at the start of the week that um the UK was going to have to change the name of Marmalade. to citrus marmalade in order to comply with EU regulations. No. And Well it came from Reform UK, which is our up and coming and hopefully dying political party. And it turned out to be complete bollocks. Uh This is from the BBC. Yeah, I know. And a post Brexit food deal. I mean Paddington would not approve, but nevertheless. That's the first person I thought of, yeah. Yeah, I mean when you actually look into the details of it, it just says you have to qualify what type of marmalade it is. Now, 90% of the marmalade sold in the UK Orange marmalade. Italy and France and Germany all have their own marmalades and they generally call themselves citrus. But this is a completely manufactured scandal, which is uh coming back to our earlier point. For no good reason whatsoever. And you know, sometimes Tim Berners Lee must have wanted to cut his fingers off watching some of this stuff. Apparently in Italy and Spain sometimes they make their marmalada or marmalata with figs, shockingly enough. So it's important that you understand, if it's made of bitter Seville oranges, that it is orange marmalade. So so wait, the whole thing was that there was some y regulation that said you have to say what's in the Thing? That's what it's international. That's what the issue was. Like you have to see what's inside the bucket. I feel like if it's orange, it sh you could tell? Like I don't know. I feel like orange marmalade or fig marmalade or whatever. Uh isn't the the the subtext of this This is Why We Left the EU Oh I'm the subtext, right? Yes, absolutely. You see these nutty EU people making us Don't get me started on Brexit. I mean I can rant for this on this for hours, but you know, greatest act of self harm and whatever, but You know, it's just it it comes back to the the whole Ins you know, outrage is the is the thing that sells. Um Marmalade is a very busy thing and It's got a a lot of coverage and then it turns out four days later that or two a couple of days later, it really wasn't a big thing all at all. And I I do I regret what the internet has become with these kind of things. You know? It it's just Or rather what social media then leading into the internet has become. And I hope we can get better in the future. Well, I'm just glad that you brought this up at the end of the show because now I have a name for the show, the Great British Marmalade Ski. I would click on that. Approve. Yeah. Wouldn't you wanna wouldn't you wanna hear that show? A thousand percent. And I like to get those names from the last part of the show to force you to listen to an entire two and a half hours just to find out what the hell they're talking about. It's like putting milk at the back of the grocery store. You gotta work your way through to get there. It's good. Excellent. Yeah. Bra, you get it. You get it. See, we're we're on a wavelength, I'm telling you. Keep peeping peeping through people's windows, you know? You'll find a Brar's great work at uh Cnet, where she's a senior technology reporter, and of course here on Tech News Weekly and whenever we can get her on Twit too. Thank you so much for being here, Bra. I appreciate you. Yep. Absolutely. Uh, Ian Thomson, of course, uh you must subscribe to what do you call the view from the valley. Yeah, uh View from the Valley, yes, on Techfinitive. If I go to Techfinitive.com I should be able to find it there, yes. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. It's um I mean, okay, my s my name is spelled s uh rather oddly, but you view from the valley will always get you there. That's a little easier. Yes. I A I N T H O M S O N. Yes. I but no P. Is how I always remember it. Oh yeah. But I never in English and in French. Yes. Ah we get lay a lot over here and I've never met them. The I could be an L. It could be an L. I I I miss Serif um. I know. You need serifs. You need something. Yeah. You need something. Thank you, Ian. Great to see you. And Patrick Beja, thank you for being the contrarian that you are sometimes and it's always appreciated. I Try my best. I am glad to make things spicy. Staying up late, no less. You'll find his French and English podcasts. He's brought back the Aphilius Club. And le rendezvous tech, if you like the French stuff. Thank you, Patrick. Great to see you. Thanks, man. Since 2009. I was gonna actually, Ian, figure out when your first show was. I think it was 2010, but I'd have to check. Let's see. It's fantastic. Uh I look the the picture doesn't you know I like it. Well we were audio I think in the um maybe in the early I know Patrick's first show was audio only. Oh right. No I came up to the studio for the first time, but um How do you spell your name again? I-A-N Thank you, Leah. Lane. That's it, Lane. That's it. Let me see if I can Oh look at you, young young man you. Holy Oh wow. Holy No no no don't change a thing. There are eleven pages of Ian on here. Nice. Holy cow. And that first one. was uh Tech News Tonight uh from twenty fourteen. Oh, twenty four as late as that, right. Yeah. So uh Patrick wins the prize for this. Okay. Yeah your first twit appearance was uh four ninety three on uh January eighteenth, twenty fifteen. And that was video. You were there with uh Up in the street up in the brick house. Yeah. Yeah. That was uh looks like Veronica Belmont and uh oh that other guy looks so familiar. Is that Ben Thompson? It is Ben Thompson. Oh, sorry. It's Serenity Calwell and Ben Thompson, yeah. And some strange guy in a hat. Thank you so much, you guys. It's great to have you. We do twit every Sunday afternoon, two to five Pacific, five to eight, Eastern, twenty one hundred U T C. You can watch us live as we stream the show, uh, YouTube. Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. And of course, if you're in the club, you get behind the velvet rope access in the club twitch. Discord. After the fact get the shows at twit.tv or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a YouTube channel too dedicated to the video. There's audio and video of every show. Please subscribe though. We'd love to have you back on a regular basis. And now as I have been saying for twenty long years. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another twit isn't. Hey there, it's Leo Leporte, host of So Many Shows on the Twit Network, thinking about advertising in 2026. 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