you have reached 99.5 WBAI is now off the hook. 
I hope that's understood. 
Bumblebee, go! 
Bumblebee, go! 
And it's another exciting edition of Off the Hook. 
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you tonight. 
Joined by Kyle. 
Yes. 
And out there in Skype land, we have what looks like Rob T. Firefly. 
Good evening. 
And it sounds like Rob T. Firefly too. 
You know what? 
I think that is Rob T. Firefly. 
And over there in a totally different window, I see what could only be Alex. 
Is that correct? 
The inimitable Alex it is. 
Okay. 
Alex it is. 
It is. 
Yeah. 
Okay. 
Well, welcome, folks. 
Welcome to another hour of talk of technology and fun things like that. 
How many of you knew what that sound was? 
That rather annoying grating sound in our weekly telephone sound collection? 
Anybody want to guess? 
I'll play it again. 
That sound. 
Anybody? 
No? 
No guesses? 
I know there are listeners out there that know what this is, and they're jumping up and down saying, for God's sake, how could you not know this? 
An old dial tone. 
Well, absolutely. 
An old dial tone. 
When I was a kid growing up in Jamaica, the one in Queens, that was the sound that the phone would make when I picked it up. 
And I would pick it up a lot because I wanted to know what that thing did. 
And I found out. 
Hey, can I complain? 
Do we have a moment for me to complain about something? 
That would be a first. 
Okay. 
Thank you. 
And I note a tinge of sarcasm in that, but we'll get to that later. 
I use this service, someone you might have heard of. 
It's called YouTube. 
It's like a video thing that you can play videos on it, other people's videos. 
And, in fact, we do a show on it. 
But maybe you're not familiar with it. 
It's something that you can watch all sorts of material on. 
How long is a moment? 
Yeah, that's a good point. 
I'll try to get through it. 
Technically, is a moment like one second? 
Nobody can define that. 
Scientists have tried for a long time. 
Okay. 
So, basically, Google owns YouTube, and they have this really annoying habit of forcing ads down your throat. 
And you know what they do? 
It's kind of like a bully who is beating you up repeatedly and saying something like stop hitting yourself or saying give me money or something and I'll stop. 
Google does that. 
They flash this ad saying don't like ads? 
Pay to not get ads. 
Pay us to not have us send you ads. 
And it's mocking. 
And that kind of stays on the screen for quite a while. 
It makes you throw things and yell things. 
That's not the complaint. 
The complaint is they have this little countdown thing where you can skip ads. 
So there's an ad, and then it plays for maybe ten seconds, five seconds, and then there's a little skip button. 
And before the skip button shows up, there's a countdown timer. 
And, yeah, these numbers have been getting longer. 
I know. 
They've been adding more advertisements. 
But what I noticed happening in recent weeks is that that countdown timer, it goes five, four, three, two, one, ten, nine, eight. 
It basically lies. 
It counts down and then goes right back up and starts counting down again. 
Now, there's this other amazing service out there that I discovered called Reddit. 
And Reddit is a place where people complain an awful lot about various things, about really anything. 
And I found the Reddit page for people complaining about this. 
YouTube skip timer now lies for five-second countdowns, doesn't let you skip ads after the timer expires for the first ad. 
On my three Rokus for videos eight seconds and shorter, they're very specific as to what it's not working on. 
But, basically, these people are very angry, as I am as well, as I'm sure many people should be, to suddenly notice. 
I've confirmed on my three Rokus the five-second skip timer is not functional. 
On five-second advertisements, you're forced to watch the second ad video and wait for the second ad video's skip timer to expire. 
Then you can skip. 
Now, there's all kinds of comments to this, people saying it's not just on Roku. 
I've had that happen multiple times on a PC. 
I've had it happen on my Xbox. 
Basically, it seems to be happening everywhere. 
Google is just pouring more ads into this thing and making the ads longer, making it so that you have to wait a longer period of time before you can skip. 
So you have to watch 60 seconds instead of what would have been 30 seconds before. 
And it just keeps getting worse and worse. 
And these people are noticing it. 
Comments I see everywhere that this has suddenly become far worse in the last few weeks. 
And, you know, there's another side to all this, and that's the people who pay to advertise. 
Because what happens is they have the impression that people are watching their ads. 
When they see a 60-second ad not get interrupted, they say, Oh, that person wanted to watch my ad. 
Well, I guess I'll buy another ad then, you know, so that I can continue to see results. 
Except nobody wants to watch their ad, and they're wasting their money. 
And we're having ads thrown at us, and other people are doing the work, creating the content, and Google is just taking the money. 
Anyway, that's my complaint. 
Alex, do you have a rebuttal? 
Not necessarily a rebuttal, but perhaps a compliment for this. 
A compliment with an E, not an I, to be clear. 
But my point in this is that I think this may be somewhat telling with respect to Google's business model here. 
We all know that Google is essentially a gigantic advertising machine. 
That's what they do. 
They index data. 
They provide you data. 
But they make their money by showing us ads. 
And I think that their market share is slowly eroding, edging away from them, especially when it comes to search, because you do a search in Google these days, and it feels antiquated in a lot of ways. 
It feels polluted, and I think this is the worst compliment that you could pay a search service. 
It feels untrustworthy in many ways. 
And I meant that compliment with an I that time. 
But there's so many of these sponsored results, and it feels so money-hungry. 
And then all of these paid results seem to be somewhat related to what the search was, or maybe it's some kind of swatting on a particular trademark. 
But you have to scroll down, and then you have to scroll down in order to actually get to the actual results of what Google would be providing to you organically on the basis of their search algorithm and not on the basis of some kind of paid advertising revenue model. 
And so I think that this manual is really just a function, perhaps, of Google showing its true colors as being really an advertising company and not much else, and the fact that it's getting desperate for cash. 
And we see that as well given the massive layoffs in the tech sector that have not escaped Google as well. 
It's a damn shame because the potential of a service like YouTube is great. 
Now, I know a lot of people fixate on earning money from it through advertising, but that makes you part of the problem. 
If you earn money from the content itself somehow, that's a different story. 
But to subject people to just constant advertising and in the middle of content to have an ad thrown at you. 
There are sometimes very dramatic things happening in the world, and Associated Press has a live stream that broadcasts on YouTube. 
And there was something recently where there were bombs being dropped on Gaza. 
In the middle of that, I get a deodorant ad. 
That is just so disturbing on so many levels, and I'm sure that's not what Associated Press wanted to do, but that's what Google wanted to do, and they did it. 
And they're just throwing ads constantly. 
It's really disgusting. 
We need to find a different way. 
Maybe a YouTube that is based on no advertising. 
I'd even pay for a service like that. 
It's a yearly fee to have access to something that didn't have commercials, that had lots of variety of content. 
I'm sure there are people out there developing all kinds of services. 
We'd like to hear from them, and we'd like to talk about those alternatives. 
This battle is being fought on multiple fronts too, on YouTube specifically. 
There is the phenomenon where people will make a YouTube video and then stop what they're talking about in the video in order to advertise something to you. 
They'll have sponsored segments and things like that, and that's not even on the YouTube server side of things. 
That doesn't count as an ad. 
In the middle of that, you might get a Google ad. 
In the middle of an advertisement, you'll get another ad. 
It's crazy. 
Indeed. 
But there is a tool out there called Sponsor Block, which is a free tool to basically mark and then skip over the segments of YouTube videos. 
People have been using this for quite a while to streamline the YouTube experience and give people the option to skip over the ads, even when they're in that sort of form factor. 
But the Sponsor Block developers posted today that their tool is being broken because YouTube has begun inserting ads in the video stream of the original video. 
So your standard YouTube ad that we're all kind of used to by now, the video that you're watching would stop and it would play something else. 
And technically that's a different video that's being shown to you. 
But YouTube is now inserting their video into a preexisting video, and that completely changes the video file that's being served to you. 
It messes with things like if people want to record, save YouTube videos they're watching or skip over the sponsored segments with a tool like Sponsor Block. 
And this has a lot of people sort of up in arms. 
But yes, it is a constant arms race between ad-based companies like Google and ad blockers and things like that. 
Is it really a big deal? 
Someone has to say it. 
Is it really a big deal for all the terrific content that Google brings you, never mind the creators of the content, but Google themselves, for us to sit through an advertisement or two or 20? 
Nobody's going to jump on that? 
I will jump on that and say that I like the option to not watch commercials. 
Back in the day of VHS, I would record shows and then fast forward through the commercials or pause while I was recording something so it wouldn't tape the commercials. 
And nowadays I use ad blockers and things. 
And I enjoy having that amount of control over my media environment. 
And personally, I don't think anyone has the right to advertise things that I didn't ask for to me, no matter what they're giving me. 
Yeah, there are multiple layers of options to avoid them. 
And you also have to sort of assess how you value your attention span. 
And I think as the cost and the drive for a subscription service or the realization that it is not necessarily a public utility and that they can change and reset the terms on a whim in ways like this, you have to kind of determine what and how much you are going to consume that form of media. 
And is it worth that much to you for your time barring using tools like Rob is describing? 
Yeah, because it wasn't like this in the past. 
How did the service exist in the past if this is essential for the service to continue to exist? 
It just seems like they're taking more and more and more. 
And we're just being programmed to accept it and think of it as normal. 
Go ahead, Alex. 
You're right. 
They're taking and taking and taking. 
And if you think about it in terms of our life and the time that we have on this planet, we have 86,400 seconds in a day, and they're taking up more and more and more of that time. 
We're never getting that back. 
We're watching some stupid ad about whatever it is they think we're going to be interested in, based on our browsing history, as well as an accumulation of data that they may have about us, which is probably and largely inaccurate and nonsensical. 
And it's just a waste of our time and a waste of our life to watch this. 
We've been dealing with this on broadcast media for so long when commercials interrupting. 
Everything is about selling something. 
And I think we see this as well infecting podcasts more often nowadays, too, that everything has got more and more and more commercials. 
Sorry to cut you off, but we have to take a break right now for a commercial message. 
It's funny you do that, though, because what doesn't have commercials? 
It's probably a great time to mention the fact that WBAI never plays commercials, that Off the Hook has never had a commercial on it. 
And WBAI, how many years has it been on the air, Emanuel? 
Fifty-four, if my numbers are correct. 
1960 is when we went on the air for the first time. 
Basically, the station existed beforehand, but the station itself was a donation to the Pacifica Foundation, and it's been operating ever since without commercials. 
And it's not because we can't get a sponsor. 
We could get lots of sponsors if we wanted to do that, but we want our only sponsors to be our listeners, and they have been keeping the station going all this time. 
212-209-2950 is the number to call to pledge if you feel so compelled, or go to givetowbai.org. 
But, Alice, you're absolutely right about advertising everywhere. 
And you learn that so much. 
I'm a news junkie. 
You might know that. 
I tune through various channels on various systems, and almost whenever I tune to CNN, they're in a commercial. 
Don't see any news. 
Skip to the next one. 
Maybe MSNBC. 
Nope, commercial there, too. 
I have to go to BBC News or Al Jazeera or some other broadcaster from a different country, CBC, for instance, and they either have no commercials at all ever, and they somehow are able to do that and do better reporting, or they have much fewer commercials. 
And in our case, it's like Google. 
It's just more and more. 
I remember when I was a kid, there was a set limit to how many commercials a TV station could have in an hour. 
And it was something like, I don't know, six, seven minutes. 
Good luck if it's not half the hour now. 
And that's why when you see syndicated TV programs, they always have to edit bits of them out. 
An episode of All in the Family from the 1970s, I think it went 28 minutes. 
And now shows barely break 20 minutes. 
Half-hour shows are something like 16 minutes long because they have to fit all these commercials in. 
And even then, when it goes into syndication later on, they'll have to chop more out because more commercials will be sold. 
It's nuts. 
It's a disease, I think. 
What do you think the threshold is before people are driven to piracy and other forms of consuming media? 
Because I think using a broad channel like YouTube, where you have creators and other types of content on there, they've just determined that that's not a place to get revenue because in the interest of production companies, Google's getting a percentage of all of that as a distribution method. 
I mean, trailers and stuff that is advertising for them does exist on YouTube much in the way most all promotion comes into play. 
But I'm curious if the saturation, them all developing their own apps or platforms to distribute to get away from that and get sort of subscribership and metrics and revenue and control back on whatever devices people use. 
I'm curious if the annoyance level for a service that had been something that people look to for longer playing stuff and stuff that wasn't interrupted as much, if the appetite turns towards even abandoning those subscription services and just finding what things of interest you want on your own. 
And even if there will then become mirrors of YouTube that are just ad-free copies of things that are up on that platform. 
Because people just, I don't know, they're not stopping their viewership. 
And I think also part of it is because they're counting on it, specifically with something like YouTube, incidental viewership until you maybe dive in for their subscription service level. 
At that point, then they have you. 
But if you just incidentally view it and you don't have the types of blockers that Rob talked about, you are going to kind of subject yourself incidentally to those advertisements and have to kind of relinquish viewing something in whole. 
And it changes even more for some of the live channels that we've talked about that get interrupted or sometimes it gets fixed. 
I don't know what the policy is and how content creators deal with that, if they distinguish this is a slow TV program or something like that. 
But that's even sort of novel for a platform like YouTube. 
Google blames the users saying that they set it up this way. 
And basically, technically that's right, but it's because Google made that the default and they didn't uncheck it because they don't know about it. 
So yeah, okay, blame the user if that's how you want to do it. 
But believe me, these entities that are showing things like a peaceful leak for 24 hours don't want to interrupt it every two minutes with a stupid advertisement. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
I do want to mention, the possibility of an alternative to YouTube that doesn't engage in these shenanigans. 
And the Fediverse, which is the home of things like Mastodon, which is the free and open platform to rival Twitter and things like that, have an app called PeerTube, which works on a peer-to-peer distribution model and is very up and coming. 
Still not maybe the easiest thing in the world to use, but it's getting better all the time and it's worth a look. 
It's run by a nonprofit. 
It does not run shady algorithms or punch you in the eyeballs until money comes out with ads. 
Here's the thing, Rob. 
It sounds great, PeerTube, but when you say it's not the easiest thing to work with, this is not the time to try to sell to people then because they're going to take one look at it, it's going to be difficult and incomprehensible for them, and they're not going to come back. 
Why don't we get it as simple to use as the commercial products and offer that as an alternative, and then people will stay because it's far less annoying. 
But it's really hard to constantly be trying to get people to use things that they feel are too complicated for them or too confusing, and I just feel like I'm doing more harm than good when I get people to look at these services before they're ready. 
I think the interesting factor there is where will the line be as YouTube gets more and more annoying and anti-user and experience? 
Where will the line be that causes people to think, maybe I should take a moment to figure out this other thing and make that the thing? 
There's two fronts to this battle. 
One is developing something better. 
The other is fighting it with ad blockers. 
On my desktop, I don't see the ads. 
I have a very good ad blocker on my desktop. 
However, Roku, I don't think there's a decent ad blocker for Roku. 
If there is, please let me know. 
I'd love to find out about it. 
Developing those bits of software to fight this malignancy on the net is, I think, quite important and within our rights to do that. 
Yeah, that's, I think, part of the case that some of our feedback has covered where people are talking about building small computers and then just running that through as a part of the input for whatever kind of display you use. 
That way, you do have control over the machine in entirety with whatever kinds of added features. 
And a lot of them, I mean, there are OSs and distributions that are customized for the kind of like media playback, purpose-built media center kind of use. 
So there's a lot of options out there, but it's a great point. 
Like how accessible is it? 
And what are the scenarios around people's choices to stay or not be a part of something or find something else? 
It's great to have a lot of options, but most people just want it to work, you know, out of the box, plug and play, whatever, as simple as possible. 
You know, for people like us, yes, lots of options are great, configure it all different ways, but not everybody's going to want to do that, and we have to recognize that. 
We have to have a plan for that. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
But it's also people like us in the hacker community who are going to do the work on things like this to improve them and, you know, give the best user experience possible with a goal toward making this as easy to use as something like YouTube. 
Exactly, yeah. 
All right, moving on. 
Let's complain about Windows now because apparently Microsoft is revealing a new Windows AI tool that can answer questions about your web browsing and laptop use. 
Yeah. 
Have you heard about this? 
It's called Recall. 
Recall is launching on new Copilot Plus PCs on June 18th, and basically what it does, it stores what is on your actual screen. 
Every five seconds, is it? 
Every five seconds, and you can go back and look at that. 
The screenshots are stored in an unencrypted database. 
The data could easily be captured by an attacker. 
And now in a warning about how Recall could be abused by criminal hackers because they're always the enemy here. 
How about law enforcement? 
They could do it too, you know. 
How about your parents? 
Anyone can. 
A cybersecurity strategist named Alex Haganah, an ethical, so-called ethical hacker, has released a demo tool that can automatically extract and display everything Recall records on a laptop, and that's, of course, dubbed Total Recall. 
That tool can pull all the information that Recall saves into its main database on a Windows laptop. 
The database is unencrypted. 
It's all plain text, he says. 
Since Microsoft revealed Recall in mid-May, security researchers have repeatedly compared it to spyware or stalkerware that can track everything you do on your device. 
It's a Trojan 2.0 really built in, Haganah says, adding that he built Total Recall, which he's releasing on GitHub, in order to show what is possible and to encourage Microsoft to make changes before Recall fully launches, this article coming from Wired. 
Have you guys heard about this? 
Are you concerned in any way? 
Because I sure am. 
Rob? 
Well, what was fun about Recall was watching them tout this as an amazing feature and something that everyone's going to want and need, and the security community, the infosec community, and just the privacy-focused community were dumbfounded, I think, by this and just how do they not see that this is a dangerous thing, that this is ridiculous, and that this is a huge threat to add to the Windows experience. 
And after a while of this backlash to it, yesterday Microsoft quietly pulled the preview build of Windows that you could try out Recall with, and it seems like they may be walking back on this whole thing or at least really reconsidering how it is implemented. 
But, Rob, the fact that they walked forward to this point in the first place, after all the talk of security and privacy and all the lessons that have been learned over the decades, what are they doing? 
Are they not paying any attention whatsoever? 
Who in their right mind would think that having this data saved in an unencrypted database anywhere, without the user specifically saying, this is what I want, how could they think that is a good idea? 
I mean, what planet are they on? 
Alex, I mean, any theories? 
Well, I think what we've been saying all along here is that this migration towards utilizing all different types of data streams for the training of AI systems is creating, in and of itself, a separate attack vector. 
And I think companies lose sight of the fact that they are creating an additional surface area for these particular types of attacks and creating quite a large surface area for these attacks, especially if they're using things like unencrypted databases to store this type of data that's being processed. 
And, you know, we lose sight of that. 
We look for these great leaps in innovation and, for some reason, have not learned from the 30 decades of information security and cybersecurity. 
30 decades? 
I'm sorry, three decades, 30 years. 
Imagine, imagine that, wow. 
But if Microsoft is still around after 30 decades, they'll still be making these mistakes. 
Look, you know, encryption's been around for far longer than 30 decades, to be honest with you. 
We've been dealing with security of information for millennia. 
In a sense, yes, maybe we can say 30 decades, but perhaps not Microsoft for 30 decades. 
But if we have learned anything from the 30 decades or the 30 years of having to secure information, it's that we need to think about these things as we're creating the information systems themselves. 
They can't be afterthoughts. 
And it seems to me like the developers are still considering this type of cybersecurity and the practices surrounding the security of data, and in particular user data, as an afterthought. 
I recently spoke with Bloomberg Law about this migration of AI systems going to on-device processing as opposed to being put into the cloud, and they wanted to know about the security implications of that type of migration. 
And I think, you know, yet again, it sounds like a great idea that we may want to have certain types of AI systems running locally as opposed to sharing data with some kind of amorphous cloud, which we all know is just simply, you know, another way of saying somebody else's computer. 
And so keeping that data locally might be great, but then that raises this whole host of issues about, well, how secure is that data being held locally? 
And how portable is that data? 
And is that data, if it's being trained on a device with certain types of user data, is a user then going to be able to take that particular, let's say small language model that might be trained on its own personal data or preferences and migrate that to another device? 
Who owns that particular instance of that AI? 
So I think that in this rush to utilize AI in every single possible thing, it reminds me in a lot of ways of going back to maybe 2007, 2008, when apps were just starting to come out for smartphones, and the tagline for Apple was there's an app for that, there's an app for this. 
And we started injecting technology and applications everywhere when we didn't necessarily need it. 
And I feel like we're doing the same exact thing with AI now. 
We're interjecting AI into everything, or we're calling technology AI, even though what we may actually be talking about is something like simple conditional statements. 
If this threshold is met, then do this. 
If this threshold is not met, then do this. 
That's not artificial intelligence. 
Those are conditional statements that have been around for a long time. 
But we seem to somehow need to migrate everything over to AI in order to generate consumer interest and perhaps generate venture capital into these particular types of projects. 
So I see us idiotically repeating the same mistakes of several decades, perhaps maybe even 30 decades. 
Well, yeah, I agree. 
Maybe that's how long it'll take for people to catch on. 
Or that's the apprehension or the anxiety over it, really, like the big worry, is that what will be available won't be used because a sense of distrust has been pervading this sort of rollout or the introduction of it into society. 
I worry about when you talk about small language models, AI that doesn't talk to the cloud or get updates from outside, what kind of brainwashing of AI is going to take place inside people's homes? 
I mean, it's happening to humans a lot. 
I've seen AIs get polluted with misinformation unintentionally. 
But what happens when it becomes intentional and that becomes a very strong tool for basically spreading lies? 
Because AI is simply really, really good computer code that is able to spit back the information that it's processed. 
And if that information is wrong, it's going to give you wrong information back and it's going to seem to believe that it's correct and it will double down and it gets really ridiculous sometimes when you get into an argument with AI about what day it is and you know what day it is and it doesn't, but it's insisting that it's right. 
We've seen this happen. 
It's all code. 
There's nothing beyond that and it's hard when it mimics human behavior to not get taken in. 
Yeah, I think this reminds me of when ChatGPT first came out. 
Do you remember, Emmanuel? 
Way back, yeah. 
Kyle, well, do you remember this article that came out in The New Yorker that went, quote, unquote, viral for a while? 
And it was entitled, ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the Internet. 
Remember that article? 
It was a great article. 
It was by a guy by the name of Ted Chiang, and Ted Chiang is a science fiction writer in the, I believe he's in the Bay Area. 
I think he's Seattle. 
I'm just relieved you didn't say he is AI. 
I thought you were going to say that. 
No, he's not AI, but there was a great interview with him several months ago in the Financial Times when they do their Lunch with the FT section where they go and talk with somebody and they talk about what they're known to be experts in, but then they also talk about what they ate for lunch and all that fun stuff. 
So it's my favorite part of the weekend edition of the Financial Times every week. 
This was a particularly great article, and Ted Chiang was asked what he thought about AI systems, being a science fiction writer, and whether they're cognitive and whether they can think, and he said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, absolutely not here. 
And he said that AI itself was a very unfortunate misnomer that occurred in 1954 when AI was just developing. 
And so the interviewer said, well, if it's just the wrong name for something, well, what would you call artificial intelligence if you don't want to call it artificial intelligence? 
And he said, well, that's really easy. 
I'd call it what it is. 
It's applied statistics. 
That's not necessarily as sexy as calling something artificial intelligence. 
I mean, we love to anthropomorphize this type of thing, but the whole idea that these things are just applied statistics I think really complements exactly and dovetails exactly what you were saying there, Emmanuel. 
And here's my fear when it comes to artificial intelligence. 
If we know and we think about this thing as essentially generating data and text on the basis of what it's already ingested so that we are going to become less creative as a species, unless we harness and we utilize these things to become more creative as a species, I think we're going to be dumbed down. 
It's going to be harder for us to organize our thoughts. 
It's going to be harder for us to generate our own writings, our own creative output. 
And if that is the case and that AI systems operating on the basis of applied statistics begin to re-ingest their own output, if the total amount of new creative energy that human beings are generating becomes far less than what it has been in the past and AI systems begin to essentially just regurgitate their own data, when the output that they have created and generated through statistics becomes its own input, then what happens? 
Then I think we're in a very dangerous area because we are very severely limiting the amount of creativity and I think human talent that's going to be out there by inhibiting our own intellectual capabilities. 
But then I think we may be in this situation where we have almost like an artificial intelligence mad cows type of situation where it's feasting on its own data and something weird is going to happen in that respect. 
I think something odd is going to happen when that occurs and who knows when it will, but I would predict it to be in the not too distant future. 
One thing I don't worry about so much is a lack of people being creative because creative people are going to be creative. 
You can't stop that. 
What's going to happen I think is that non-creative people are going to pretend they're creative by using AI as a crutch and it's up to the rest of us to be able to tell the difference. 
If human creativity is truly a valuable thing, it should be able to shine through what's artificially created. 
That is my hope. 
Go ahead, Kyle. 
Yeah, just getting back to the story in general, like the amount of imagery that you're compiling and I'm just not sure what exactly their intentions or if they even know what they're creating and that if things are compartmentalized or I know there's like a lot of this hardware is coming soon to a lot of everyday things and the capability is there and then so there's a lot of this being like sort of laying the groundwork for a future where this capability is growing and upgraded and it is reliable in as many ways as we pointed out, they're really just throwing it into everything. 
Like do you want AI in your ice cream? 
Do you want it? 
Oh my God. 
Where do you want it? 
We will put it everywhere, absolutely everywhere. 
It does feel like kind of like the internet of things moment of 10, 20 years ago. 
I don't know. 
But the hardware notwithstanding, like our use of it and sensitivities to it are gauged by these missteps. 
They can't know if it'll be something that people think is worthwhile without trying it, but I don't think they really understood it. 
Even if it is so compartmentalized and they're only asking it certain questions or you're only asking it or using it for certain purposes, the temptation to not compartmentalize all that information from people's screens and ask it novel questions or questions unrelated to its intended use, I think that temptation would just grow the more people that were on board with this in their operating systems. 
And therein, I think there's a risk in what happens when all of that is compromised by a third party or someone else that then all of a sudden has all this insight into what people are doing en masse on their screens and can run it across their own systems. 
And, I mean, these are ramifications that they're not kind of in the fine print yet here and I think are the questions we're asking. 
Well, speaking of things that are coming soon, New York is introducing a mobile ID app starting on yesterday, the 11th. 
Okay, so it's not coming soon. 
It came yesterday. 
New York is the latest state to introduce a mobile ID program which gives residents the option to digitize their driver's license or non-driver ID. 
We had quite a conversation about identity, driver's licenses, information, things like that last week. 
So beginning yesterday, the New York mobile ID app is available on the various app stores. 
They can be used for identity verification at airports. 
A physical license permit or non-driver ID is required to activate a mobile ID. 
You'll need to take a photo of the front and back of your ID with your phone during the enrollment process. 
And then, I guess, you just need your phone. 
You don't need your actual ID card on you, which seems a bit risky to me. 
Yeah, for now, acceptance of mobile IDs by businesses and the cops is completely voluntary. 
There's no deadline in place for compliance. 
So it's definitely too soon to start leaving your physical cards at home. 
But that day apparently is coming. 
Bars, other small businesses, they can start accepting them immediately if they install the state's verifier app. 
Mobile ID can be used at all the terminals at JFK, LaGuardia, nearly 30 participating airports across the country. 
Yeah, and New York now joins Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, and Utah. 
So, yeah, I guess everything is winding up on your phone now. 
Your keys, your wallet, your phone, it's all there. 
And your ID. 
So I don't know. 
This seems like it's - I don't know which bad idea is going to manifest itself first. 
But you lose your phone, you lose your license, or somebody can copy your license if they get the right access to your phone. 
I don't know enough about this to say exactly what the threat is. 
I just - my instinctive nature is to say there's going to be a problem here at some point. 
Rob, what do you think? 
I'm looking at the page about this on the New York DMV's website, and there's a lot to be amused by here. 
First of all, in big, bold letters, it says, do not get rid of your physical document. 
MID does not replace your physical license permit or non-driver ID. 
Not all businesses accept MID, so you must continue to bring your physical driver's license permit or non-driver ID card with you and use it wherever MID is not accepted, which raises the question. 
So if you need to still bring your ID card with you, what's the advantage to having it on your phone? 
On behalf of people who make fake IDs, I have a question. 
Because to make a fake ID, it's a real pain in the ass. 
But it sounds like this could be an upgrade of sorts because all we'd need to do - all they would need to do is simply get access to the picture, I guess, on your phone and replace it with a different picture, i.e. 
your picture. 
Now, you can say, but it won't allow you to do that. 
Well, how is somebody behind the counter going to know the difference between you holding up your ID in an app and you holding up your ID in something that looks like an app? 
How are they going to know the difference? 
Well, the interesting thing about this is it seems, going by the minimal tech info on the site here, that this doesn't involve just showing a picture on your phone. 
This involves communication between the phone app and a device at the place that would be accepting this. 
So you would need to decode and figure out how to spoof whatever's going on there, whatever near-field communication sort of thing is going on. 
Okay, hold on. 
So now, what you've just told me, now it's not a simple issue of just looking at someone's ID. 
Now, they're logging the fact that you brought your ID to this person. 
Any store that you buy a can of beer in, it's now logged that you did that, your location, your transactions, your habits, all sorts of things like that. 
Anytime somebody looks at this, they're going to click a button on something. 
They're going to have an app as well. 
It seems like a real surveillance state is being born here. 
It's also against the rules to use this on a smartphone that has been jailbroken or rooted. 
So you have to have a stock phone with whatever restrictions and things that the manufacturer puts in place. 
Hang on, hang on. 
It's illegal to use it on a rooted phone. 
Who's going to be determining if the phone is rooted or not? 
Who's going to say? 
Is the software going to know that? 
Is the storekeeper supposed to know, hey, this phone is rooted? 
I'm not going to accept this from you. 
Or do you just face prison time if you have a rooted phone now and you put certain bits of software on it? 
This is a very good question. 
All the site says is you cannot download MID on a smartphone that is jailbroken or rooted, meaning the software has been changed to remove restrictions or limitations placed there by the manufacturer. 
I'll bet you can. 
I'll take up that challenge. 
I bet you can download it. 
What was wrong with the little cards we carry on us? 
I don't understand. 
Why is that a problem? 
The little cards that we'll still have to carry with us as well. 
For now, but you know the goal is for them to just cut over to this so that you have your Omnicard, you've got your credit cards, you've got your license and your keys and everything is on your phone so that when you lose your phone, you lose everything at once. 
There's no backup. 
No backup. 
That's kind of the mantra, I think. 
Folks, we have three minutes left. 
What else is going on in the world that's disturbing to you technology-wise? 
I do want to quickly give a shout-out. 
Unfortunately, this week we lost a luminary of the hacker community, Lynn Conway, who was a pioneer in the field of chip design and engineering, worked at IBM, worked at Xerox, and was also an incredible transgender activist, passed away on Sunday. 
And I encourage everyone who's curious to just at least look her up on Wikipedia. 
That's Lynn, L-Y-N-N, Conway. 
And you'll learn a lot and be grateful for the impact she left on the world. 
Well, I'm going to try and cram this letter into the two minutes we have left from either Jan or Jan. 
I'm not really sure which. 
Thanks for an interesting show, some random comments. 
The TV Netflix thing, it's definitely annoying and literally you can do about it. 
This is my TV no longer being supported by the Netflix app, which I got around, but it's just an annoyance. 
It might have technical reasons like the certificate expired and the TV vendor didn't update it. 
Again, shouldn't be the end user's problem. 
Or just Netflix saying they want the newer version of their app for whatever reasons. 
Perhaps you could try if you could find an older version of the app that does work. 
It's still too much work. 
You just want to enjoy a damn TV show. 
So, yeah, we agree on that. 
Another avenue would be trying to jailbreak the TV and checking if there's something you could do that way, taking back control. 
I never wanted to lose control in the first place. 
My TV never had to be jailbroken before. 
Regarding AM car radio, I don't get why manufacturers are being stupid about this. 
I actually drive a full electric automobile, have an AM radio built in, and it works. 
I use it from time to time. 
I love the effects that thunderstorms have on the reception. 
And that's another thing. 
I didn't mention this. 
But, yeah, when you're driving around listening to AM radio and you hear that burst of static, you know there's a thunderstorm in the area. 
And I think that's really awesome to have that ability and to know just how close it is, how severe it is by how loud that static is, little things like that. 
Regarding VPN, I had hoped that you would also have said something of the dangers of VPNs, that you really have to trust the intermediate party because they can see a lot of what you do, possibly defeating the entire purpose of the VPN. 
And, yes, that's when user reviews are so important. 
So definitely do your research before you sign away anything to VPN companies. 
And last, I was wondering if there's any plan to also make the overtime show available via RSS. 
I've done this myself using a small script. 
But it would be nice if it was from you guys. 
You know, that's something I know almost nothing about. 
That's our net master, Jens, who does all that. 
So we'll ask him. 
In fact, maybe we'll bring it up on overtime, which follows on YouTube. 
Maybe it will be working by the end of overtime. 
Maybe. 
Maybe we can do that. 
Alex, very quickly. 
We only have a couple of seconds. 
I think it's such a great point about the intermediary VPN issue. 
And there are some really malicious VPNs that have been out. 
So great point, great letter from the list. 
Thanks for sharing. 
And you can write your letters to OTH at 2600.com. 
And we will endeavor to, well, we do read all of them. 
And we will read a select few over the airwaves. 
We are told we're not on next week, but that might change. 
Check your local listings. 
We'll be on overtime at 8 o'clock on YouTube. 
And we will see you either next week or in two weeks. 
Take care. 
Good night. 
  And welcome everybody over on YouTube. 
Well, we're over on YouTube, too. 
Everyone's on YouTube, so welcome to the service that we just lambasted for the past hour or so. 
I made it over, I think. 
Kyle, you're there? 
Yes, I am. 
Other side of the studio. 
Okay. 
And Rob? 
Yes, indeed. 
And Alex. 
Alex. 
Where's Alex? 
I see the view behind Alex, but there's no Alex in front of it. 
What is the issue of getting Alex onto overtime? 
It really seems to be a hard transition. 
He seems to have stepped away, but I have faith that he'll come back to us. 
Well, last time he stepped away, he didn't come back. 
So, you know, and since we don't have Gila this week, you can't do overtime with three people, Rob. 
You need at least four. 
Those are the rules. 
I mean, I could put on more voices if that would help. 
No, no. 
You know what I mean. 
People don't take things seriously. 
That's the problem. 
So, okay. 
All right. 
Well, that's how it's going to be. 
So, we don't have Gila, as I mentioned, which means you're handling the chat. 
I am. 
And you've never done that before. 
So, this could be a disaster, right? 
I'm always up for a new disaster. 
All right. 
All right. 
Yeah. 
So, but I would like to say hello to the chat and, you know, thank you everyone for joining us. 
And Gila said, please be nice to me while I do her job poorly. 
Mm-hmm. 
Well, we'll determine that. 
We'll be the ones that determine. 
Our phone number, 802-321-4225, for people who want to call in. 
We do have a couple more stories we want to get to when I talked about, but obviously, if there's an urgent call, we'll take that. 
Because, you know, that's one of the purposes of this program. 
The phone lines are open. 
They are open. 
Yes. 
Not unplugged this week. 
Yeah, we had it unplugged for 25 minutes before we realized what was going on last time. 
And we're sorry, all the people that called in and didn't get through. 
Everything works. 
Everything works now. 
It does. 
Okay. 
Well, I guess I'll just dive into this then. 
Adobe. 
You guys use Adobe, right? 
Oh, now the phone's ringing as soon as I start the story. 
Well, I guess we can take it. 
Please do. 
All right. 
We'll get to this Adobe story. 
We will. 
Good evening. 
You're on Off The Oak Over Time. 
Go ahead. 
Hi. 
It's Bob Cat. 
Hey, what's up? 
Okay. 
A couple of things from the earlier show. 
Various applications can tell if your cell phone has been rooted. 
Banking applications can do that. 
So don't root your phone. 
There's hardly any reason to do that. 
If your ID or something is on your phone and someone has to look at it and know it's not just a picture, if you've ever been on a MTA train and bought a ticket online or with the app, it shows the ticket to the conductor. 
It's got, like, moving lights, and it uses the camera so that it can obviously be a live image, and you can't fake it. 
Got it. 
Don't hear me? 
Yeah. 
Okay. 
Now, further, the Microsoft recall thing just records things locally, as far as I can tell, which is not a big deal, as long as your system is secure enough to prevent anybody from looking at things live. 
But did they convince people that that was... 
Hold on, hold on. 
The point is, every five seconds, right? 
Does that not mean it stores it someplace? 
On your local computer. 
Right. 
And if you lose your local computer, now the thief has everything you've done on your desktop window for however long that database goes back, as do the authorities, as does anybody that gains access to it. 
Yes, and I can look at your browser history and see what you've been looking at lately. 
Well, yeah, and that's one reason I don't give out my browser history, and I don't tend to lose my laptops. 
But, you know, browser history is one element of this. 
They can still do that, but now you've given them something else. 
You're... 
First, you're opting in. 
Okay. 
And this was described over 30 years ago by David Galerner, the Yale professor, in his system called LifeStreams. 
And the way that works is, let's say I remember that I went to the first HOPE convention, and I want to remember what else was happening that weekend. 
And so I could go look back through my history and see that it wasn't just HOPE that was happening. 
It was the 25th anniversary of Woodstock was happening. 
And I would have everything recorded so that I don't have to remember every little detail of my life. 
And the system was called LifeStreams. 
And one of the people who objected to this was named Ted Kaczynski. 
Wait, what, he happened to be in the audience? 
No. 
Oh, okay. 
I thought it was some kind of seminar or something. 
He said the bomb to David Galerner because he opposed this memory thing. 
It's technology that helps normal people remember things because people have to remember. 
Hang on. 
Hang on one second. 
So you're saying, I don't know if you are saying this, but you're saying that the idea of this recall type feature proposed back then was what inspired the Unabomber? 
One of the things, yes. 
My goodness. 
Well, you'd think Microsoft would back down knowing that, that that's what it inspires in people. 
But boy, that's interesting. 
I think what they were describing back then is different than this. 
It sounds more self-contained and user-controlled. 
Like, you know, I don't trust when Microsoft does this. 
I'm sorry? 
It's local. 
It's on your machine. 
You can throw your machine in a fire and it will destroy all your memory. 
But why would you do that? 
Why is it unencrypted? 
Why does it have to be unencrypted? 
I mean, at least put a password on it so that if someone does steal your machine or hacks into your network, they won't immediately get access to that. 
My computer is encrypted. 
I'm running Windows 10. 
I'm running BitLocker and if you steal my hard drive, it's useless to you. 
If you do any, if you take the machine away, in 10 seconds it turns off and you have to put in my passwords, which you don't know. 
You can beat them out of me, but hey, you can beat me to death too. 
Uh-huh. 
Well, you're the exception, okay? 
A lot of people don't do that. 
So that's what I worry about. 
They do. 
Instead of being freaking out that Microsoft is doing something evil, let's teach people that they can lock their computers down so that it's useless to anybody who steals them. 
Sure, I'm all in favor of that and we're not freaking out over Microsoft. 
We're basically accepting it with quiet resignation because they have a history of this kind of thing. 
And also trying to imagine what in the future they're trying to build and otherwise sell to consumers as sort of everyday normal practices in your computing life. 
And by all means, yeah, like we need more stories about how people are learning and teaching one another to protect themselves in all regards, partly why we try to get stories like this out there. 
So thanks for your observations about the story, though. 
Yeah, Alex has something to add. 
Yes, I'm back, too. 
Welcome. 
I see the caller's point about things running locally being not as dangerous. 
But I think, caller, you are operating under the assumption that the security controls surrounding your device are always going to be effective. 
Vulnerabilities are found for these types of things all the time. 
Exploits come out every day. 
You don't necessarily need access to the entire file system in order to access a device. 
Or if you do somehow manage to get access to the device itself, then all of that local data can be compromised. 
But I think another aspect of this that we should also think about is that you mentioned your file system is encrypted. 
We cannot, I think, assume that encryption is always going to be effective as well. 
I mean, we are on our way quite rapidly towards living in a post-quantum computing world, where all of our encryption algorithms right now may be subject to attack by way of quantum computing. 
And if that's the case, then all of that local data, whether encrypted or not, could be accessible to some kind of malicious threat actor. 
Also, the computers are networked like most of their operating day when you're using it, chiefly, but in other regards as well. 
And the idea that, yes, the data is stored and processed on the machine, sure, but, I mean, you're also, I mean, it's not necessarily the case that these are all offline installations of those operating systems. 
But who is going to expend the effort to use a quantum computer, which does not exist yet, to attack me when I'm trying to remember the name of the place that I went to get cheesesteaks in Philadelphia in 2001? 
Was it Jim's on South Street? 
They had a fire, and I think they're rebuilding. 
And it wasn't Pat or Gino's either. 
Yeah, Pat or Gino, everyone goes to them, but Jim's is the real place. 
I was really heartbroken when that had a fire. 
I think it was University, but I'm not quite sure. 
Okay. 
I might have the menu around still. 
Was it on 6th Street? 
I don't know. 
Not 6th Street. 
South Street. 
I'm in the wrong city. 
I'm in Austin. 
No, in Philadelphia, South Street. 
I'm sorry. 
Yeah, sidetrack. 
Yeah, that's a good question, you know, but at some point, it could become an issue, or it could become an issue a lot sooner than that. 
Look, all I was saying before is that they should have talked to people who are experts in the field of security and privacy, and it didn't seem like they did any of that. 
Because those two fields are jumping all over this, and it just didn't seem well thought out. 
Co-pilot recall Bobcat's cheesesteak. 
Is that the command? 
Yes. 
I remember that day very well, by the way, but I don't remember the name of the cheesesteak place we went to. 
Speaking of Woodstock in 1994, do you remember how hard it rained up there? 
You know, I remember seeing the New York Times on that Sunday, and we were, you know, snug in the hotel pen, but people in upstate New York were living in misery. 
It was kind of like the first one, because it rained a lot then, too. 
Yes. 
Well, naked and muddy is the best way to listen to music. 
I suppose so. 
There was one good memory of the original Hope. 
Nobody recorded this, but there was a guy who was, well, he's younger than we are now, but he's sitting in the hallway and bored out of his mind, and his son wanted to go to Hope. 
And so someone said, what are you doing here? 
He's like, well, my son wanted to come. 
I work for the phone company. 
I'm not really interested in this stuff. 
So we start talking to this guy, and he tells us that, yes, you can spy on anybody if you work for the phone company. 
So he had, like, a whole crowd around him, listening to him talk about phone stuff for an hour. 
It was really great. 
And the thing is, someone said, so who did you spy on? 
And he mentioned some famous actress. 
And, well, then what? 
He's like, yeah, it was boring. 
I stopped. 
I don't do it anymore. 
Nobody does it after the first time. 
Just out of curiosity, since the building no longer exists, where did that conversation take place? 
The 18th floor, across from the elevator. 
There was, like, a couch across from the elevator. 
Okay, yeah, I know. 
I remember it. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
Just someone chiming in on the YouTube chat. 
Mr. 
Underscore says, there's already malware made for recall. 
It's one of the reasons it's not shipping now. 
Sweet. 
Don't be so happy. 
Oh, I'm thrilled. 
But it was inevitable. 
It was inevitable. 
Hey, thanks for your phone call. 
All right. 
Good. 
Take care. 
Bye. 
See you next time. 
Hey, 202-321-4225. 
Let me just, before the next caller comes in, let me just get into it. 
I'm going to forget, otherwise. 
There's a change to Adobe terms and conditions for apps like Photoshop. 
It's outraged many professional users. 
Concern that the company is claiming the right to access their content, use it freely, and even sub-license it to others. 
The company is requiring users to agree to the new terms in order to continue using their Adobe apps, locking them out until they do so. 
That right there. 
I don't care what the story is actually about. 
But that move right there is a dick move. 
They lock them out until they agree to the new terms. 
Now, Adobe says, The terms say solely for the purposes of operating or improving the services and software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the content. 
For example, we may sub-license our right to the content to our service providers or to other users to allow the services and software to operate with others, such as enabling you to share photos. 
Oh, my God. 
So, designer Wettenschneider, who counts DC Comics and Nike among his clients, was one of the graphics pros to object to the terms. 
Here it is. 
If you are a professional, if you are under NDA with your clients, if you are a creative, a lawyer, a doctor, or anyone who works with proprietary files, it is time to cancel Adobe, delete all the apps and programs. 
Adobe cannot be trusted. 
Movie director Duncan Jones was equally blunt in his response. 
Hey, Photoshop, what the hell is that new agreement you forced us to sign this morning that locked our app until we agree to it? 
We are working on a bloody movie here, and no, you don't suddenly have the right to any of the work we are doing on it because we pay you to use Photoshop. 
What the F? 
And I, I'm sorry. 
I'm sorry. 
It was all caps. 
What was I supposed to do, Kyle? 
And, and they censored the last word, too. 
They did. 
So, otherwise, I would have said it. 
Yeah, concept artist Sam Santana pointed out that if he can't raise a support request to discuss the terms without first agreeing to them, you can't even uninstall the apps. 
I can't even get a hold of your support chat to question this unless I agree to these terms beforehand. 
I can't even uninstall Photoshop unless I agree to these terms. 
Are you effing kidding me? 
I think maybe it's a, um, the news story that's bleeping out that word. 
I'm sorry about that. 
Um, so, yeah, um, that's what's, uh, been going on, um, just from nine to five Mac. 
Now, apparently, um, Adobe has, has clarified, uh, since then, um, their initial statement, um, basically was, uh, nothing to see here, move along type tone. 
Uh, their next explanation, though, um, I, I guess I realized the, uh, issue wasn't, wasn't going to go anywhere. 
Uh, they offered a general explanation that it wanted to be transparent about the content checks it performs along with a change log, which highlighted the amendments. 
Uh, the focus of this update was to be clearer about the improvements to our moderation processes that we have in place. 
Given the explosion of generative AI and our commitment to responsible innovation, we've added more human moderation to our content submissions review process. 
Um, yeah, uh, so they're blaming this on AI, I guess. 
Alex, you're a lawyer. 
Can you cut through all the crap and tell us if this is a good development, a bad development, if it's even a new story anymore? 
Well, it, it's really crazy that it, it came out. 
I mean, that's, that this happened and that Adobe let this happen in, in so many ways that it, it could have been predicted that there should have been a backlash against us. 
I mean, requiring acceptance of terms and conditions to proceed, I guess, is pretty standard in a lot of these, uh, software updates, but, um, they should assume that certain people are going to read them and object to them. 
It's really, uh, beyond the pale crazy for companies to expect that any data that is created with their products is, is fair game for them to ingest in some way. 
But again, it goes back to everybody wanting to figure out some new data source for a new model, for a new type of AI system, some kind of new functionality that's going to be derived or created out of, uh, this massive amount of data that's ingested from all these different sources and various sources. 
And, and perhaps what Adobe could say in response, if we were to be their advocate, to be the devil's advocate in this particular situation would be that, well, you know, we're not ingesting whole cloth, your, your work and going to, to spit it out. 
They would say what all of the other large language models and AI systems that are being sued for copyright infringement are saying that, you know, we're ingesting this and it's essentially, uh, it amounts to a tiny fragment of what may be output at some particular time in the future. 
And so the idea that we're ingesting the entirety of, of your movie and, and somehow going to infringe upon it is fanciful, but it, it does not, I think, respect the commercial nature of the agreement between the user and the software developer. 
And, and I think it's a very sacrosanct relationship between a software developer and a user in that you are trusting that, that software developer is going to respect your rights to the data that you are creating with that particular piece of software. 
And they've, they've crossed that line. 
They've crossed some kind of Rubicon, uh, from which they, they can't now tread back so easily. 
They've lost a lot of user trust and I don't think it matters anymore, um, how they're trying to reel this back. 
The damage is done. 
The, the, the Rubicon is crossed and, uh, Adobe's got a big problem on their hands. 
One aspect of the way this is, um, this is used, I think that, uh, that is concerning is the potential for people that are artists or producers of, uh, media using this, uh, uh, technique, uh, some of their processes and use of the Adobe product itself could be, um, taken and used to create new tools that Adobe then integrates into their software, thus sort of eliminating maybe a, um, burgeoning or a boutique business that specialized in a certain way or a certain form or a certain style, basically turning their whole, um, differentiation in the market into like a paint bucket or something and basically diminishing the skill and, and, and ingenuity they brought to creating actual works. 
So I, that's, I think another aspect of this is that, that the, um, the tool, the tools and the features that they're starting to include, they don't necessarily have to wait for feedback or, um, uh, their own teams to come up with them. 
They're sort of have a greater ability to look at how their products are being used and, and, um, and learn from that and integrate it into their own development in ways we just cannot personally do ourselves yet, I think. 
And that's worth looking at, or at least considering, um, because there's a lot of, uh, work that goes into people's craft and the access they have. 
I mean, there's a certain trust there that, and then if all of a sudden, um, uh, the creative output can be used and, and, um, learned from by all the systems that Adobe can bring to bear to use, to use in some campaign, like you've seen their ads, like they do like meld different styles and go through. 
I mean, that's an example alone of stuff that they've probably either, I guess, contracted or licensed from actual users of their products. 
So imagine that on like a different scale and a less visible scale, that's the interest they have. 
And they're kind of treating their, like use the users of their products as themselves, um, uh, sources of revenue for future tools. 
When you employ these products employees that anything you create belongs to us, but I don't think that's what's happening here. 
I think they, they've walked it back. 
Maybe they, they phrased it badly in the, in the first place and then they never intended for that. 
But what they did do was lock everybody out of their own software until they agreed. 
And that to me, that's the, the real violation here that they cannot deny. 
And it's a wake up call to all of us using a software in the cloud that, uh, they can turn it off anytime they want and, and, and really screw you up and, and, uh, have more control than they ever deserve. 
Rob, go ahead. 
Um, some interesting, uh, thoughts in the YouTube chat about this. 
Uh, our pal Johnny fusion says subscriptions for software are awful to begin with. 
I'd rather own than rent. 
And, uh, Tim in Connecticut says, yeah, time to get a new software. 
I prefer the software I own, not a subscription model. 
And, uh, what you were saying about the, the computer locking it up until you agree to the new terms. 
Um, Alex, I wanted to know if you had any thoughts about this, because the fact that you agreed to terms of service to use a software and then they, um, take it, take you basically hostage later on, um, with a new change to the terms, um, is that even something that they should be able to get away with doing? 
Well, it, it doesn't seem like it because what they are creating quite literally is a contract of adhesion. 
You don't have any opportunity to negotiate. 
You don't have any opportunity to reject this. 
They're forcing your hand if you want access to your data. 
So in, in a lot of ways, you, you could be considered to have, uh, accepted the contract under duress, right? 
In order for a, uh, a contract to be binding when I, I always remembered the four elements of a contract when I was in law school by the, um, mnemonic device, uh, input, output, air conditioning. 
So you need an intent offer acceptance and consideration consideration being a legal term of art, meaning that essentially the price you pay for a promise that the value underlying the mutual promises that the parties are making to each other. 
And in this situation, it would seem that the element of acceptance would certainly be missing because you don't necessarily have a choice. 
You can't say no to it. 
So I think it's, it's literally a contract of adhesion and would be pretty tough for them to, uh, try to enforce this. 
Uh, I think if they were to try to rush to court. 
Yeah. 
And like without notification and like, uh, uh, uh, way to feedback, you really can disrupt people's livelihoods on mass with this kind of stuff. 
And it's terrible to, I mean, how often has, uh, have you walked into someplace and they, and try to transact or otherwise interact with people using commercial software for their business and you hear like, oh, my screen crashed or, oh, the system's down or, oh, I can't do this. 
I got a hotel or anywhere there. 
They always, uh, have like, uh, management stuff going on in the background and things are slow and, and, uh, uh, otherwise compromised or, or faulty. 
This is incredibly common when people are reliant on these systems and that's when they're just sort of in the normal day to day, like, uh, course of business day, uh, that activity gets magnified when they make these kinds of policy policy changes on the fly and expect people to just be able to, uh, uh, turn their attention immediately to this new phenomena that they haven't really been able to consult and, and under and digest in a, um, in a timely way that, you know, that meets their, their, uh, activities and, and availability. 
You see examples of this every day. 
Were you talking about the hotel we tried to check into? 
I was thinking of that. 
That poor guy, we, we checked, we, we got there late. 
It was at two in the morning and we're checking in and the systems are down for backing up or something like that. 
He cannot access his own hotel systems because of somebody somewhere that started a process. 
Well, they're all franchisees. 
Exactly. 
No. 
And, and we heard him calling them on the phone. 
They're treating him like, like, you know, a customer and not a fellow employee. 
He's giving out his, his name, his password, all kinds of information, just right out there for anyone to hear while we're, you know, standing around fascinated, but also tired. 
And this, you know, if you, if you check into a hotel after midnight, this could happen to you where you have to wait a half hour for them to back up their systems. 
And it's not even the fault of the people standing there. 
They have no control over the system. 
It's unbelievable that we accept these things. 
But it's convenient for the larger, uh, uh, companies to, to have a portfolio of properties. 
Yeah. 
But you know what? 
It makes it easy for them to encumber, to, to control. 
It's not easier for any, any person who's awake at that hour. 
It's not, it's not easier for us. 
It's not easier for the employee. 
I'm sure the person pressing the buttons in whatever city they were in, it's not easier for them. 
Yeah. 
It's easier for the shareholders in the end, I guess. 
But boy, what a bad practice. 
It's, it cheapens it. 
Uh, do we have a phone call or, um, no, can you give the number out? 
I'll give the number out then. 
Eight zero two, uh, eight zero two, three, two, one, four, two, two, five is our phone number. 
Eight Oh two, three, two, one hack. 
Um, and, um, Hey, it's, I, I look at, um, I'm looking at the computer screen. 
It's the 12th. 
It's exactly a month away from hope. 
Hope begins on July 12th, July 12th through 14th. 
So, um, yeah, uh, we are, um, to just update people on that because we are so incredibly busy. 
In fact, I've been so busy that I have not been doing a lot of things I should be doing, i.e. 
getting back to people showing up where I'm supposed to show up except for, you know, this place, um, and, um, um, uh, paying bills or, uh, returning phone calls, all that stuff. 
Um, cutting the grass, everything is just sort of put aside because we have to put together the schedule and we're doing that right now for the conference. 
We have more talks than, than ever, it seems. 
Uh, and they're really, really good too. 
A lot of workshops, a lot of villages, um, it's happening July 12th or 14th at St. 
John's University. 
And, uh, it's, it's going to be a blast. 
Uh, we sent out a, um, uh, a mailing yesterday, um, letting people know that, uh, we, we do need to sell more tickets because it's, um, I, I know this is something that's affected events around the country post COVID and all. 
Uh, in fact, some recording artists have had to cancel their tours because they're not selling enough tickets. 
Well, we only need to, to sell another 300. 
I'm not sure how many we, we, we sold in the last day or so, but, uh, another 300 by the end of June and we'll be fine. 
But, um, we got to get there because, um, you know, we have to survive. 
We have to keep the next conference, uh, a possibility in, uh, in, in the future. 
And we have a lot of things to add to the current event. 
Yeah. 
We want to, we want to be able to rent things so that we can, uh, you know, have good AV equipment and all that. 
And, um, you know, you can't do that with just a smile. 
Uh, so, uh, more information, hope.net, you'll see all the talks that are scheduled so far. 
Um, if you have, um, um, applied for a talk and you haven't heard back, um, check your spam folder or it's, it's possible that there just isn't room right now. 
It doesn't mean you can't give a presentation though. 
We are going to have the unscheduled track. 
We'll send information out about that as well. 
But boy, this is, um, this is going to be quite an event. 
Uh, it's completely different than last time. 
You know, if you were at the one of the St. 
John's in 2022, yeah, we're going to be in a completely different part of St. 
John's. 
So there people complained about the Hill in St. 
John's. 
I mean, like, like we could do something about it. 
Like it was, you know, our responsibility. 
Well, guess what? 
We did something about it. 
You don't have to climb the Hill anymore because we're at the bottom of the Hill. 
Yeah. 
We did that. 
We did that for you. 
Uh, actually it made more sense in many ways. 
Um, but you know, with a college campus, you can do things like that and it's really a pretty awesome place. 
So hopefully, um, we, we see a lot of you out there again, hope.net, all the information is there. 
You guys want to add anything? 
I, I just personally am very excited about this. 
Uh, as, as you may know, I, I missed last time around because I had COVID and I missed it. 
That was my first, that was the first time I missed hope since I started going in 2000. 
And, uh, so I, I have to, I have to get my streak back up. 
So, um, just this and the next, uh, 22 years and, and I'll be good. 
Why weren't you there in 1997 and 1994? 
I was going to be in there in 1997, but I couldn't get my day job off at, at the, or I couldn't get off my day job. 
Well, wow. 
I couldn't, I couldn't get the time off from work. 
You could have quit. 
You could have quit. 
Many people quit their jobs to attend. 
I mean, I'm not sure why that's a problem. 
All right. 
So how about 94? 
How do you explain that one? 
Uh, 94. 
I did not yet have the agency to get myself out there. 
I'm learning a lot about you, Rob. 
Okay. 
All right. 
Alex. 
Yes. 
Well, I'm, I'm very much looking forward to it. 
And, um, uh, if people haven't noticed, I feel like I, I might have bitten off a bit more than I can chew this particular time around. 
I think I'm involved in three different talks at, at home. 
Well, I hope, I hope, you know, you got to keep track of how many talks you're a part of. 
So, yes. 
Yeah. 
Well, um, uh, I'm doing, I'm doing something really cool with, um, the EFF with Cooper Quentin from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as, uh, Lorax Horn and Emma Best from Distributed Denial of Secrets. 
Uh, and we are going to be talking about, uh, what's happening with Appen. 
That's the Appen Tech Center. 
And our, our listeners will remember that that has to do with the Indian hacker for hire operation that Raphael Satter had reported on. 
And then there was an Indian court. 
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. 
Hold it. 
Isn't that the thing where if anybody who mentions it gets sued? 
That's pretty much the case. 
And we're doing a whole talk on it. 
We're having a talk about this thing where if you even say its name, their lawyers come after you and we're going to have a talk in front of an audience and videotape for the world to see. 
Yeah. 
We're going to, are you mad? 
Absolutely. 
Good. 
Because I would not expect anything less. 
And mad in the sense of, of angry too. 
So, uh, you know, there's been a massive abuse of legal process, massive abuse of the courts for censorship for even in, you know, this even reaches issues of, uh, making it, uh, perhaps contempt of court to ingest cyber threat intelligence about this group of threat actors in India. 
Um, and, uh, uh, perhaps there may even be some more interesting developments going on in this case before, uh, the hope talk. 
Another one that I'm doing is with, uh, Jason Long, who's one of the directors of the innovation lab of human rights first. 
And, uh, we're going to be talking about developing technology on a budget that has a human rights impact and I'm, I'm on the technology advisory board for human rights first. 
So that's going to be pretty cool. 
And I think that might be the first time that HRF is at hope, which, uh, this will be a very, very cool first, and I'm sure it won't be a last. 
And the last one I'm doing is with, uh, Dan Nowak and, and Roel Schoenberg, and it's something of a continuation of the talk that we did in 2020 during the nine days of, of hope, uh, that has to deal with the proliferation of disinformation and especially ahead of the election season that we are, are heading into or already in, uh, I guess. 
So I'll have my hands full at hope. 
But I think it's going to be a hell of a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to, uh, hanging out with everybody and seeing everyone. 
And, uh, it's just, I think it's going to be all around great time. 
We're going to have, uh, Corey Doctro giving another talk. 
Uh, Johannes will be, um, uh, showing another one of his films. 
Um, and, um, we're going to have the radical librarians there. 
His mantra is all computers are broken. 
I can hardly wait to see that one. 
Uh, love hackers and robots making surveillance policy change in Canada, modern day automobile safety, rescue ops using Canbus. 
I'm just going through reading one by one here, but there's about a hundred talks, uh, that have been scheduled so far. 
Um, I think we're pretty much full at this point, but it's, it's a wide variety. 
It's, it's the most interesting, um, uh, amount of material that I can, I can imagine seeing in one place. 
It really is something, uh, protecting JetBlue airways from cyber threats in the clouds. 
Great title. 
It's great on the title alone, but. 
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. 
Which cloud? 
Clouds? 
Clouds. 
That's for you to decide. 
Clouds like in the air? 
How about this? 
Or like cloud, like computer cloud? 
Protecting the network traffic of 1 billion people, reverse engineering Chinese cryptography. 
Yeah. 
So there's so much, I mean, we could just spend hours talking about all this. 
We don't have the time, but, um, if you have the time to, uh, to attend, um, July 12th through 14th, St. 
John's university, easy to get to. 
If you're driving free parking, you can't really beat that. 
And if you're not driving mass transit, uh, gets you there dependably. 
And, um, it's, it's, it's not midtown Manhattan. 
We know that that was, uh, our, our, our former location is a pile of rubble right now. 
So not much we can do about that. 
And, um, uh, finding an affordable place in Manhattan is, is about as impossible as you could imagine. 
But, uh, we found a great place. 
It's spacious. 
It's, uh, filled with potential and, uh, support. 
They have, you know, equipment that works. 
They have really, um, uh, well-maintained buildings and rooms. 
And, uh, it's, it's just a joy to be there. 
Uh, again, um, um, we're looking to, uh, to have more people get tickets before the cutoff at the end of June. 
Uh, also we have, um, virtual tickets too at a, um, a fraction of the cost where you get to, uh, talk to other virtual people and attend all the talks virtually, but also support hope so that we can continue doing this. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
Uh, our pal Tim in the YouTube chat asks if, uh, Mitch Altman will be there, uh, doing the soldering workshop again. 
And, uh, I'd like to address that. 
Of course he is. 
Not only is he doing that, he's doing four workshops, uh, this time around. 
Um, learn to solder with the Icon solder badge kit. 
He's doing LED strips everywhere for everyone. 
He's doing Arduino for total newbies and he's doing digital music synthesis solder with an RG touch synth kit. 
So you can do a bunch of soldering with our, our good friend, Mitch Altman, um, at this, uh, at hope this time around. 
That's right. 
And he's giving a talk too. 
So, uh, there's that to look forward to, uh, is robot invasion, the rise of educational robots or robotics rather. 
Um, here's another talk about airless, securing airlines in the clouds. 
That's different from the jet blue one, but they also use the clouds. 
That's a popular way of, uh, of saying this. 
So yeah, go through, um, hope.net. 
There's a, there's a whole, um, um, section on, on talks that have been, uh, accepted so far, uh, as well as workshops and more information is being posted daily. 
Go ahead, Alex. 
Uh, Hey guys, I just wanted to say, and I apologize, but I'm going to have to jump a little bit early from you guys tonight. 
As you can probably see, uh, behind me, I'm still in the office, um, Alex, every week you either don't show up or you, you leave early. 
Uh, we're going to have to discuss this. 
Yeah. 
We might have to bring other members of your family in to discuss this, this issue that you seem to have. 
My, uh, 11 year old will be at hope with me as well. 
Well, he, he's going to have to be consulted on this because, um, you know, it's, um, his fault that I have to leave. 
Uh, is it trouble at home? 
Is that what we're dealing with here? 
I have to, I have to get home and I, I, I had made some promises to him. 
So I have, uh, promises to keep and miles to go before. 
All right. 
Well, listen, uh, we won't see you next, well, we might see you next week if they'd change their mind on preempting us, but I'm not sure right now we're planning not to see you next week. 
So, okay. 
Well, that's, uh, that will be, uh, you know, all your losses, I'm guessing. 
Yes. 
We're looking forward to it. 
Uh, and, uh, I guess, um, well, uh, say hi to, uh, all your family who have stolen you from us and, uh, we'll see you next time and our phone number eight, zero two, three two, one, four, two, two, five. 
Someone can please call quickly to make up for this loss. 
Not fast enough. 
Come on. 
See the silence. 
How do you feel that silence? 
This is over time, not overkill. 
Overblown. 
That's, that's what we should be called. 
Absolutely. 
Well, the YouTube chat is, uh, throwing around ideas to call in and say things like, uh, Alexa play never going to give you up or Alexa turn off the lights. 
Um, but, uh, the joke's on you folks, cause we're all wearing headphones. 
Um, but yes, do give us a call at one eight zero two three, two one hack. 
And, uh, they think we're playing the show through our own speakers. 
That'd be so echoey. 
It would sound terrible. 
Wow. 
And plus we don't even have one of those stupid things nearby. 
We have a phone call. 
All right. 
Good evening. 
You're on off though. 
Go with time. 
Go ahead. 
Hi. 
I, uh, tuned in a little late, but I caught the part where you talked about, uh, streaming services and we're asking if, when's the point when people are going to go back to pirating? 
And I think we've already hit that point. 
I think we hit that point years ago and we're not going back. 
That's what I think. 
Uh, I think it's, we've gotten, um, it's got, the situation's gotten bad enough. 
It's getting popular again because like I stopped pirating when like Netflix came along because it was convenient, but now I need five, six, whatever services just to keep up on whatever my kids want to watch. 
It's just as expensive as the cable I was getting away from in the first place. 
Uh-huh. 
Yeah. 
Yeah. 
That's it. 
The saturation and the like fatigue of trying to find shows you want to watch. 
Uh, you can do the same search and there are a myriad of tools that never left, uh, for distribution, torrenting, uh, all of those things that were popular way back before these sorts of phenomena emerged on the market. 
And, uh, it's the equal time spent at zero at less costs. 
And, um, people are sharing information about it. 
New sites, uh, and independent efforts are emerging and there's just, um, a real will to bypass it because it's been made so ugly. 
Yeah. 
You can't, you can't possibly keep up with it all. 
I mean, you know, it started off simple enough. 
It was prime. 
There was Netflix, you know, then, then, uh, you had Peacock and then Paramount plus shows up and Apple plus, and you know, you want to see one show and it's on FedEx prime and you're not going to subscribe to that. 
You know, so it's just ridiculous. 
How many things do you have to subscribe to? 
And when are they going to all merge together and so that you can go back to what you were doing before, which was just watching TV. 
Oh, sorry. 
And we're starting to even see the, uh, the bundle options where you can subscribe to more than one, uh, streaming, streaming service at a time. 
Yeah. 
Like a market emerged even trying to get it on it. 
Yeah. 
I'm surprised it's not showing up as a channel on your, on your cable TV now, you know, the Netflix channel or whatever, even though you're choosing things, uh, they could do interactive on a particular channel and just sort of incorporate it. 
I don't know. 
People would probably go for that rather than all these, uh, separate places they're, they're, they're paying for. 
But the, but the thing is, I think a lot of people don't realize they're paying for all these, um, all these streaming services because, you know, the amount isn't that great. 
It's billed automatically to credit cards or bank accounts. 
And, um, I think many people might have just lost track of what they're actually subscribed to. 
And they're definitely counting on you doing that too. 
Yeah. 
I think that's part of the business model. 
Absolutely. 
Rob, go ahead. 
Yeah. 
Yeah. 
The, the whole Hulu Netflix thing took off in the first place because people were tired of the cable TV business model where you had to subscribe to every little bit of everything, um, separately that you wanted and, and spend a huge pile of money when everything could be in one place, maybe two places. 
And, uh, that took off like, uh, like nobody's business. 
It was wildly successful. 
And their next move was, well, let's go back to how things were with cable television. 
Right. 
Right. 
And, you know, it wouldn't be so bad, but the interfaces are all terrible. 
I have not found a single one yet that can handle closing credits in a way that doesn't piss me off. 
You know, I don't want to have to do all this acrobatic jumping around with my remote just to be able to, to see who directed the episode I just watched because, you know, it turns into a little tiny screen and you have to click on something to get it back. 
But then by the time you do that, that credit is gone. 
So you have to rewind and then you rewind and it does the same thing all over again. 
And God forbid, you're just scrolling around looking for something to watch. 
It starts playing it while you're reading the synopsis. 
I haven't decided yet. 
So you wind up not doing that. 
You wind up scrolling fast and not reading the synopses. 
And, uh, it's just a very stressful situation. 
You turn off the TV and read a book. 
Oh yeah. 
Yeah. 
Um, and on that thought, you are also mentioning, um, like if people are going to adopt other options, they've got to be a lot easier to use. 
Um, and I know one of the issues like in my house is just the sheer number of ads you're seeing, we're seeing on YouTube. 
Um, I'm getting like two minute skippable ads and, um, at least there's one for YouTube called, um, new pipe with an Android client that is easy enough to use that you can hand it to somebody who is not tech savvy and they can figure it out. 
Okay. 
New pipe. 
And it is at least, yeah, new pipe. 
Um, and it is at least bringing the borrowed entry down to where non tech savvy people would be willing to use that. 
See that that's really useful for a lot of the user generated stuff that you just cannot find on, um, but it's not commercially distributed as like a show show. 
It's like, um, uh, self-generated or. 
And anyone who's, who's, uh, uploading content to YouTube, they can also upload content to, to new pipe or whatever other things are out there. 
Unless YouTube turns around and says, no, you can't do that. 
You can only upload to us. 
They don't have that kind of control over, over their users yet, but I'm sure they want it. 
Yeah. 
Yeah. 
Cause new pipe is just a third party YouTube client. 
I see. 
Um, so you get everything on YouTube, but without the ads. 
Oh, okay. 
All right. 
And I, I know I've been, um, I like my TV and my smart devices. 
Um, I'm dealing with the ads just with, um, pie hole on raspberry pie. 
Okay. 
That's, that sounds good. 
Yeah. 
But that was just thought I had well listed in. 
So I'd share that with you. 
Yeah. 
All right. 
Well, thanks for that information. 
That's, that's, that's very handy and, uh, we will spread it around. 
Yeah. 
Thank you. 
All right. 
Y'all have a good, uh, good evening. 
All right. 
Take care. 
Thanks for your call. 
Take care. 
802-321-4225. 
We're on the air for a little while longer here on YouTube. 
I like that we're bitching out YouTube and we're on YouTube at the same time, but you notice we don't have ads and, you know, you better not see an ad on our channel, you know, at least on here. 
I think they're on the, the hope videos, which are a different part of the channel. 
Um, just because we don't know how to turn them off, but, um, yeah, uh, there shouldn't, we, we did an experiment here once just to see how many ads we could get in. 
And, uh, it was, it was mayhem and craziness, but, um, for this, it would be ridiculous to have advertisements. 
So it'd be so, so wrong, but you see them everywhere. 
You see them everywhere. 
802-321-4225. 
Yeah. 
And, uh, as the YouTube chat, uh, folks mentioned, uh, Bobcat, uh, mentions YouTube keeps breaking new pipe because of that same arms race we were talking about on the radio hour where YouTube is in a constant battle against people who want to make the YouTube experience better, less advertise-y, less, uh, less, uh, hinky, less invasive. 
And, uh, yeah, it's, uh, YouTube keeps breaking new pipe. 
Um, and also the new pipe version that you need to install, the official versions are on the F droid store or on GitHub. 
You can't just get it off the Google play store. 
So, you know, it's, you, you have to, you have to do a certain amount of muscle on your own phone to get new pipe even working. 
And is there a desktop client? 
I don't know that there's a desktop client, but that sounds like a pretty- That's one of my other complaints is that there are too many things that are just, uh, geared towards phones. 
And, um, a lot of us aren't on our phones all the time. 
There's nothing more, you know, nothing better, I think, than a, than a good old fashioned desktop, not even a laptop, you know, big screen, big keyboard, can sit back, you know? 
Yeah. 
Generally, you can use the VLC. 
Or stand, yes. 
Sorry, what? 
Generally, you, generally you can use the VLC player if you have a YouTube URL that you want to watch and it will load in the VLC, uh, video player software on desktop. 
Um, but again, you can't navigate the interface and choose new things to watch that way. 
VLC is one bit of software that has not ever pissed me off. 
I wonder why that is. 
They just consistently seem to do it right. 
You can get it to give you, uh, less than desirable results. 
Have you done that? 
Have you managed to get the VLC? 
It's mostly because it's so capable in some regards that you, you know, throw some things at it that it just is like, no, I can't. 
It played a video upside down once. 
I couldn't figure that out. 
It's worked well for me. 
I've, um, been playing around with their app and, uh, using it with various collections of music and media and stuff and seeing how good it is. 
It's not, it's not bad. 
Um, we have a call by the way. 
We do. 
Oh, okay. 
Well, I'll take the call. 
Good evening. 
You're on Off the Hook Overtime. 
Go ahead. 
Yeah. 
Hi. 
Um, I, uh, I wanted to know if you guys ever had this experience. 
I call it, uh, capture hell where I'm on a, a YouTube, I'm on YouTube and, um, I click on a link where to see the email address. 
And, uh, the last few times I've done it, I've gotten like a dozen captures where it says, uh, click on every box where there's a bicycle. 
Oh my God. 
And then there's like 10 more of those stupid things. 
You know, my, my, any way to short circuit that thing. 
The one I hate is the crosswalks because I, I check all the crosswalks because sometimes it's just a little bit of a white line that you see and that's a crosswalk. 
So I check it, but I get it wrong. 
And then the robot says, no, you're, you're not real. 
You have to do it again. 
That's traffic lights. 
And they, they, they show us these pictures of massive traffic lights with like 18 different lights on them. 
And that takes at least five different little boxes. 
So you have to check them all, but that's not what they're looking for either. 
So, you know, you can't read the mind of the robot wanting you to prove you're not a robot. 
Um, there's gotta be a better way. 
No, but I'm saying I do that. 
But every time, the last time I checked for some, I wanted to see someone's email. 
I went through that. 
It showed me like 10 or 12 different things. 
And I just wanted to know, is there any way to, to short circuit, to, to skip out of that stupid thing? 
Well, that's, that's what I'd like to know too, because, you know, the fact that you got 10, that means you got it wrong 10 times in its eyes. 
That's why it keeps giving in new ones. 
And that's just, you know, they're the ones that are wrong. 
They don't know their own, their own pictures and, uh, they're, they're assigned in an incorrect way. 
Rob, did you have something to contribute? 
Yeah. 
Sometimes those captures can get stuck in loops when you're using an ad blocker or when you're looking in an incognito, uh, mode in, um, browser window or things like that. 
And, uh, it can interfere with that. 
And yeah, it just adds to the aggravation. 
So a couple of things to try would be, uh, disabling things like that. 
Why would an ad, why would an ad blocker make you get lots of captures? 
Because, um, sometimes it interferes with how the capture verifies things through, say, a third party site that happens to be blocked by the ad blocker or something. 
It's, it's a, it's a mess. 
It's all a mess. 
Huh? 
Wow. 
I don't use any ad blockers actually, by the way. 
See, he's clean. 
Yeah, I'm clean. 
Well, I recommend it. 
You might like it. 
Yeah. 
I mean, YouTube, um, it's good, but I agree with you about the ads though. 
The ads are out of control. 
Yeah. 
And they've gotten worse. 
And the worst ones are the ones in the middle of content. 
It's just, you know, nobody gains anything from that. 
And that, that really should be a rarity if used at all. 
Rob? 
Yeah. 
Speaking of Ted Chiang, I know Alex mentioned him. 
Uh, there was a great science fiction film that was based on one of his short stories called Arrival with, uh, Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. 
I, I highly recommend that. 
Okay. 
And also, uh, I agree with Alex about the Financial Times. 
Great newspaper. 
Uh-huh. 
And the lunch, uh, with so-and-so is really good. 
And the weekend before, uh, the weekend before Thanksgiving, they have a list of the best books of the year. 
And it runs for like three pages and it lists about a hundred different books. 
Wow. 
So, um, it's, it's definitely worth reading. 
Great newspaper. 
Rob, did you have something else? 
Uh, yeah. 
Just a tip from the YouTube chat. 
Uh, Bobcat mentions that, uh, the CAPTCHA is not checking that you clicked everything. 
It's checking how your mouse moved as well, just to make sure you're, you're a human being moving your mouse like a person. 
What the hell does that mean? 
How, how am I supposed to move my mouse? 
I don't understand that. 
Yeah. 
I don't understand that. 
How, how dare a robot judge me if I'm human? 
I swear to God. 
Yeah. 
Well, I guess it's another reason to switch to something other than YouTube. 
Yeah. 
But I'll, if I find anything, I'll let you guys know. 
Thank you. 
Anything you promise. 
Thank you. 
Take care. 
All right. 
How about, uh, you know, Chinese YouTube. 
I'm, I'm desperate enough to go there and use whatever they use. 
Of course, it's probably going to be censored to hell and back, but still, but are you, are you desperate enough to learn Chinese so you can navigate their site and search for things you want? 
How, you know, I don't already know Chinese. 
That's a very good point. 
All right. 
802-321-4225. 
We only have a few minutes left. 
So, uh, let's see who else is out there. 
Yeah. 
Do other things, do other things, other things. 
Yes. 
You don't have to watch what's on YouTube. 
You realize like you, you might use it incidentally and then you get sort of drawn into it. 
And that itself is, uh, you know, unhealthy. 
There's other things out there to do. 
That's true. 
That's true. 
Don't let the algorithm run your life. 
No calls. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
Sorry. 
Another, another thing I like to do about this is, uh, was actually suggested by someone in the chat as well, which is, um, use the software YT-DLP, um, which is a command line tool to download a video from YouTube. 
It doesn't work on all of them. 
It doesn't work on ones with a DRM and stuff. 
But if you, if you are able to just download a video off of YouTube and then you have a video file that you can watch anytime, any place in any way that you want and skip around to your heart's content. 
That's true. 
You can also save it as audio if you prefer that. 
Yeah. 
That kind of struck me. 
Like, um, if the paid subscription accounts have a better ability to, um, get copies of content or if they, uh, themselves have to chase down people who are using the accounts to record and otherwise copy things commercial free and distribute them as a third party. 
Like if that's policed in any way and what kinds of experiences, both people that are trying those things as well as, uh, what observers of content like that have to do to, to, uh, circumvent a lot of this. 
I'm, I'm, I'm very curious. 
Uh, I mean, uh, also, uh, users at home, like if they're, um, if there's ways of pirating stuff once you've got a paid for account, because I imagine that's how a lot of these other platforms come up with it. 
Um, if they're not doing something like YouTube downloader, go ahead, Rob. 
Um, our, our, uh, listener, uh, Alexius, uh, mentions on the, on the YouTube chat that, um, their 11 year old who is listening, um, awesome. 
Hello to you. 
Um, says the capture also connects to your search history to make sure it's human, which, uh, I, I would find a slightly troubling if that's how it works. 
If that's true, it'll be a big scandal. 
So let's, if that's true, let's prove it because, uh, that that's definitely a step beyond anything that they should be doing. 
Um, but, but it is awesome that, uh, that you're having, that you're listening to this with your kid and we, we love to hear about that sort of thing. 
Yeah. 
Thanks for the comment. 
And this, uh, I'm told by the way, is, um, uh, setting a record for a YouTube broadcast that is tearing down YouTube more than usually, usually YouTube broadcasts don't do that. 
And yeah, that's, we went there and we're, we're telling you what's bad about YouTube and why we need something better. 
And, um, yeah, and, and, and we'll continue to do that. 
Or what, what to do were it to just all go away? 
Cause they seem disinterested in having it work the way it had worked. 
And I think there's a little alienation and, uh, realization in some of the other stories, you know, well, what would we do if, if it wasn't really viewable, if it wasn't watchable in the same way, it's not the public utility that we've come to know it as, and it can, it can be that they change the way you have access to it very quickly to meet their interests and not necessarily those of their creators and, uh, and, uh, people that view it all the same. 
When did Google buy YouTube? 
Because I think that's when things started to go wrong. 
Hmm. 
Yeah. 
Ask Google. 
I want to say. 
You're going there, right? 
That's how else are you going to ask? 
Free 2010. 
Uh-huh. 
Yeah. 
I think it looks like, um, according to DuckDuckGo, um, it was, it was October of, uh, 2006. 
Oh, really? 
Well, I mean, Google wasn't around much longer before then. 
That sounds about right. 
Wow. 
Okay. 
So they've been screwing it up for a while. 
Huh. 
Well, or going back to it for different, uh, models of revenue extraction. 
You know, uh, we should use the Wayback Machine and archive.org and, and visit YouTube back in like, you know, 2004 or something and see what it was like then. 
Before, before Google. 
If I have my history right, I mean, they did exist before Google, right? 
Before Google bought them. 
So I'd like to know more about that and what, what the vision of the original developers was. 
Absolutely. 
And that's the thing that like, we're, we're introduced to products that themselves have a vision, but the overall goal of, of a platform like YouTube became sort of maybe, maybe a lot, I think the observations alongside the complaining complaints we have, uh, are that it's may, it may have lost its way. 
Right. 
And what happens when it's kind of not, not really performing the same function and in people's eyes. 
Wow. 
Okay. 
I'm, I'm looking it up and, uh, Google or YouTube rather was started in 2005 and, uh, Google bought it in 2006. 
So it, it, uh, chugged away for a whole year before it was absorbed by the monolith. 
Oh, that must've been a special time. 
Wow. 
Okay. 
Well, I'm, I'm sorry. 
I didn't appreciate it more than it probably was a lot better though. 
You know, in the early days after the acquisition too, but it's, it's certainly going downhill with all the advertising and, uh, pressure to pay them to stop advertising. 
It's just, it's just so, so wrong. 
Anyway, that's how, um, we started and I'm going to end by complaining about Google and YouTube. 
Um, that's going to do it for us tonight. 
Thank you for the people who called and, uh, write to us. 
O th at 2600.com. 
Get involved in hope. 
You can be a volunteer. 
You can be part of, uh, all kinds of different teams and, uh, you can have a great time. 
July 12th or 14th, hope.net. 
And, um, anything else we need to tell people were there meetings last week, Rob? 
Uh, there were meetings last week. 
Uh, you know, I, I went to our local one. 
It was, uh, it was a lot of fun and great to see some folks, a lot of new faces, uh, still popping up, which is excellent. 
And, uh, also some very old faces coming back, which is also excellent. 
You know, uh, I've, I've been told by a number of people, which is kind of odd that, uh, Canada is having a problem with meetings. 
In fact, there are no more meetings in Canada at all. 
Uh, the ones that came back after the pandemic evaporated and, um, no one else has, has come forward. 
I don't know. 
Did all the hackers disappear in Canada? 
It doesn't seem right. 
We used to have so many. 
We used to have Toronto. 
We had Montreal. 
Uh, we had, uh, Winnipeg. 
We had Vancouver, bunch of others. 
Um, details, 2600.com slash meetings. 
You get the guidelines there. 
If you're in Canada, consider starting a 2600 meeting there, they're, you know, easy to start, fun to run. 
And, um, you know, you're, you're basically opening up minds and, uh, inspiring people to do all kinds of cool things. 
Just as people have gone to 2600 meetings over the years, since we started back in 1987, um, it's changed people's lives. 
So, um, I know some of the best hackers come from Canada. 
I'd like to see that, uh, uh, come back and, and, and be, um, be a force to reckon with again. 
Absolutely. 
All right. 
On that note, we're going to say good night and, uh, see you either next week or in two weeks. 
Good night.