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?
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.