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Supreme Court Barbeque
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Theme
00:00:00
Speaker
Supreme Court BBQ intro music. Hello. Yeah, we don't have that anymore. Yeah, we need to, you mentioned that they have an upgraded version of the text to music engine and I keep meaning to go and check it out. Me too. I played with it a little bit. I wasn't able to generate anything that was worth, I had an idea that like at some point I want to like throw a bunch of them in here and we could play through them and see, you know, which one we like or whatever, but I just never get around to doing it. Did you do Supreme Court BBQ again to see what it would bring up?
00:00:27
Speaker
I did not. I should have. Sorry. That would be a good, like, sciencing, like, what does it think Supreme Court barbecue means, in opposed to the other one? I don't think I realized that was actually your prompt. I thought that was you naming it post hoc. No, no, that was what it spit out when I said Supreme Court barbecue. Oh, that's interesting. I was trying to think how could, like,
00:00:49
Speaker
I was trying to beam my thoughts in, you know, right, mind flayer tadpole style into this mercy and and say, like, I, it's a legal podcast that isn't supposed to be that too serious. Right. I'm picturing Supreme Court justices at a barbecue. And that's what I was. I was trying to get it to say, what do you think that means, AI? And that's what spit out. And it would change legal at all. But, you know,
00:01:17
Speaker
that would change throughout history, right? In terms of like what the, it's sort of like, it has to look to what the composition of the court is. Like what, there's like a joke now you could make where it maybe would be like Wagner or something, you know, some sort of, you know, different personalities. I, well, I mean, I can imagine,
00:01:34
Speaker
You mean here, as in, here comes the destruction? Is Wagner the Rite of Valkyries? Yes. Yes. I'm imagining, I immediately pictured Apokolips now in a tech helicopter coming and bombing everything. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that would be the Valkyries. That was what you were going for? Yeah. Sounds about right. Sounds about right. Clarence Thomas in socks and sandals and hanging out with Harlan Crow. And that music is playing.
00:02:00
Speaker
How much did that cost, I wonder? Quite a bit. Those hot dogs are very expensive. Yeah.
Host Introductions and Backgrounds
00:02:06
Speaker
So in case people don't already realize, this is a squaring minds. It's episode 24 for September 7th, right? 2023. Sounds right. And the show is just three lawyer friends goofing around for our own enjoyment. Nothing we say here is legal advice because we are not qualified to give. Well, some of us are, but I'm not qualified to give legal advice. Yes.
00:02:23
Speaker
I'm one of the friends though that you, you listeners are not qualified to receive our legal advice. We do have not gained the privilege of receiving our legal advice to you. So I don't remember the particulars of my professional responsibility class, but that doesn't sound right in terms of heavy handed. Yeah. Jake's getting real heavy handed there. We don't have an attorney client relationship with any, any of you for listeners. Uh, so yeah.
00:02:53
Speaker
We have other kinds of relationship. It's not an attorney client relationship So what maybe one or more of my clients listen? I I cannot I don't know that only Andrew knows that and he doesn't know that my clients are so yeah The information it's all cabin so we don't have there's no overlap in information. So I don't know that you don't know that I don't know this No, but we got a future clients out there. We have info sec. We have good info sec on this podcast. I
00:03:17
Speaker
Do we now? I think so. I think so. Okay. I'm Jake, Florida local government land use and construction attorney in central Florida, by the way. You're my favorite, central Florida land use and government and construction attorney. Thank you. Did you know that? Oh, by a lot. I guess. Andrew, you're my favorite tax and technology lawyer from New Jersey slash Philadelphia.
00:03:44
Speaker
Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. You're probably not my favorite overall tax and technology attorney, but I would hope not. You're top three. That's cool. Yeah, that's good. I'm climbing up in the rankings. A couple of weeks ago, you implied that I was not even in the list. Did I? I don't remember that. I think so. That doesn't sound like something I would say.
00:04:00
Speaker
Anyway, hi, I'm Jason. I am an employment lawyer. I sue people's bad bosses. It's how I spend my working days. I enjoy suing people's bad bosses. It feels like justice. It feels like doing good and right, especially when the bosses are super, super bad, like racist bosses who instead of firing the racist coworkers who talk about
00:04:27
Speaker
We make racially motivated death threats against fellow coworkers. Instead of disciplining them, they say, oh, HR says I can't do anything about it. Yeah, especially bad bosses. No.
00:04:42
Speaker
They're protecting the vibes, you know? It would be really bad vibes if I were to fire this guy for the, you know, racist death threats. A small thing like a death threat. I mean, what's next, right? You start firing people for death threats. Next thing, it's violence in the office isn't allowed. We don't want that. I'll tell you what's next. I fit my office fight club. Act of violence, and that's not great. We should not have it. No. Hey, don't be bad bosses, or I'm going to sue you. Or some of my friends in the employment bar will come sue you.
00:05:09
Speaker
I'm a millennial. I'm never going to be a boss of anybody else. Oh, sure you are. Yeah. Well, you already broke the millennial thing. I mean, we're all homeowners. That's true, right? We're not supposed to own houses. We're supposed to be like living in hovels or something. That's true. I was the last one. We were the last ones. The very last millennial to ever buy a house.
Football Fandom and Viewing Habits
00:05:28
Speaker
We got in, we kicked the ladder out from underneath us and that's it. We're in here and everybody else is in apartments. Thanks Boomers. Yeah. Gen X are cool, but Boomers, yeah.
00:05:38
Speaker
In my backyard, we can play football. It's very small. It's just big enough that I could throw a ball and be okay with it. That was my attention segue to the fact that it's football. That was an excellent segue. It was very smooth. It didn't seem to come out of nowhere. It was great. I read the word football and I was like, okay, how can I do this?
00:05:59
Speaker
So Jacob, we've already talked about you having a strange and kind of pitiful allegiance for baseball teams. Uh, what is, what is your allegiance for football team? Well, I believe I've discussed this. I was a Raiders fan. Uh, and then, you know, uh, they were part of the list of people that left Oakland. And so I, I tried to be a,
00:06:25
Speaker
I tried to like adopt the team where I moved. So like I tried to be a bucket. I didn't try to be a Bucks fan because I hate the Bucks from way back in the Raiders. Good judgment. 2002 Super Bowl grudge. Long lasting grudges here. Also Tom Brady. Yes, exactly. Yes. Though once he won the Super Bowl, I couldn't deny. I couldn't deny how, you know, he's undeniable. Just like good. And then I tried to be a Jags fan.
00:06:57
Speaker
It just doesn't take. It never takes as much as the team you grew up with. But the good thing about the NFL is that unlike basically every other sport, the NFL has a really good product if you don't care about the teams.
00:07:14
Speaker
And that is NFL Red Zone and playing fantasy football because you just get all the highlights constantly. Do you all know about NFL Red Zone or do you watch the Red Zone? Yeah, Andrew, but I mean, I know of it, but I don't I don't know. OK, so, you know, it's like one channel and they constantly switch between all the live games for whatever is the most exciting thing going on.
00:07:37
Speaker
in the red zone means there's like a team in the red zone, meaning just about to score a touchdown or maybe anyway. But yeah, that watching red zone, once you've watched red zone, I feel like it's impossible to watch football any other way, at least. Interesting.
00:07:55
Speaker
Baseball has attempted, has attempted this. It doesn't, it doesn't work quite as well. MLB has a big inning, which on the MLB like app, which does the same basic idea or it'll have like four games at once and sort of switch around. It doesn't seem to comport really the same way that it, I'm not a big football fan, but from what I can tell from other football fans, it seems like that really, like you said, like you, there's no sense in watching a game start to finish any other way. This is the better way to sort of take it all in at once.
00:08:19
Speaker
Surely the difference there has to be baseball. You're going to have at bats that are like somewhere usually between like three and 12 pitches. And if you're watching a football game, if you're in the red zone, chances are you're talking about four plays total, maybe eight, maybe more if there are penalties or, you know, things like that. But like,
00:08:40
Speaker
That tends to happen with a little bit more definitive action, whereas baseball, you may have five pitches where a batter doesn't even swing a bat. I think it probably lends itself better to football, that sort of format.
00:08:55
Speaker
And also a solo homer in baseball is not as exciting as a 80-yard touchdown pass. Because it's just like, pop, it's gone. It's over and done now. And that's a run. And then you'll have big innings where two or more runs score, where they load up the bases and all that.
00:09:21
Speaker
But if a football team gets in the red zone, you're like, OK, the next two or three minutes are very likely to be exciting. Will they, won't they score kind of thing? Yeah, if there's a huge inning, it's like 35 minutes. It's a series of singles and doubles and stolen bases and whatever. And so it's not something that you would just switch over to. I think baseball, by virtue of how many games are played,
00:09:47
Speaker
people are more locked into their team and they're less interested in like, Oh, Juan Soto is, you know, is that bat and he's on the cusp of, you know, some minor home run record. Whereas football, it seems like a lot of people take in all the games, more people take in most of the games in a season that are played than obviously you can in baseball. It's just not possible. So Andrew, I assume based on your geography that you are a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles. Am I wrong? Am I right? You're wrong. Okay. That's good. That's good. New York Giants.
00:10:17
Speaker
Yes. Boom. Yeah. Yes. Yankees Giants. I mean, I feel like if you're a Mets fan, you would go Jets. I mean, I think those tend to kind of go together. I'm a Philly transplant. So I don't I disavow any any links to this region. I guess I just assumed National League.
00:10:34
Speaker
NFC was the connection. I, that doesn't make any sense at all. It's just a letter or a name because yeah, you know, Yankees, ale, uh, giants NFC, but I guess they run. That's the connection. That's what it is. Yeah. It's also the hipster teams, I guess, because yeah, the underdog, you know, through the eighties and nineties, right? Yeah. The Mets were the underdogs of the eighties. Yeah. Well, no, no, you're right. That's true.
00:11:03
Speaker
That's true. OK, not in the 80s or the 90s. Yeah, there you go. The Mets are the underdog more often than they are the overdog or whatever, whatever the alternative is. I don't know what's the alternative. Top dog. Yeah. Right. I mean, the Mets are sort of perpetually like a season here and there aside, they're generally not the like dominant New York team. Yeah. Yeah. And I would say the same for the Jets, I think. Right. I know less about football than I do about baseball. Actually, so I was thinking about this because the Giants have been recently
00:11:33
Speaker
Not good. Definitely better than the Jets. But like I say not good. They somehow kept winning. They somehow won multiple Super Bowls, even though they were never really good. Eli Manning just pulled it out. The most like incredible winner. Super Bowl winner. Super Bowl MVP.
00:11:54
Speaker
considering their teams were never really that good. That's my perception of them. But the Jets have just been terrible for very long time. The Jets were briefly, they were good for, uh, they were good for like a hot second, like to go to the Superbowl or not the Superbowl, uh, the playoffs, like
00:12:15
Speaker
What was it? The mid 2000s when Rex Ryan was our coach and then that was it. Um, yes, we can hang on with that. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, uh, every time I hear about or think about Rex Ryan, I can't help but think about that time that Tom Brady was playing against the jets and just like really loudly, he must've been like directly miked up. He just screams out Rex Ryan, like he's calling a play and it just seemed like this amazing troll. That's the only thing that Tom Brady has ever done that I've liked.
00:12:46
Speaker
I thought you were going to go another place with where the only thing I think about when it comes to Rex Ryan, which people can Google if they want to. But yeah, so the Jets, I'm sorry. Yeah, the Jets haven't had a winning season since 2015. So that's not great. OK, no, that's that's a while. That's that's the year that Fumble that I think Fumble was too. I think that was earlier than that, because that was about Sanchez Sanchez was I want to say like 2011. Hmm.
00:13:16
Speaker
Uh, yeah.
00:13:19
Speaker
That's my guess. But the butt fumble was like, they had to, do you know the butt fumble, Andrew? I don't know the butt fumble. No, but I can imagine what it is. That's a video I need to watch. I'm not going to Google that outright. There was like every year. Matt Sanchez butt fumble, you'll be all right. That's a safe search. Are you familiar with the not top 10 on ESPN where they play the worst play? Yes, yes, yes. So, and there's like a fan vote for these.
00:13:47
Speaker
I think it's every sun. It might be every Sunday. It might be like it might be less often than that. But they had to retire the butt fumble because it got number one for so long. They were like, we're going to have an all that's the stairway to heaven for. Yes. For terrible plays. They were like, we're going to have an all butt fumble episode because y'all need to. We have to have other plays. OK. We have to move on. This is not fun anymore because nothing's ever going to surpass the butt fumble and how stupid it was.
00:14:17
Speaker
Yeah. So, uh, here's an interesting question. I don't know if baseball has an equivalent. I don't know. I mean, I get what you're saying. So like, I can imagine what this must be. I don't know if baseball has an equivalent. Maybe Jose Conseco, home run. Yeah. That's pretty stupid. Um, like other than that, the Boston outfielder who like intercepted the cutoff
00:14:37
Speaker
Do you know what I'm talking about? No. There was like a guy trying to throw home and like another outfielder intercepted that throw. Yeah. Uh, and he was like, and tried to get it, get it down to home after like got up like a second later, made a very athletic play to intercept it.
00:14:57
Speaker
like dove to intercept it and then like struggled to get up and throw it. Um, I wanted that. It's not as good as Jose Consego for sure. No, because there's also like, you could look it up on YouTube. There's quite a few of the like mistaken, uh, second out plays, right? The outfielder catches the fly ball, thinks it's a third out and tosses it to some fan. And then it's like, Oh,
00:15:18
Speaker
And there's the, like, you know, the looking around under the lights with your hands upturned towards the sky. Can't find it. And it like lands behind you. But I don't, I think sort of the same way we're talking about red zone football is more like a really bad play is more like enjoyable to see than in baseball and baseball. It's just sort of. Well, as a Mets fan, I just like there's an obvious play that goes at the not top 10 of baseball forever. You know, you know what I'm talking about for the Mets, but yeah, who's.
00:15:47
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Billy Buckner. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Through the legs, right? Yeah. Through the legs. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. I was thinking of, um, you remember tragic than funny is the problem. Yeah. Cause the thing that comes to mind for me for the Mets is was, uh, Mike Piazza with the Mets when Roger Clemens drilled him in the head and his helmet exploded.
00:16:06
Speaker
Oh, I don't remember that. I think that was Dodger's years. Yeah. All right. Well, this has been baseball, uh, uh, this week on sports. Sorry, football, football, and I made it. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry about that. I didn't mean to drag it into baseball. No. Shall we get to our actual, uh, mini topic? Sure.
Elon Musk vs. ADL Controversy
00:16:25
Speaker
Now at minute 16. Yeah. Let's do it. Introduce us to it.
00:16:30
Speaker
So it seems Elon Musk is threatening the Anti-Defamation League. I've heard two different sort of, I think he's tweeted saying two different things. One is that they're the reason why all of his advertisers have fled. But the other I heard was that it's because that has caused the value to drop on Twitter, which to me is, I understand they're related, right? Obviously the value of Twitter is tied to the advertising revenue and whatnot. But like I see them as sort of two
00:16:57
Speaker
different things because the advertisers leaving, that seems not in the specifics here, but in general, that's at least a plausible complaint, not a plausible lawsuit, but a plausible complaint that you said something that caused all my advertisers to leave.
00:17:13
Speaker
But for the other one, for the value, to me, it seems the obvious problem here is that there was one person in the world who was willing, the market was for Twitter at $44 billion was a market of one person. You were that one person. You bought it. The market collapsed. It was never worth that amount. And in fact, you know it was never worth that amount because you had to be court mandated to go through with it at that price.
00:17:37
Speaker
And now you're looking around and saying, no one would ever buy this for $44 billion. It has lost value. It cannot be me. It both has to have been worth it when I bought it. And it cannot be my, under my shepherding here that has caused this value to drop. So who could it be? ADL sounds like a good scapegoat.
00:17:56
Speaker
So let's take a second and describe. So the ADL is the Anti-Defamation League that is primarily geared towards preventing the basically fighting against antisemitism in America, primarily, I think.
00:18:14
Speaker
but really kind of probably throughout the world, at least its influence has grown to such a point in America that it is probably influential outside of the United States. And so the ADL is not just the Anti-Defamation League, like we're against all kinds of defamation. It's specifically against anti-Semitism and like defamation, particularly relating to Jewish people.
00:18:41
Speaker
Right. And somehow Elon Musk has gotten it into his mind that the Anti-Defamation League is responsible for the devaluation of Twitter and advertiser ceasing. How did it come to pass that Elon Musk got that into his mind?
00:18:56
Speaker
The ADL has made some comments recently about Twitter and the specific details of the comments aren't exactly important at the moment, but basically they're pointing out, hey, you know what? In the past few months,
00:19:14
Speaker
Twitter has gotten to be a pretty bad place for antisemitism. And here are some examples of, uh, like people's usernames that are permitted that are like very clearly antisemitic and like basically hateful, uh, and advocating for the, uh, for killing Jews. And like, so in the username, like this isn't a tweet, this is the person's username. Right. And so like, if your username is going to be that you can imagine some of the content that comes out there on that
00:19:41
Speaker
And so, you know, you look at this situation and you hear Elon Musk complaining that the Anti-Defamation League is responsible for the devaluation of Twitter. Elon, do you think it's possible that something else is at play here in the devaluation of Twitter is because you're allowing Nazis and racists and Confederate flag waivers to propagate on your platform, propagate? Is that right? I think it's fair. There's a huge overabundance.
00:20:08
Speaker
One is an overabundance. There's a huge... There's not the normal good amount. There's way too many, right? Right. Let's be clear. This is irony. The appropriate amount of antisemites and races is zero. Anyhow, Elon, there may be something else at play here. It's probably not the fault of the ADL. So this is all because of recent stuff the ADL did?
00:20:33
Speaker
because that undermines the whole thing. So I haven't been paying attention to this. I did see that he said his damages against the ADL would be like 50% of Twitter's value because they've lost 50% of their advertiser revenue. But the whole thing is they lost that
00:20:53
Speaker
They lost that back when he took over, like when he first took over and he started making these decisions, these content moderation decisions, they immediately left. And so the whole idea that ADL is somehow the cause of it because of what they said recently.
00:21:09
Speaker
It's kind of ridiculous. There was a comment maybe like two or three days ago where, let's see, I don't know, I think the ADL, like an ADL spokesperson, ADL CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, he issued a statement and this is a quote, it is profoundly disturbing that Elon Musk spent the weekend engaging with a highly toxic anti-Semitic campaign on his platform.
00:21:35
Speaker
The quote goes on from there, but I'll stop at that. So like Elon was engaging and like Elon engaging with a tweet, a Z and an X, whatever they're called, has the huge effect of boosting it, right? Elon puts a comment on it or likes something and it is
00:21:54
Speaker
he immediately amplified out to zillions of people. And so he engaged with some pretty nasty anti-Semitic stuff over the weekend or maybe late last week. And that's kind of what spurred on the comments from the ADL folks.
00:22:12
Speaker
this seems to be part of like a larger sort of I I'm trying to think of how to classify this but like I'd say like libertarian tech bro kind of thing that is the problem isn't the problem it's that someone calls you out
00:22:26
Speaker
about the problem. That is the real issue. The problem isn't that we have Nazis on our social media platform. It's that the ADL pointed it out and then advertisers were, I would say, rightly felt they wanted to pull themselves from Twitter. He would say, I assume, they're pressured into it. These advertisers don't really care. They're just doing it to avoid being associated with something that's now been labeled anti-Semitic.
00:22:52
Speaker
And this seems to be like part of a broader problem of just sort of like, it's not the problem of what's on the service. It's the problem that you're pointing it out. If you would just shut up about it, then this could fly under the radar. You wouldn't draw attention to it. And I would still have my advertisers. But you had to point it out and here we are.
00:23:08
Speaker
I think it's really broad, like it's not just tech bros. It's just a, it's just as the wrong word, but it's an extension of the current it's, we see it a lot more. I don't know whether it's a real trend, but where people are gravitating towards the people that are calling me out or the problem, which right now is like,
00:23:31
Speaker
And, you know, cancel culture is, uh, is a buzzword for, you know, this is part of what people are using cancel culture as an attack for, which is a lot of bad people are saying, Oh, this is cancel culture. You know, they want me sexually. Yeah. They caught me sexually harassing my.
00:23:51
Speaker
My secretary, therefore. Right. This is cancel culture. I can't believe they cancel me for a little thing. I got arrested for for embezzling money. This is cancel culture. Right. It's all the Scooby Doo thing of they pull the mask off and it's I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't a few meddling kids. Right. It's all just that basically. And it feels like an extension of not just like
00:24:13
Speaker
not culture, but like the narcissistic personality, which is everything is about me. I'm only I can only perceive myself. I'm speaking into existence of a reality in which I am a victim. And in this case, Elon chose one organization that just happens to be primarily Jewish of the dozens, hundreds that are constantly calling out Twitter's culture and like, right moderation problems just happens to pick the Jews. I don't think that's a coincidence.
00:24:42
Speaker
No, I was gonna say, yeah, that just happens. All things go to Jews. Yeah, that is the immediate. Yeah, the first scapegoat is immediately. Every individual seems to maybe genuinely believe, every individual in Musk's shoes seems to maybe genuinely believe that they are just
00:25:03
Speaker
randomly choosing, not randomly choosing, but I'm choosing the one that's in front of me right now. But it is interesting how it always seems to go in one direction, even in a situation like this, where, as you said, he lost most of his advertisers when he first took over. I don't know that, I don't know, maybe they've been calling out Twitter as a problem for a long time, but it seems like he's pointing to recent comments about how, since he acquired it in October of 2022, and reinstated extremist users, and there's been more anti-Semitic content on there, it's gotten worse.
00:25:32
Speaker
And so I don't know that they've been saying it the whole time. So unless he's now only acknowledging that the value has decreased, like is he saying that he lost 60% of the advertisers like in the last two weeks, 50% of the value or since the comments, if it wasn't for them saying that they would have come back at this point, that's what they're piling on. Yeah. I don't know.
00:25:54
Speaker
trying to apply logic to it doesn't make any sense. He whatever he needs to do to feel like he's the victim and that he's, you know, fighting the righteous fight, which just happens to be on his own behalf in which he has done nothing wrong and nothing, of course, nothing of that happened bad to Twitter is his fault for mismanaging or anything like that.
00:26:14
Speaker
Um, and the other thing he's sorry. Yeah. The other thing he's typifying also is he, he went out of his way to make a comment saying he's, uh, you know, he's for free speech, but he is explicitly against anything anti-Semitic whatsoever. Like he said that flat out. Right. But
00:26:29
Speaker
not apologies for accidentally, accidentally, you know, reinstating these, you know, Third Reich members or whatever, nothing like that. And it's part of this thing we're in now where you don't have to do anything to show you're anti-Semitic or you're not
00:26:46
Speaker
Yes, that you're against antisemitism, right? You can merely say, I am against antisemitism and I can still proceed with reinstating users and allowing users to have whatever usernames I want. I just have to sort of performatively say this thing and then that's enough. I've like sort of discharged my duty as a good member of society.
00:27:03
Speaker
And that seems to be part of a broader trend, too, because like the follow up question to his quotes, his comments saying, you know, he's against anti-Semitism, he's for free speech, but but against that right is OK, well, then why are these users on your service? Why do you allow them? Have they been banned already? But that never seems to happen. I never seem to see that question and see the person actually have to answer that. Yeah, I don't think Elon is in the mood to answer questions any time in the next few years and like to openly answer questions from people that aren't being nice to him.
00:27:33
Speaker
Um, yeah. I mean, did you guys see on blue sky that there was like a, there was a huge content moderation, like, uh, like meltdown on blue sky. This is old news. There was like a month and a half ago, but there, there was somebody who had a username that included the N word. And, and it was there and people started pointing it out. And then the moderation team of blue sky didn't say anything for like six hours. Hmm.
00:28:02
Speaker
And it just stayed there. And I think it stayed there for multiple days, if I remember correctly. And people were just like, what's going on? Is this the? Because on Blue Sky, there's still only one Blue Sky instance, even though it's theoretically going to be federated at some point. So you have to depend on the Blue Sky team to moderate, just like with Twitter. And they just didn't do it. Have you ever gone under the moderation tab in Blue Sky and seen the flags you can hide certain things?
00:28:32
Speaker
No. So there's these like, I don't have it in front of me, but there's these moderation panes where basically you can, you can, you know, show, like obscure or entirely hide different things, right? So like not safe for work imagery, you can, you know, hide behind a blurred out screen or whatever, or you can completely hide violent material of any sort.
00:28:52
Speaker
One of the pains that, at least in the early days, maybe it's still there, that had that option is hate speech and threats of violence. Do you want to show it? Do you want to obscure it? Or do you want to hide it entirely? And people were rightly pointing out, hey, if you can spot that to be adjusted by my content preferences, why don't you just go ahead and not have that on the service at all? If you already know, there you go, there's another bomb threat.
00:29:17
Speaker
that why is that like being subjected to content filtering at the user level? Like I don't like to see when people, you know, uh, docs people. So just hide that for me. I don't want to see it. If you can see, if you, if you being blue sky can, can discern that sort of content, why is it even on the surface to shut it down? Just make it unavailable entirely. Yeah. I can, I know the philosophical argument for let people choose whether or not they want to see that, but I feel so, but the thing is you are always,
00:29:45
Speaker
Call it, you know, thinking about Rush.
Content Moderation Challenges
00:29:48
Speaker
You're always making a choice of what degree you're allowing on your own platform. You can't not decide because obviously there's some stuff that's literally illegal, like child sexual material, literally illegal. Bomb threats, literally illegal. That kind of thing.
00:30:07
Speaker
Uh, and you have to take that down. And so where is it? Are you literally only taking down things? That's things that are literally illegal. I doubt it. Cause there's a lot of God awful things that are not literally legal in America at least. Well, there's a question too. Are you waiting to be constitutionally protected in America?
00:30:26
Speaker
Right. Are you waiting to be informed that it's illegal or are you making that judgment? There's another question too, right? There are some things that I understand there are databases that can be checked against like child material, right? That you can know that this falls under that category and just ban it. But in terms of what constitutes a threat, you're making a decision, right? There's obviously very explicit threats, but then there's most real world threats, which are a little bit more
00:30:49
Speaker
carefully worded and not just outright saying you know, whatever You're making those judgment calls So you're already deciding to to moderate even if you are just technically just in your own mind complying with taking down what is illegal you are making moderation decisions yourself, so why not just take the step a little bit further and You know not have a Nazi bar basically
00:31:09
Speaker
So if you want to take, I want to take one second here and notice, uh, take note. Uh, I did not keep a tally of this because it was already too late by the time I noticed it, but I think Jake probably said literally about 17 times in the last four minutes. Uh, no, no, no, Jake said literally 17 times. Oh, I thought you were going to say, I said Nazi or something. Oh no. I mean, we said Nazi a bunch, but we're talking about Nazis a little bit.
00:31:35
Speaker
And so one of the funniest things about this whole thing and to like bring it back to a legal aspect of it here, Elon Musk is now threatening a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League. He's reveling in the irony of suing the Anti-Defamation League for defamation.
00:31:52
Speaker
one of the very most important things that I'm sure his legal advisors will cower in fear while they meekly tell him, hey, Elon, truth is an absolute defense to defamation. If it is true that, for example, you spent the weekend engaging with a highly toxic anti-Semitic campaign on your platform, if that's true,
00:32:16
Speaker
I think guess what? You don't have any good grounds for a defamation lawsuit and you're going to get, no, you can't get rule 11 out of there, but a rule 12 down there. Maybe slap. Yeah, maybe. If he sees in California.
00:32:31
Speaker
Yeah, but maybe, you know, you end up with a pretty swift summary judgment against you, uh, because they're going to be able to show, Hey, here are the tweets, the seats, the X's that you did that were you engaging with this antisemitic campaign? Hey, you know how we know it's antisemitic because the username literally says something, just overtly antisemitic. So.
00:32:53
Speaker
And I imagine the anti-Semitism, whether or not it is anti-Semitic, would be pretty broad. I don't think it has to be that broad when you have a username like that. But I imagine it could be pretty broad. It would not be a very narrowly tailored definition, right? Right. I shouldn't think so. Have you all played that content moderation game that the Tector writer made? Do you know who I'm talking about? There's a guy that writes for Tector and created a content moderation game.
00:33:22
Speaker
where you try to moderate correctly, basically, and it's like impossible. And one of the things that, going to your point, Andrew, about the whole bomb threat thing and how you don't know whether things are illegal, I played it, and one of the messages it asks you to moderate was somebody saying like, I'm gonna stab you in the neck, you idiot. And I said yes, yes, remove that, that's a threat.
00:33:48
Speaker
Uh, or it was violent or whatever. And then it was a movie quote or something, right? Yeah, it was a movie quote. And it was like, yes, it was a movie quote. And it's, and I got like, you know, it like booed me. Um, and the mob is after you and you're in big. Yeah. And it's the game. Is it like a trick? You know, it's not like trying to trick you. You have the ability to look more into a message.
00:34:13
Speaker
Uh, in order to find out things like that, but that takes time and it's a time pressure situation. So like, you only, you have to get through this many reports in a day and to look more into, into the message you that takes time. And then you're going to fall behind on how many messages you have to moderate per day.
00:34:31
Speaker
And so anyway, the whole notion is showing that it's, it's an actually, it's a difficult thing to actually carry out content moderation and do it well. Yeah. Yeah. Mike Massey was the, was the writer, but it's not, it's not hard, but it's not hard to content moderate, uh,
00:34:48
Speaker
Anti-Semitic usernames like we can decide that you know what like if I don't even I don't even want to utter some of the Potentially offensive user or actually offensive usernames here, but like
00:35:04
Speaker
It's easy to tell if you are advocating for harm to a group of people, and like, yep, that's, we can go ahead and get rid of that. Unless it's a fictional people. Like when you're growing up, everybody's mother said like, you know, bad people don't wear signs. In this case, they are literally wearing a sign. It's pretty, they have a sign around their neck. They're saying, I have an anti-semite, anti-semite. Pretty easy. So two things. One, did you guys hear about the Burning Man tweet? Somebody tweeted out. So Burning Man had that whole issue of, you know,
00:35:33
Speaker
Rainstorms and everybody got flooded and they were hip deep in mud and somebody on a apparently set on a podcast. I have a great idea. I'm going to hop on Twitter and I'm going to say I'm at Burning Man and I just tested positive for Ebola. And he did that and it went nuts. And like, you know, newspapers started reporting. There's an Ebola outbreak. And apparently it was up on Twitter for a considerable amount of time before it was moderated, as I go. So that was one point to this was the blue sky content filtering. So they have hide, warn or show for three different types of things.
00:36:04
Speaker
One is impersonation. If accounts falsely claim to be people or organizations, you can hide, warn, or show, right? So hide it completely, warn, you know, let me know, don't show it to me without me clicking okay, or just show all the time. Spam, that's excessive unwanted interactions. The fact that it says unwanted in there would suggest that you could just go ahead and delete all these, right? But okay, fine, you know, not gonna quibble with a word. The other one is hate group iconography.
00:36:29
Speaker
images of terror groups, articles covering events, et cetera. First of all, I don't think you should throw together under the same umbrella images of terror groups and articles covering events. I think those are two very different things, but they're all lumped together and you either hide, warn, or show that there is no, it's just hiding it. There is so that you can't even just like not be certain it's not going to be on your feed whatsoever.
00:36:52
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, it's, it's the same problem there, right? Where like, I understand that content moderation is difficult, but you don't have to make it harder by like trying to toy around, trying to get down in the mud and play with these people. You know what I mean? Well, that, I can imagine that hype group, iconography and images of terror groups and news and article stuff. I could, I can see where that goes because I know that with YouTube, they've had a lot of problems with people having videos talking about, you know, covering
00:37:22
Speaker
hate groups covering terrorism and how it's hard how to distinguish when you're covering it and when you're supporting it as news and so they if you can automate that they can automate that hey this is a this is a picture of a hate group this is it this is language from a hate group they can automate that they can't automate the context
00:37:44
Speaker
And so that's the hard part. So if you just want to be like, I don't want any bummers in my feed, then that's a lot easier. And that's why you go to threads. That's exactly right. That's what I was going to say. If you don't want any bummers, you go to threads. There's still bummers on threads, just considerably fewer. You just have to intentionally engage with the bummers on threads for it to show you bummers. Yeah.
00:38:07
Speaker
Yeah. You have to tell threads. I want to be bummed. Make me feel bad today. Yeah. Speaking of bummed, a lot of those hate group things seem to be happening kind of right in your neck of the woods lately. Jake Orlando's had a whole mess of Nazis swarming around the city. One of them was in Altamont, which I am very, very close to Altamont. I am like, I could probably throw my, I go to Cranzer's where they, where they hung out.
00:38:35
Speaker
where they were doing their march. That all sounds like Nazi high command palaces in Germany. Cranes roost, right? Cranes roost, eagles nest. Cranes roost is a swamp, is a swamp mall. So these Nazis hang out at a mall?
00:38:53
Speaker
So it's like it's a nice area like I like reviews like it's a place where people have festivals But like 90% of the time it's a you know, it's just a place to go Sit on a lake, you know Gotcha. I call it a swamp mall because everything is a swamp here So but like yeah, I mean but Florida is a
00:39:17
Speaker
Florida is madness. And I'm like, look, I live here. I like it here. It's there's it's madness, man. If you're the political crazy side on all sides, certainly more like more active on the conservative side these days. But like the political crazy side is here, man, that this is this is political crazy central. Florida is the new Montana.
00:39:43
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't seem like they're going to make America Florida, though. I mean, that campaign seems to have sort of fizzled out. No, no, they look likely. No, I don't think the rest of you can't you can't force that old God upon the unwilling souls of the rest of America.
00:40:01
Speaker
Let Florida be Florida and everybody else be everybody else. We've had a couple of January six bozos have been from Philly. It's like local dudes every time they get, yeah. I mean, I'm sure there's tons of them, but like a couple of the, you know, or maybe one of the proud boys was a Philly, Philly. I'm not surprised. I mean, I'm sure, you know, most of them have some ties to that God forsaken city, but anyway, we want to move on to Philadelphia, our, our cars spying on us. Yeah.
00:40:31
Speaker
Yeah, not my car. I got no, this is the benefit of being a 2014 Toyota Camry owners. I got the last generation before they started keeping track of where you are and selling it to, uh, selling it to the highest bidder.
Car Data Privacy Issues
00:40:44
Speaker
And do you want me to cover what the, the actual thing that prompted this, that the Mozilla foundation, uh, which both, which is responsible for the Firefox web browser, but actually does good stuff about the internet.
00:40:59
Speaker
made a report on the worst industries for data privacy. And the worst products, by far, when it came to data privacy were cars, modern cars, because they capture all your data, they capture data on your passengers, and they sell that data. You have no rights to stop them. For most cases, you have no rights to stop them. You have no rights to delete your data. You have no rights to manage it.
00:41:26
Speaker
By getting in the car, you have consented to them capturing your data and selling it. That's the perspective of most of these car companies. And they are doing it. Over 80% of car companies are selling your data.
00:41:40
Speaker
to anybody. And that sucks. That makes me not want to buy a new car. My initial thought was, I mean how, right? Was my initial sort of thought about this. But then I realized every modern car, I mean the two cars I have that are
00:41:57
Speaker
2022 and I guess 2023, they have an app to go with them. So that's rolled into it. And iOS is pretty good about privacy, but I imagine not perfect. And Android is probably worse, I think, on privacy matters. So cars have become a lot more of our
00:42:16
Speaker
They have their tendrils. Yeah, they're they're they're computer that and they're tight like yeah They are their own computer, but they're also tied into your computer is my point Yeah, right because your phone is your computer and now your phone has ties to your car and so they have access to your phone They have access to everything. Yeah, and because they're a computer they can track your GPS and they're tracking your GPS and They are can store it and they can send it to their purse their own servers very cheaply I don't do deer
00:42:42
Speaker
Do your cars have their own cell chip in them or whatever, their own GPS in them, or do they rely on your phone?
00:42:51
Speaker
I imagine Andrew, both of yours do. We have a 2022 Tesla Model Y. That definitely is spying on me a lot, except for once I knew we were talking about this tonight, I went through. There's a data sharing thing in there. And for whatever it's worth, and I don't know that it's worth very much, it assures me that they never sell my data.
00:43:18
Speaker
They're second to best on the list. I hate to defend Tesla, but only BMW is better. No, that's great. Oh, that's great. Yeah. But also reading through this article and seeing the news coverage about it caused me to go back into that data sharing thing and turn literally everything off. Because I had turned off the things that let you where they want to be able to see your cabin camera for, I don't know, whatever. Because sometimes things happen in my car that I don't want them to see.
00:43:46
Speaker
But I still had on like, leave on your road cameras for routing so that we can learn more and like improve our mapping system or improve our autopilot system, the steering and the
00:44:05
Speaker
cruise control system where I had all that stuff on and you know what now that I know that they're creeping on us pretty fiercely then and it's it's reassuring that Tesla is on the better side of it but still like you know what if if car companies are gonna creep then I am not going to give them an inch an inch that I voluntarily can withhold from them and
00:44:28
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Just to quickly give this, so we gave the better side. It is a BMW, Tesla, and Cadillac, the worst, our Nissan Buick and Kia that apparently just suck up all the data.
00:44:42
Speaker
The totally alarming thing, and this is from a tech dirt article from today, that's kind of summarizing the article. There's a quote in this tech dirt article, Nissan earned its second to last spot for collecting some of the creepiest categories of data we've ever seen. You should know it includes your sexual activity. How? How? How? Do they, when you download their app, does it ask for health data and also
00:45:12
Speaker
Maybe. GPS. I don't know. But what would that have? I mean, for most people, what would your health data like? What is it now? I mean, is it trying to use car sensors to detect certain rocking cadences in the vehicle? Or are there cabin cameras that they're monitoring and passing data through? That seems like the most obvious one.
00:45:35
Speaker
And so we have a Nissan Leaf, which I would imagine would be the most this car that they have in their lineup, I would think. I mean, it's not a very expensive car, but like it's electric car. And usually they throw all the crap at them. It has exterior cameras, but to my knowledge, it doesn't have any interior. I don't really know why. It's the knowledge. Yeah. Well, that's the exterior. That would be just for this.
00:45:55
Speaker
Oh, yeah, for the rocking. Yeah, if that you could find the horizon and then if it's if it's some engineer at Nissan that had to like spend just like a year coming up with that algorithm.
00:46:09
Speaker
I assume that this is like, are you, they try to figure out if you're single or you're married so that they can sell you, they can add that information. I would guess. Yeah. To their selling points on their, on why their information is so valuable. But I mean, it's,
00:46:29
Speaker
So I've written about this in the context of tax stuff. Basically, my thinking on all of this is that, not to go all Karl Marx, but this is capitalism eating itself, right? We're in an era now where every company that has some widget it makes
00:46:48
Speaker
has to gather data about its customers just to have the widget work properly, and then has to sell that data in order to remain competitive with other companies that are also selling comparable, otherwise comparable widgets that will be able to undercut them if they don't
00:47:08
Speaker
subsidize their widget with the data profits. Does that make sense? They have to subsidize their lower cost product by selling the data as long as every other entity that is making those widgets, cars, whatever it may be, is doing that. And unless we start to value privacy such that people will go, no, I will happily pay for... I'll buy a Tesla because I know they don't share any of my information.
00:47:33
Speaker
until there's some value there that can sort of rejigger everything, that's just gonna continue forever. So we're seeing some of the tide turn on that as far as cell phones are concerned because people, I think pretty rightly, yeah, Apple is doing big marketing campaigns based on privacy being a key facet of that. Health data and all that, yeah.
00:47:55
Speaker
And those are some of the most important devices in our lives. Certainly, they're the ones that we probably touch the most. And so the tide is kind of turning there. And I think another spot where this is really picking up is with televisions. I don't know if you all listen to the accidental tech podcast ATP, but they did a longer discussion about TVs monitoring you and like there's
00:48:18
Speaker
Just generally accepted advice in tech nerd circles is if your television wants to connect to your Wi-Fi network or to your hardwired network, just don't let it because they can't communicate stuff about you if you don't let them access the communication method of getting out of the house unless they're going to start putting like- 5G.
00:48:39
Speaker
LTE modems in these TVs, which they will communicate. Just use the use the like Google TV or whatever you're like dongle instead of using TV. Yeah. Have your smart TV be stupid. Yeah. And just stick to the dongle or whatever, which I mean, but again, like, is you feel better with Google?
00:48:56
Speaker
I don't know. Sometimes there are technical limitations to what Google can do even if it wanted to. The TV is the whole thing. There's always the app. They can throw microphones in there all they want. They can throw 13 microphones and you'll never see them.
00:49:12
Speaker
Right, exactly. And TVs are like the market is sort of dispersed enough that there's not like an iFixit for every TV where somebody's breaking it down and going like, holy crow, the new Vizio TV has a microphone in it or something. Whereas that would come out pretty quickly if Apple TV had like
00:49:29
Speaker
a secondary chip in there that was just for sending data off to some other server or whatever. But to your point, Jason, I think devices will ship. I think the value of user data will only go up. And I think that eventually that will be able to subsidize throwing a 5G chip into there. Cars do it now by piggybacking off of the satellite radio.
00:49:50
Speaker
That's how you don't need to use a cell modem in order to unlock the Ford Bronco. That's what we have. It doesn't have a cell modem in there. I don't have a cell connection to it, but I can unlock it from an app because it goes through Sirius satellite radio. And I don't have a subscription to Sirius satellite radio either, but it's in the car and it's an option I could turn it on. And apparently it's slightly on so that the doors can unlock and the windows can open when I hit the app. It takes 30 seconds, but it works.
00:50:14
Speaker
going to your point about the you know people need to actually value this the problem is like you can't you can't even know whether or not and how much they're taking your information without doing like an insane amount of research like the Mozilla took 600 hours they said to find out this information on the car privacy in order to find out what your what your TV is collecting on you you'd have to buy it
00:50:42
Speaker
and then read the user license stuff and then read through the legalese to understand what it's saying. And then it's going to say something very broad that says they do get to do whatever they want with the information they collect. It's not going to give you a very clear picture at all. Consumers do not have a picture of what they're signing up for whenever they buy a consumer electronic product when it comes to data privacy. And that's that to me says legislative solution.
00:51:13
Speaker
with travel damages. We'll see about that. Yeah, exactly. The 600 Hours with Mozilla, the Mozilla Foundation, that was just an analysis of the privacy policies for these car companies. This is all predicated on the idea that everybody's playing fair and they are disclosing what data they're aggregating or gathering, which
00:51:33
Speaker
In the car industry might be more likely because relatively there's fewer companies and nobody wants to be the next Volkswagen with the lying on the biodiesel stuff, right? But into televisions, why would they bother putting it in the privacy policy? If you're going to do something that's sniffing data or something, don't put it in there. That's crazy. Make people have to tear it apart and find that one chip that doesn't seem to be for anything else other than for monitoring what's output to the television and then we'll deal with the problem.
00:51:59
Speaker
Yeah. And we're going to see, because so many televisions, very few of them are domestically manufactured. In fact, I don't know that there's a single television that is domestically manufactured. And so there's a lot of opportunity for, you guys remember, maybe it was six or seven or eight years ago, the whole dust up over Huawei and like the interception of data that they were doing to the point where I think, did their cell phones get banned in the United States because of this?
00:52:29
Speaker
All of their network hardware at all is banned and they used to have 5G towers. They were installing 5G towers in America and now I believe it's all banned. And so they're still banned? I thought it was like a temporary thing. No, I think it's still too. I think it's gone. And they sued and lost.
00:52:47
Speaker
or they sued and dismissed one of those because I know they sued and they then that didn't help them. Yeah. And so I think that's probably more discoverable because we're talking about cell phones and like networking equipment in a situation like this where it's a TV like who bothers to look at the web traffic that's coming over their TV because like you expect web traffic to go over your TV if you're using it to watch Hulu and Netflix and Disney Plus.
00:53:12
Speaker
And so like are you really splitting hairs to say it like oh this web traffic is going to this domain what's that domain yeah i bet some enterprising info sec nerds are doing that and that's probably how you end up with you know reports like this and right and discovering problems like this but.
00:53:31
Speaker
Jake, you're absolutely right. This is a situation that is ripe for legislative intervention. I think that this is like, hey, FTC, get a load of what's happening over here because this is ready for some regulation because users don't have a good idea of what they're giving away.
00:53:55
Speaker
It's one thing to get my Kindle for $30 cheaper so that Amazon can put ads on my screen when it's locked. They watch my Kindle purchasing history to know like, oh, Jason likes science fiction books. We're going to put science fiction ads on there.
00:54:14
Speaker
It's a totally different thing when you get your TV creeping on. Let's assume it's relatively benign and the TV company is just watching what I watch on the TV and not watching what happens in my house. I don't necessarily know that I want
00:54:32
Speaker
you know, TCL knowing that I watched how I met your father on Hulu. That's embarrassing. Yeah. It's not that embarrassing. It's a fun show. It's pretty embarrassing. Yeah. That's pretty bad. Yeah. But like, I don't know if I want them to know that, but like my, my watching habits are relatively benign. Like
00:54:53
Speaker
What about somebody with some more, you know, uh, shameful watching habits that they might not want to exploit it or to be subjected to blackmail for? Like do they, do people understand that they're giving that stuff away by having a whatever brand TV?
00:55:09
Speaker
I don't know. And the blackmail thing is the other point too. All this data is who knows where it's stored. So even if you think, well, these companies are not going to be interested in blackmailing you, why do they care what you... I don't know what you're watching on your TV, but how I met your father. That's deeply embarrassing. You wouldn't want that to get out to people you know and your family, your loved ones. Definitely not on their podcast. Yeah. You don't want to see the look on their faces when they find... You can't face your children and tell them you've seen how I met your father.
00:55:34
Speaker
But you assume that the television company wouldn't be interested in blackmailing you, but how good are their security protocols for keeping this data anonymized? And we've talked before about the rootkits that came in DRM software in the early aughts where people... I don't remember what it was. Maybe it was World of Warcraft or something? Or no, it was
00:55:54
Speaker
all Sony audio CDs. If you put them into one of those PCs, it installed the rootkit and then that was it. Whoever wanted access to your computer had access. That kind of thing can absolutely happen again. These companies that are aggregating this data are not interested in protecting the data. They're just looking to package it up and sell it. It's not only an issue of
00:56:15
Speaker
your television manufacturer has information about you, everyone potentially has information about you. Yeah. Forget about them maliciously getting it in an attack. I'm pretty sure that the television companies would just sell it to them. Right. Probably pretty cheaply. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:56:30
Speaker
And speaking of this sort of data, X is the next company.
Twitter and Biometric Data Concerns
00:56:33
Speaker
We can just do this quickly, and then we'll get on to our recommendations and stuff. They're looking to collect biometric data. X is Twitter, of course. Biometric data en route to their becoming the everything app. They want to get data from your face, your eyes, and fingerprints. When I heard this, I thought that I'm assuming it's for the banking purposes and crypto purposes to be able to face ID on your phone for sending money or whatever. It's like a secondary
00:56:58
Speaker
security method beyond just the password, right? Because if you have Twitter or X installed on your phone, when you hit the icon on your phone, you're in the app, right? But you wouldn't want anyone who had access to your phone to have access to, say, the banking features of X when that comes along or the crypto purchasing features simply because your phone was left unlocked. You'd want some secondary lock. So I'm guessing that's what this is for. But nonetheless, it's kind of scary that they just sort of quietly updated their privacy policy to say they're going to be collecting information about your eyes.
00:57:28
Speaker
They're going to have a fun time with the FTC and the EU where they're already facing problems for not managing user data like they were supposed to under the FTC consent decree and EU orders or whatever. Yeah.
00:57:46
Speaker
doesn't affect me anymore. I don't have that app on my phone. So no, no. Yeah. But do you have, I'm actually, that's a strictly browser, uh, material for me. Yes. I do have my message. I'm a, I got a fruit phone. I got an Apple phone.
00:58:02
Speaker
Because this was something you were talking about, right? The UK is going to, they're not going to demand Apple to break the end-to-end encryption on iMessage? That was Jason, I believe. Yeah, just Jason. I'm sorry. So the UK has been looking at kind of a broad-based legislative package
00:58:20
Speaker
That was going to affect a lot of different digital services. And they were talking about including as part of that, basically forcing providers like Google, like Apple, probably like WhatsApp and places like that.
00:58:36
Speaker
Yeah, to include, if you have a service that is end-to-end encrypted, you need to include a way to basically not be end-to-end encrypted so that they invoke the trope that the governments always invoke, which is so that we can catch the bad guys, so that we can stop terrorists, so that we can catch people who are peddling in child sexual abuse material, which like, great, good motivation.
00:59:03
Speaker
I have trouble believing governments when they say that that's their motivation because that's the benign motivation, but there's also pretty often malignant motivations that are lurking beneath the surface unnamed by the government, but named by conspiracy people like me.
Debate on Encryption and Privacy
00:59:19
Speaker
I'm not a conspiracy person.
00:59:21
Speaker
I don't think it's conspiracy. I agree. I mean, I think it's true. And you can usually tell by how, especially in the United States, but with this one in the UK as well, how they name the bill. Like the more, Oh, how could you go against this? The more like, I suspect that this is some, some nonsense. So this one is called the online safety bill, which I feel like we can say online safety. You don't want to be safe online. What's wrong with you?
00:59:43
Speaker
So I'm betraying my public defender roots. Like they're absolutely, they are actually right about like end-to-end encryption that actually is going to be a problem for enforcing, for stopping the midstream. Like the fact that child sexual material has to go through a midstream thing that is not encrypted is how they catch a lot of these people. And I've seen people say like,
01:00:13
Speaker
This is that, and America has been talking about doing this as well, like requiring some way to eliminate, to intercept the encryption, to make it unencrypted so that law enforcement can do it. And people have said, but what, like imagine, you know, imagine somebody puts their stuff in a safe, like it would be in the same situation. I've heard people say that. The thing is, you can get a warrant for a safe. You can get a warrant to go blow up a safe.
01:00:39
Speaker
Even though that's destructive and extreme and all that, you can still do it. That said, I'm not going to say it would be good to eliminate end-to-end encryption. There's a lot of very valid reasons, obviously, to have an end-to-end encrypted thing and a lot of very valid concerns that the ability to just unencrypt something could be a problem.
01:01:04
Speaker
from bad actors. But yeah, it's a legit concern. I get the concern. I've never been a public defender. I don't know anything about any of this. So you may have an answer for me that'll come back immediately. It seems like a lot of people are getting caught.
01:01:25
Speaker
for having child sexual abuse material. It seems like they're getting caught even with the encrypted stuff. My concern is to what extent is it concern trolling that they're getting away with it because of the encryption? Are there a lot of people who, we're dead to rights, we know you have it on that phone, but you just won't
01:01:45
Speaker
type in your code, and so that's it. He goes free. Is that happening? I know you don't know off the top of your head. I'm sure that people are getting away with it because of end-to-end encryption, because everybody that's not end-to-end encrypted is a mandatory reporter and also monitors. At least they're supposed to be monitoring the content.
01:02:08
Speaker
Right. And having. Which Apple just backed down from doing. They were going to do that. Remember, they're going to do that with photos. All the. Yeah. Everybody saw the library. They backed down from that. And so like I I'm not sure. Well, the encryption thing, I don't know, because like you. The fact that let's let's say you're a distributor, I'm trying to think this out live, like trying to think if you're a distributor and you're sending stuff out and it's ended and encrypted.
01:02:38
Speaker
and your end destroyed the messages once they were sent. And you don't know what that other end is from that end. I don't know. I'm imagining situations for how that would work, about how you would have enough probable cause to actually get that message unencrypted, but not be able to do anything about it.
01:03:00
Speaker
without eliminating the end-to-end encryption. Right. It seems to me like this whole cry against end-to-end encryption is predicated on the fact that we need to be able to catch this stuff while it's in flight.
01:03:17
Speaker
There are encryptions that are encrypted at rest, encrypted in flight, and they're different, but they're similar. It feels like what we're really talking about here and what they're attacking here in iMessage is stuff that's encrypted in flight while it's traveling from one user to the next. For that stuff,
01:03:39
Speaker
There are other ways to catch bad guys other than catching their bad stuff as it's moving from one person to the next. As it turns out, a lot of times bad guys are pretty stupid or maybe not stupid, but they make other mistakes that cause them to get caught.
01:03:56
Speaker
Now, might we be losing valuable evidence by not being able to go get their stuff that's kind of in-flight encrypted? Sure. Yeah, probably we're losing valuable evidence there, but also there's a competing concern of, hey,
01:04:12
Speaker
I don't really want people to see the messages that I send my wife or that my wife sends to me. I don't want the defense in a case where I'm suing a company for sexual harassment or race discrimination. I don't want them to be able to send an enterprising hacker to intercept the messages that I might be exchanging with that person.
01:04:39
Speaker
there are virtues to end-to-end encryption. And I think that we can probably count on bad guys to be stupid and get caught other ways. And it's an unpopular opinion, but Apple had what seemed to me to be a pretty ingenious way of addressing this, which was basically taking like this database of known child sexual abuse material. Like it's CSAM, right? Child sexual, CSAM database, yeah.
01:05:05
Speaker
Yeah. So they had this database that was from like the only organization in the United States that is trusted to have and evaluate and like know what this material is that creates this database. And they were going to compare not the stuff, maybe it was the stuff that was in flight in iMessage, but I think it was more geared towards like, hey, everybody backs up their iPhone. That's what it was. Why don't we compare
01:05:33
Speaker
the contents of that encrypted end-to-end backup on your device, we will compare that database to the content that you're backing up to our servers that we can't look at. We don't have a key. It's encrypted, but we can compare it against this thing and it'll raise a flag if
01:05:55
Speaker
If it starts to compare favorably, unfavorably, probably however you want to describe it. If it flags a match to this database, it's not a perfect solution. It's fairly elegant and they got beat up on it because people were kind of nimbying the whole thing, not in my backyard.
01:06:18
Speaker
don't use my own device against me, but like, you know what, if you have this stuff on your device, you should have your device used against you. Absolutely. That was an interesting approach too, because what they were doing was that that database is a known database of known material.
01:06:34
Speaker
And so my understanding from reading about this particular thing is that within these circles of these people who are sending these sorts of messages around, there is material that is common material that is like, you know, this isn't something that this individual person created, this is like part of the larger universe of this sort of stuff. And so there's a known database of hashed
01:06:53
Speaker
images and I assume videos but a hash is just basically like reduce a photo or any piece of data to a string of basically random characters but those random characters should be reproducible if you were to take another copy of this picture and hash it
01:07:10
Speaker
as well. So you would be able to compare the hashes without actually comparing the photos or the videos or whatever. But the weird thing to me that is always weird in all these sorts of situations is that the system was, it would need I think two flags before then it would be kicked up to an actual human being who would look to see if there seemed to be a match.
01:07:29
Speaker
That is very strange to me. That is high on my list of worst jobs in the world, right? In terms of what you're doing, you're sitting around. And it's also an interesting thing. Same thing with this database of this material. How that works, like, I really don't know anything about this in terms of how they are sort of given the license to have this library of this material and to be comparing it to, like, why is that not a governmental entity?
01:07:56
Speaker
Yeah. Right. Somebody's got to do it. I guess if we want this to be done, somebody's got to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. All right. That's a terrible and dark to move on to. So I don't know. Can you guys like video games? You guys want to talk about baseball for a minute before we move on. I have a transition.
01:08:16
Speaker
I like a topic to transaction to totally unrelated, which is y'all y'all may remember I got fiber in my
Tech Troubleshooting and Solutions
01:08:24
Speaker
house. Right. Mazel tov. Like a month ago or two months ago. Like Brian and back on the fiber. Right. You've been eating a lot more. Total. Yeah. He's getting very regular. Total. Yeah. So we got it installed two months ago. It's been it's been good. And then it went down on Friday or and it went down in a weird way.
01:08:45
Speaker
which is it was still pulling Google photos, but nothing seemed to be working. And my computer still thought I was online, but everybody on my community Facebook group was like, wow, is down, wow, is down people in Pinellas County, which is two hours away, an hour and a half away were saying, wow, is down while being my internet provider. And so there's clearly a problem. I called, I called them, I chatted them.
01:09:12
Speaker
And they were like, uh, first they were like, there's no problem. And then they were like, okay, it appears to be an outage. Don't hear anything. I still haven't heard anything from them. And it's a week later. Uh, and it was down for two, for two days. Here's the thing. It was down for two days. Did I get back online? How I got back online was I had, I,
01:09:34
Speaker
I home brewed this thing. I figured it was the DNS because it didn't make sense because it said it was an online. The online light was on and I changed the DNS servers on my router to the Google public DNS servers of eight point eight point eight and eight point four point four. Right. Eight point eight point four point four.
01:09:58
Speaker
And it worked. So the Internet was online the whole time. They never told anybody that. And it was two days long. They never explained it. And their phone line was literally busy. Anyway, you go on your Facebook group and like you're like the guy who invented insulin and ran around giving all the kids who were in the diabetic column as the insulin. They woke up and tell everybody and their I edited the thing to say to say it. I think that some people did did fix it. Somebody else was also there talking about this. And he was like, he started talking about CloudFlare.
01:10:28
Speaker
And he's like, use Cloudflare servers. And I was like, I don't know. I don't care. I think it's 1.1.1.1 or whatever. They do some ad filtering and stuff, but Google works too. Back in the day, what we used to do is we would have the IP address of yahoo.com written down on a post-it on your monitor. So when you didn't have the internet and you went to ping something, you could ping an actual IP. Because back then, Yahoo was the thing that will always be online. That'll never go down.
01:10:54
Speaker
So you would ping that IP to see if you were still online and it was just a DNS issue. That was a lot more common back then. I have not heard of that in a very long time. Hmm. Yeah. Anyway, I just wanted to relay this, like, you know, mid to mid I small ISP problems slash a solution. I do have fiber. And that did that make downloading Starfield work really quickly? Did that just fly right down? I have not download Starfield.
01:11:21
Speaker
Oh, my God.
Video Game Recommendations
01:11:22
Speaker
No. Onto recommendations. You know, I download. Here's the thing. Baldur's Gate three. Massive, massive game RPG. You're you're going around, you're exploring, you're picking stuff up. It's a it's a giant hunker of a meal. And after that, I was like, I don't want to go have a giant hunker of a meal again. A star field. I want to go.
01:11:48
Speaker
I want to go play something really like brisk and like pulse pounding, something the exact opposite of Baldur's Gate 3, which is this turn based thing. So I bought an Armored Core 6, which is a mech game made by the same people that do Dark Souls and Sekiro and all that, which are famous for extreme difficulty. And this is like the most opposite of Baldur's Gate 3 game I could imagine.
01:12:16
Speaker
which is Baldur's Gate 3, slow, turn-based. Everybody's a friend. It's all very friendly. It's very communal. It's all about the people around you. And you got all the time in the world to think about your combat decisions. I bought Armored Core 6, a mech game, which is all about
01:12:36
Speaker
isolation, you wake up, you are an augmented human named six to one, everybody calls you a different name because they don't care who you are, you never see anybody's face. And then the fights are like, are like missile dodge, dodge, missile, big laser, big laser move, shoot, shoot rockets, shoot rockets, shoot gun. And it's like the fat and the music is like this driving drum and bass electronic like
01:13:04
Speaker
It's like I equivalent to exercising Baldur's Gate is like running a marathon or exercise bike for hours and this is like doing
01:13:14
Speaker
extreme high intensity hit stuff where it's just like, I couldn't put, if I did this for like two hours. Just throw up after every game. Yeah. If I did this for two hours in a row, I'd have to go lay down. So there's a little Baldur's Gate palette cleanser. Yeah. I beat the second, the last boss last night. And after like trying for two hours and I went like, yeah. And my wife was like, are you okay?
01:13:42
Speaker
I was like, yeah, I was like, I'm ecstatic anyway. Yeah, that's my recommendation. Armored Core six. If you are for six Rubicon something or other fires of Rubicon and Rubicon. It's the first armored core game in like 14 years. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah.
01:14:02
Speaker
Well, I've played a little bit of Starfield because I was trying to I was doing homework here. I thought you guys you talked about it. You're trying to follow the gamer trends and play. I was like, oh, man, I'm going to be on top of this one. I don't have much to say about it. It's one of those games like I can tell I won't have an opinion on until like hour 10. And by then it's too late and you have to just kind of keep going. I'm still in the like figuring out what you're doing stage and everything is boring. But it looks cool. It seems interesting. Reviews look good, I guess.
01:14:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a Bethesda Bethesda game. Yeah. Loveable, lovable games for the fallout series. Just chef's kiss. Great day. The Elder Scrolls series. Very, very reputable, super acclaimed. Like I think they've released like a game of the year edition every year for 20 years for Elder Scrolls games.
01:14:52
Speaker
Yeah, that's excellent. Excellent. I think the online one is still going. They're still going, right? Like they're still. Yeah. Yeah. That's like a different kind of thing. Skyrim was or Oblivion Elder Scrolls for Oblivion was one of my favorite, like one of my favorite games ever and Fallout three. Also, obviously there were sequels after that. Yeah, I played Skyrim for I want to say 90 hours during finals week.
01:15:19
Speaker
of my 1L year. That was bad judgment. My first 1L semester, those are the best grades I ever got in law school. Oh, really? So I should have done that for all the other semesters, but instead I studied harder. Whoops. Yeah, I did worse when I studied harder too. Once I stopped caring, I did much better. Funny how that works. Hold the fish loosely.
Music Nostalgia and Tributes
01:15:42
Speaker
Yeah. My recommendation is not a video game. It is, if you have children, expose them to older music, in particular, bad music from the 80s and 90s. My three-year-old is currently wandering around grocery stores, Target. We got a regional Target-like store here called Meijer, and he is just
01:16:05
Speaker
randomly belting out step by step. Ooh, baby. I'd like to hear it from a three year gonna get to your girl. Oh, I thought I thought that was the sitcom. I thought it was not to. Oh, no, no, no. It's new kids on step day by day. No, step by step was the name of step by step was the name of the show. Yeah. Yeah. Susan something.
01:16:29
Speaker
Oh, got Suzanne Summers. Yeah, I think Suzanne Summers. Yes, I think so. Yeah. Boy, that's a deep cut. But expose your kids to old music. Michael Jackson from the 1980s and 90s. There's a lot of good stuff in there, and it's good for some fun if you want to hear a three-year-old belt out at a
01:16:50
Speaker
at a, I don't know, what do you call a Walmart type store? Like a super, if you want to hear them built out of the store, yeah, a big box store, uh, built out a random song from your childhood that that's good fun. My son generally does not have opinions on music that he expresses to me at least, but I played, um, I disappear by Metallica from the mission impossible to soundtrack.
01:17:14
Speaker
And he was like, he was like, stop. He asked me to please stop. And I'm like, do you guys know that song? Nope. Not even a little bit. From then, when you said it, it sort of like hit something in my brain.
01:17:30
Speaker
Yeah, so I don't know why to me like if you if you were to ask me to name like four Metallica songs, this would be in there, even though nobody else seems to remember this song at all. Yeah, I didn't until you said it. But now I do. Yes, definitely. Yeah. So anyway, well, in terms of music, not popular with five years, five year olds, at least my five year old.
01:17:54
Speaker
I would imagine Metallica is not a huge hit with the under, the Gen Z, what are they now? Gen Alpha, whatever. People we have to listen to because we just lost them are the Smash Mouth lead singer. That's right. He's walking on the sun now. He is the all star. I'm not going to listen to that song. And Jimmy Buffett. Oh yeah, Jimmy Buffett. Those are the two, yeah. Sad. And then we could listen to this song.
01:18:17
Speaker
and not supreme court barbecue cheese burger and paradise how mercy