Leo [00:00:23]:
Well, how's it going, Gary? What's life like in Denver right now?

Gary [00:00:26]:
Oh, pretty good. How about yourself?

Leo [00:00:28]:
I have unexpectedly sunny skies and I'm liking it. Oh, we're tired of this wet spring we've had. So what you got to start us with today?

Gary [00:00:41]:
Yeah, so, you know, a bunch of. Just a variety of different stories that I found. This one's really interesting. So it seems like it's not the type of story we would normally talk about. Not even newsworthy. In fact, it's about police department. A police department in a town using social media tactics to try to get, you know, find people that have warrants out. You know, so they.

Gary [00:01:06]:
They have a warrant out. They want to get information about where these people are. So they, you know, usually you see the wanted posters, right? That's the old thing. You know, it was 150 years ago, there'd be a wanted poster.

Leo [00:01:19]:
Well, they were still in the post office, weren't they, for a long time?

Gary [00:01:22]:
Yeah, probably. Probably. Who goes to the post office? But yeah. So you so wanted posters, but for the modern era, for social media. Right. So they. They're posting on social media, probably with the police department's account or whatever. We're looking for this person and they're offering rewards, but instead of saying, you know, $100, you know, wanted, that kind of thing, they're offering, like, prizes, like Lego sets and games and stuff like that.

Gary [00:01:50]:
You know, they're trying to be cute. They're trying to be like, oh, it's social media and all.

Leo [00:01:53]:
Something different. Yep.

Gary [00:01:54]:
So no big deal. So why am I even talking about it? Well, the problem with this, as opposed to a wanted poster is, you know, wanted poster, you're wanted. They put the wanted poster up, they find you, the wanted poster goes away, you know, is taken down optimally, but it just is pasted over with something else or, you know, falls off or whatever time you are, of course, then apprehended, taken in, put on trial, and then perhaps found innocent. Right, because just because you're wanted doesn't mean you're guilty. It could be. You could be innocent. People are innocent all the time. The weird thing is that social media posts are forever.

Gary [00:02:42]:
I mean, they could be taken down, they could be deleted, but they're always archived and often aren't taken down. And it'd be very easy to actually just look at an archive of it. They'll show up in things like people doing background checks for you for search for job openings or other reasons, running for office later on. It seems Like a nice idea. But we have that problem again that creeps up every once in a while where things online are kind of permanent, even if forever.

Leo [00:03:17]:
Yep.

Gary [00:03:18]:
The Internet. Yeah.

Leo [00:03:20]:
It's interesting because I've got an article about it somewhere I wrote some time ago that basically points out the fundamental premise here, is that anything you post online is pretty much online forever. Yeah. Even if you take down the original, because copies are so easily and frequently made. But the flip side of that is that if you've posted something and you know that it's out there, but you've lost track of it. Yeah. Good luck finding it. Right. Everything's on the Internet.

Leo [00:03:48]:
You just can't find it.

Gary [00:03:50]:
Yeah, exactly. We even had things like old. What? You know, wasn't it like geocities or whatever, the pages. It went away and then somebody resurrected them. Yep, I did. I did read something about another system like that where. Oh, you know, what is it?

Leo [00:04:06]:
The.

Gary [00:04:07]:
The vines. Remember Vine? Oh, yeah, yeah. So vine was resurrected under a new name, and one of the things they did in resurrecting it is they brought all the old vines back.

Leo [00:04:19]:
Interesting.

Gary [00:04:20]:
Yeah, I'll try to find a link to that, you know, and see if I could add that to the list.

Leo [00:04:26]:
So the thing is, bought fines. Was it. Was it Twitter that bought them or was it somebody else?

Gary [00:04:31]:
Yeah, it was somebody. See if I can find an article. Yeah, so, yeah, so good old, you know, Jack Dorsey, whose name seems to come up more often than not when we talk about these kinds of stories.

Leo [00:04:43]:
Okay.

Gary [00:04:45]:
Yeah. Started Divine D I V I N E. And a reboot of vine that includes Vine's video archive. So, yeah, I'll link to that. That's a good one to add on to this because. So the idea is here that, you know, maybe you're cheering that on, like, hey, all right, vine is back. And my old vines that I thought I maybe lost because I didn't bother to save them myself, they're back. But some people may be horrified to find their old vines.

Leo [00:05:12]:
Oh, my God. Went away.

Gary [00:05:15]:
Exactly. Yeah. So that's. Yeah, that's a kind of a related story there. You never know. Even when it seems like, yes, this is really gone, gone, gone forever, it may actually come back. So be careful what you post online. But then if it's not you posting about you, if it's like a local police department because somebody made a frivolous charge against you or something like that, you might be just out of luck.

Gary [00:05:42]:
You might just have to live with the fact that people 30 years from now are going to ask you in a job interview, so what about this? And then suddenly show you something on a screen and you have to explain yourself again.

Leo [00:05:56]:
I do want to throw in one more thing that I think a lot of people don't think of. It's particularly true in posting online, but it's actually true for just about any digital data and that is that these companies are backing up. Right. So your social media services, they've got their own backups. The backups aren't for you. It's not the kind of a thing that you can use to restore anything. It's to protect the company from things like hardware failure and just all the different things that can go wrong. The problem that most people don't think of is that the police can get a warrant to retrieve things that they may have been taken down, but they're still in the backups from some time ago.

Gary [00:06:43]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:06:44]:
So yeah, even taking things down, depending on your level of either paranoia or culpability can still come back to bite you.

Gary [00:06:57]:
Indeed. Yeah.

Leo [00:06:59]:
So the interesting news of the past couple of days is that there's been a new set of laptops introduced in the PC world that are being referred to as neo competitors, presumably because they've got the, you know, roughly same form factor and price and power. Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra, because we keep coming up with names. We already have a Pro and I think we already have a Max. So now we have an Ultra. It's based on the Nvidia chipset. It's a new chipset that is ARM based, so it's not x86 based. I'm going to come back to that in a second. But it is something that has been attempted multiple times in the Windows world.

Leo [00:07:45]:
So of course you'll have the Surface Laptop Ultra running Windows on this supposedly very, very powerful, very spiffy new chipset. Apparently it's also very much AI oriented, as everything is these days. The problem I have with it, and I've got a link to a How to Geek article on why it's doomed to fail, this is something that Microsoft has tried multiple times already and that is any attempt to get away from the X86 family of processors, they have tried this multiple times. Surface RT is the most recent example from several years ago that just never really did go anywhere. And many people are predicting the same situation for these Nvidia chip based Surface laptops and laptops. The Surface isn't the only one. It's just an example. Some of the other manufacturers are doing the Same.

Leo [00:08:53]:
The problem is the fundamental one, that there is so much software that is essentially x86, only that to switch to one of these machines can severely restrict the amount of available software you can actually use. Now, if you're a light user, if you're spending all your time in your browser, probably a great machine, much like any number of other machines, including the Neo itself or somebody's Chromebook or whatever. But the whole point of the Windows ecosystem is in many cases to do way more things than that. And those way more things typically rely on the x86 processor. What's funny is I guess that there is an emulation layer, so it'll fire up x86 processes, but not all of them work. And not all of them work completely, particularly in the, in the gaming space and particularly in the. I saw something about an Adobe, one of the Adobe products that would run, except for this feature over here is not available if you're running on a, on an ARM processor. Anyway, thought it was interesting we're trying to compete.

Leo [00:10:07]:
I just don't see it happening.

Gary [00:10:10]:
Yeah, I mean, I could see why they're trying to compete too, because a story from today was that the Neo is the best selling Mac of the previous quarter.

Leo [00:10:19]:
So.

Gary [00:10:19]:
Best selling model, but it was only for sale for the last three weeks of the quarter, so. So just in three weeks it caught up and passed all the other.

Leo [00:10:29]:
Well, to be fair, there's the new announcement rush. Right. Which is not. There's. There's certainly a, you know, a bubble of purchases right away, but my guess is it's going to remain a very popular machine.

Gary [00:10:43]:
Yeah. So I have, you know, I could report from all this time later that I am still using my Neo as my main laptop machine.

Leo [00:10:53]:
Nice.

Gary [00:10:54]:
So I bought one because I thought, well, it'd be good to do a comparison video or two or three. And so I would just get it since it was cheap enough, I thought, yeah, I may even make enough money from YouTube ads to justify it. Right. So I did that initial set of videos which were just as I predicted, pretty popular because people were searching for like MacBook Neo review stuff and then they would find the typical review. They were like, yeah, I know it looks cool and it does all this, but you know, how does it compare? So people did watch my videos and then I just kept using it. The plan was originally, I have a MacBook Air that isn't that much older and I just basically subbed one for the other and I thought, I'll go Back to the MacBook Air. After, you know, some period of time, I've never gone back to the MacBook Air. I'm still using the MacBook Neo and I'm using it more than ever because I started doing a little work at a second location.

Gary [00:11:50]:
Which means that instead of it just being this companion that sits on my desk next to my Mac studio and sometimes comes into the like living room with me, I'm actually using it to get real work done. In fact, I didn't realize this, but something maybe to talk about another time, but I've started making some travel related videos in addition to the Mac videos and I decided I wanted to do some work on that remotely. So I transferred the Final Cut profile. So not imovie, not like the lightweight da Vinci or anything else, but Final Cut Pro. I was like, oh, let me hit the download button for Final Cut Pro. Then I was like, let me transfer the 3 or 4 gig file that had the Final Cut Pro project onto it onto the laptop. Then I took it and then I worked editing the Final Cut Pro project on the MacBook Neo in a remote location for a whole afternoon. I came back and I transferred the file back and I continued working.

Gary [00:12:52]:
And it only occurred to me after I posted the video like a week later, hey, wait a minute. I didn't even think about the fact that I was, was editing a pretty sizable Final Cut Pro project on a MacBook Neo. But I didn't think about, oh, how does, how is this going to measure up? I just did it and kind of just forgot about the hardware.

Leo [00:13:12]:
Right, right.

Gary [00:13:13]:
And I can't remember ever running into any issues. Like I just edited. Like the issues were like, what do I put here? How do I treat, you know, like all the stuff you want to care about while editing. Not the technical, like, oh, I'm using a phone processor in a 600 MacBook to edit this video in Pro software. So that worked really well. And I have no plans to go back to my, my M2 MacBook Air, which should be like, has several things to give it an advantage over the Neo. But the NEO has just become my permanent laptop now.

Leo [00:13:48]:
That's very cool. I'm curious. That afternoon, do you take a charger with you or do you run completely off battery?

Gary [00:13:55]:
That's. Yeah, no, it was completely with battery. It was probably, I probably didn't even notice, but it was probably relatively charged up and I used it for three or four hours. I didn't really notice where the battery was when I left. It just came home and it got put on a Charger at some point that evening. So, yeah, which is kind of how it should be. Right? I, you know, I, I, I get lots of questions from people that obsess over the technical details of things, but when things are working right, when the products are right and everything, you don't worry about the fact that you're on this Mac or that Mac that you're on battery or not, you know, any of that stuff.

Leo [00:14:35]:
Very cool.

Gary [00:14:35]:
So, so, yeah, so good report there. And yeah, so, so the next story fascinated me. Like, I got obsessed with this. Like, now I kind of get why people listen to true crime podcasts or things like that and they get obsessed with a news story. Because I got obsessed with this little story that I first saw posted on Reddit. And then there was another Reddit thread and another Reddit thread and there were thousands of comments and then news articles. And it was this little story about a United Airlines flight on its way from Newark to Spain, I believe, that was turned around over the Atlantic back to, I don't know if it went all the way back to Newark, but it went back to North America because of a Bluetooth device name. So it was a bizarre thing.

Gary [00:15:28]:
First you had several Redditors posting live updates from the flight.

Leo [00:15:35]:
Oh, really?

Gary [00:15:36]:
You had several people with different perspectives, some up front where more was going on, some, some further in the back where they were more in the dark. But apparently at some point, flight attendants got on and made an announcement and said, everybody needs to turn off their Bluetooth devices now. Okay. Which is a weird thing. And I'm trying to imagine myself on a flight like this and how I would have reacted, because first of all, what do you mean by Bluetooth device? Because obviously it's a normal thing to go into your iPhone and put it in airplane mode or turn off Bluetooth and maybe a laptop, maybe a tablet as well. But those aren't technically Bluetooth devices. They're computers that connect to Bluetooth. The Bluetooth device is your headset or speakers usually.

Gary [00:16:26]:
I don't know why anybody would be using speakers. They shouldn't have been right away. Just turn the flight around immediately if that's going on, because, you know, that's annoying. But probably headsets. And there's another class of devices which probably almost nobody using them would even think of as Bluetooth devices. Things like airtags and other similar location finding things and medical devices, hearing aids, pacemakers, all this stuff that are not necessarily going to be in your face. Bluetooth, your pacemaker's got Bluetooth, you Get a little tattoo with a Bluetooth logo tattooed on your chest, I guess, to tell you, I don't know. But these things use.

Gary [00:17:07]:
All these things use Bluetooth technology. Technically, they're all Bluetooth devices. Some of them can't be turned off. Like pacemakers, maybe can't. Hearing aids, various levels of. And I got a feeling a lot of times, like, people with hearing aids, they're not necessarily, you know, they're in and then they're on the charger. They're. Nobody's fumbling for an off switch for, I think, for some of these, you know.

Leo [00:17:31]:
Right.

Gary [00:17:31]:
So, yeah, so turning off Bluetooth, I would have been the tech guy raising my hand and saying, can I have some technical specifications of which Bluetooth devices. Exactly. So I can help fellow travelers perhaps figure out what they need to find in their carry on and turn off. So why did they say that? Because there's another thing here. If you've flown on an international flight recently, or even a big domestic flight or one of the neat things you can do is if you have a TV screen in front of you, you can connect your Bluetooth to it. Your Bluetooth headset can be used as headphones to watch the movie.

Leo [00:18:13]:
Cool. I didn't know that.

Gary [00:18:14]:
Fairly recent thing. I noticed it first last year, and I noticed it again flying recently, internationally this year. So twice I've used this. It's one of the things on the screen. You go into the headphones or whatever, and there's a Bluetooth symbol, and you can pair your Bluetooth with the screen in front of you, which is great because more and more people have a Bluetooth device and they're not connecting with wires, you know, and you don't necessarily want to use the airlines ones, although that can be more convenient because you don't have to, you know, fish around to get your stuff. You don't have to pair your stuff with the TV screen. But those headphones still suck. They're still in general, not very good.

Gary [00:18:59]:
And I Even recently when I. I said, yeah, sure, give me one, because maybe I'll use those instead of my own. Yeah. One of the head, one of the sides was out. You know, it's like, all right, whatever. So I just use my AirPods paired with Bluetooth using the instructions on the screen. So, yeah. So, okay, how am I supposed to watch my movie now? Because I'm trying to do it with Bluetooth on the screen, number one.

Gary [00:19:22]:
Number two, your screens are Bluetooth. Every one of them on the back of every seat is Bluetooth. You know, so we all supposed to be turning those off and are they ever really off or are they in sleep mode? So there's all of that. Now why were they saying this? Because you technically don't need to turn off Bluetooth. Matter of fact, if you put your phone into airplane mode, you may notice that Bluetooth does not go off. It's no longer, you know, used to be airplane mode was just turn off all the wires.

Leo [00:19:52]:
Yep.

Gary [00:19:53]:
But now it doesn't do that anymore. Airplane mode does not turn off Bluetooth. So you can Listen to your AirPods, listen to your iPhone, listen to music, audiobook, whatever, watch something on it, you know, so it makes sense. So why do they need the Bluetooth devices suddenly turned off? Well, we don't know for sure, but the report from the plane are somebody overheard a flight attendant or perhaps the cockpit saying something about a Bluetooth device using that four letter word. Now, I don't think it was profanity that they were referring to. I think the word was bomb. And a lot of news report outlets are actually saying that supposedly it was somebody used the word bomb in the name of their Bluetooth device. And that was the problem.

Gary [00:20:45]:
And also this is unconfirmed, but it wasn't that there was like one of the flight attendants was like their job was, okay, we're in the air now. Time for me to go and check the name of everybody's Bluetooth device. Supposedly it was somebody trying to connect their Bluetooth headphones maybe to one of these TVs, I don't know. And noticed that there was a name of a Bluetooth device with the word bomb in the name. They called a flight attendant over concerned. And that's where this kind of came from. Then the flight attendant was like, everybody turn off their device. So this actually there are more questions now than ever before because first of all, so if you had brought a bomb on the plane, all you needed to do to get away with it was just to change the name of the Bluetooth device to something that didn't have the word bomb in it.

Gary [00:21:35]:
That seems rather ridiculous. Also, I did, funnily enough, somebody commented that there is actually a. I don't know if they're headphones or speakers that came up with a kind of a funny name that has the word bomb in it. So if there's a default name for those devices, and granted most people do not know how to change the names of their Bluetooth devices, you would be stuck with this. This is the name of your Bluetooth device and this is now going to be a problem on a lot of flights. There's that. There's also the fact that. So the flight attendants became very angry when this device didn't go away.

Gary [00:22:20]:
And apparently at some point they said, well, there's still two people with Bluetooth devices still on. So we're turning the plane around. Which is like, I don't know if everybody knows how to turn off their Bluetooth devices. I don't know if they can. I don't know if everybody knows what a Bluetooth device is anymore. I mean, it's not exactly. When you buy AirPods, which have to be the best selling Bluetooth device on the market, they don't go and say Bluetooth AirPods, they're just called wireless. They use the term wireless, not Bluetooth.

Gary [00:22:50]:
So I don't know if everybody knows that the headphones they're using are Bluetooth devices. They just may not. It's kind of a technical term. Plus, there's one more thing I have noticed and I'm sure this is true. If you have, say a pair of Bluetooth speakers and you try to connect to them and you do or do not, and then you turn off those Bluetooth speakers, your device later on is still going to list them.

Leo [00:23:20]:
Yes.

Gary [00:23:22]:
So if the flight attendant was saying, I don't think the flight attendant has sophisticated Bluetooth name detection, you know, gadgets, they probably just had an iPad. And if the iPad saw that somebody's Bluetooth device with this, with the word bomb in the name was on before and that person promptly said, oh no, my Bluetooth headphones are from, you know, bomb headsets or whatever. You know, it's really cool, the bomb, I'm going to turn it off. Then the flight attendant would have still seen that listed as a Bluetooth device available. Very likely. Even though the device had been turned off. So the whole thing was kind of ridiculous. And there's just multiple failures at many levels of like understanding technology and trying to deal with the situation.

Gary [00:24:12]:
There's even weird stuff. Like one person reported that when they were told to exit the plane, and by the way, the plane didn't go back to the gate because somebody really thought that there might be a bomb on the plane and the bomber was stupid enough to name the Bluetooth device that they actually didn't approach the terminal and had everybody walk downstairs onto the tarmac or whatever.

Leo [00:24:32]:
Right.

Gary [00:24:33]:
And one person reported we weren't allowed to take our devices with us. Yeah. Leave them on the plane. Where I should note that another person said, that's not true at all. We all, Nobody told us that. And we've walked out with, you know, our carry ons with all of our devices on it. Right. So who knows what the truth is there? But just lots of ridiculousness over, like, technology.

Gary [00:24:54]:
Sometimes you feel like, oh, we're finally past this kind of stuff.

Leo [00:24:58]:
No.

Gary [00:24:59]:
And other times it's like, wow, there had to be like multiple people and procedures that were outdated and misunderstood for this mess to happen.

Leo [00:25:08]:
I think the misunderstood is probably the biggest part of the story. Just because, like you say, not everybody understands what Bluetooth even is. Like, you know, it's, you know, you've got a wireless connection. What technology it uses is, is irrelevant as long as it's working. Right. But yeah, I know that, you know, the airlines have to be super sensitive to that word, but a little common sense might not be a bad thing either.

Gary [00:25:34]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, and certainly, hopefully whatever weird conjunction of rules led to this whole incident. A specific rule is now being put into place for this specific thing. Not, you know, because I, I think it was maybe a combination of like three or four dominoes in a row that fell into place.

Leo [00:25:57]:
Right.

Gary [00:25:57]:
For all of this to happen, they

Leo [00:26:00]:
need to understand that it's the moral equivalent to calling your WI fi hotspot FBI surveillance van. Right. You, you make it up. It doesn't mean anything. It's just something so that you can identify the connection you're trying to use.

Gary [00:26:14]:
Yeah. And I think I'm, I'm actually pretty sure that there are Bluetooth devices or situations combining your computing device, phone or whatever, and the Bluetooth device that make it impossible to rename it. Like, I've got USB devices that are that way older USB devices where there is no way for me to rename them.

Leo [00:26:35]:
Right.

Gary [00:26:36]:
And I have other USB devices where I can go and rename. And I think it's the same thing, perhaps for some Bluetooth devices. I rarely use anything but my AirPods that would be considered a Bluetooth device. But I'm thinking that there might be situations, somebody with a phone running this software, they have this headset and there's really no way for them to go. If the Bluetooth device is called, you know, the Bob Headphones, they're stuck with that name.

Leo [00:27:06]:
Yeah. The only thing I could see is that at a practical level, if you know that your Bluetooth device has a name like that that you can't change, maybe don't take it on the airplane.

Gary [00:27:19]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:27:20]:
And if those kind of devices can be identified beforehand, I could also see Them being on like a no fly list for devices.

Gary [00:27:30]:
No fly list. Or they could perhaps. I mean, they're. Well, first of all, yeah, now you wouldn't have known before this incident, right. That you shouldn't have taken that. Now you have to actually be reading this kind of news or seeing this kind of, you know, so they need to get better at it. Also, if there is like some company out there making Bluetooth headphones that have the word bomb in the title, first of all, they stop putting that as the name.

Leo [00:27:54]:
That seems like a bad choice.

Gary [00:27:55]:
Yeah, bad choice. And they need to have some sort of, some sort of recall or education if the name could be changed to make that doable. Also, you know, it also throws into like, question, like people doing the funny names for the, for WI FI networks or Bluetooth devices, you know, you know, it seems so harmless, but now there's going to be a subset of people, probably might even include me, that'll be like, well, all right, that was funny while it lasted. Now I need to actually, like, care about it because who knows what could happen.

Leo [00:28:34]:
I will say that the. I've used the hotspot on my phone fairly frequently, so of course it broadcasts a WI FI ssid. I use that for marketing. If you ever see a hotspot labeled whose name is askleo.com Hotspot, that's me, I'm nearby.

Gary [00:29:00]:
Yeah, but then you're going to get people asking, hey, I saw you were nearby. And then of course, I've seen your picture. So I spotted you across the, the waiting room at the, at the airport. And I've got a question. Can you look at my Windows laptop? Tell me.

Leo [00:29:13]:
So I've actually got a. A page, since obviously that's a URL. So I've got a page there and it actually invites people to come say hi if they find me. So, I mean, I'm out in public. You know, my, my expectations are low.

Gary [00:29:32]:
Okay, so.

Leo [00:29:33]:
Well, I. Yesterday. Yes, today's Tuesday. Yesterday I was working on an article that was in response to a YouTube commenter. Basically, I had published an article on using cloud storage safely. And in that article, I downplay a number of the objections that I downplay a number of issues that people object to. And I was curious as to your reaction as to some of these objections that people tend to raise.

Gary [00:30:13]:
Okay.

Leo [00:30:13]:
When it comes to cloud storage. Yeah, let me bring it up. So the first objection that people have is that the cloud storage provider can see their data.

Gary [00:30:27]:
Yeah. Well, because people don't understand encryption. Right. I Mean, that's part of it, but in some cases it's kind of true in a weird way.

Leo [00:30:42]:
No, it's absolutely true.

Gary [00:30:43]:
Because if, if the. It's not end to end encrypted.

Leo [00:30:47]:
Right.

Gary [00:30:48]:
I'm just, you know, I, I don't know. The other services, they're standing on this, but Apple's got end to end encryption or in transit encryption. And the deal is. And there's also advanced data protection, something you turn on. Now if you turn on advanced data protection, it's absolutely not true that they can see your stuff. They can't. And they can't get it back for you either. It's like totally opaque to them.

Gary [00:31:14]:
The encryption key is only something you have and they don't have it. So they're just.

Leo [00:31:19]:
Does that imply you can't access that data through the website?

Gary [00:31:24]:
No, you can. You just have to log into your account and. Yeah, you just have to be logged in and it's going to use your browser's security stuff and you'll be able to get it, but it'll be encrypted until it gets to you.

Leo [00:31:39]:
Okay, so it's decrypted client side.

Gary [00:31:41]:
Yeah, so. But not everybody turns on advanced data protection, first of all, because it puts you vulnerable, it makes you vulnerable to data loss, which is a, for a lot of people is a much bigger problem. You know, if you're just storing your recipes and your photos of your friends, parties and stuff like that online and it's all just normal stuff, then you do want it encrypted so that others cannot get to it. But you don't necessarily want to go to advanced data protection, which means if you're locked out of it, you lose it all. Two different security issues. The security of getting to keep your data and having a way to get to it in an emergency, or the security that nobody else can read it but you. But you know, you have to choose one or the other.

Leo [00:32:26]:
It's interesting because the other services I, I typically am using, of course, OneDrive as my example throughout. If you upload a file that you've not encrypted yourself, well, of course they can see it. You're putting your file on their hard disks. The question is not whether they can see your data. The question is really, do they do anything nefarious with it? Which actually leads to the second, the second objection. Okay, great, they can see my data. They're scanning my data, is objection number two. And I think we've talked about it here.

Leo [00:33:08]:
I don't know Where Apple is right now on scanning for csam.

Gary [00:33:12]:
Yeah, they not doing anything.

Leo [00:33:15]:
They're not doing that anymore.

Gary [00:33:16]:
They backed off of that completely.

Leo [00:33:19]:
And the other thought that I had, of course is that some governments may enforce searching for threats. The common response I get from folks is that fine, if you don't believe your data is being scanned, if you don't believe that you're, you know, interesting in any way, upload a document that makes a threat to a prominent politician and see what happens. And there is in fact in Microsoft's privacy statement, a very explicit statement about this, that some of our products systematically scan content to identify spam viruses, abusive actions, URLs that are flagged as phishing and so forth. So yeah, of course they are possibly scanning your data, but they're scanning your data for things that are at least in my mind. Okay, please do scan my data, right. If there's malware in there, I want to know about it. You know, that kind of thing.

Gary [00:34:21]:
Yeah, I mean Apple had, you know, for the CSAM stuff, they had a great system worked out, but they still got pushback. And the system was that they, that your device does the scanning, right? So it's not being scanned in the cloud, it's being scanned locally by your device and it's looking to match things. It was only if there were multiple matches and all these other rules and stuff like that that you were flagged. The basic scanning was not actually happening on the server. It was a really interesting, cool, privacy oriented system for it, but they're still pushed back. So they just said, I guess, I guess they just said it's not worth it at this point and they backed off.

Leo [00:35:08]:
Interesting. The. It's, it's. I guess I'm surprised and I would not, I would not put it past Apple to still be doing some level of surface scanning. Do you know if they say anything specifically in their policies?

Gary [00:35:30]:
I think they say they don't in their policies. I mean they have, if you're not using the advanced data protection, then you can basically you can get recovery from them.

Leo [00:35:41]:
Right.

Gary [00:35:41]:
So you got to go in and get recovery and that's. And they could potentially use that same system to look at your data.

Leo [00:35:49]:
Right.

Gary [00:35:50]:
But that's, it's kind of like a, you know, throwing the, they have to intentionally do it. It's not like there's systems that are just looking through all the stuff, gathering information for advertisers, you know, doing, you know, data analysis on what everybody's saving to icloud, you know, that's not happening. It's. Right, but technically, in order for them to help you recover your account, they have to have the key to do that.

Leo [00:36:14]:
Right. They have to be able to access it. Yep.

Gary [00:36:16]:
So you're just doing a trust thing. You're trusting Apple to not use that key for anything else.

Leo [00:36:23]:
Right.

Gary [00:36:23]:
Other than helping you recover your account

Leo [00:36:26]:
or where a lot of people are falling down. Yeah, yeah.

Gary [00:36:32]:
Or potentially a warrant if. So that's the thing. And it goes back to what you said over and over again. Well, if you say, well, I don't trust Apple, I think they are using that recovery information to just spy on me. They don't need to use that, they don't need to break that door down. They have lots of other doors on Windows. Your operating system that you're using on your iPhone, on your iPad, on your Mac is made by Apple. All the code there is made by Apple.

Gary [00:37:04]:
All the chips are designed. Not all the chips are designed, but prominent chips are designed by Apple, the system's designed by Apple, all this stuff. So saying that, oh, I think I trust them in every other way that they won't spy on me, but this one particular way I think they will.

Leo [00:37:23]:
Right.

Gary [00:37:23]:
It's kind of ridiculous. It's like, yeah, it's all right. So, so yeah, there's that.

Leo [00:37:31]:
The, the third one that I've got listed is. You'll, you'll laugh because you've, I'm sure you've heard it before too. The cloud providers are claiming ownership of my data.

Gary [00:37:44]:
Oh yeah, yeah.

Leo [00:37:46]:
Which of course they are not. Now the Microsoft services agreement is pretty clear. Quote, we don't claim ownership of your content. Your content remain yours and you are responsible for it. What's interesting though is that I think that it's an objection that results from a different clause in most providers terms of service that says basically you give them a license to access your files in order to provide the very service you're asking them to provide. Yeah. And that wording is apparently sometimes being misunderstood. People are basically stopping at the, let's see, you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty free intellectual property license to use your content.

Leo [00:38:36]:
People stop reading at that point because it's actually much more restrictive than use it for anything they you're allowed to use it for or they're allowed to use it to do the thing you're asking them to do.

Gary [00:38:49]:
Yeah, to display your information. I mean this happens a lot with photos in photos galleries, but also in social media and stuff. You know, the idea is it's like, oh, you want us to show your photos to people? We need your permission to do that, right? So we're going to ask your permission to do that. And people just say, oh, now they own it. And it's like, okay, you know, you've got, in every, every company, you've got a marketing department and a legal department. And what probably still happens but should be changed is the marketing department says, here's all the features. And then the legal department then writes up these agreements and then people read them and say, oh no, this. And you end up with bad press because the legal agreement, it needs to go back to marketing after legal.

Gary [00:39:34]:
And the marketing department needs to say, oh boy, the way you worded this is going to look really bad. Let's put more details in there. Let's, let's work together. There's probably, probably really beneficial if you're in school now and getting a law degree to take some marketing classes and vice versa, because the two need to work together to avoid these kind of disasters that go, that go back and forth from this.

Leo [00:40:03]:
So the fourth option is a rel or fourth objection, I should say is a relatively new one. In that quote, they're using my data to train their AI. This is where I mentioned in our show notes that this is an opportunity for AI to be used because as you know, Terms of services and privacy statements, a, they're written by lawyers, as you just said, so they use a unique vocabulary to put it, to put it gently. And they're huge. They're absolutely huge. Nobody's reading a terms of service from start to finish or I shouldn't say nobody. I actually, there's apparently one podcaster that does that, but like I said, this is a wonderful opportunity. So what I did is I made a copy of both Microsoft's privacy statement and their services agreement, threw that into Claude and started asking it a few questions about the terms of service.

Leo [00:41:15]:
And indeed, in the case of OneDrive, which again was my specific example, the privacy statement describes some document handling so that they, Microsoft can provide the service, but storing A file in OneDrive doesn't feed it to a training pipeline. That's Claude's analysis of both of these two very large documents. If there's controversy at all about this is that there is no simple and clear we don't use your data to train AI, period. Statement like there was about ownership, right? There's. They, they don't claim ownership and they're very clear about that. I think this is a good case of yes, you're absolutely Right. I think marketing and legal needed to talk together about, talk to each other about this because that simple statement would make a lot of this paranoia go away. Not all of it, of course.

Leo [00:42:13]:
Some people are dedicated to their paranoia, but sometimes it would just be nice to have something that clear. The worry, of course, in all of these cases is that terms of services can change. Microsoft or any of the other companies that are storing your data for you could indeed start doing things. So there's a simple objection that it's our simple solution that I think you've mentioned Apple has already put in place, and that is encryption. While if you're not going to trust Apple, if you're not going to trust Microsoft, the encryption that you might use might better be an encryption that is not provided by the people you don't trust. So I end up suggesting people use tools like Cryptomator or Veracrypt or whatever other tools they're comfortable with to encrypt their data before it goes online. That way the provider, they can't see your encrypted data, they can't scan your encrypted data, and they can't use your encrypted data to train AI. It's, it's really simple.

Gary [00:43:22]:
Yeah, yeah. You have tools out there if you want. I think a lot of times people with the AI accusation, they, they, they're confusing two things. One is the AI remembering stuff to help you, and the other is training that can, then others can, you know, benefit from. It's really a weird thing because usually training with AI is like getting lots of information from sources. You know, imagine encyclopedias and books and, you know, transcripts of videos and all that stuff. But having, you know, the, when it's getting information from you so it can remember stuff, the, you know, and you can ask questions and it knows it's. That's information that's part of your account.

Gary [00:44:15]:
Right, right. So when people see that, they're like, wow, the AI knows all this stuff about me. Yeah. And so does your phone. I mean, you know, your phone for years has like your calendar with your events and it has, you know, this, this is just AI's way of doing it. AI doesn't have this visual interface where you can look and say, hey, I've got seven events in my calendar for this week. You know, and here's what they are. And you're not surprised when you get in your car and want to start driving and you have an.

Gary [00:44:41]:
Something you're supposed to be at in half an hour and your Car says for directions, the first choice is the address of that place you need to go.

Leo [00:44:48]:
Yep.

Gary [00:44:49]:
It's like, oh, that makes sense. AI doesn't have it spelled out like that. They just have stuff like that in your account. So when I ask, I can go right now to ChatGPT and say, what's a good telephoto lens? You know, what's new in telephoto lenses? And it right away is going to come back and say, for your camera.

Leo [00:45:08]:
Right.

Gary [00:45:09]:
You know, and these are all things

Leo [00:45:11]:
we've asked, these are all things we've told it.

Gary [00:45:15]:
Yeah, so, so, yeah, I, you know, I get that. And. But that's not training AI. That is just remembering stuff about you and your account. So when you ask questions, it has context.

Leo [00:45:28]:
Right.

Gary [00:45:29]:
Which is actually something I was going to talk about later, but, you know, there's an article I'll just include in the, in the show notes about somebody that was reviewing the latest version of Gemini and then got creeped out when it knew all this stuff about them. It asked them to plan a vacation and then it used tons of past data to plan that vacation, including names of family members, the fact that their family members were young, young children, discounts for tickets, nap time, that kind of thing. So they were creeped out by it and they kept using. And it was even in the headline. Well, Maple was in the headline, but it was. Yeah, no, it was. So anyway, and I don't know, to me, I don't see it as being something being creeped out, because I don't. I.

Gary [00:46:21]:
I think it's something we talked about before when we were talking about like using AI as somebody to talk to, like a chat and using it as a tool. And it's often ignored. You know, a lot of people are jumping right to, oh, I can chat with this thing. It's a person, I can talk to it like a person and all that. And by all means, that helps you get the results you want. Fine. But don't forget, it's not a person. Right.

Gary [00:46:45]:
So when it comes back and says, oh, your son named this will probably enjoy this part of the trip, you know, this is not a person that's doing it. It's a thing that has that information and is spitting it back, back out at you in an interface that is basically a chatty type interface.

Leo [00:47:04]:
It's a thing with a perfect memory.

Gary [00:47:09]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:47:09]:
It remembers all the details. It's funny because I will occasionally, obviously use Claude when I am working on my articles for various things and if I ask it to do an editorial pass. It will sometimes tell me, you know, for your audience, you might want to reword it this way. And over the course of the past few months, it's gotten a very good concept of what my audience really entails. And that's just because I told it all these things and it's making wonderful inferences from it. The training that I think most people are concerned about are the large language model trainings. In other words, the documents you upload and are somehow used for that. Honestly, two things on that and then we'll move on.

Leo [00:47:56]:
One, I don't care if they're training their AI on the documents I have in OneDrive, more power to them. I really don't care. And one of the reasons I don't care is because they're not copying my documents into the model. Right. What they're doing is they're using it. They're using the structure of whatever's in my documents to train the model. And the, the best comparison I can come up with right now is, are spam filters. When you mark something as spam, they take a look at the characteristics of that message and use it to update the filter.

Leo [00:48:34]:
They're not copying the message, not saving a copy of the message, they're using its characteristics in some form. The same thing is happening, I believe, with large language model training. They're using the characteristics of the document. Now, it could be incredibly detailed, nuanced characteristics that you and I would never think of. But it's that that they're saving. It's that that they're using to adjust the LLM. They're not squirreling away a copy of my manuscript, for example.

Gary [00:49:00]:
That's a good point. Good point.

Leo [00:49:02]:
Anyway, yes, creeped out was, was very cool. I, Yeah, I can imagine people reacting.

Gary [00:49:11]:
Well, people think. I think it's. I think getting creeped out is something that has happened many times over the course of the evolution of computers.

Leo [00:49:20]:
Yes.

Gary [00:49:20]:
I mean, people, I think people that got the, you know, a lot of people when email first came out probably got creeped out by the fact that, oh, I know this for a fact, that, you know, they wrote an email and hit send and three minutes later got a response that was probably creepy when it first happened, not creepy to anybody now because messaging is so commonplace. But, yeah, there's.

Leo [00:49:46]:
That.

Gary [00:49:47]:
There's all sorts of things that computers did early on that creep people out. And this is just another one of those. There are real security and privacy issues. But I hate when journalists get lazy and just say, well, I don't know why this is bad. I was just creeped out. So that's what bothered me about the article. Another article I saw this week was kind of interesting because we talk a lot about software subscriptions versus buying the software, right? And like I always say, first of all, you never buy the software. You're buying a license to the software, and you're never subscriptions.

Gary [00:50:24]:
And buying the software are not completely separate models. Because when you used to buy software and you still can, you're probably not buying the upgrade, right? The upgrade is going to be another price at some point. So you're going to pay again, probably for it if you want to keep using the software in the long term. And that's the case here. Where Microsoft Office 2019 for Mac, right? If you bought that thinking, I'm not going to pay for a subscription to Microsoft Office, I'm going to buy office 2019, and that's all I'll ever need. I don't care what new features they add to Microsoft Office in future versions. 2019 is all I'll ever need. Well, guess what? You're going to need more than it now, because soon Microsoft Office 2019 will not work anymore on Macs.

Gary [00:51:13]:
You'll be able to open and read documents, but you will not be able to edit them.

Leo [00:51:17]:
Really? I hadn't heard that.

Gary [00:51:19]:
So it apparently has to do a little bit with certificates. A new certificate needed to be issued for Microsoft Office 2019, easy to do now. The software has to be updated to include that certificate. Microsoft has said, we don't update Office 2019 anymore. It's done. So even though we do an update with this new certificate, we're not doing that. And I know as a software developer, it's not that easy. You can't just go, there's not a computer sitting in a closet that was turned off in 2019 or 2023 whenever it was last updated.

Gary [00:51:58]:
That has everything configured and ready to go. And you can put a new certificate in there and hit compile. You open UP Microsoft Office 2019 in whatever development environment they're using, and the new development rights going to be like, you have 815 things you need to update in order to compile again with the latest version of all the stuff. So it's not that easy. But it does mean that Office 2019 could no longer be used to make documents. Microsoft suggests that you buy a new copy of Microsoft office. I think 2023 is their latest version, standalone or something.

Leo [00:52:34]:
I'm not sure what it is for the Mac, I think on the PC side it's 2024 or you just use

Gary [00:52:40]:
the free Office 365 subscription or not subscription apps, but get a subscription, right? So you're gonna either like buy another one that we're probably gonna do the same thing to eventually or get the subscription that you've been avoiding this whole time. If you bought 2019 thinking, I'm done, I'll never need to buy Office again. You know, people like me warned you that that would probably not be true and, and it looks like that's very true right now. It's interesting enough, you know, for a really cool feature of Microsoft Office on Mac, is that ability to get the full versions of the apps, no subscription needed, and use those to open documents. This is something they introduced years ago. And it's really cool because one of my biggest pet peeves was people that use Microsoft Word so often that they forget it is not ubiquitous. And they will do something like write a memo and then email the Word document. And this happens in organizations all the time.

Gary [00:53:47]:
You're in some sort of Facebook parent group and somebody decides to write one page of something in a Word document and sends it to the group, hey, I've listed all the things we all need for the weekend event. It's in this Word document. And then you get it. And as a Mac user you're like, oh, I don't have Word. Well, on a Mac, of course there's several ways to open a Word document up, especially if you just need to read the text inside. But one of those that's really cool is just download Word, say no thanks to the subscription. And now you can read any Word document. And it's an up to date version of Word.

Gary [00:54:21]:
It's going to be able to faithfully reproduce what you see in the Word document. You just can't edit it, can't produce new documents. But you will not be stuck in the dark because you can't read it. So anyway, that's just a side there about Microsoft.

Leo [00:54:38]:
There's bad things. Sure. No, I get it. There's a free online version as well. Not unlike Google Docs. You could do everything online, which would include being able to save. But yeah, the ability to open alone on your desktop makes a lot of sense. And it's funny because this is a battle that I fight regularly with a couple of the organizations I support is stop emailing.

Leo [00:54:59]:
I've stopped asking them to stop emailing documents that way, but I've definitely been adamant about. This is not the format for a document you want to post on your website.

Gary [00:55:13]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:55:14]:
You know, you want to save as PDF and do that. Alrighty.

Gary [00:55:18]:
All right.

Leo [00:55:20]:
So ain't it cool? It looks like we're both talking about series finales this week, which I think is kind of fun. We ended up watching Euphoria. We got caught up with Euphoria. We got. What do I want to say? We got caught in a way that we, you know, we just wanted to watch the whole series. After watching a couple of episodes, I will warn people that Euphoria is brutal. And if you have teenage, you know, teenage daughters, in particular teenagers, or if there's a. An issue with drug abuse that you don't want to be able to.

Leo [00:56:01]:
You don't want to watch, those kinds of things are triggering. Euphoria is not for you, but it is a. An amazing insight into some extreme high school culture. And then post high school life. I won't give away any spoilers. I love Zendaya. I did not like Zendaya much just before watching all this, but after watching this entire series, she's an amazing actress and I'm. I'm very glad we did watch it.

Leo [00:56:29]:
So Euphoria, that's on hbo. The entire series is done. They just submitted the series finale last Sunday and, yeah, we. We actually enjoyed that quite a bit.

Gary [00:56:43]:
It seems to be lots of series finales happening now. My vehicle for our next episode will probably be one as well. I think you already mentioned the boys series finale a few weeks ago.

Leo [00:56:54]:
I may have, yeah. Or just.

Gary [00:56:58]:
It fits with what you just said. It's very triggering and there's. And it's not for everybody, definitely the whole thing. As a matter of fact, I kind of found I've been finding it harder and harder to watch each season. Not because the show has changed, because I'm kind of changing. I'm just. I just want to be entertained. Make me smile and be entertained.

Gary [00:57:23]:
This is my relaxation time. This isn't. I don't want to be dealing with stuff that isn't even real. It's fictional. But, yeah, I did get through the last season, you know, and the weird thing, I don't know how it was with Euphoria, but, boy, it is so hard to pull off a successful series finale.

Leo [00:57:41]:
Yes.

Gary [00:57:42]:
Nobody. You can't make everybody happy. I actually saw a spoiler for the boys series finale. Not of anything that happened, but of how disappointed somebody was. And yet another series that ended so poorly.

Leo [00:57:59]:
Interesting.

Gary [00:57:59]:
And I regretted having read that. And I was like, well, I need to get through this. And watch it because I want to, you know, judge for myself. And then once again, I was dumbfounded with like, well, what was wrong with it now? It wasn't, it wasn't like anything amazing like, you know, like, oh, this finally a series. Got the season finale, the series finale completely right. It was fine. It was just fine. It was like, I don't.

Gary [00:58:24]:
I can't think of any other way that they could have ended it that would have had, you know, less people disappointed. I mean, because they could have gone different ways and I would have made some different choices. But I don't know if that would have changed the ratio of people that liked it versus disliked it at all.

Leo [00:58:40]:
Right.

Gary [00:58:40]:
Because you just cannot please everybody. There's going to be people that want things to go one direction. People. People don't want them to go the other. So anyway, it was, it was perfectly fine and I'm kind of glad it's over because, yeah, it's just. It's just, it's difficult sometimes to watch things. A lot of. I know the series had this reputation earned reputation of having things take place in the series that later on would actually kind of happen in real life in a different way.

Gary [00:59:10]:
Obviously, there are no superheroes, right. But you could go and make a case for. Look at what happened today in politics.

Leo [00:59:17]:
Right.

Gary [00:59:18]:
Kind of like what happened in episode whatever of season whatever of the Boys. But it seems so ridiculous then the.

Leo [00:59:27]:
There they. There are a lot of parallels that I honestly don't know how much of it was intentional.

Gary [00:59:33]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:59:34]:
Specific things happening or how much it was just a side effect of having in this case the Big Bad being a, you know, narcissistic dictator like Persona

Gary [00:59:47]:
and having a lot of scenes take place in the Oval Office.

Leo [00:59:50]:
The.

Gary [00:59:51]:
I think it was probably at this point it has to be a combination. Right. Because they obviously were aware of. Of similarities between real life events. And I think that sometimes it was very easy. It was like, well, this is where the story naturally goes and hey, it happens to parallel some events taking place. So it would be like we would have to intentionally avoid this direction in order for it to not be like that.

Leo [01:00:21]:
But anyway, there is a, A prequel coming out.

Gary [01:00:25]:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I saw that. And then of course there was the side series. I guess if there was anything disappointing about the last season of the Boys series, was that the side series, Generation V, Gen V or whatever it was that kind of led you on to saying, oh, you're going to want to watch this, else you won't understand something. In the final series because these characters will come in and the characters did appear. But you know what? You didn't need to watch Generations.

Leo [01:00:53]:
I was going to say there was no relationship.

Gary [01:00:56]:
No, you could. Oh, these are. These are characters from that series. And they're going to have a few lines here and there that was. You didn't need to watch it.

Leo [01:01:04]:
So, anyway, self promotion. The article I want to point people at this week is Mythos about Mythos. Mythos or actually, the biggest controversy seems to be, is it Mythos or Mythos? Mythos is the large language model that the folks at Anthropic put together. It is extremely powerful. It is apparently really good at identifying vulnerabilities in software. Supposedly, it has identified thousands of vulnerabilities, including in every major operating system. As a result, Anthropic held it back. It's not publicly available yet.

Leo [01:01:46]:
But honestly, to me, that's not the takeaway. To me, that's not what people should be learning about Mythos and thinking about Mythos. It's more a matter of the fact that Mythos is mythos class AIs are inevitable, and that that's what we really need to be preparing for. Anyway, Mythos. About Mythos askleo.com 192235 Cool.

Gary [01:02:15]:
I'll point to a video called 7 Skills need to Master Mac Pages. I love it sometimes. A lot of times I do videos on new features in apps, and sometimes I'll do videos on specific features of apps that have been around for a while. But every once in a while, I do a recap of features just because I get the feeling that people are missing them. Like, there's like, these things. Oh, Pages can do that. You know, you have to. But you have to master it to know where things are.

Leo [01:02:45]:
Right?

Gary [01:02:46]:
So I do a video like this, and then they always seem to do well. And this video did particularly well just pointing out things that longtime Pages users should already know. But there's seven of them, so chances are, even if you're a longtime Pages user, I bet you you might just know five or six, right? And be surprised by all the full list.

Leo [01:03:04]:
Very cool. All righty. I think that does it for yet another week. Thank you everyone for listening, and we will see you here again very soon. Take care, everyone.

Gary [01:03:15]:
Bye.

Leo [01:03:15]:
Bye.

Gary [01:03:16]:
Bye.