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Welcome to Tech Grumps Tech Grumps 3.20 and today on Sunday the 6th of October we have
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myself being a forester. I am very quiet because I am somewhere in Europe, hiding away. And
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then we also have Ryan Alexander. Hello, I am still in London. And we have David Eastman.
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Hello, I am also still in London. And also I am still on X as David J Eastman won. And
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also Blue Sky as Eastman which is easier. I am not even going to start by X. Anyway,
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we also have Wendy Grossman. Hi, I write about computer freedom and privacy and you will
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find me on Mastodon. I do still have an X account but I am deeply ashamed of it. Too
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fair. I have one and I never log in. I am just spite camping it so no one else ever
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takes my username and does stupid things with it. Yeah, I kind of keep it just barely alive.
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You do realise that Elon Musk spent this weekend jumping up and down behind Donald Trump. He
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is wearing a Macacat. Wow. Okay, so our first story is one of mine. And I find the surveillance
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of cars to be insane. And just to put my hands up on the table. I do not own a car. I do
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own a motorbike. But this hasn't come from motorbikes yet as far as I can tell. And I
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think it is just more difficult even doing so. But ultimately, the car's data and what
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it has been used for, how it has been taken from the owner, just to me seems so insane.
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I am aware that the likes of Tesla and others, electric cars, are doing this. But there is
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a video which I will link to that just indicates to me that this has gone way too far. And
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also I have to give credit to Mozilla for their privacy not guaranteed report last year which
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also outlined this. And actually the video that I am pointing to will point to a lot
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of the stuff there. But I am wondering from the rest of the tech grumps if they have a
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car and what their thoughts are on this absolute data grab.
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I do not have a car these days. I sold my last car about ten years ago. And I consider
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it fortunate that I don't have to own a car. Because it is not just the spying. It is also
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the car design has gone through a sort of bad patch where everybody was putting in touch
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screens instead of things that you, buttons and things that you can feel without looking
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at them. But yeah, I mean, the surveillance, it is not just cars. I mean, basically, as
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we add software to all sorts of physical objects, manufacturers see it as an opportunity to
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have advertising. And they see it as an opportunity for data collection. Because even if they
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do not want to run advertising themselves, they can sell the data or they can sell insights
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from the data. So I think we are going to see more and more
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of this in the obvious example with televisions, which collect a mass, smart television, so-called
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smart television, collect massive amounts of data on what you watch and when and how
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often. And increasingly, there is also advertising being built into the TV's own operating system
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so that you can't get away from it at all. And the only answer really is to disconnect
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your smart television from the internet and run a separate streaming device, which I don't
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mind doing, but it kind of defeats the purpose. Yeah, exactly.
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I saw an interesting article on this subject someone was posting about. They like collect
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this. This is an interesting thing of the TV age. They have had to construct a small
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device to take with them to charity shops and pawn shops that will broadcast an analog
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TV signal that a TV that they want to buy in there can pick up to test it because there's
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no longer analog TV signals ambiently available for them to use for that purpose. That's how
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far we've come. That's kind of a separate issue though. I
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mean, it's not digital television per se that's the problem. No.
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In terms of advertising and data collection. The thing that made me think of it is that
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I too came from car culture. I moved over here from the US about 20 years ago and I
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was a car owner and lived in a city that was obligate car ownership, which is most of the
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cities in the US. There are very few cities in the US that are not obligate car ownership.
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I have been to Minneapolis. I know what you're talking about.
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Because of this, my snapshot on cars was something very infrequent. I lived in London, didn't
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need them. But when I would return to the cities, especially for a long time, I would
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either borrow a car or for a certain chunk of time, I actually went so long without driving
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a car and getting rides from the people that I actually kind of got a little bit afraid
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that I didn't have the chops anymore. I maintained my driver's license still do in the US. But
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what this meant is that for me, the last car I owned had nothing really digital about it
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except for maybe the radio. It was an old Saturn, remember that brand. And the way they
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jumped ahead when I finally rented a car after 10, 15 years of living here just because I
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needed to. All of a sudden I was like, wait, I can plug my phone into this? What the hell?
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It's showing me my phone screen on the TV and just the leaps and jumps that it made.
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And now coming back and riding with friends who have EV cars and seeing all the stuff
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in there. And I really feel you on the where did all the buttons and dials go, Wendy? Like
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I absolutely had that moment. I was like, is this even a car anymore? Because I remember
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the whole physicality, the challenge of driving. I mean, I learned on a manual shift that's
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going to mark me as a dinosaur.
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I've only ever owned manual shift cars.
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I have just one automatic and everything else is manual.
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And the fact that this transition has happened in our lifetime.
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Well, some of it's going away again because they have actually recognized the ergonomic
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disaster that is touch screens for drivers. And so they are beginning to bring back buttons
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and stuff like that, which is a good thing.
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To your thing about the data, I think all of these things are just they put in, at this
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point, they put in digital stuff just because of the new avenues of monetization that it
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opens up.
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Well, yeah, there's actually Intel, I think, is partnering with, I forget who, to make
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software defined vehicles. And what that means, sadly, is not that you can run a bunch of
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software and turn a car into a truck, which is what I would like that to mean, but rather
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that it enables things like you can subscribe to heated seats and you can subscribe to different
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future.
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But that's because they have already been built into the car. So what is, you know,
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it's maddening the notion that you have to subscribe to something like that.
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Yeah, but their logic is that cars last longer because they build the better now. And they're
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like, oh, we can't sell people on new cars every minute. So of course they want, as you
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just said, they need a new monetary angle. So it's literally like it's literally like
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the TV where, oh, I've just paid for Netflix. I know I need another sub channel on the Netflix.
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It's a money. It's just for money. So it's just like you can turn on the seats.
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David, I hope you're not, you're not supporting this.
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No, no, I just say that is their logic.
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Okay, just want to clarify.
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But also there's another thing is, and I think that also comes on this whole thing where
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they're giving away information. I mean, they need the care or fully understand the problem
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for that. I mean, they might do now, but it was just for monetization. It wasn't because
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they care about data. It's just like the people that they can get money from.
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That's insurance company. Insurance companies would like to game the system so that they
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only ever have customers who will never make a claim, which defeats the purpose of having
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insurance in the first place.
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Yeah.
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And as much as I don't want to break the trend that we've started so far by bringing this
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up, but data itself, the value of it has changed in the last year or two. It used to be they
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wanted customer tracking and customer dynamics, but now there's a market for just anything
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as long as it wasn't made by AI so we can feed it to an AI.
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Fresh data. What do we call this?
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That's true.
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Real data. I don't even know what to call it.
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There's a lot of places that are basically just like you can use our stuff, even AI,
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as long as you let us use the interactions that you give this machine to train it up.
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Previously, it's like the junk bonds of data.
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Yeah.
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It wasn't worth anything before, but now there's companies out there that are like, we don't
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care what form it comes in just as long as it didn't come from one of these. Give it
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to us.
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Yeah. Is it real? Give me real.
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If you want terabytes, what's next after terabytes? Bigger than terabytes. Petabytes of data.
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Petabytes.
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Petabytes is the one we use. Yes. They might be something you can use.
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We will buy it from your wholesale.
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Yes.
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We can remember it for you wholesale.
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We can remember it for you wholesale. Yeah.
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So my other thing that I was going to say, maybe an obvious answer, but I'm wondering,
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I mean, none of this stuff, as far as I can see, has happened to motorcycles. And I'm
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wondering, is it just because there's just not enough people?
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Have you looked at electric motorcycles yet?
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Oh.
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Well, there's e-bikes.
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Yeah, that's true as well.
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I suspect that first of all, motorcycles don't really have a dashboard of the kind of size
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that a car does. And second of all, the kind of people who buy motorcycles are, I mean,
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the stereotype is that they're much more kind of into...
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The way that is.
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Well, I mean, the stereotype is that they're more into autonomy and...
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But you mean like Ian?
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I don't know.
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I mean, I got a scooter.
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I'm hypothesizing, which means that I'm...
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No, no, I think you're right. I think you're right. I think there's a notion... This is
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one of the things I kind of grapple with. So I think that... Okay, I'm going to use
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my own stereotype here. I think car drivers tend to be like, they're kind of very functional,
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where motorcyclists are a lot more into the feel of the motorcycle. I'm not saying all
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car drivers, but there's a functionality to a car.
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I like to feel my car.
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I know, but would you ride through... Or would you go through some long journey in the snow,
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with freezing cold?
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No, because I've got an Italian car and it would just whiz off the road.
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Well, actually, I don't have a car because I scrapped it because the course...
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I would, but that's because where I live, that's for one side of the year.
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Yeah, that's true.
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Yeah, but you have a great...
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But obviously, but okay, so the other side of it is I do think that it's interesting
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that technically it's possible to do the same thing with a motorcycle or let's say even
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the e-bikes. And I guess this is where I'm going to go with Ryan is like, what's happened
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in that space?
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I would make the argument that there is a certain... What's the word I'm looking for?
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Ratio of price that occurs. The devices that they need to record this data are not big
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or thing, but they do cost a certain amount of money, as does the infrastructure to broadcast,
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return that data. Now, a car already has this very high price point. It probably already
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has some infrastructure to send data back and forth. So making a device to suck down
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your data and broadcast it back can piggyback on a lot of those things and becomes like
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the total cost of the car. This device is a fraction of a percent, say. For an e-scooter,
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you're looking at something that can cost a 10th as much, maybe even less than a 10th
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as much as a car, but you still have these components. So the price to benefit ratio.
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And also, frankly, who knows what that data is worth on a scooter versus a car.
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Oh, sorry. I have one thing to add here. The worst data misuse I've had with transport
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is actually on my bus app. So I have a little app that tells me when buses are due. And
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at the bottom, it had a little flashing thing saying, thank you for using this app. Can
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you just answer a few questions? And I thought it was genuinely just asking questions about
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the app users. You're supposed to obviously do via the way it's sold, or it's the Android
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store or whatever. And it was just a massive list of questions of a classic, we're just
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going to repull your data. I mean, I couldn't believe it. It was the sort of old fashioned
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name, birthday, and the usual, here, if you can enter all this, we'll give you a prize,
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which we've all seen before, we know exactly what they are. It was just a massive dragon
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face.
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David, David, David, name and shame. I'm sorry, but you know.
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Okay, I will give you the yeah, if you want to. I'll give it to you at the end. So you
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can write that obviously, because I'm not holding my phone. But I'm happy to shame them.
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Yeah. Bunch of wankers, for God's sake. And I think we're talking about cars. And this
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was a flippin bus app. God, buses are supposed to be friendly and local and stuff.
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I remember when city mapper was useful. Yeah, yeah.
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I remember when you could actually plan a journey on the TFL website. Now, you try to
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plan ever since they I think they made a deal with Google or somebody because ever since
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when you try to make when you try to plan a journey, it takes you on these routes where
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you take five buses, or you change four times when you know, and, and it's just the dumbest
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thing ever. And it's like one minute shorter than the trip you used to that takes that
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makes one change, but you can't get it to load. It's that was one of the things that
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made me angry every time I encountered it was how much the TFL planner and city mapper
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and everyone else desperately tried to convince you that the best way to get to Heathrow was
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to take the Heathrow Express with no acknowledgement of what an absolute pain in the ass it is to
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navigate Paddington, plus the fact that it costs you 50 pounds more. Oh, yeah. And at
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best it saves you five to 10 minutes of time. And it's actually more work from where I live,
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it doesn't save you any time at all. It would be caught because it takes it takes you all
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that time to get to Paddington by the time you got to Paddington, you'd be out actually
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out it's you'd be past South Ealing. Yeah, which is where I live. So for me, it's
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not that's not with the Elizabeth line. I give a little cheer every time I go.
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The Elizabeth line, the Elizabeth line does not make it any faster for us either.
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But at least at least it's less expensive. And it's finally using the tracks.
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Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, it's it's the Elizabeth line is a wonderful thing. It just doesn't
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help you if it doesn't help you if you live in Richmond. For me, the Elizabeth line is
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the best thing that's happened to me in years. That's just absolutely wonderful. But yeah,
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frankly, to get to the airport. I don't. Okay, after a long discussion about data,
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motorcycles, cars, I'd love to transfer. We have David, David's going to what the network
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state tell us David, what do you mean? Leads down the rabbit hole of the networks. Yeah,
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I have to say it's almost like the return of the network state because we keep seeing these
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pretend places where what used to be the crypto bros thing. Yeah, we'll we'll pretend we don't
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need government. So we'll go to this place and start our own economy stroke nation stroke country
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with our crypto. Now, of course, there kind of is no crypto popularity now, but it's still there.
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The whole latest part was always that they would like their idea of doing it was to like get a
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ship and have a nation on a ship without ever recognizing that that life at sea is the most
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regulated life in the world. Yeah, well, I think it is just it is just stuff. And basically,
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a couple of things have happened. I mean, I think this is more like a it's more like a hyper object
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because these bits of life that keep on appearing out of nowhere of the large number of people
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honestly think they can create a sort of nation out of rich people. It happens in different
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state. I think we've all read written about it talked about something different times.
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And this is just I think a current version that has appeared through into reality. I don't think
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it's anything new to say, but it's just a couple of things that are current. So this guy I've never
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heard of, but apparently is well known called biology. He's correct. He started in fact,
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it was just a few days back, started this new mysterious school for the network state.
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And basically, he said, give me some money. And I'll start this school, you'll be enrolled,
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but I won't tell you where it is. And he really did do this apparently. Yeah, it's last month.
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And I think it's going to be in this place called Forest City in Malaysia, which is another of these
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prosperity, ridiculous, we've talked about one in California before, all these places that have
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either slight changes in rules or allow rich people to do whatever they like. Or sometimes they have
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literally got a government fraud. And this forest city Malaysia is one of those places. So this is a
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school for people who are going to aspiring network participants or sort of death or despots, I don't
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know what exactly they are. So they go to this location, they learn about sort of always sort of
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projects and zones and alternative education systems, and God, no doubt, loads of stuff with
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crypto, and media institutions and so forth. But the thing that makes this a little bit more
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current apart from that, is if you've been following the coming storm from Gabriel Gatehouse,
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which is on BBC sounds, his current one, it's probably on Saturday, is also about the network
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state. And he's also following a slightly different group called Praxis. And they have a magazine
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started in New York, they're all the same crowd. These guys have also been on the boat, as Wendy
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was talking about the famous Laurie Penney did a famous article, Bleaker, I think, talking about
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this terrible boat, this crypto bros boat. And he's he's following this the same sort of people,
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the same sort of right wing nonsense as well. Also, I can't remember the name of the guy,
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and Prospera is a is one of the similar places, but this is on Honduras. I think they're trying
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to close it down. But unfortunately, I think they're having difficulty doing it. And I would
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suggest people definitely listen to the coming storm. It's the current version is called,
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I think the photocopier, because a lot of them were just photocopying pieces of their body in
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a party where they got rip-roaringly drunk. Forgetting that. The thing that makes it a
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little bit more spicy or interesting is right now because Trump, one of his many promises,
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and of course, people don't really listen to what he says, because he's spent such a lot of rubbish.
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But one of the things he mentioned was he's promising to introduce charter cities. That's
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it's a sort of side thing, but it's amazingly similar to what we've just been talking about.
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I mean, in Britain, we talk about free ports. I think it's a thing in the US, but it's a much
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bigger thing in the UK and in Europe. You say this is a free port, you give it different tax
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advantages to get people to sort of crack bits of Britain that they otherwise wouldn't go to. It's
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just classic leveling up style, as we would say, what Mr Johnson would say, tax incentive. But he's
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doing that. He's talking about charter cities. He's possibly opening up a much bigger start in
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the networked state. So just a warning to everybody, if you get Trump, you might also get
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mad people with lots of money taking over bits of the country. I'm not aware of any charter cities
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in the states in the term that you're talking about. I mean, states compete with each other,
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I guess, to attract businesses, certainly. Have a look at the article. Yeah, it's a fact. Sorry,
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I think I have to thank Ian for that, because I don't think I put that article. I put the link in.
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Thanks, Ian, if you put that link in. Yeah, I put the link in. I started looking at all the stuff.
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No, you're absolutely right. I don't think one has officially existed. There hasn't been any
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term. There hasn't been any legal framework. It's exactly as you say, states can to some degree,
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make up the rule here. So this is something that Trump wants to introduce a little bit more
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formality. I think we need to disabuse ourselves with the notion that Trump wants this. Yeah.
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And recall that what is probably going on is that someone who donated a significant chunk of money
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asked him to make this a talking point and he parroted it with absolutely no idea what's going
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on. I doubt the man is remembering what he had for breakfast. No, no, absolutely. This isn't some
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special MAGA thing. This is exactly what you've just said. It's like he's parroting something.
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That being said. This is all about money. It is, but there's this thing that I've started to
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notice with a lot of these structures. So if you remember, DAOs, which was a structure that went
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along with NFTs and Web 3s. And there was this thing where it was this don't look behind the
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curtain thing where they were trying to persuade you. And when I see things like this, when they
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talk about network state, when they talk about virtual network cities or on that. And somewhere
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in there, if I bet if I digged in deep enough, I would find lines about, and we can just set this
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all up with smart contracts. And that's the hook. See what they want is they want literally any way
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that they can get to get any kind of function of society dependent on blockchain technologies,
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including smart contracts. And this is the thing behind the curtain that they care about.
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But I think that's a means to an end. What they really want is to get rid of government.
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I think that's a very happy side effect. But for right now, getting more people onto that platform,
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getting more people using those platforms, making it a requirement to be able to use those platforms
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to exist is a thing that they will benefit from. Well, yeah. But I'm a little older than you are.
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Back in the early 90s, when they were first democratizing crypto via PGP,
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they were talking then about bypassing governments and having their own financial system.
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I was around for the early 90s, and I do remember that.
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Yeah, OK.
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OK, stop the ages.
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But the point is they didn't have blockchain and stuff, that stuff then. That's come along later
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to as maybe as an enabler, but it's not, you know, I don't think that may be the purpose now. But
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I still think that the whole, the real thing is they just don't like governments and they
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don't like paying taxes and, you know. I think there's a codependency. I think they don't like
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government and they want freedom with any form of trustless system. And I think they go backwards
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and forwards in parallel. I feel like they're strange bedfellows in much the same way that
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anti-abortionists and Republicans, they're like, we don't actually care this much about it, but
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we'll give it to you in order to keep in order to keep you keeping us in power. Right. Yeah,
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yeah. It's like it's like a Venn diagram with overlapping circles. OK.
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I, I, so I just got to say, so when I started looking down this rabbit hole, as I said before,
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it was quite enlightening. I'll put it in those words. I do also, I do think a lot of what you're
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saying, but all of you are saying is correct. I think that this is, this is people who just want to
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remove themselves from paying taxes, not overthrowing governments, but just having complete
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freedom so they can earn whatever they want. And they just want to have no taxes and they'll do
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almost anything to go through that. But I also find it interesting. So I just posted the
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link afterwards about the companies that I would say shouldn't be better, but like MasterCard,
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I've just started supporting crypto and I'm making a big kind of who-ha about it. So I feel like
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they're four years out of date, isn't it? It does. Why are they doing that now? It does. It doesn't
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listen to me. It's like Tony Blair proposing ID cards. It just feels like, it's not in the
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current century. Out of time. What was the other thing I was going to say? There's two things that
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I see happening here. The first one is like, one, watching crypto die the death of a more effective
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scam, a more effective con, which is the AI thing. Right now, all the hardware that everyone was
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trying to buy up to use to crypto, all the AI companies are buying. The market's competing
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them out of it, which is kind of fun to watch. But there's also this odd thing about how, oh crap,
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I'm just, it just ran screaming out of my brain. Nevermind. I'll just leave the point on that one.
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Maybe it'll come back to me. About watching this happen much too late and having them come in now
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when it's kind of doesn't make much of a difference. Yeah. I think the only thing I want to end this on
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is a little bit of philosophy. Because a lot of this is, I said at the beginning, it's a bit of a
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hyper-object. Because we talk about a lot of subjects that are the same thing. It's this,
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but it's another angle of it, or it's another bit of rich people doing weird things. And it's sort
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of all part of accelerationism. And if you haven't read it, you should. Nick Lanz, he did it some
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time ago, 20 years ago. It's called Meltdown. If you just look up Nick Lanz, Meltdown, he just
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writes this, he's obviously on drugs or something, but he writes this essay about the future. And
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it's embarrassingly accurate. I mean, it sort of, it looks a bit, feels like a William Gibson novel.
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But it's worth, it's probably just about, it's about two sides of A4. But it's worth looking at,
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because that was the start of accelerationism, which we are, these people are definitely on.
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This is to destroy capitalism by actually going too far and going so far that capitalism breaks
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in on itself, which is a bit odd, but it's actually where they're going. Because the thing that I
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remembered was to link back to last month's episode where we talked about the arrest of the fellow who
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runs Telegram. And this is the thing that's kind of like, you want to exist outside of these
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cultures, but if you're interacting and harming them, they, you know, you're not existing outside
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of them, you're existing in interaction with them. And the idea that you get to hold yourself above
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it. I mean, there's a bit of this where it's like, somebody with a whole lot of money had,
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thinks they had this brilliant idea that, you know, if we put ourselves in a boat, they can't eat us.
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Two things. One is that Pavel, the Dorov, after being arrested, actually did change Telegram's
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policies. And now they've started giving data to law enforcement like they were supposed to.
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And the second thing is that in the collection, All Tomorrow's Futures, which is put out by
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Cyber Salon Press and combines like expert commentary and sort of neuroscience,
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fiction provocations, there's a story by DJ Coburn, which had about a ship full of billionaires.
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Yeah, so which might entertain you if you run across it. The problem is that billionaires are
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not going to share a ship. They're just not. Each one, each one wants his own bunker, you know.
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It's interesting you said that him, which is, I'm not, I think is probably very true.
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It's not entirely true, but it's mostly true. Yeah, it's mostly true. And I'm not, you know,
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I don't know if there's such a thing as a good billionaire, but the ones that are close to
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Richard Branson's not a good billionaire. Richard Branson, I please. I, I,
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I kid. Sorry. You could try to make it, you could make a case for George Soros too,
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but the process by which he became a billionaire wasn't necessarily a good thing. No, it definitely
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For our last story, we have the one that you probably heard of and it may have changed again
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and shifted and changed since we started. So, I think it's a good one.
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It's shifted and changed since we recorded this.
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WordPress or automatic are throwing dirt at WP Engine and WP Engine are
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shouted back at WordPress. So, this is one of my stories and
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I'll be upfront and say that I knew one of the founders of WordPress Engine and I have got a very
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privileged account with WordPress Engine. However, I also do also know Matt Wallenway,
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who is the founder of automatic. I used to know him, but he's probably changed quite a lot.
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But there's back and forth. So, what automatic are basically saying or automatic who own,
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sorry, they don't own WordPress because WordPress is an open source piece of software,
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but they kind of steward it. They are saying that WordPress Engine, who is a big,
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well, competition for WordPress.com, they are using the WordPress code and they are
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selling it to all their clients and they're not contributing anything back to WordPress
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open source or like very little. And so, they're not contributing anything back to
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WordPress. And so, Matt Wallenway, who is from automatic, who is the founder of WordPress,
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has criticized them publicly. It's got very complicated and very difficult, but it sounds
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like what's also happened is that Matt Wallenway also kind of like said, you need to do this,
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otherwise we're going to stop giving you updates, which I think that's kind of the latest
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stage of where it's at. So, there will be bad citizens in a world where they're breaking the
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law. They're just being bad netizens. Yes. And so, automatic have gone, well, you need to be better
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citizens and if you're not doing it, we're going to start withdrawing updates to you,
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which I don't know how they would do that because it's open source, because it's software.
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By definition, you can't do that. Yeah, that's the thing that I don't understand.
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And then, from what I understood now, it feels like a super opera. It's annoying because it
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does literally feel like a super opera. In fact, WordPress engine has also shown that,
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also WordPress makes it easier to have kind of put this and said, look, you need to do this,
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otherwise we're going to do this. And so, WordPress engine said, no, no, this is like a,
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what's the word, like a ransom, but like a, I can't remember the word. Yeah, it's not,
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automaton. Yeah, I think it's probably closer. And it's unfair. And so, they've kind of
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outlined the whole lot of what's happened. And then, obviously, WordPress engine of,
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of WordPress engine, sorry, WordPress of automatic have also kind of gone, no, no, this is
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it from our side. And it looks like it might end up going to some kind of, I know the
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lawyers are being called in now. And part of me is like, this is, yeah, as we were, sorry,
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we were just saying before that WordPress powers a lot of the blogs and other services on the
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internet. And this feels like a real waste of time. However, I know that Matt would say,
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Matt Mullenway would say, hey, this is a big deal, because you've got a VC funded,
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yeah, which is what WordPress engine is kind of like just leeching on this, this open source
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system software, which to be fair, a lot of other companies do anyway. So, I just wanted to get the
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feelings about what everyone else thought. And I'm sure by the time we release this, it would have
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blown up and become something else. So, I'm very conscious of that. But thoughts for everyone else,
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that makes sense at all. Well, first of all, WordPress is written on PHP, which is already
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worrying. There are actually 30 million websites use PHP. I have to be careful here, because I did
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an article on Laravel, which is the current cool way of developing PHP. But it's just a Facebook
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is on a customized version of PHP. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's how they started. In fact,
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they're probably pushing the continuous. In fact, it's probably then have continually pushed. So,
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Laravel is actually almost as popular, I think, is as popular as RubinRails. PHP just never dies.
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I mean, it's a bit of a concern. And WordPress, PHP, of course, but what can you do? Yeah, a lot
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of things. I wasn't aware of that relationship between automatic own WordPress and then WP Engine.
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Oh, yeah. It's a big deal. So, sorry, go on. What is the difference between WordPress and
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WordPress Engine? So, okay, so WordPress Engine is a it's always like a hosting company, which will
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provide you just WordPress. But they have also added a bunch of elements to get the maximum out
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of WordPress. So, you can almost do anything with it. The other thing I was gonna say is...
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Are they fault the code? Or is it plugins? Yes. Okay, so from my point of view,
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I'm not going to do not hold me because I don't want to get sued. I think they fault the code a
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little bit. Okay, this is what Matt Monway is kind of complaining about. Because when I use WordPress
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Engine, there's a bunch of like integrations, which are very WordPress heavy, WordPress Engine
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heavy. But I don't think they're plugins. They are things that only WordPress Engine could do.
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I don't think that the only ones that are doing this, but it definitely feels like there's
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sort of disadvantages. I know one of the things that they did say was that they were charging
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for backups, where from WordPress, you can do backups for free, because it's just WordPress
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open source. You can just press a button and it will create a kind of archive. And so WordPress
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Engine were charging. I haven't seen that because I've been able to download mine, no problem.
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But I think there's stuff like that. So is it possible that what they're doing in
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they've become a large enough consumer of it, and they've kind of addressed this point. So they're
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taking it for free, but then they're doing something with it, like a feature that might
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00:39:14,120 --> 00:39:19,400
be something that you could use possibly even WordPress could be making money from for charging
401
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for backups. But they're basically, so it's like, they make it for free, but now they're making
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money off of them. And they're like, we're still kind of okay with this, if you would just be
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giving back something to the source, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds about right.
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00:39:36,440 --> 00:39:42,520
But I also think I forgot to mention at the very end is that, Matt Munn way, I think the way that
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00:39:42,520 --> 00:39:51,800
it got about is very painful because he kind of a lot of the employees of WordPress, of automatic,
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00:39:51,800 --> 00:39:59,240
sorry, have been given kind of like, what's like an ultimatum, do you follow what we're doing or
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00:39:59,240 --> 00:40:07,240
not? And I was at 120 plus employees with bright one, I think this is all wrong. So we're leaving.
408
00:40:07,240 --> 00:40:11,800
Which is, it's just kind of blown up into this kind of, I don't know what on earth is going on.
409
00:40:12,200 --> 00:40:17,880
But also the thing for me is that it's just, I don't have to, I mean, maybe this is the whole
410
00:40:17,880 --> 00:40:20,840
thing is that maybe capitalism just breaks everything.
411
00:40:23,080 --> 00:40:27,640
They have this similar problem with forking versus plugins with Visual Studio, Visual Studio,
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Visual Studio code, which is the sort of one that works on any language, but it's not,
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one that works on any languages and it's pretty flexible. So there's a very popular AI editor
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00:40:42,680 --> 00:40:49,480
called cursor and cursor should be using plugins with Visual Studio, but they did this thing where
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they say, rock, I know we're going to fork Visual Studio. And since that point, Visual Studio,
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you should be able to build, do full build chain on Visual Studio, but they now don't work on
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00:41:03,400 --> 00:41:09,160
cursor because they say, sorry, but this is not, they'd look in the binder and go, this is
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Visual Studio. So we're not going to allow you to build, which is kind of screwed them up.
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I think this is going to be a bit of a problem with if you do fork and you're forking from
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a project that is open source. And I really use very heavy scare quotes, air quotes there,
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because companies are beginning to be very flexible on, yeah, we said we're open source,
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00:41:29,960 --> 00:41:36,280
but we don't like you benefiting from it. Use the plugins or fuck off, which is beginning to be
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00:41:37,080 --> 00:41:43,880
a more common problem now. Again, it's because of, I mean, obviously we've seen quite a lot of this.
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Oh yeah, we said we're open source, but we're not really open source. We're getting this Facebook
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and they just release this llama stack and they use the term open source because they know
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developers like it. They know the community likes it. Then when you look at the licenses,
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00:41:58,440 --> 00:42:04,200
yeah, it's not really open source. It's just open sourcing a bit or rather not opening source a bit
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00:42:04,200 --> 00:42:14,280
that actually is extremely important. Yeah, it feels like maybe this is kind of a,
429
00:42:14,920 --> 00:42:21,960
something that's, I've seen it elsewhere in slightly different examples of this, but
430
00:42:21,960 --> 00:42:30,360
yeah, it just feels like it's got so out of hand. I don't understand how it got,
431
00:42:30,360 --> 00:42:38,840
it just grew out of hand so quickly. Probably there were things going on inside that you
432
00:42:38,840 --> 00:42:44,360
couldn't see until they burst out into light. That's true. That's a good point. Yeah.
433
00:42:44,360 --> 00:42:51,000
So yeah, that's, I'm sure, yeah, in two weeks time or a week's time or even in a day's time,
434
00:42:51,480 --> 00:42:57,080
something would have happened and it'll make this or either this whole conversation redundant.
435
00:42:57,080 --> 00:43:04,760
And it annoys me because it's just, it's like soap opera. And I know I like sitting down
436
00:43:04,760 --> 00:43:09,720
and having some popcorns or something soap opera, but it is quite an important
437
00:43:09,720 --> 00:43:17,720
piece of software because it does power a lot of the internet. And as I said, I've got, I'm on,
438
00:43:19,400 --> 00:43:31,480
I am a WP Engine customer. I do pay them when I go over the allowance, but also I'm also a fan
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00:43:31,480 --> 00:43:40,760
of WordPress. I don't know. I don't know what to say. Yeah. I remember when Oracle bought Java,
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00:43:40,760 --> 00:43:48,200
that produced a whole load of these fork problems. Two or three companies just said, well, we're
441
00:43:48,200 --> 00:43:51,720
just going to change stuff because we don't want anything to do with Oracle, although we still
442
00:43:51,720 --> 00:43:55,480
want to use Java stuff. Yeah. It's just not a new thing, unfortunately.
443
00:43:55,480 --> 00:44:05,560
So, and it is the end of the show. And at the end of the show, we have shout outs on AOBs.
444
00:44:05,560 --> 00:44:13,080
So I'm going to start the AOBs. So it is UK Black History Month in October. There's a number of
445
00:44:13,080 --> 00:44:22,040
things happening. I'm actually running Afrofuturism workshop with a couple, well, with the BBC.
446
00:44:22,040 --> 00:44:28,200
Oh, where's that? Unfortunately, it's internal. So you will be able to see it, but we will try and
447
00:44:28,200 --> 00:44:36,440
do as much as we can externally. The next one is, if you haven't seen Corey's De-Shitify or Die
448
00:44:36,440 --> 00:44:43,320
from Defcon24, the video is now up. It is definitely worth watching. Although there was,
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00:44:44,280 --> 00:44:50,680
it definitely got pushed. It was good, but then it didn't really get the full, it was a bit of a
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00:44:50,680 --> 00:44:57,480
time for whatever reason, technical problems, which is a shame, but it's well worth the messages
451
00:44:57,480 --> 00:45:07,320
still there. And finally, for me, I watched this conversation with Simon Sinek, I'm not sure how
452
00:45:07,320 --> 00:45:13,320
to say his name, and Trevor and Noah in conversation. And I was quite touched by it.
453
00:45:13,320 --> 00:45:22,360
And I'm starting to consider if I should start saying to my friends, I love them. So I don't know
454
00:45:22,360 --> 00:45:26,760
how that, me and my girlfriend had a good conversation about that. So I definitely,
455
00:45:26,760 --> 00:45:35,320
it was well worth watching. And I pass on to Brian. Yeah, so I had two very interesting
456
00:45:35,960 --> 00:45:41,720
copyright things come up. The short story of this is Flickr sent me an astigram saying,
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00:45:41,720 --> 00:45:44,760
you have to go look at your photos. I looked at the photos reminded me about the early days of
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00:45:44,760 --> 00:45:48,440
the copy fighters. And that's what led me to think about two copyright issues, very interesting
459
00:45:48,440 --> 00:45:55,400
contrast. The first one is, I'll start with the more recent one, which is Infinity Train,
460
00:45:57,000 --> 00:46:03,400
which is a not necessarily for kids, actually, probably not for kids, animated show that has
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00:46:03,400 --> 00:46:08,840
been going through a really interesting struggle. This was made, this was a critically acclaimed
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00:46:08,840 --> 00:46:13,960
show. The writing on it is amazing and interesting and fascinating. It's really well done. And it has
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00:46:13,960 --> 00:46:20,280
now become a show that you cannot watch in its entirety, unless you pirate it, there are no
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00:46:20,280 --> 00:46:26,280
legal means to acquire this show. And this show was made three or four years ago, it is not an old
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00:46:26,280 --> 00:46:35,000
show. And the creators are literally saying, we want you to see this art, and there's no legal
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00:46:35,000 --> 00:46:42,600
way for you to see this art put two and two together. You can watch the first two seasons
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00:46:42,600 --> 00:46:46,840
on something, the third season is available in a different place that you have to buy the whole
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00:46:46,840 --> 00:46:53,400
season. And then only like four of the episodes of the fourth season are available piecemeal
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00:46:53,400 --> 00:46:59,800
commercially in places. I keep saying that the entertainment industry is doing everything they
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00:46:59,800 --> 00:47:04,920
possibly can to promote piracy. I have no idea why they're doing this, but they are. I mean,
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00:47:04,920 --> 00:47:13,160
between deleting shows and deleting websites full of video and they deleted all these music news
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00:47:13,160 --> 00:47:21,160
video clips from MTV and Comedy Central's history of something else, all this stuff, you know,
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00:47:21,160 --> 00:47:29,400
honestly, the only system that works currently is piracy. You can go to one place, find everything
474
00:47:29,400 --> 00:47:32,760
and there it is. But before we go down that rabbit hole, because it's supposed to be shut
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00:47:32,760 --> 00:47:39,160
out, I'll do the second part of this, which is that we are now seeing works that are being derivative
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00:47:39,160 --> 00:47:44,360
works being made by things that are just freshly coming out of copyright. And one of them is,
477
00:47:44,360 --> 00:47:53,160
and I'm not making this up people, it's called the poona verse. So, and what brought it to you
478
00:47:53,160 --> 00:47:57,000
hope more than Winnie the Pooh, see about two years ago, Winnie the Pooh was one of the was
479
00:47:57,000 --> 00:48:01,320
one of the first things that came into public domain. Specifically, you can't do the Winnie
480
00:48:01,320 --> 00:48:04,520
the Pooh with a shirt on because that's still Disney's but the original Winnie the Pooh is now
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00:48:04,520 --> 00:48:09,720
public domain. And so people made Winnie the Pooh, Blood and Honey, which is an, just a horror
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00:48:09,720 --> 00:48:14,760
slasher flick based on Winnie the Pooh and Winnie the Pooh is the slasher in it. Okay, great,
483
00:48:14,760 --> 00:48:18,600
whatever. Now they've made a sequel. But then there's a third one that came out and there's
484
00:48:18,600 --> 00:48:24,600
something very UK specific about it that made my brain go wait, can they do that? Because they've
485
00:48:24,600 --> 00:48:31,320
made a movie called Peter Pan Neverland Nightmare. Now the filmmakers are British, and Peter Pan is
486
00:48:31,320 --> 00:48:39,000
in the public domain everywhere except in the UK. Because the UK, it's Great Ormond Street,
487
00:48:39,000 --> 00:48:44,840
Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, the UK, Peter Pan is perpetually held by Ormond Street
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00:48:44,840 --> 00:48:50,600
Children's Hospital and God help anyone who wants to try to fight that battle, the optics on that
489
00:48:50,600 --> 00:48:57,640
you are never going to win. Hi, I would like to wrest control of this thing that makes that that
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00:48:57,640 --> 00:49:03,240
helps children at Children's Hospital, so I can take this beloved childhood character and turn
491
00:49:03,240 --> 00:49:09,000
him into a slasher and yet they've done it. And more importantly, there, and I just found this out,
492
00:49:09,000 --> 00:49:13,320
this is my little rabbit hole. They're making a shared universe of all of these characters.
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And that's what's called the Pooh diverse has been unofficially titled. They're also calling it like
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00:49:16,840 --> 00:49:20,920
the children's night, the cinematic nightmare universe or something. But it's called they're
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00:49:20,920 --> 00:49:28,520
calling it the Pooh diverse. And I'm just like, I'm not saying that this is the best case for public
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00:49:28,520 --> 00:49:35,560
domain works. But it's a fascinating one. By the way, if you want to great Winnie the Pooh thread,
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00:49:35,560 --> 00:49:40,200
unfortunately, I think it's only on X, there's Winnie the Pooh, but as a film noir,
498
00:49:40,200 --> 00:49:45,320
Pooh, which is very good, where he's a detective, and he's looking at the drugs are in fat honey,
499
00:49:45,320 --> 00:49:49,320
and he's looking for some murderers who ends up being taken. So it's brilliant, absolutely
500
00:49:49,320 --> 00:49:54,040
brilliant. There's some there's some fascinating, there's some fascinating twists on that. Like,
501
00:49:54,040 --> 00:49:58,680
I mean, they had the happy time nightmare, the happy time murders or something,
502
00:49:59,400 --> 00:50:04,760
which was a very odd, weird adult puppet. It's like it's like, think who framed Roger Rabbit,
503
00:50:04,760 --> 00:50:14,200
but actually serious and much more adult. On that note, to Wendy. Well, it's sort of another
504
00:50:14,200 --> 00:50:21,960
copyright issue. Glynn Moody at Tech Dirt has called my attention to the fact that you know,
505
00:50:21,960 --> 00:50:27,320
Taylor Swift was rerecord has been rerecording all her early albums in order to have control of them
506
00:50:27,320 --> 00:50:33,320
herself rather than the record company. And the reason she can do that is there was a standard
507
00:50:33,320 --> 00:50:41,080
clause in her contract that said that after two she couldn't she after two years, she could do that.
508
00:50:41,080 --> 00:50:46,120
And because she is doing it, and because she is being successful doing it, record companies
509
00:50:46,120 --> 00:50:52,120
now are have raised the number of years you have to wait to do that sort of thing to 20 or 30 in
510
00:50:52,120 --> 00:50:59,560
new contracts. So, you know, it's it's sort of typical story of giving away a right because they
511
00:50:59,560 --> 00:51:03,080
don't think it's worth anything, discovering it's worth something and grabbing it back.
512
00:51:03,080 --> 00:51:08,600
And we've we've seen plenty of that before in the past, but it's just, it's sort of nobody has
513
00:51:08,600 --> 00:51:13,560
really noticed that this is what's going on, but Glenn Moody did. I don't know where to get off on
514
00:51:13,560 --> 00:51:25,000
this. I don't know. Good spot. David. This is a short one. And this is actually I should have done
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00:51:25,000 --> 00:51:30,040
this last month, but I didn't. I didn't make it last month. I did Wuthering Bites at the Insorby
516
00:51:30,040 --> 00:51:36,200
too. So good talk. And you were you were excellent. Thank you. Thank you. I talked about the game I
517
00:51:36,200 --> 00:51:44,280
wrote the rewrite. Full 13 deep state. Yeah, it was fun. And it was I've been outside London for
518
00:51:44,280 --> 00:51:54,120
some time all the way out to what the place now at the bridge. Yeah, which is cool. Now that's it.
519
00:51:54,120 --> 00:52:06,040
That's all I wanted to say. Hey, thank you very much, everyone. So on that note, it is time to
520
00:52:06,040 --> 00:52:12,840
close this show up. This is tech grumps. And if you would like to be on tech grumps, then reach
521
00:52:12,840 --> 00:52:19,720
out to us by using the hashtag tech grumps on whatever platform you're using. We should be able
522
00:52:19,720 --> 00:52:28,920
to like it. No, no, you know what, someone will find it. I would anyway, probably the wrong
523
00:52:28,920 --> 00:52:40,280
people. Hopefully not the wrong people. We also do filter so that you know, if you put it is,
524
00:52:40,280 --> 00:52:47,080
you should just reach out to us on tech grumps, and the hashtag. And I would like to thank all my
525
00:52:47,080 --> 00:52:58,360
guests. So let's say thank you to Wendy and you want to say goodbye. Bye. And Brian. Bye. And David.
526
00:52:58,360 --> 00:53:16,280
Bye. And it's bye from me. Thank you very much.
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:18,200
Welcome to Tech Grumps Tech Grumps 3.20 and today on Sunday the 6th of October we have
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00:00:18,200 --> 00:00:27,520
myself being a forester. I am very quiet because I am somewhere in Europe, hiding away. And
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00:00:27,520 --> 00:00:36,280
then we also have Ryan Alexander. Hello, I am still in London. And we have David Eastman.
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00:00:36,280 --> 00:00:45,040
Hello, I am also still in London. And also I am still on X as David J Eastman won. And
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00:00:45,040 --> 00:00:51,840
also Blue Sky as Eastman which is easier. I am not even going to start by X. Anyway,
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we also have Wendy Grossman. Hi, I write about computer freedom and privacy and you will
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find me on Mastodon. I do still have an X account but I am deeply ashamed of it. Too
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fair. I have one and I never log in. I am just spite camping it so no one else ever
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takes my username and does stupid things with it. Yeah, I kind of keep it just barely alive.
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You do realise that Elon Musk spent this weekend jumping up and down behind Donald Trump. He
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is wearing a Macacat. Wow. Okay, so our first story is one of mine. And I find the surveillance
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of cars to be insane. And just to put my hands up on the table. I do not own a car. I do
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own a motorbike. But this hasn't come from motorbikes yet as far as I can tell. And I
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think it is just more difficult even doing so. But ultimately, the car's data and what
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it has been used for, how it has been taken from the owner, just to me seems so insane.
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I am aware that the likes of Tesla and others, electric cars, are doing this. But there is
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a video which I will link to that just indicates to me that this has gone way too far. And
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also I have to give credit to Mozilla for their privacy not guaranteed report last year which
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also outlined this. And actually the video that I am pointing to will point to a lot
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of the stuff there. But I am wondering from the rest of the tech grumps if they have a
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car and what their thoughts are on this absolute data grab.
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I do not have a car these days. I sold my last car about ten years ago. And I consider
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it fortunate that I don't have to own a car. Because it is not just the spying. It is also
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the car design has gone through a sort of bad patch where everybody was putting in touch
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screens instead of things that you, buttons and things that you can feel without looking
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at them. But yeah, I mean, the surveillance, it is not just cars. I mean, basically, as
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we add software to all sorts of physical objects, manufacturers see it as an opportunity to
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have advertising. And they see it as an opportunity for data collection. Because even if they
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do not want to run advertising themselves, they can sell the data or they can sell insights
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from the data. So I think we are going to see more and more
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of this in the obvious example with televisions, which collect a mass, smart television, so-called
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smart television, collect massive amounts of data on what you watch and when and how
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often. And increasingly, there is also advertising being built into the TV's own operating system
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so that you can't get away from it at all. And the only answer really is to disconnect
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your smart television from the internet and run a separate streaming device, which I don't
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mind doing, but it kind of defeats the purpose. Yeah, exactly.
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I saw an interesting article on this subject someone was posting about. They like collect
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this. This is an interesting thing of the TV age. They have had to construct a small
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device to take with them to charity shops and pawn shops that will broadcast an analog
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TV signal that a TV that they want to buy in there can pick up to test it because there's
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no longer analog TV signals ambiently available for them to use for that purpose. That's how
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far we've come. That's kind of a separate issue though. I
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mean, it's not digital television per se that's the problem. No.
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In terms of advertising and data collection. The thing that made me think of it is that
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I too came from car culture. I moved over here from the US about 20 years ago and I
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was a car owner and lived in a city that was obligate car ownership, which is most of the
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cities in the US. There are very few cities in the US that are not obligate car ownership.
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I have been to Minneapolis. I know what you're talking about.
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Because of this, my snapshot on cars was something very infrequent. I lived in London, didn't
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need them. But when I would return to the cities, especially for a long time, I would
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either borrow a car or for a certain chunk of time, I actually went so long without driving
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a car and getting rides from the people that I actually kind of got a little bit afraid
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that I didn't have the chops anymore. I maintained my driver's license still do in the US. But
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what this meant is that for me, the last car I owned had nothing really digital about it
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except for maybe the radio. It was an old Saturn, remember that brand. And the way they
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jumped ahead when I finally rented a car after 10, 15 years of living here just because I
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needed to. All of a sudden I was like, wait, I can plug my phone into this? What the hell?
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It's showing me my phone screen on the TV and just the leaps and jumps that it made.
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And now coming back and riding with friends who have EV cars and seeing all the stuff
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in there. And I really feel you on the where did all the buttons and dials go, Wendy? Like
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I absolutely had that moment. I was like, is this even a car anymore? Because I remember
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the whole physicality, the challenge of driving. I mean, I learned on a manual shift that's
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going to mark me as a dinosaur.
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I've only ever owned manual shift cars.
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I have just one automatic and everything else is manual.
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And the fact that this transition has happened in our lifetime.
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Well, some of it's going away again because they have actually recognized the ergonomic
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disaster that is touch screens for drivers. And so they are beginning to bring back buttons
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and stuff like that, which is a good thing.
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To your thing about the data, I think all of these things are just they put in, at this
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point, they put in digital stuff just because of the new avenues of monetization that it
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opens up.
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Well, yeah, there's actually Intel, I think, is partnering with, I forget who, to make
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software defined vehicles. And what that means, sadly, is not that you can run a bunch of
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software and turn a car into a truck, which is what I would like that to mean, but rather
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that it enables things like you can subscribe to heated seats and you can subscribe to different
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future.
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But that's because they have already been built into the car. So what is, you know,
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it's maddening the notion that you have to subscribe to something like that.
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Yeah, but their logic is that cars last longer because they build the better now. And they're
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like, oh, we can't sell people on new cars every minute. So of course they want, as you
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just said, they need a new monetary angle. So it's literally like it's literally like
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the TV where, oh, I've just paid for Netflix. I know I need another sub channel on the Netflix.
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It's a money. It's just for money. So it's just like you can turn on the seats.
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David, I hope you're not, you're not supporting this.
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No, no, I just say that is their logic.
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Okay, just want to clarify.
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But also there's another thing is, and I think that also comes on this whole thing where
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they're giving away information. I mean, they need the care or fully understand the problem
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for that. I mean, they might do now, but it was just for monetization. It wasn't because
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they care about data. It's just like the people that they can get money from.
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That's insurance company. Insurance companies would like to game the system so that they
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only ever have customers who will never make a claim, which defeats the purpose of having
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insurance in the first place.
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Yeah.
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And as much as I don't want to break the trend that we've started so far by bringing this
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up, but data itself, the value of it has changed in the last year or two. It used to be they
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wanted customer tracking and customer dynamics, but now there's a market for just anything
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as long as it wasn't made by AI so we can feed it to an AI.
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Fresh data. What do we call this?
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That's true.
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Real data. I don't even know what to call it.
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There's a lot of places that are basically just like you can use our stuff, even AI,
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as long as you let us use the interactions that you give this machine to train it up.
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Previously, it's like the junk bonds of data.
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Yeah.
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It wasn't worth anything before, but now there's companies out there that are like, we don't
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care what form it comes in just as long as it didn't come from one of these. Give it
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to us.
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Yeah. Is it real? Give me real.
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If you want terabytes, what's next after terabytes? Bigger than terabytes. Petabytes of data.
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Petabytes.
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Petabytes is the one we use. Yes. They might be something you can use.
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We will buy it from your wholesale.
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Yes.
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We can remember it for you wholesale.
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We can remember it for you wholesale. Yeah.
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So my other thing that I was going to say, maybe an obvious answer, but I'm wondering,
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I mean, none of this stuff, as far as I can see, has happened to motorcycles. And I'm
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wondering, is it just because there's just not enough people?
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Have you looked at electric motorcycles yet?
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Oh.
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Well, there's e-bikes.
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Yeah, that's true as well.
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I suspect that first of all, motorcycles don't really have a dashboard of the kind of size
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that a car does. And second of all, the kind of people who buy motorcycles are, I mean,
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the stereotype is that they're much more kind of into...
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The way that is.
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Well, I mean, the stereotype is that they're more into autonomy and...
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But you mean like Ian?
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I don't know.
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I mean, I got a scooter.
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I'm hypothesizing, which means that I'm...
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No, no, I think you're right. I think you're right. I think there's a notion... This is
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one of the things I kind of grapple with. So I think that... Okay, I'm going to use
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my own stereotype here. I think car drivers tend to be like, they're kind of very functional,
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where motorcyclists are a lot more into the feel of the motorcycle. I'm not saying all
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car drivers, but there's a functionality to a car.
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I like to feel my car.
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I know, but would you ride through... Or would you go through some long journey in the snow,
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with freezing cold?
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No, because I've got an Italian car and it would just whiz off the road.
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Well, actually, I don't have a car because I scrapped it because the course...
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I would, but that's because where I live, that's for one side of the year.
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Yeah, that's true.
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Yeah, but you have a great...
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But obviously, but okay, so the other side of it is I do think that it's interesting
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that technically it's possible to do the same thing with a motorcycle or let's say even
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the e-bikes. And I guess this is where I'm going to go with Ryan is like, what's happened
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in that space?
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I would make the argument that there is a certain... What's the word I'm looking for?
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Ratio of price that occurs. The devices that they need to record this data are not big
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or thing, but they do cost a certain amount of money, as does the infrastructure to broadcast,
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return that data. Now, a car already has this very high price point. It probably already
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has some infrastructure to send data back and forth. So making a device to suck down
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your data and broadcast it back can piggyback on a lot of those things and becomes like
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the total cost of the car. This device is a fraction of a percent, say. For an e-scooter,
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you're looking at something that can cost a 10th as much, maybe even less than a 10th
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as much as a car, but you still have these components. So the price to benefit ratio.
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And also, frankly, who knows what that data is worth on a scooter versus a car.
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Oh, sorry. I have one thing to add here. The worst data misuse I've had with transport
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is actually on my bus app. So I have a little app that tells me when buses are due. And
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at the bottom, it had a little flashing thing saying, thank you for using this app. Can
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you just answer a few questions? And I thought it was genuinely just asking questions about
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the app users. You're supposed to obviously do via the way it's sold, or it's the Android
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store or whatever. And it was just a massive list of questions of a classic, we're just
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going to repull your data. I mean, I couldn't believe it. It was the sort of old fashioned
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name, birthday, and the usual, here, if you can enter all this, we'll give you a prize,
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which we've all seen before, we know exactly what they are. It was just a massive dragon
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face.
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David, David, David, name and shame. I'm sorry, but you know.
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Okay, I will give you the yeah, if you want to. I'll give it to you at the end. So you
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can write that obviously, because I'm not holding my phone. But I'm happy to shame them.
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Yeah. Bunch of wankers, for God's sake. And I think we're talking about cars. And this
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was a flippin bus app. God, buses are supposed to be friendly and local and stuff.
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I remember when city mapper was useful. Yeah, yeah.
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I remember when you could actually plan a journey on the TFL website. Now, you try to
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plan ever since they I think they made a deal with Google or somebody because ever since
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when you try to make when you try to plan a journey, it takes you on these routes where
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you take five buses, or you change four times when you know, and, and it's just the dumbest
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thing ever. And it's like one minute shorter than the trip you used to that takes that
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makes one change, but you can't get it to load. It's that was one of the things that
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made me angry every time I encountered it was how much the TFL planner and city mapper
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and everyone else desperately tried to convince you that the best way to get to Heathrow was
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to take the Heathrow Express with no acknowledgement of what an absolute pain in the ass it is to
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navigate Paddington, plus the fact that it costs you 50 pounds more. Oh, yeah. And at
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best it saves you five to 10 minutes of time. And it's actually more work from where I live,
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it doesn't save you any time at all. It would be caught because it takes it takes you all
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that time to get to Paddington by the time you got to Paddington, you'd be out actually
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out it's you'd be past South Ealing. Yeah, which is where I live. So for me, it's
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not that's not with the Elizabeth line. I give a little cheer every time I go.
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The Elizabeth line, the Elizabeth line does not make it any faster for us either.
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But at least at least it's less expensive. And it's finally using the tracks.
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Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, it's it's the Elizabeth line is a wonderful thing. It just doesn't
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help you if it doesn't help you if you live in Richmond. For me, the Elizabeth line is
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the best thing that's happened to me in years. That's just absolutely wonderful. But yeah,
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frankly, to get to the airport. I don't. Okay, after a long discussion about data,
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motorcycles, cars, I'd love to transfer. We have David, David's going to what the network
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state tell us David, what do you mean? Leads down the rabbit hole of the networks. Yeah,
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I have to say it's almost like the return of the network state because we keep seeing these
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pretend places where what used to be the crypto bros thing. Yeah, we'll we'll pretend we don't
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need government. So we'll go to this place and start our own economy stroke nation stroke country
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with our crypto. Now, of course, there kind of is no crypto popularity now, but it's still there.
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The whole latest part was always that they would like their idea of doing it was to like get a
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ship and have a nation on a ship without ever recognizing that that life at sea is the most
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regulated life in the world. Yeah, well, I think it is just it is just stuff. And basically,
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a couple of things have happened. I mean, I think this is more like a it's more like a hyper object
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because these bits of life that keep on appearing out of nowhere of the large number of people
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honestly think they can create a sort of nation out of rich people. It happens in different
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state. I think we've all read written about it talked about something different times.
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And this is just I think a current version that has appeared through into reality. I don't think
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it's anything new to say, but it's just a couple of things that are current. So this guy I've never
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heard of, but apparently is well known called biology. He's correct. He started in fact,
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it was just a few days back, started this new mysterious school for the network state.
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And basically, he said, give me some money. And I'll start this school, you'll be enrolled,
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but I won't tell you where it is. And he really did do this apparently. Yeah, it's last month.
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And I think it's going to be in this place called Forest City in Malaysia, which is another of these
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prosperity, ridiculous, we've talked about one in California before, all these places that have
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either slight changes in rules or allow rich people to do whatever they like. Or sometimes they have
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literally got a government fraud. And this forest city Malaysia is one of those places. So this is a
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school for people who are going to aspiring network participants or sort of death or despots, I don't
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know what exactly they are. So they go to this location, they learn about sort of always sort of
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projects and zones and alternative education systems, and God, no doubt, loads of stuff with
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crypto, and media institutions and so forth. But the thing that makes this a little bit more
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current apart from that, is if you've been following the coming storm from Gabriel Gatehouse,
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which is on BBC sounds, his current one, it's probably on Saturday, is also about the network
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state. And he's also following a slightly different group called Praxis. And they have a magazine
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started in New York, they're all the same crowd. These guys have also been on the boat, as Wendy
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was talking about the famous Laurie Penney did a famous article, Bleaker, I think, talking about
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this terrible boat, this crypto bros boat. And he's he's following this the same sort of people,
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the same sort of right wing nonsense as well. Also, I can't remember the name of the guy,
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and Prospera is a is one of the similar places, but this is on Honduras. I think they're trying
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to close it down. But unfortunately, I think they're having difficulty doing it. And I would
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suggest people definitely listen to the coming storm. It's the current version is called,
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I think the photocopier, because a lot of them were just photocopying pieces of their body in
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a party where they got rip-roaringly drunk. Forgetting that. The thing that makes it a
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little bit more spicy or interesting is right now because Trump, one of his many promises,
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and of course, people don't really listen to what he says, because he's spent such a lot of rubbish.
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But one of the things he mentioned was he's promising to introduce charter cities. That's
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it's a sort of side thing, but it's amazingly similar to what we've just been talking about.
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I mean, in Britain, we talk about free ports. I think it's a thing in the US, but it's a much
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bigger thing in the UK and in Europe. You say this is a free port, you give it different tax
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advantages to get people to sort of crack bits of Britain that they otherwise wouldn't go to. It's
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just classic leveling up style, as we would say, what Mr Johnson would say, tax incentive. But he's
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doing that. He's talking about charter cities. He's possibly opening up a much bigger start in
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the networked state. So just a warning to everybody, if you get Trump, you might also get
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mad people with lots of money taking over bits of the country. I'm not aware of any charter cities
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in the states in the term that you're talking about. I mean, states compete with each other,
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I guess, to attract businesses, certainly. Have a look at the article. Yeah, it's a fact. Sorry,
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I think I have to thank Ian for that, because I don't think I put that article. I put the link in.
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Thanks, Ian, if you put that link in. Yeah, I put the link in. I started looking at all the stuff.
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No, you're absolutely right. I don't think one has officially existed. There hasn't been any
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term. There hasn't been any legal framework. It's exactly as you say, states can to some degree,
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make up the rule here. So this is something that Trump wants to introduce a little bit more
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formality. I think we need to disabuse ourselves with the notion that Trump wants this. Yeah.
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And recall that what is probably going on is that someone who donated a significant chunk of money
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asked him to make this a talking point and he parroted it with absolutely no idea what's going
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on. I doubt the man is remembering what he had for breakfast. No, no, absolutely. This isn't some
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special MAGA thing. This is exactly what you've just said. It's like he's parroting something.
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That being said. This is all about money. It is, but there's this thing that I've started to
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notice with a lot of these structures. So if you remember, DAOs, which was a structure that went
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along with NFTs and Web 3s. And there was this thing where it was this don't look behind the
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curtain thing where they were trying to persuade you. And when I see things like this, when they
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talk about network state, when they talk about virtual network cities or on that. And somewhere
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in there, if I bet if I digged in deep enough, I would find lines about, and we can just set this
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all up with smart contracts. And that's the hook. See what they want is they want literally any way
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that they can get to get any kind of function of society dependent on blockchain technologies,
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including smart contracts. And this is the thing behind the curtain that they care about.
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But I think that's a means to an end. What they really want is to get rid of government.
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I think that's a very happy side effect. But for right now, getting more people onto that platform,
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getting more people using those platforms, making it a requirement to be able to use those platforms
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to exist is a thing that they will benefit from. Well, yeah. But I'm a little older than you are.
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Back in the early 90s, when they were first democratizing crypto via PGP,
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they were talking then about bypassing governments and having their own financial system.
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I was around for the early 90s, and I do remember that.
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Yeah, OK.
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OK, stop the ages.
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But the point is they didn't have blockchain and stuff, that stuff then. That's come along later
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to as maybe as an enabler, but it's not, you know, I don't think that may be the purpose now. But
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I still think that the whole, the real thing is they just don't like governments and they
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don't like paying taxes and, you know. I think there's a codependency. I think they don't like
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government and they want freedom with any form of trustless system. And I think they go backwards
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and forwards in parallel. I feel like they're strange bedfellows in much the same way that
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anti-abortionists and Republicans, they're like, we don't actually care this much about it, but
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we'll give it to you in order to keep in order to keep you keeping us in power. Right. Yeah,
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yeah. It's like it's like a Venn diagram with overlapping circles. OK.
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I, I, so I just got to say, so when I started looking down this rabbit hole, as I said before,
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it was quite enlightening. I'll put it in those words. I do also, I do think a lot of what you're
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saying, but all of you are saying is correct. I think that this is, this is people who just want to
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remove themselves from paying taxes, not overthrowing governments, but just having complete
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freedom so they can earn whatever they want. And they just want to have no taxes and they'll do
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almost anything to go through that. But I also find it interesting. So I just posted the
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link afterwards about the companies that I would say shouldn't be better, but like MasterCard,
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I've just started supporting crypto and I'm making a big kind of who-ha about it. So I feel like
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they're four years out of date, isn't it? It does. Why are they doing that now? It does. It doesn't
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listen to me. It's like Tony Blair proposing ID cards. It just feels like, it's not in the
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current century. Out of time. What was the other thing I was going to say? There's two things that
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I see happening here. The first one is like, one, watching crypto die the death of a more effective
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scam, a more effective con, which is the AI thing. Right now, all the hardware that everyone was
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trying to buy up to use to crypto, all the AI companies are buying. The market's competing
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them out of it, which is kind of fun to watch. But there's also this odd thing about how, oh crap,
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I'm just, it just ran screaming out of my brain. Nevermind. I'll just leave the point on that one.
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Maybe it'll come back to me. About watching this happen much too late and having them come in now
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when it's kind of doesn't make much of a difference. Yeah. I think the only thing I want to end this on
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is a little bit of philosophy. Because a lot of this is, I said at the beginning, it's a bit of a
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hyper-object. Because we talk about a lot of subjects that are the same thing. It's this,
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but it's another angle of it, or it's another bit of rich people doing weird things. And it's sort
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of all part of accelerationism. And if you haven't read it, you should. Nick Lanz, he did it some
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time ago, 20 years ago. It's called Meltdown. If you just look up Nick Lanz, Meltdown, he just
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writes this, he's obviously on drugs or something, but he writes this essay about the future. And
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it's embarrassingly accurate. I mean, it sort of, it looks a bit, feels like a William Gibson novel.
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But it's worth, it's probably just about, it's about two sides of A4. But it's worth looking at,
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because that was the start of accelerationism, which we are, these people are definitely on.
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This is to destroy capitalism by actually going too far and going so far that capitalism breaks
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in on itself, which is a bit odd, but it's actually where they're going. Because the thing that I
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remembered was to link back to last month's episode where we talked about the arrest of the fellow who
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runs Telegram. And this is the thing that's kind of like, you want to exist outside of these
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cultures, but if you're interacting and harming them, they, you know, you're not existing outside
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of them, you're existing in interaction with them. And the idea that you get to hold yourself above
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it. I mean, there's a bit of this where it's like, somebody with a whole lot of money had,
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thinks they had this brilliant idea that, you know, if we put ourselves in a boat, they can't eat us.
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Two things. One is that Pavel, the Dorov, after being arrested, actually did change Telegram's
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policies. And now they've started giving data to law enforcement like they were supposed to.
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And the second thing is that in the collection, All Tomorrow's Futures, which is put out by
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Cyber Salon Press and combines like expert commentary and sort of neuroscience,
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fiction provocations, there's a story by DJ Coburn, which had about a ship full of billionaires.
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Yeah, so which might entertain you if you run across it. The problem is that billionaires are
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not going to share a ship. They're just not. Each one, each one wants his own bunker, you know.
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It's interesting you said that him, which is, I'm not, I think is probably very true.
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It's not entirely true, but it's mostly true. Yeah, it's mostly true. And I'm not, you know,
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I don't know if there's such a thing as a good billionaire, but the ones that are close to
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Richard Branson's not a good billionaire. Richard Branson, I please. I, I,
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I kid. Sorry. You could try to make it, you could make a case for George Soros too,
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but the process by which he became a billionaire wasn't necessarily a good thing. No, it definitely
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For our last story, we have the one that you probably heard of and it may have changed again
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and shifted and changed since we started. So, I think it's a good one.
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It's shifted and changed since we recorded this.
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WordPress or automatic are throwing dirt at WP Engine and WP Engine are
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shouted back at WordPress. So, this is one of my stories and
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I'll be upfront and say that I knew one of the founders of WordPress Engine and I have got a very
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privileged account with WordPress Engine. However, I also do also know Matt Wallenway,
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who is the founder of automatic. I used to know him, but he's probably changed quite a lot.
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But there's back and forth. So, what automatic are basically saying or automatic who own,
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sorry, they don't own WordPress because WordPress is an open source piece of software,
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but they kind of steward it. They are saying that WordPress Engine, who is a big,
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well, competition for WordPress.com, they are using the WordPress code and they are
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selling it to all their clients and they're not contributing anything back to WordPress
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open source or like very little. And so, they're not contributing anything back to
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WordPress. And so, Matt Wallenway, who is from automatic, who is the founder of WordPress,
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has criticized them publicly. It's got very complicated and very difficult, but it sounds
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like what's also happened is that Matt Wallenway also kind of like said, you need to do this,
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otherwise we're going to stop giving you updates, which I think that's kind of the latest
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stage of where it's at. So, there will be bad citizens in a world where they're breaking the
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law. They're just being bad netizens. Yes. And so, automatic have gone, well, you need to be better
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citizens and if you're not doing it, we're going to start withdrawing updates to you,
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which I don't know how they would do that because it's open source, because it's software.
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By definition, you can't do that. Yeah, that's the thing that I don't understand.
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And then, from what I understood now, it feels like a super opera. It's annoying because it
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does literally feel like a super opera. In fact, WordPress engine has also shown that,
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also WordPress makes it easier to have kind of put this and said, look, you need to do this,
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otherwise we're going to do this. And so, WordPress engine said, no, no, this is like a,
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what's the word, like a ransom, but like a, I can't remember the word. Yeah, it's not,
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automaton. Yeah, I think it's probably closer. And it's unfair. And so, they've kind of
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outlined the whole lot of what's happened. And then, obviously, WordPress engine of,
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of WordPress engine, sorry, WordPress of automatic have also kind of gone, no, no, this is
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it from our side. And it looks like it might end up going to some kind of, I know the
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lawyers are being called in now. And part of me is like, this is, yeah, as we were, sorry,
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we were just saying before that WordPress powers a lot of the blogs and other services on the
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internet. And this feels like a real waste of time. However, I know that Matt would say,
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Matt Mullenway would say, hey, this is a big deal, because you've got a VC funded,
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yeah, which is what WordPress engine is kind of like just leeching on this, this open source
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system software, which to be fair, a lot of other companies do anyway. So, I just wanted to get the
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feelings about what everyone else thought. And I'm sure by the time we release this, it would have
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blown up and become something else. So, I'm very conscious of that. But thoughts for everyone else,
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that makes sense at all. Well, first of all, WordPress is written on PHP, which is already
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worrying. There are actually 30 million websites use PHP. I have to be careful here, because I did
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an article on Laravel, which is the current cool way of developing PHP. But it's just a Facebook
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is on a customized version of PHP. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's how they started. In fact,
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they're probably pushing the continuous. In fact, it's probably then have continually pushed. So,
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Laravel is actually almost as popular, I think, is as popular as RubinRails. PHP just never dies.
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I mean, it's a bit of a concern. And WordPress, PHP, of course, but what can you do? Yeah, a lot
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of things. I wasn't aware of that relationship between automatic own WordPress and then WP Engine.
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Oh, yeah. It's a big deal. So, sorry, go on. What is the difference between WordPress and
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WordPress Engine? So, okay, so WordPress Engine is a it's always like a hosting company, which will
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provide you just WordPress. But they have also added a bunch of elements to get the maximum out
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of WordPress. So, you can almost do anything with it. The other thing I was gonna say is...
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Are they fault the code? Or is it plugins? Yes. Okay, so from my point of view,
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I'm not going to do not hold me because I don't want to get sued. I think they fault the code a
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little bit. Okay, this is what Matt Monway is kind of complaining about. Because when I use WordPress
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Engine, there's a bunch of like integrations, which are very WordPress heavy, WordPress Engine
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heavy. But I don't think they're plugins. They are things that only WordPress Engine could do.
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I don't think that the only ones that are doing this, but it definitely feels like there's
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sort of disadvantages. I know one of the things that they did say was that they were charging
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for backups, where from WordPress, you can do backups for free, because it's just WordPress
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open source. You can just press a button and it will create a kind of archive. And so WordPress
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Engine were charging. I haven't seen that because I've been able to download mine, no problem.
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But I think there's stuff like that. So is it possible that what they're doing in
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they've become a large enough consumer of it, and they've kind of addressed this point. So they're
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taking it for free, but then they're doing something with it, like a feature that might
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be something that you could use possibly even WordPress could be making money from for charging
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for backups. But they're basically, so it's like, they make it for free, but now they're making
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money off of them. And they're like, we're still kind of okay with this, if you would just be
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giving back something to the source, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds about right.
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But I also think I forgot to mention at the very end is that, Matt Munn way, I think the way that
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it got about is very painful because he kind of a lot of the employees of WordPress, of automatic,
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sorry, have been given kind of like, what's like an ultimatum, do you follow what we're doing or
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not? And I was at 120 plus employees with bright one, I think this is all wrong. So we're leaving.
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Which is, it's just kind of blown up into this kind of, I don't know what on earth is going on.
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But also the thing for me is that it's just, I don't have to, I mean, maybe this is the whole
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thing is that maybe capitalism just breaks everything.
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They have this similar problem with forking versus plugins with Visual Studio, Visual Studio,
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Visual Studio code, which is the sort of one that works on any language, but it's not,
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one that works on any languages and it's pretty flexible. So there's a very popular AI editor
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called cursor and cursor should be using plugins with Visual Studio, but they did this thing where
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they say, rock, I know we're going to fork Visual Studio. And since that point, Visual Studio,
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you should be able to build, do full build chain on Visual Studio, but they now don't work on
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cursor because they say, sorry, but this is not, they'd look in the binder and go, this is
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Visual Studio. So we're not going to allow you to build, which is kind of screwed them up.
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I think this is going to be a bit of a problem with if you do fork and you're forking from
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a project that is open source. And I really use very heavy scare quotes, air quotes there,
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because companies are beginning to be very flexible on, yeah, we said we're open source,
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but we don't like you benefiting from it. Use the plugins or fuck off, which is beginning to be
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a more common problem now. Again, it's because of, I mean, obviously we've seen quite a lot of this.
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Oh yeah, we said we're open source, but we're not really open source. We're getting this Facebook
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and they just release this llama stack and they use the term open source because they know
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developers like it. They know the community likes it. Then when you look at the licenses,
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yeah, it's not really open source. It's just open sourcing a bit or rather not opening source a bit
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that actually is extremely important. Yeah, it feels like maybe this is kind of a,
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something that's, I've seen it elsewhere in slightly different examples of this, but
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yeah, it just feels like it's got so out of hand. I don't understand how it got,
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it just grew out of hand so quickly. Probably there were things going on inside that you
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couldn't see until they burst out into light. That's true. That's a good point. Yeah.
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So yeah, that's, I'm sure, yeah, in two weeks time or a week's time or even in a day's time,
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something would have happened and it'll make this or either this whole conversation redundant.
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And it annoys me because it's just, it's like soap opera. And I know I like sitting down
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and having some popcorns or something soap opera, but it is quite an important
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piece of software because it does power a lot of the internet. And as I said, I've got, I'm on,
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I am a WP Engine customer. I do pay them when I go over the allowance, but also I'm also a fan
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of WordPress. I don't know. I don't know what to say. Yeah. I remember when Oracle bought Java,
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that produced a whole load of these fork problems. Two or three companies just said, well, we're
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just going to change stuff because we don't want anything to do with Oracle, although we still
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want to use Java stuff. Yeah. It's just not a new thing, unfortunately.
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So, and it is the end of the show. And at the end of the show, we have shout outs on AOBs.
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So I'm going to start the AOBs. So it is UK Black History Month in October. There's a number of
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things happening. I'm actually running Afrofuturism workshop with a couple, well, with the BBC.
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Oh, where's that? Unfortunately, it's internal. So you will be able to see it, but we will try and
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do as much as we can externally. The next one is, if you haven't seen Corey's De-Shitify or Die
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from Defcon24, the video is now up. It is definitely worth watching. Although there was,
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it definitely got pushed. It was good, but then it didn't really get the full, it was a bit of a
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time for whatever reason, technical problems, which is a shame, but it's well worth the messages
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still there. And finally, for me, I watched this conversation with Simon Sinek, I'm not sure how
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to say his name, and Trevor and Noah in conversation. And I was quite touched by it.
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And I'm starting to consider if I should start saying to my friends, I love them. So I don't know
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how that, me and my girlfriend had a good conversation about that. So I definitely,
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it was well worth watching. And I pass on to Brian. Yeah, so I had two very interesting
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00:45:35,960 --> 00:45:41,720
copyright things come up. The short story of this is Flickr sent me an astigram saying,
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you have to go look at your photos. I looked at the photos reminded me about the early days of
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the copy fighters. And that's what led me to think about two copyright issues, very interesting
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00:45:48,440 --> 00:45:55,400
contrast. The first one is, I'll start with the more recent one, which is Infinity Train,
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00:45:57,000 --> 00:46:03,400
which is a not necessarily for kids, actually, probably not for kids, animated show that has
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been going through a really interesting struggle. This was made, this was a critically acclaimed
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show. The writing on it is amazing and interesting and fascinating. It's really well done. And it has
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now become a show that you cannot watch in its entirety, unless you pirate it, there are no
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legal means to acquire this show. And this show was made three or four years ago, it is not an old
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show. And the creators are literally saying, we want you to see this art, and there's no legal
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way for you to see this art put two and two together. You can watch the first two seasons
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on something, the third season is available in a different place that you have to buy the whole
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season. And then only like four of the episodes of the fourth season are available piecemeal
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commercially in places. I keep saying that the entertainment industry is doing everything they
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possibly can to promote piracy. I have no idea why they're doing this, but they are. I mean,
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between deleting shows and deleting websites full of video and they deleted all these music news
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00:47:13,160 --> 00:47:21,160
video clips from MTV and Comedy Central's history of something else, all this stuff, you know,
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honestly, the only system that works currently is piracy. You can go to one place, find everything
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00:47:29,400 --> 00:47:32,760
and there it is. But before we go down that rabbit hole, because it's supposed to be shut
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out, I'll do the second part of this, which is that we are now seeing works that are being derivative
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works being made by things that are just freshly coming out of copyright. And one of them is,
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and I'm not making this up people, it's called the poona verse. So, and what brought it to you
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00:47:53,160 --> 00:47:57,000
hope more than Winnie the Pooh, see about two years ago, Winnie the Pooh was one of the was
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one of the first things that came into public domain. Specifically, you can't do the Winnie
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00:48:01,320 --> 00:48:04,520
the Pooh with a shirt on because that's still Disney's but the original Winnie the Pooh is now
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00:48:04,520 --> 00:48:09,720
public domain. And so people made Winnie the Pooh, Blood and Honey, which is an, just a horror
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00:48:09,720 --> 00:48:14,760
slasher flick based on Winnie the Pooh and Winnie the Pooh is the slasher in it. Okay, great,
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whatever. Now they've made a sequel. But then there's a third one that came out and there's
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00:48:18,600 --> 00:48:24,600
something very UK specific about it that made my brain go wait, can they do that? Because they've
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00:48:24,600 --> 00:48:31,320
made a movie called Peter Pan Neverland Nightmare. Now the filmmakers are British, and Peter Pan is
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in the public domain everywhere except in the UK. Because the UK, it's Great Ormond Street,
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00:48:39,000 --> 00:48:44,840
Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, the UK, Peter Pan is perpetually held by Ormond Street
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00:48:44,840 --> 00:48:50,600
Children's Hospital and God help anyone who wants to try to fight that battle, the optics on that
489
00:48:50,600 --> 00:48:57,640
you are never going to win. Hi, I would like to wrest control of this thing that makes that that
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00:48:57,640 --> 00:49:03,240
helps children at Children's Hospital, so I can take this beloved childhood character and turn
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00:49:03,240 --> 00:49:09,000
him into a slasher and yet they've done it. And more importantly, there, and I just found this out,
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00:49:09,000 --> 00:49:13,320
this is my little rabbit hole. They're making a shared universe of all of these characters.
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00:49:13,320 --> 00:49:16,840
And that's what's called the Pooh diverse has been unofficially titled. They're also calling it like
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00:49:16,840 --> 00:49:20,920
the children's night, the cinematic nightmare universe or something. But it's called they're
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00:49:20,920 --> 00:49:28,520
calling it the Pooh diverse. And I'm just like, I'm not saying that this is the best case for public
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00:49:28,520 --> 00:49:35,560
domain works. But it's a fascinating one. By the way, if you want to great Winnie the Pooh thread,
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00:49:35,560 --> 00:49:40,200
unfortunately, I think it's only on X, there's Winnie the Pooh, but as a film noir,
498
00:49:40,200 --> 00:49:45,320
Pooh, which is very good, where he's a detective, and he's looking at the drugs are in fat honey,
499
00:49:45,320 --> 00:49:49,320
and he's looking for some murderers who ends up being taken. So it's brilliant, absolutely
500
00:49:49,320 --> 00:49:54,040
brilliant. There's some there's some fascinating, there's some fascinating twists on that. Like,
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00:49:54,040 --> 00:49:58,680
I mean, they had the happy time nightmare, the happy time murders or something,
502
00:49:59,400 --> 00:50:04,760
which was a very odd, weird adult puppet. It's like it's like, think who framed Roger Rabbit,
503
00:50:04,760 --> 00:50:14,200
but actually serious and much more adult. On that note, to Wendy. Well, it's sort of another
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00:50:14,200 --> 00:50:21,960
copyright issue. Glynn Moody at Tech Dirt has called my attention to the fact that you know,
505
00:50:21,960 --> 00:50:27,320
Taylor Swift was rerecord has been rerecording all her early albums in order to have control of them
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00:50:27,320 --> 00:50:33,320
herself rather than the record company. And the reason she can do that is there was a standard
507
00:50:33,320 --> 00:50:41,080
clause in her contract that said that after two she couldn't she after two years, she could do that.
508
00:50:41,080 --> 00:50:46,120
And because she is doing it, and because she is being successful doing it, record companies
509
00:50:46,120 --> 00:50:52,120
now are have raised the number of years you have to wait to do that sort of thing to 20 or 30 in
510
00:50:52,120 --> 00:50:59,560
new contracts. So, you know, it's it's sort of typical story of giving away a right because they
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00:50:59,560 --> 00:51:03,080
don't think it's worth anything, discovering it's worth something and grabbing it back.
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00:51:03,080 --> 00:51:08,600
And we've we've seen plenty of that before in the past, but it's just, it's sort of nobody has
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00:51:08,600 --> 00:51:13,560
really noticed that this is what's going on, but Glenn Moody did. I don't know where to get off on
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00:51:13,560 --> 00:51:25,000
this. I don't know. Good spot. David. This is a short one. And this is actually I should have done
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00:51:25,000 --> 00:51:30,040
this last month, but I didn't. I didn't make it last month. I did Wuthering Bites at the Insorby
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00:51:30,040 --> 00:51:36,200
too. So good talk. And you were you were excellent. Thank you. Thank you. I talked about the game I
517
00:51:36,200 --> 00:51:44,280
wrote the rewrite. Full 13 deep state. Yeah, it was fun. And it was I've been outside London for
518
00:51:44,280 --> 00:51:54,120
some time all the way out to what the place now at the bridge. Yeah, which is cool. Now that's it.
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00:51:54,120 --> 00:52:06,040
That's all I wanted to say. Hey, thank you very much, everyone. So on that note, it is time to
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00:52:06,040 --> 00:52:12,840
close this show up. This is tech grumps. And if you would like to be on tech grumps, then reach
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00:52:12,840 --> 00:52:19,720
out to us by using the hashtag tech grumps on whatever platform you're using. We should be able
522
00:52:19,720 --> 00:52:28,920
to like it. No, no, you know what, someone will find it. I would anyway, probably the wrong
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00:52:28,920 --> 00:52:40,280
people. Hopefully not the wrong people. We also do filter so that you know, if you put it is,
524
00:52:40,280 --> 00:52:47,080
you should just reach out to us on tech grumps, and the hashtag. And I would like to thank all my
525
00:52:47,080 --> 00:52:58,360
guests. So let's say thank you to Wendy and you want to say goodbye. Bye. And Brian. Bye. And David.
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Bye. And it's bye from me. Thank you very much.
