Hollywood Backlash, Smart Glasses, and Ring’s Surveillance Shift | TSG Ep. 1022

Hey everyone. Happy Wednesday and welcome to Techstrong Gang. We are live as we've been since the beginning.

Well, we were live before the beginning of the year we were alive, but now we stream live and we stream live at noon Eastern time. I hope you enjoy the time we're, we're thinking about maybe going back to the mornings though, but, uh, let's hear what youth guys think about it. But, um, our gang kinda likes it, or at least the ones who show up, I guess the ones who, who don't boat with their feet.

Um, but we've got a great gang for you here today. Let me introduce you to them. We've got, uh, from Boulder, Andy Mann.

We've got Terry Robinson, who's ditched the brick wall Dipper rear in, in the Valley, John Schwartz and man in the High Castle, Mike Ard. I wish they'd continue that series. That was a great series.

Uh, anyway, gang, welcome, welcome to the Gang, to our Gang show this lovely Wednesday. Mike, there's still so much news coming down the pike. I, I'm, I'm actually backed up in articles that I have uploaded to our Textron system.

Well, there you go. This, this So unusual, but what, what are we talking about today? The first thing is, I heard Tom Cruise and, and who was it?

Brad Pitt, Brad Deep Faked, I dunno. Deep fake D What have they got that I don't got? We're, we're, we're going Hollywood today.

So it turns out that there was a bit of a, a, a kerfuffle, shall we say at the moment, and maybe we'll see how this all plays out. But, uh, yes, there were AI generated images of, uh, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, and the folks in Hollywood flipped out and were screaming at Bite Dance, which, uh, had something to do with this in terms of creating these images on their TikTok feeds. But John, you wrote this story.

Is this a win for the Good Guys? Somehow or other? Is this like for the folks to create?

You know, You know, when, when Major, when a companies like, uh, Walt Disney Paramount, and then the Motion Pictures Association, association threatened to sue you and throw everything at you, I think you will back down. So it takes a certain force to, to, to make the the bad guys step away. But, you know, this kind, this whole situation kind of underscores for me this belief that, um, real we used to say seeing is believing.

I'd have a hard time believing a lot of the stuff I see now, or I don't know if it's real or not. 0 that just came out. Ironically, I was actually in Hollywood when this was happening, and I was, I, we went my wifi went to the Academy Museum.

And, um, it was interesting the timing of it because this, this, this Irish filmmaker and visual effects artist comes up with this, this, this video of, of these two famous mega stars beating the hell out of each other, um, which freaked out Hollywood to the point where Walt Walt Disney Company issued a cease and desist letter that will always have an impact on you. They referred to this as Virtual smash and grab. Um, I think this is something that we've been talking about on this show for a long time, how, how real these videos will become.

And one of the fears was that people who were not mega stars were gonna lose work because of, um, the fact that they didn't have the, uh, intellectual property or the, the, the, uh, legal standing to fight back. Um, that's probably true in this case. Um, it, it's, it's interesting what will be produced.

I mean, this guy just did a 15 second clip, but it's gonna be interesting to see is, is, uh, AI models advance where this is gonna go, and we're gonna, whether we're gonna see even more of these attempts, 'cause they're gonna filter through, um, the reason why this one got so much attention is that the Irish artist talked to the New York Times and kind of raised his profile. So in a sense he gained public stature, but by dance suffered the consequences. Look at that, an Irish Guy stir in the pot.

I'm Surprised. Imagine that. Imagine that.

So, so I, I got a few thoughts on this one, guys. First of all, Mike, to quote Michael Corleone, there are no, you know, there are no good guys here Now, who's being naive? Mike?

There's, there's no good guys. There's no good guys. There are, look, a cease and desist letter from Walt Disney.

Oh my, it's, it's only February. They've probably sent 200,000 of them out already. You know how many I've gotten over the years at a hosting company we used to own, every time someone put a Princess Le thing or a, or a Mickey Mouse on a website, we would get cease and desist letters.

I I, I, I hope they don't pay the lawyers by the letter there. I mean, thing is out. Lemme just interject something for a second and say good opening as the agreement with Disney, the use of Sora, Right?

O open Ara, they don't necessarily let you either. Sora is pretty good about observing copyrights. I've tried to get around it a lot.

Um, but that being said, let me say what's unsaid. And John, we were talking offhand that some of the folks you've met fans of ours enjoy our honest take on things here on the gang. So let me give you Shimmy's honest take.

If this wasn't Bite dance, the, the Chinese company behind TikTok, we wouldn't be talking about it. Mm-hmm. If it was open in that AI and so, or Anthropic the good guys, we wouldn't be talking about it.

But we've got a, you know, as they would say in my neighborhood, something on for by dance and their Chinese Communist Party overlords. My question is, was this the by dance that Oracle loans now, or was this the original by dance that is still Chinese? Because Larry would just make a call and make it go away.

Right? And that's not, you call his son, right? Yeah, yeah.

Let, let's not Well, no, he calls into the 1600. He's got that bat line in there. When you give that much money and you own your own Hawaiian island and you own a president, it's Atory.

Um, so, But, but correct me if I'm wrong here. I mean, at some point, won't the average in individual be able to create an equivalent of this video for their own quote unquote entertainment? Not, not if you, not, if you put the guardrails into the programs, we've spoken about this, right?

You need some sort of Asimov's laws, some sort of constitution like, and, uh, uh, Claude has the Claude Constitution. You, and, and, and guys, though we're early in the AI game, this is what, it's a lot easier to put the guardrails in now than correct it later, right? An ounce of prevention's worth a pound of cure.

Well, yeah. And, and we need, we, we need it in here. Now, as I said, I don't know how many of you played with Sora, but I play with Sora every day.

I, I enjoy making stupid little nine second video clips, but, uh, usually starring myself i my net, but it's very hard to get around copyrights and soa. But the AI folks have done a good job of, of building that in you, Alan, to this too, too. I'm gonna push back a little bit.

I do believe in the, in the guardrails. I think that's a great, great thing. I've got two big challenges with that.

One is, let's look at the people who are running the companies where we expect guardrails to come in. Who's gonna put the guardrails in us? Not the people who are founding these companies.

It's not the people who are creating these capabilities, not the people who are people pillaging, copyrighted works and demanding that their illegal activities be made legal so that they can make more money. They're not gonna put the guardrails in. The other big, big issue I have is just that this is a huge data ethics problem, and AI has no ethics or morals.

I read a blog yesterday from a code committer running an open source project where an open source, uh, uh, an AI bot had been trying to check in code, and this person rejected the pr, uh, for very good reasons. And the AI went on a vendetta publishing blog post. Mm-hmm.

I mean, that was one of those open claw. Yeah. Yeah.

It was, it was open, an open claw maintain. Um, I don't see this changing because the morals and the ethics that are built into ai, there's none. They're more narcissistic sociopaths, basically.

Mm-hmm. And I don't see Who's the narcissistic sociopath you're talking about? You're not talking about the big guy, are you?

Oh, just ai, just generally AI wants to please it wants to be the best it wants to be, right? Uh, it wants to know about itself. It's, it's not that big guy, but the other big guy maybe.

Uh, choose your big guy. Um, Justin, that's a whole male problem Asking Andy, you are asking who's gonna have a big enough stick to enforce this? Yeah.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Wait, open ai And those guys have licensing agreements in place now with Disney and some of these other places.

So what Disney's freaking out about is that, you know, by dance probably doesn't have that. They Didn't pay, they didn't pay the, the, the, the, the, the toll. But, but it's not about the Disney's of the world.

Let's say Andy Mann or Terry Robinson was a starving young actor in New York City waiting on tables until their big break came through, and they were brought in for a commercial to film a commercial. Terry says, my God, at least they're paying me to, to say a line or two. And, and Terry does her commercial and she gets $800 in some petty royalty that'll keep her in, uh, I don't know, won't even keep her cat in food over the years.

Right? And then a year later, the same company that filmed the commercial all of a sudden has Terry starring in a whole bunch of commercials and, and a new movie they made around, you know, what the, what this company is behind or whatever. And Terry says, oh my God, that's me on there.

That's not, but that's not me. Well, Terry, when you signed on to do the commercial, you, we, you signed your likeness over to us for the commercial and however we want to use it. Terry's not Disney.

She doesn't have an army of lawyers. Did I read the contract? Probably not.

You were happy to get the gig. Exactly. But so we, we need, and this is why we need SAG after we need, we need a process.

We need the guardrails in place about how AI can use likenesses, not of Mickey and Darth Vader, but of Terry and Andy. And that's what has to be done. And and it's easier to do it now than to do it later.

Well, wait, wait. Terry can't afford a real agent, but her AI agent read the contract and highlighted her particular issues for her, and she renegotiated the deal. There you go.

And my Age, Jake Manel sign. I'll sign anything, mate. Just I turn up at the opening of a book.

Um, look, just, just to sound a positive note though, um, yes, I agree. Look, AI is going to kill the extras business, right? Um, any background actor is no long, is no longer real, I assume.

Yeah. Um, but AI's never gonna intentionally or knowingly at least be able to create like a Brazil, a 2001, even a Barbie, right? It's never gonna be able to improv a line like, I don't know, I'm walking here, right?

Uh, uh, are you talking to me? You're gonna need a Bigger boat. You're gonna need a bigger boat.

Right? I mean, improvise on the spot. I mean, All improvised lines.

Mm-hmm. I know. That's so interesting you say that.

That's true. And, and I just recently, uh, listened to some old clips by uh, uh, Rob Reiner, right? And he was talking about where you get those lines and how they, uh, they come about and I guess it was his wife that came up, his Mother.

His mother. His mother. His mother.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

So Ai AI doesn't have a mother. So Will you, will you pay extra to go see a movie with real people made by real people using, you know, non-AI technologies or, 'cause you know, the price of a movie is still, I don't know what, 15, 20 bucks, depending on where you are. And you know, you're probably gonna look at a lot of AI enabled movies that may come in at like, I don't know, five bucks, eight bucks.

So, you know, will there, will, will pricing kind of drive behavior. That's interesting. Yeah.

That's Interesting. That may you See the interesting thing, there's a bit of a backlash though. I mean, after all these Marvel Universe movies or the, the big superhero mega pictures, there was kind of a pushback against that.

I mean, that's, that's a, those were made by humans, but they have a kind of an element of being artificial. No, they're all C-G-I-C-G-I. Right.

And if you want human to human interface types of movies, I think there's, there is like a huge appetite for those movies. So maybe we divide the audiences. So Maybe we need like a non GMO organic label for movies and we could get 'em in Whole Foods for a little bit more.

I mean, look, already I'm working on DuckDuckGo is my browser and their search engine already has a show. AI don't show ai, right? Uh, I'm waiting for that for Spotify.

I feel like Spotify is feeding me a lot of AI slot now. Um, I want a no AI button on that. I absolutely want that.

Uh, I might even subscribe to a service that has that by preference. Um, and, and by the way, uh, look, I think there's a role for AI to play because things like, how hard can it be to write a screenplay for Fast and Furious 35, right? Yeah.

I mean, maybe the guy who, woman person who wrote that, who's assigned to write that maybe they just shouldn't. Maybe that should be an ai. You know, Andy, that's interesting because the sag after people, I used to do a lot of stories on this, and they, that was one of their biggest fears is like the, just the 17 sequel to some formulaic movies will be spit out by ai.

Most of the movie will be edited by AI acted in the background by ai. And it'll just put in Yeah, you just put in all the other versions, right? And say, give me the sequel and make it better.

No. So, you know, guys, I I, I have an article I published this morning, uh, I think it's on digital CXO, if not, it's on Techstrong ai. Mike, I don't know if you can look it.

It's this guy. I, I briefly mentioned yesterday, this guy Schumer, not Chuck Schumer, the senator who does nothing, Schumer, uh, the, um, he's concerned. He, he, he's an a, John.

John liked that one. You're So right. Sorry.

He, he's, he's, he's a founder and, uh, he's a developer and he's a founder of venture backed companies. And and he's the one who said, look, he feels like it's February, 2020 and COVID is about to hit. No one knows, but we don't realize that the ward is already up to our armpits.

And that's where we are here with ai. Okay? Right.

It's not about that we're gonna lose jobs. It's not about losing the jobs, it's about just changing the game, changing reality, changing. Andy, the idea that you want a human made film or a human only search engine is like saying, you know what?

I want those Russian shoes that don't fit so good because I'm not gonna pay for the Italian ones. I, I don't like the way the Italians make their fancy shoes. When, when AI is demonstrably better, as good as, or better.

Are you sort of a AI discrim person? Or like, what, what would be your reason for not a and and, and, and in this essay, which I riffed off of mm-hmm. From this fellow, and, and that's, and it set the internet ablaze when that came in, I think last Friday.

Um, that's the real issue here. We're at the point where this thing is as intelligent as, doesn't have to be super intelligent at this point, right? We're not talking about super int intelligence as intelligent as you really wanna sit here and say, well, that's not good enough for me.

Right? I'd like to have the option. Maybe, You know, can we also be honest about Hollywood here for a minute?

Because, you know, for every one great movie they make, they make, you know, hundred scenes, crappy movies everywhere. And you have humans doing that. And maybe they, I can create all those crappy movies and the humans will make something more interesting.

I don't know. I dunno. Do you, do you think, do you think an I AI can create A toxic avenger can, can the AI create a cult classic?

That'll be an interesting challenge to see if that ever happens. This Is Spinal Tap. Yeah.

Like something like that, one of these sleepers that, that that didn't chart, that wasn't successful and then all of a sudden gets a zeist, Rocky Horror picture show that Sure. I was gonna say. Yeah, exactly.

Mm-hmm. I See, I see where we're going here. I gotta move on.

We gotta move on, fellas. We're deep, deep in the morass. How do you know?

It already hasn't. But, um, Mike, let's move to our second segment. Meta Vision.

Are they at this, again, selling the goggles, the glasses? What are they doing there? They, They are, you know, and I don't know if you've been in the mall lately, but they actually have little stores down selling these, uh, meta glasses.

And now they're talking about putting facial recognition in there. And people are also getting a little concerned about the fact that, well, maybe these meta glasses are recording conversations to go with their vision. Um, I, for one, you know, I'm pretty good at faces, but I kind of suck at names sometimes.

So maybe if I have these glasses, I'll get the facial recognition and a little heads up as to who this person is that I'm about to talk to. But then again, Andy, everybody's gotta buy glasses and wear glasses, and I don't think that's gonna happen either. So, Andy, what's your take on what's going on here?

I actually think this is really smart. Um, you know, maybe they're learning from all the failures. Uh, look, the goggles approach, we with 3D television just died.

'cause who wants to wear goggles while you're sitting in your living room with your friends and your family? Same when you are out and about, you know, the, the vision pro, everyone was gaga about the vision pro and, but goggles, right? Big goggle.

But you are right, Mike. Everyone wears glasses. Well, most people wear glasses, some kind of glasses.

They're meeting the customer where they are rather than trying to create a whole newness. They're, it's a blend, not a radical restructure. When I think about theories of innovation, yeah, there are some times when radical innovation gets adopted very easily and very well.

But if you can provide on-ramps, then you're gonna get better adoption than if you just provide, you know, some, a leap of faith that someone's gonna have to take. So creating, not just creating them in goggles, in glass form, not goggle form, but doing it with a fashionable brand. Uh, getting out into the marketplace where people are already buying, not having to go to a special meta store or something to buy it and try it out.

Uh, being able to see it on other people that it doesn't look stupid. Um, so look, I think it's really smart, but let's face it, Facebook has already written off a billion dollars on vr. It's already written a billion written off a billion dollars on Metaverse.

Um, and it's scaled back. Its ambition drastically. This, these glasses don't show you imagery and stuff.

They're, they're little cues. It's got a little speaker, it'll tell you about stuff. They are talking about this as a way to connect with your friends and people you are already connected to.

But I also have major issues. And I think the, the world will push back on the privacy concern. Um, but again, everyone wants it for them, but not for everyone else.

I want what you said, Mike, I wanna go into a conference, or I want my glasses to tell me who everyone is. 'cause I'm very bad at remembering all the names. I just don't want their glasses to be telling them who I am.

Um, this is so true in our world. Uh, I think there's opportunity, but the major privacy concerns are gonna be, they're gonna continue to be painful. Oh, let's see if anyone trusts meta after all their slip ups.

Yeah. You know, look, they've had this agreement with RayBan for a while now, selling the MetaFrame of Raybans. I looked at it then.

Where's the killer app here, right? Yeah. Okay.

So now it's gonna tell me that's Mike Ard, man in the High Castle, right? Versus me asking Mike, what is it you do these days? Um, I, I just don't see this as the killer app that flips this market, which has been a relatively, look, Google tried it.

Facebook has thrown at it now a number of times. I I, I just don't see the killer app here that that's gonna have me, shell out 250 or $300 for these glasses. Plus there's probably a subscription involved to store and, and use all of that.

You know, wearables are where it's at, but I don't think they're glasses. I I don't, Uh, but the collection of data, you know, that just, it's just troublesome. I mean, it's not consensual.

You know, you're picking up, you know, data and passing it along about other people. They don't, they don't know. I mean, the biometric information that can be involved, I mean, that's permanent stuff.

Yeah. No, but, but this, that's our world. Don't, don't blame Matt or Rayman for That.

Well, no, but I'm just talking about adding this particular thing and making it easier and making it easier to do without people's consent. If I go to some places that, you know, like you get into, I don't know, an amusement park, you know, they're using your biometric data maybe to gain entrance. I don't necessarily know when I walk up to you and you're wearing your ray bands that you know, you're collecting it and it's going someplace.

Maybe not just to you. I just, You gotta assume whether they're wearing Ray bands or they have a, you know, their bow tie is really a camera to quote some band song or something. Right?

Um, you know, you know, you, there's no, you can assume you're being, and, and especially in the world we live in today, where video surveillance is everywhere, you know, so where you are seeing That assumption, I just don't think it's right. And I con I'm concerned about it. You know, the amount that's, you know, that's, that's captured here.

Take Note, take note of all the little signs you see when you walk around places that this is under video surveillance. So, Should I have to put that on my glasses? You are under video surveillance, I think in today's world.

You gotta assume it's, but, but guys, let me, 'cause we went so late on the first one I got along. Can This is something, can I, Mr. Go ahead, John.

Mr. This is like dystopian interpretation for me. I think of two things.

I think of the movie John Carpenter's. They live where you can see people who are not people. You can see the a Liz and oh, the, With the little boy, te Hayley, what's his name?

Uh, Roddy Piper played the guy Six Six Sense. That's the movie. Six stents.

I mean, you can, you can see things and I, I think in terms of surveillance, but here's the problem. I, I'm just gonna go back to the history of this meta in 2021, shut down their photo tagging, facial recognition, because they said they needed to balance innovation with growing privacy concerns. They felt very strongly about that until they sold 7 million units of these glasses last year and decided, wait, if we had this feature, like a real-time search feature and, and, and, and appeal to the vanity of our customers, we're gonna sell off.

People might sign up for the subscription too. Yeah, they'll, um, that's what they're thinking. But let me, let me, let me put two ends of the, of the rainbow here together for you to give you an idea of the world we live in today on this one end.

We're worried about anyone, everyone, everywhere we go, violating our privacy, filming us, and using that video, not filming it videoing us and using that to somehow harm us, profit off us extract, to use Tim Wu's term right from last week, extract our data for their benefit. At the same time, we live in a world where everything we see, we assume is AI faked. And it's not legitimate.

We can't trust our sources. We can't trust what our eyes see. You wanna talk about dystopian, John, that that's, that's two sides of this.

What is real, what's real? What's private? What, how, how does one live in this?

You know, I, I'm working with our team right now. We're gonna be doing a virtual event on digital sovereignty. For a lot of you, you think of digital sovereignty as sort of nation state digital sovereignty, right?

I, I'm in the eu, I don't want America keep your hands off my data. I want to have a, a, an EU cloud provider, Asia, wherever. But digital sovereignty, there's government, there's national sovereignty tied into it.

There's corporate sovereignty tied into it, and there's individual sovereignty tied into it. And that this sovereignty issue is an issue for this century, right? All three of those variations on sovereignty are paramount in a world where geopolitical alliances are shifting under our feet.

It feels like the world's changing. The technology's changing so quickly. What we're really talking about is sovereignty.

Sovereignty over our own data, sovereignty over our own likeness, sovereignty over our own comings and goings. And what we take in. You were, Let's step down now.

You were talking about an amendment to the Constitution or something of that level to achieve that goal. Well, I think it starts with a text on virtual event. We'll see where it goes.

The ball rolling. Yeah. Yeah.

There was a, uh, and, and South by Southwest a long, long time ago, there was this app that was the, the craze of the show was called Twitter. Twitter, no, not that one, but out the Twitter. And after Groupon, there was, uh, something called character.

There was a bidding war for this thing. And basically the idea was you would go into a room and, and you would get a, a, an alert, like a, a person who is a third iteration away from you is in the room. So you could basically say, oh, that person knows that person.

So why I'm gonna go up there and, and talk to them. And it, it, it, it went away because there was a lot of privacy concerns. Also, it burned batteries.

It burned the battery life on your, on your phone. But it seems like kind of a more benign attempt at it. I shouldn't say benign because this involves meta.

What am I talking about? So meta, I mean, if we've given them 55,000 at chances and free passes, and they're still gonna take advantage of whatever they can, sorry, meta, but that's not the way I feel about you. Do you think I could get glasses that would tell me maybe that the person across the way maybe has a cold or the flu?

And maybe I should. There you go. That might be interesting.

I just Love how, uh, uh, giving away all my private data to a corporation to destroy my life. Uh, that's not the line. Using my battery.

Oh, I'm out. Exactly. Hey, let's get what's Higher.

Yeah. It's the world we live in. But, you know, let, let's end this segment with that word sovereignty.

Stay tuned for more on it. Mike, let's talk about, well, we'll talk about a little more sovereignty and surveillance. Yeah.

So we were talking about this in a couple of recent episodes where it was a question was raised is are people gonna get concerned enough about their personal data and where they're being tracked and not tracked? And well, it turns out Amazon Ring had an ad on the Super Bowl talking about how they were collecting surveillance data and data that people could share with the local police department. And they were, I think the come ad was for, you know, finding somebody's dog.

But Terry turns out what people freaked out about this, that they had to kind of walk back this little integration agreement. So what's your take? What's going on here?

So people went wild, right? That cute little dog, they're tracking it across the neighborhood seems har uh, harmless enough, right? But, uh, yeah, people did in fact freak out.

And, um, Amazon, although I'm gonna just preface this, and John, you can correct me if I'm wrong, Amazon said this, uh, uh, termination of its, uh, partnership with, uh, flock Safety, which is that, uh, police surveillance firm that they've worked with, uh, has nothing to do with this hue and cry from the, the public. I find that a little hard to, uh, believe, um, what they, what they say is the problem is, uh, that it was going to, you know, the integration part of this with the flock was gonna take more time and more resources than they had originally thought. So I guess they'll stick to that story.

Um, well, That's the story that's sticking to it. Yep. There's two pieces.

I'm sorry, go ahead, Tara. Well, I was just gonna say, the, the whole issue of surveillance has really, you know, ratcheted up, right? With things like this, that's that Super Bowl sort of play of ads that, that, that had AI and whatever kind of freaked people out just in general.

But then you have this whole bit with ice in neighborhoods and all the surveillance and monitoring that's going along there. Volunteer sensitivities, panier, I mean, here in New York, uh, one of the guys that's running, I guess for some office, you've seen this Mike, where, I can't remember his name, but he was associated, associated with Paneer, worked there for five years. That's one of the ads against him.

You know, um, you don't want this kind of guy that For good reason did This Yeah. And, or that was involved in this. And so I think it's really ratcheted up people's interest and then their fear of, uh, just how much surveillance, you know, is, is going on.

You know, on on the ring thing, there's two aspects. One was this agreement with the flock or whatever it's called, the law enforcement liaison, you know, taking data again without permission and passing it into law enforcement violation. The other piece of it was just adding ai, the ring.

You know, Paul, one of our video guys, he has ring up at his house and he got a, he got an email alert, congratulations, we've added AI to your ring camera. And the next thing he knows, he gets an alert with video. A silver car just went by your house, you know, and, and it's showing him the car and trying to get the license plate.

I don't know. Paul doesn't live in a high crime rate area, do we? Is that where we want to go with this?

You know what I mean? Maybe it should just tell me if a brown skin person walks by. Geez.

Well, right. And that's, it's interesting to see that's the issue. It is Interesting to see the, the, some of the backlash happening.

And I think part of it is just awareness. You know, people look around, you don't, you look at the, the light poles and the traffic lights, you don't see the cameras. You don't know what they're doing.

Mm. Um, a lot of those cameras, by the way, the flock cameras have been shown to be highly insecure and exposed. You know, being able to get access.

Individuals can log into these cameras half the time 'cause they never changed the user ID password on them to start with. Right. But we've got cities throwing, we've got cities throwing out flock.

Um, I know the city of Denver, I live in Colorado, the city of Denver has, uh, basically thrown out flock, big movement in Boulder, the people's Republic here, uh, to try and get rid of it. Um, that integration with Ring Yeah. Dissolved all of a sudden.

'cause people learned about it. I think the biggest problem was them advertising it. I think they could have kept going if no one knew about it.

But I'll tell you, I think the number one topic on Reddit's home Automation subs these past two weeks has been, what can I replace my camera with my doorbell camera that doesn't send video to the cloud? I tell you, I I, I should buy stock in, in Rio Link or, or UFI or one of these, uh, vendors that does do these cameras that don't connect to flock. 'cause I think that when people learn about it, they wanna get out.

Oh, by the way, one thing on Palantir, um, they're moving their headquarters from Colorado to Miami to Florida, apparently. Um, which is bizarre. We thank Gavin Newsom for that online, apparently.

I don't know. Um, but a lot of that was because of staff jacking up against these partnerships and having internal meetings and stuff about what we're doing with the government. And so, so I think as long as people learn about it, they react More of it was because the billionaires behind it were afraid California was gonna start taxing billionaires.

Yep. That's, that's, that's why Zuckerberg moved to Florida. And that's why, and that's why Peter Theo from Palantir and the other guy who runs Palantir did too.

Just quickly, it moved from Colorado, not from from California. And yet people are blaming California and politics. It's just a weird thing.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. That's a, that's a major issue in the governor's race, by the way.

The, the two, the, the leading candidate is being backed by a bunch of billionaires. His name is Matt, Matt Mahan. And, uh, he's getting a lot of grief for it, but he's also in pretty good position to, to make a run.

So he is, he's their candidate. That's interesting. Florida, it seems would be more favorable toward this stuff, maybe considering its leadership, you know, Um, oh, we, we welcome it with open arms.

It's front page news. This is like when These players, this Is like when the self-driving cars were banned in San Francisco for killing people. They just went to Texas instead and killed people there.

Now they're, now they're in the peninsula. They're everywhere where I live now. They're moving everywhere.

Yeah. Everywhere. You know.

So how will this play out though? Because for every one person that doesn't want their data shipped up in the cloud, there's another who's, you know, gonna be basically they'll perceive themselves to be the local civilian watch, and they're gonna put these cameras out there and they'll probably point them externally out to the street and start collecting all this data and shipping it up and sending it to any law enforcement agency that wants it. And So they, they call Mike, they call that the Mrs.

Kravitz model. The mr. Yeah.

Well, there you go. If you remember Mr. You remember Bewitch.

Yeah. Now, Technically, as I recall the law, and Alan, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but basically anything you do in public is, you know, observable for the rest of society. It is what it is.

Right. But do you remember all the, the hue and cry? I, it just was not even that long ago about Google Maps and if they revealed something, a car with a license in a driveway, Google, whatever, people pitched a fit.

And we've gotten, you know, all the stuff that's Magnifying, you know, I don't want to sound like Dustin Hoffman in the graduate, but I've got one word for you. Sovereignty. Yeah.

And aren't we doing something on that? Yeah, we're gonna have a Virtual, we might do something on that. You know, the, so, so one of the crazy things, I mean I, I'm not sure how popular it is in other states, but next door, that website.

Yes. It's a Marriot, very Popular here in Florida. Oh My God.

Here. There's somebody suspicious. Can you imagine what the AI element, it's only gonna skyrocket.

Oh, I know. I'm on the next door item. Actually, you know how I got there for, um, Louisiana?

'cause I still have a house there in my, you know, the neighborhood I grew up in my, and You say that out loud. Oh, I, I know. I, I shouldn't, I'm getting rid of it, but I'm, you know, it's like the, the paranoia.

Louisiana, keep watching us. Go ahead. The paranoia of everything is crazy, you know, On that All, all I know is I don't care what your skin color is if you're walking by my house, but if you're wearing Red Sox gear, I wanna know about it.

Person of interest. Person of interest. Domestic terrorists at their best.

Yeah. F bumpy dead. What is, I mean, at least it's disheartening that people are pushing back.

I mean, people are more engaged now. I think about technology and if they see something that they object to and the companies are kind of reacting until they then come back with another version of what they did earlier, you know, the, the broken, the, the fix. Ultimately you gotta vote with your pocketbook here.

'cause that's the language they understand. Yeah. Well, I also think, you know, for all the people being now more aware and vigilant and everything else, and pushing back, which is great in my estimation, I think there's also an interest in it on the other side.

I mean, you look at the whole Nancy Guthrie kidnapping thing and you know, and her nest camera, right? That wasn't connected to a subscription service, but had the, the ghosted, you know, images or whatever they were. Um, and I, people, some people were freaked out about that.

It's, you know, like, oh my God, you don't even have to subscribe. And they get, you know, they get these images or whatever. And other people were like, well, that's a way that thankfully, because maybe law enforcement wouldn't have had a fix on, you know, the shadowy figure who came to our door in the middle of the night, you know?

But, so I think there's an interest in it too from people. But maybe it's a balancing act. I mean, I think it's interesting that ring episode, especially with Nancy Guthrie and that videos restored from the cloud service that they didn't even use, theoretically, just goes to add to this distrust of these companies of tech companies generally, of AI and surveillance companies specifically, because they lie to us all the time.

Do you remember when Facebook says it wasn't recording and yet one of its advertisers advertised to its customers? One of the benefits was we listen into the Facebook microphones. I mean, you know, they lie to us all the time.

And this, this is another instance that I think is gonna, Andy, Andy, is that an urban legend or is that real? No, that actually happened. Um, there was a, one of these, one of these resellers, and I, I can't, they said it was a mistake.

Oh no. We just, it was marketing in, they published an adv advertisement in like the, a trade journal saying this is why you should use us to buy ads. And we've got this unique ability to understand what people are, what are talking about, even when they don't give permission.

And it was published in an advertisement for their service, whether they could actually deliver on that promise. They said, oh, it was just marketing after the event. But I think we all know.

So look, something's listening to me. I don't know. Is it my Alexa?

Is it my wife's Facebook? Is it tick? I don't know.

Something's all's absolutely listening to me Triangulating. Guys, we are about outta time though. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta pull the plug on this one.

I'd love to sit up here and talk all day with you, but I've got, we got other stuff to do, including text Strong TV replay immediately following this, uh, tomorrow we'll be back with Fresh Gang. I've got my shimmy says tomorrow afternoon as well. com, security Boulevard, cloud native.

ai. So It is on ai. Yeah, it's a good one.

And I've got two coming out in the morning, one on AI and one on digital CXO. That'll be the basis of shimmy sets tomorrow. So check those out.

Um, John, you've, you don't have any articles coming up, do you? Just a few. There's a backlog.

I feel, I feel badly for, uh, Mike and I, we have an, an editor a ton. We just like bury this guy in stories. There you go.

Think Soon the AI will be dealing with it. Anyway, not too much. That's True.

But I think this is the first time in any gang that we use three articles all from the Same author, John Schwartz. Oh, I know. Yeah.

Congratulations, John. They call that Hatch. We're that badge with honor.

That's a hatch trick, right? Quality will out every time. Hat trick, right?

Yep. All right. Until next time.

On behalf of Mike, John, Terry, Andy and I thank you for joining us. We'll be back tomorrow. Hope you enjoyed the Gang today.