Prove It With Cameras
I've done Marco's favorite thing in the entire world.
You've bought something?
Well, so it's both your sarcastic... It was a sarcasm.
Well, I meant it as sarcastic, but it's actually also genuine.
I did buy something, which is Marco's favorite thing.
But your least favorite thing is that literally 50 minutes ago, I basically tore apart my entire desk.
Oh.
So if any of this recording works and or if I sound even remotely decent, success.
But who knows?
If I sound like garbage, it's not Marco's fault.
It's not John's fault.
It's my fault.
Blame the third party Ram.
No, it's not third-party RAM.
Not this time.
No, I finally, just this evening, I finally received the shipment of the Caldigit TS5 Plus that I had ordered a couple of weeks back.
And I am very excited.
I have only used it for a few minutes, and my initial review is it's just like the TS4, but with faster Ethernet and a few more ports.
Wait, so you didn't really change anything.
You just swapped out one component with the component that does the same job made by the same company with one bigger number at the end?
Yes, but it doesn't sound as dramatic that way, John.
All right.
Well, we'll see how dramatic it is.
All I can say is you sound fine over Zoom.
So worst case scenario, we can use that backup track for you.
That sounds good.
I mean, initially, it seems like it's pretty nice.
Like I said, there seem to be a few more ports in the back.
There is gigabit Ethernet, which is exciting.
Excuse me, 10 gigabit Ethernet.
The TS4 had two and a half gigabit Ethernet.
Um, that being said, I quick, I did a quick I per three speed test between the Synology and my, and my Mac.
And, and it was not as impressive as I would have hoped, but I, I wouldn't be surprised if I have old wires between, you know, me and my, um, and my switch.
Oh, actually, and I might not even be on, no, I think I am on a 10 gigabit port on the, uh,
on the switch but nevertheless i have some playing to do but i didn't have time before the recording uh but yeah initial results are this extraordinarily overpriced well maybe not overpriced extraordinarily expensive costly is that the merlinism this extraordinarily costly uh cal digit doc is very nice and uh i might be reselling my ts4 to a local friend but if not uh and you're interested in one uh feel free to reach out
So have you considered the possibility that the Synology hard drives can't actually serve 1.2 gigabytes per second?
I have.
And that's a very, very good point.
I don't think I have anything else that's 10 gigabit at the moment, though.
Like my Mac Mini is an M1 Mac Mini.
It has just straight up gigabit, one gigabit Ethernet.
I guess I could... I'm just trying... I'm struggling to try to theorize a way I could do this test in...
any better and I agree with you that the hard drives may be the issue here not the not the Synology yeah like if you put like some kind of I mean I'm sure there's some Synology app that basically is like you know a network performance thing where it just sends data you know from nothing over the internet or over the network you can just do that with a shell script yourself if you want
I thought iPerf 3 did that, but I don't know enough about it to know one way or the other.
So I am talking outside my comfort zone at this point.
But yeah, I got to fiddle with it.
And again, it could be any one of several different things.
It could be the hard drives are too slow.
They're like 7,200 RPM hard drives.
I don't think that is the hard.
If you're doing sequential reads from a giant media file, especially in the initial speed when you do it a couple of times and it gets into the caches and everything, I think you should be fine.
I think you should be able to...
I mean, you're talking about, again, 1.2 gigabytes per second being read off of a collection of ancient hard drives that are in some kind of RAID arrangement.
And any RAID that does not include a 1 and a 0 is slow.
Very, very slow.
And so...
It would not surprise me if actually all of these old, presumably SATA-connected hard drives can't actually deliver 1.2 gigabytes of streaming data over the network.
Yeah, I forgot that you don't have any RAID.
Even your backups aren't RAID 0.
I think we've talked about this before.
They used to be in the 8-bay Synology, but I don't think I'm even doing Time Machine.
No, that's what it was.
I'm doing a single standalone hard drive, if I recall correctly, as Time Machine.
And so there's no redundancy or striping or splitting of any sort.
Oh, wow.
Um, so yeah, this is breaking news.
You know, I, I, I have testing to do this.
This could be cabling.
It could be the fact that my tests are flawed because of what I'm testing against.
There's so many different issues here, many of which start and end with me.
So, uh, I, I don't think a story, a story of my life for sure.
Um, so yeah, so I'm, I'm not clear what the weak link is, but it's probably me.
But yeah, I mean, the chat room is justifiably and thankfully not in a rude way saying, well, why bother go from four to five?
I don't have a good reason.
This was a little bit of a Marco purchase, especially since it is $500.
It is a lot of money.
But the good news is I had already spent money on a plane ticket to WWDC that I ended up getting refunded.
So I had a credit on my credit card.
So that makes it free, right?
Yeah.
I'm not sure that's how money works, but okay.
No, that's exactly how money works.
Come on, Marco, defend me here.
That's like business write-offs.
They're just free, right?
Right.
But either way, I really wanted 10 gigabit Ethernet so that I can go between the Synology and me faster than I was before.
And rather than getting a bespoke 10 gigabit Ethernet, I was going to say card, but I guess thing, I can't think of the word I'm looking for.
Anyway, so dongle adapter, thank you, et cetera.
I just upgraded the CalDigit.
And it is worth noting that I'm using this, and this could also be another part of the problem.
I'm using this on an M3 Max MacBook Pro, which is Thunderbolt 4.
And everything is working, but there is not as much bandwidth as it would have if I had a M. No, it's fine.
That's 40 gigabits.
I would think as well.
But also I have two different 5K monitors connected to it, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
So many of these problems could be me.
I think what I'm already hearing though, Marco, I hope you picked up what I was just putting down.
The only solution to this problem, the clear answer to this problem is to upgrade my MacBook Pro when the M5 comes out.
That's the only answer, right, Marco?
Because I need that Thunderbolt 5 action.
You can get a Mac Pro so you can hook up the two 5K monitors to the Mac and not worry about it taking your bandwidth.
It's got a dedicated 10 gig Ethernet port.
There you go.
Yeah, perfect.
Someday when they release a good Mac Pro.
Yeah.
I mean, you also get a Mac mini that has 10 gig ethernet.
That's very true.
Exactly.
Anyways, but yeah, so far two thumbs up if you're willing to spend an extraordinary amount of money on something that in my case is marginally frivolous.
But hey, here's what we're going to do.
I put an affiliate link in the show notes so all of you can buy one and then I'll get like a dollar from each of you.
And if enough of you buy it, I'll be rich.
That's what we're going to do.
So after this amazing review, you spent $500 to sort of maybe increase something a little bit.
That's exactly right.
I do have more ports.
It really legitimately does have more parts.
Future-proofing.
He won't need to buy the six.
It's like $100 per port, though.
Stop it, Marco.
You're supposed to be on my side, remember?
You're getting this all wrong.
anyways let's do some follow-up and uh last episode john and i did a review of f1 the movie uh that stars brad pitt uh we talked about that in the i believe the post show and a little bit in the uh bootleg as well or overtime or something i forget exactly where it was it was the bootleg a couple people asked about that but as i said i was going to talk about spoiler stuff uh we didn't do it in overtime i did it in the bootleg so there you go if you want to get all the bits the bootleg has everything
I believe it's pronounced boat leg.
Oh, please.
Yes, indeed.
Yes.
But anyways, one of the things I forgot to bring up last episode was Apple's rumored F1 deal.
So let me set the stage.
With Formula One, ESPN, which is a sports network that's based here in America in pretty much every cable company,
package includes it or most cable packages include it uh they are the carrier of f1 in the states however they just basically regurgitate uh i believe it's sky sports from the uk so they take the uk feed and just blast it out through espn and that's been the case since i've been paying attention to f1 for like five years now
Well, reading from, I think this is MacRumors.
Forgive me, I don't have it in front of me.
Yes, MacRumors.
Apple is expected to win the rights to stream Formula One races on Apple TV Plus in the United States thanks to a $150 million bid, Business Insider reports.
The rights to broadcast Formula One in the United States are currently held by Disney's ESPN.
According to sources familiar with negotiations, Disney is apparently unwilling to match or beat Apple's offer.
It pays, Disney that is, pays around $85 million per year for its current rights, just over half.
of Apple's latest bid.
I think this is really interesting and really exciting.
As someone who's already committed to Apple TV+, I think this is great.
If I wasn't committed to Apple TV+, I would be very grumbly because that's another subscription I would potentially need to do.
But it is worth noting a couple of things.
First of all, I pay for and subscribe to F1 TV
Which is Formula One's own streaming service, which has always been pretty good, but has gotten really good in this season.
What makes it really special now is that when you're watching on like the Apple TV, for example, you can not only have the main race feed.
But you can additionally have like two or three other feeds.
So you can have like the race feed and then your favorite driver and someone who's, you know, your favorite driver's enemy or something like that off to the side is not literally picture in picture, but, you know, kind of an accessory screen or like Jason Snell's multi-view that he's always talking about and so on.
And so that's really great.
And that's, I think, $80 a year, if I recall correctly, a season for the standard version.
It's like $120 for the fancy version I was just talking about where you get the multi-view.
And also for the six of you that happen to be Vision Pro owners, Vroom is an incredible app that I don't...
think is available anymore it was only ever available via test flight but you could hook up your f1 tv uh credentials and log into that and get like an in space multi-view so imagine what i was just describing but more little rectangles and all over the place you could get a 3d view of the uh of the track and where the cars are on the track it is phenomenal um i'll put a link in the show notes to a reddit post that does a really good job of showing a like video of how this works it's really really great and that worked via f1 tv
And then finally, last episode, I spoke about a immersive Vision Pro thing where you got to ride along with Brad Pitt.
And again, immersive means you can twist your head and you'll get a different view and so on and so forth.
And I conflated that, I think, in the last episode with John's video, which, John, remind me what you had brought to the table.
It was Brad Pitt getting to drive a real F1 car by himself.
uh in a non-movie capacity as the actual just person brad pitt and it was on youtube i think it was released around the time the f1 movie was released so it's not it's pretty new or at least it's newly posted to youtube so i didn't know that it wasn't the same thing as you were describing but i had just seen it recently
Yeah.
And I have since watched that cause I didn't even, I don't know how I missed it, but I didn't know it was a thing.
It's like 20, 30 minutes.
And if you're into Brad Pitt or F1 or anything like that, I freaking loved it.
I thought it was delightful.
Uh, we will put the link in this show notes and then the immersive ride along thing.
Unfortunately, there's no direct link to that immersive video, but I'll put a link in the show notes to something that if you have your vision pro on, if you scroll down on what I link to, you can find it there, but I can't link you directly to that video.
Apple hasn't discovered how links work yet.
They'll figure it out eventually.
Do you think there's anybody listening to this right now who is currently, as they're listening, wearing a Vision Bro?
No.
No.
But I think there are people listening who own one.
Yes, definitely, definitely.
And the immersive thing is all of like five minutes, but it's delightful.
It's really, really cool.
And it gives you a real kind of feel for what it's like to be in an F1 card.
It's really great.
John, is your toaster still really great?
Because what I have in our internal show notes is John's toaster update, and I'm nervous.
Uh-oh.
I think it was last episode where I talked about my toaster that I got as a gag gift in 2011 at WWDC that turned out to be an amazingly good toaster that I kept for 14 years that just started going a little wonky.
So I replaced it with the same model of toaster that had a couple of improvements.
Well, since then, there have been developments.
Well, first is I did actually try to buy a spare part to fix the old toaster only after removing 8,000 screws that hold...
my old toaster together and getting at the part and i was about to remove it i realized oh the replacement part that i bought to replace it with is not exactly the same the little connector is different i guess i could have cut the wires and spliced it together but they seem to have like heat resistant shielding on it and i was like nope not gonna do that not gonna try to splice wires inside the toaster so
I just put the 8000 screws back in and put it back together.
So that was a bummer.
But anyway, the real update is that my brand new toaster and I was in the kitchen.
I think I was cooking something on the stovetop, but I wasn't using the toaster.
No one to use the toaster for hours.
Suddenly, the new toaster started going beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
At first, I didn't know where the heck the beeping was come from.
It didn't sound like a smoke alarm beeping.
It was, you know, just like a computer-y beeping noise.
I'm like, what?
I don't have any... What in the kitchen could possibly be making that noise?
And then I looked over the toaster because the screen had come on.
And on the screen were the letters E-0-1.
oh no that's not good so i looked that up in the manual uh and in the manual for my toaster it says the lcd screen will display e01 when there is a non-resettable issue with this appliance should this occur immediately remove the power cord from the wall outlet and call breville customer service
So I did.
Uh, actually they were close.
I had to wait the next day.
So I called, I did unplug the toaster and then I called Breville customer service, uh, the next day.
Um, I was trying to navigate the phone tree and I'm an on hold, you know, as you are, I was calling on my iPhone, uh,
And it said, by the way, if you don't want to wait and listen to this whole music, you can press one and we'll give you a call back on my guest.
I totally want to do that.
So I brought up the keypad and I pressed one.
It didn't work.
And I tried it like nine times.
It said, you know, press one if you want to call back.
And I pressed one.
It didn't work.
So I gave up, hung up, called on my landline phone, pressed one there.
It worked fine.
Eventually, I got two callbacks from them.
But anyway, their system was a little wonky.
They did call me back, which was nice.
And I said, hey.
It showed E01.
And I always forget about that.
I've talked about it multiple times in the show, but every time it happens to me, I'm like, oh yeah, that's the age we live in.
Do you remember when I had like the wonky Microsoft mouse and I said they wanted me to like send a video of it being broken?
Yeah.
In the age where all customer service people know that you probably have a way to...
take pictures and video immediately and send it to them.
And so they're like, why should I waste my time believing what people say on the phone like we used to in the old days when I can ask them to prove it with cameras and video?
So this time they had like, they SMSed me a link to a webpage that asked to use the camera.
It's like they wanted like live video of it.
And here's the thing.
I knew because I had unplugged it.
Well, first thing it is, I unplugged it and plugged it back in, and E01 was still there.
Then I unplugged it, left it unplugged for like an hour and plugged it back in, and E01 was gone.
And everything seemed to work fine, but I'm like, well, whatever, I'm just going to leave this thing unplugged.
So I knew what the deal was, but I'm like, well, if you want to see video, all you're going to see is me plug the toaster in, and it's going to appear to work fine.
And so sure enough, I did.
I videoed.
I plugged the toaster in.
At this point, it had been unplugged overnight.
I plugged the toaster in.
It appeared to work fine.
She had me do a bunch of test things.
And yep, see, it seems to work fine.
And basically, the only reason I was calling is like, look, the manual says unplug it immediately and call customer service.
So that's what I did.
So I was like, why does it say that?
Is it going to catch fire or whatever?
And she's like, well, if it seems like it's working fine now, it should be fine.
No, it won't catch fire, blah, blah, blah.
So if I die because my toaster burns my house down, send them this podcast.
because they told me and i asked repeatedly so is it okay for me to keep using this toaster now like yep totally fine plug it back in seems like it's working fine you can plug it back in it's all good if you see the error again uh you can call us back so this and i haven't seen the error again we've used toaster all the time uh multiple times a day and it's been fine so far but anyway this toaster is on notice and i still have the old one in the attic
It has been unscrewed once and put back together.
I don't know what the deal is there.
You know, again, if you Google for this, lots of people have this easier one, various theories about what it might or might not be.
But I haven't seen it since.
But I'm keeping my eye on it.
And then, by the way, so I got, you know, I said I press one for the callback.
Eventually, the iPhone callback thing worked, too.
Like I press one and it said that they would call back.
So I got two callbacks.
One of them I did the whole rigmarole with.
The other one, I just said, oh, someone else already called me back and I got my issue sorted out.
Then today they called me again and said, hey, just checking in.
Were they checking to see if my house had burned down?
I don't know.
Just checking in to make sure you don't have any problems.
Like, nope, problem has to.
So mixed, mixed review for Breville customer service.
They actually call you back, which is not always true of Apple, by the way.
because I've done the callback thing on Apple and not got a callback many times in my life.
I have gotten the callbacks many times in my life as well.
But anyway, Breville is, you know, 100% on they will call you back.
And I didn't even know they were going to call again and say, just check in and everything's fine.
So there you have it.
My new replacement toaster.
Not sure what the deal is.
Maybe it was just nervous about being in a new house, but we'll see.
Yeah, I actually, I had to do that customer support video link thing on my phone too.
My Fios went out and I had to call Verizon.
And the thing with Verizon is Verizon Fios, you know, that's their name for their fiber optic ISP to your home.
Verizon Fios is amazing once you get it working and once it's hooked up.
You never have to interact with Verizon unless something breaks.
And in this case, it only broke after six continuous years of service, which, okay, not too bad.
However, when you do have to contact Verizon, it's terrible.
Like Verizon has...
possibly the worst customer service i've dealt with in a very long time in terms of xfinity has entered the chat sir okay it's a real uh it's a real race to the bottom between those two titans yeah like you know talk about like you know unhelpful people very very long hold times like two hour hold times like very long hold times trying to upsell you at completely inappropriate times oh my god oh totally
But they also did the same thing.
It's probably using the same service where they texted me a link.
Just like John was saying, they texted me a link to this web app that used the camera to stream video live to them, which I kind of felt a little bit uneasy about that, to be honest.
I'm like, if I knew that you were going to make me stream video to you as I walk...
through my house to show you the router and the utility closet and everything i'm like maybe i would have like cleaned up the house a little i don't know like it felt it felt very invasive like i i don't i don't mind the invasiveness of it and i'm not against it i think it does actually like let's cut to the chase here we have the technology we should use it it just surprises me every time like especially in cases where if i just say like my thing showed easier or what like they used to before they had the ability to do this they would just believe what you said which obviously is a downside they wouldn't lie to them but
But it also saved time if you're telling the truth.
And I'm telling the truth about what happened.
But anyway, in cases like Fios things, I think I would probably find it helpful.
But I have lied to Fios in the past, back when they used to be real angry if you weren't using their equipment.
And I never used their equipment, you know, like their router or anything.
But these days, they're way more chill about that.
Yeah, the whole like, you know, show us a video thing.
I can see why they do that.
And I can see why it might work well in a lot of cases.
I just it feels a little bit skeevy to me.
I don't know.
I don't love that.
Yeah, there's totally some giant cache of the inside of everyone's houses recorded on some website that's insecure, like the same way that like people getting access to the accidental like Siri activations and stuff.
This is absolutely happening with all those apps, I'm sure.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, I haven't had to do this in a long time, thankfully, as I knock on wood.
But I know that my time will come.
And I mean, because we moved to this house in 2008, so it's been almost 20 years.
And I think I've spoken to Verizon Fios customer service twice, maybe thrice.
Once you get it working, you never have to deal with them, which is good because dealing with them is the worst.
Well, I mean, so...
The in-house stuff is great, but like, for example, if a tree falls two blocks over and, you know, breaks the fiber optic cable running to your house, you would think that's like, well, they know about that, right?
They'll fix it.
I don't have to call.
You probably have to call.
And going, like, trying to convince them or convince yourself that it really is the tree that fell and broke the wire, like, that's the problem, not...
Oh, you changed something in your house, you know, or your router is broken or whatever.
Like, oh, you're not using the Fios router.
It's like, I swear it's the tree.
Like literally things are broken and on the ground.
Send a truck.
I promise.
All right.
Well, I have my own update.
I am the happy recipient.
of refreshed, refurbished, replaced, repaired AirPods.
So where we last left our hero, I had gone to the Apple store.
Shoot, I don't remember what day it was.
I guess it was like Tuesday last week.
And I had said, hey, you know, my right earbud, I keep trying to call it earbud and AirPod all at the same time.
I can only say but one word at once.
Bear with me, everyone.
I mean, you're not the only person who has ever jumbled these names up.
Exactly.
Everyone I've ever heard talk about these products.
It's so true.
Just say iTouch.
Yeah, my right eye touch.
My right eye touch was failing.
So anyway, so I went to the Apple store and explained, oh, you know, a listener was very kind to a, well, I didn't say a listener, but, you know, I said a friend had been very kind to send me a replacement case, charging case, and that doesn't seem to be working.
What do I do?
And he said, all right, well, we're going to put it back in the original case that it came with because it turns out past Casey had optioned AppleCare on it, and we're going to send both AirPods, AirPods, whatever they're called, jeezy peasy.
AirPods, though.
basketball playing dog.
Yeah.
Right.
My bad.
A great layup on that one.
Anyways, we're going to send all of them up to Apple, which as it turns out is in Louisville where all these repair places are and we'll see what happens.
And so, um, I eventually, I forget when it was specifically, but I think it was like late last week at like 10, 10 30 at night.
I got an email saying, Hey, we have results.
Here's what we found.
And let me repeat to you that the right
pod was the one that was not able to charge, was dead as a doornail.
The case seemed fine.
The left pod seemed fine.
So they said, okay, here's what we found.
There's water damage in the case, water damage in the left pod, water damage in the right pod.
That'll be 30 bucks, please.
And for a minute, I was like, what?
No.
I mean, that makes sense.
Like, you work out in them, right?
I do.
It's not terribly often, but I do.
And I think there is a strong possibility that I had dropped the right one in water at some point, which I didn't think about.
This seems like something you would remember.
I agree.
I agree that I would remember.
You think you might have dropped them in water?
I think it is possible.
This is material information to the case.
Well, how can you like do they go into glasses of water so frequently that you can't remember?
That would be a notable event in my life if I drop my AirPods into a thing of water.
Do you mean like you drop them onto like a little puddle on the counter?
I can imagine.
I can't.
See, here's the thing.
My own memory, my own confidence in my own memory is so bad that I have a vague recollection of perhaps one of them.
I think the right one.
hopping into the sink, perhaps when I was taking my contacts out and cleaning them and whatnot, so there was standing water in the sink, and grabbing it immediately, but I mean, hey, water damage is water damage.
Wait, it was standing water, like you had plugged the sink?
Yeah, because I wear hard, we're really going down the rabbit hole now.
All right, so I wear hard contact lenses because I have a weird issue called keratoconus.
Keratoconus means my eyeballs, not literally, but figuratively speaking, are shaped like American footballs.
And so hard contact lenses puts a nice regularly rounded surface in front of my eyes.
And so that's how I can see.
And when I have my contacts in, I have pretty good vision.
Not great, but pretty good vision.
And if I take my hard contacts out, I'm freaking blind.
And so that means because they're hard contacts, they're not disposable like everyone thinks of when they hear contact lenses.
So I have to clean them every single night.
And in that process, I plug the sink because it has happened many years ago that I've whiffed as I'm like rinsing them or whatever and down the drain they go and I'm out 300 bucks.
So you're plugging it to stop something from going down the drain, but do you then fill the sink with water?
Exactly.
No, it's just as in the process of rinsing them, the sink will fill with water.
All right.
All right.
Well, so that, so you, maybe like one fell out of your ear into the sink.
Right.
It was like a, you know, a half an inch of water in the bottom of it.
You yanked out real fast.
Exactly.
But I mean, Hey, water, water is water.
Damage is damage.
I mean,
honestly it doesn't matter this is the whole another one of the things you get when you pay for apple care in fact some people wrote in to say this maybe it's in part of the things you put in here but like people send them through the wash all the time like they're at dinner my pocket i sent my pants through the wash with my airpods in them you go you got apple care plus that'll be 30 bucks new airpods yep exactly so they said oh there's all this water damage and of course you know not dissimilar from my initial reaction to the uh the movie database starting to bill me i was like what
no that's not true that's not right and then i thought for a beat and i was like okay yeah sure i'll pay the 30 bucks because what am i arguing with this for and honestly like it's those water sensors like this is not this is not a waterproof device it's not a water resistant device it's not anything and it's got holes in it and like i can imagine just your sweat being responsible for water damage in a lot of airpods so that's another reason to potentially get apple care on them if you can if you know you're gonna sweat and kill them eventually
Oh, I think there is some water resistance to them.
I think they're just, it's just not a ton.
Yeah.
So one way or another, uh, I paid my 30 bucks pretty much immediately.
I think it was Thursday or Friday.
I can't recall that.
They said, okay, we'll ship.
I think it was Thursday night.
They ended up shipping on Friday, if I recall correctly.
Um,
And actually surprisingly early for UPS, they arrived at my door today.
The other funny thing was when I was with the genius, who again was very kind and very helpful, the genius was like, hey, we can ship this to your house if you want, but you're going to have to be there to sign for it.
And I was like, yeah, that's fine.
You're gonna have to be there to sign for it.
Like, this is clearly a man who has been through some stuff with angry customers in the past, right?
And I was like, no, no, it's fine.
I work from home.
It should be fine.
And sure enough, the UPS came and dropped it on my front stoop and walked away.
So I'm not mad at him, you know, having erred on the side of caution, but I thought that quite funny because he made a stink about the fact that I needed to sign for it.
But anyways, I was hoping against all logic that maybe they would give me not only, you know, a new, two new AirPods, two new earbuds, two new eye touches, but maybe...
But maybe I would get a USB-C case.
A USB-C case that, to be completely clear, I in no way deserved.
I was going to say no reasonable way.
I straight up did not deserve a USB-C case, but I was hoping.
I did not receive a USB-C case, which I'm sad to say.
I know, I know.
The era of Apple giving you little upgrades for service, that was occasionally the case 15, 20 years ago.
They'll still do it if they can't get the old one.
Yeah, but Apple maintains a very strong supply chain now, so that era is in the past.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, I mean, again, I didn't expect it.
I did not deserve it, but I was hoping.
And so that didn't happen.
So all told, this experience on the whole was good.
30 bucks later, plus whatever the cost of the initial AppleCare was, which I truly do not remember,
I have what is effectively a brand new set of AirPods.
Like maybe they were repaired rather than replaced, but it looks to me like it was, you know, a refurb or whatever.
So on the whole, not bad.
I feel like my in-store experience was not great.
Not in the sense that, you know, the genius was bad.
Again, the genius was great.
Just that I kind of wish they would have just given me a new set or whatever, a refurb set and let me walk out.
And I have news about that.
Before we get to that, though, real-time follow-up.
Someone in the chat, long form in the chat, has found footnote number nine on the AirPods Pro 2 specs page.
AirPods Pro 2 are dust, sweat, and water resistant for non-water sports and exercise.
Products, including charging case, were tested under controlled laboratory conditions and have a rating of IP54.
Dust, sweat, and water resistance are not permanent conditions and resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear.
Blah, blah, blah.
So I think, Marco, you just said a moment ago, to a degree, they are at least resistant, and that sounds accurate.
Yeah, they're made to tolerate like, you know, workout sweat and maybe occasionally get, you know, if you're jogging and it's raining, you know, stuff like that.
They're made to tolerate that, not immersion.
Right.
All right.
So now feedback with regard to how I should have handled this.
And I got a few different pieces of feedback, which I thought were really great.
Andrew on things writes, I ran into the same send them in requirement in store, but it wasn't a dire issue.
So I held off for a bit to think about it.
I called a few days later and Apple offered to ship me new ones immediately as long as I agreed to a temporary hold of my credit card until I sent mine back.
Why this is not offered in stores beyond me.
I get why they may not want to do that in store, but this was the way I should have handled it.
Mark W. writes, to get my AirPods repaired, I hopped on the Apple support website, spoke to someone in chat.
Okay, quick aside from Casey now.
Hi, this is Casey.
I looked for some mechanism by which to chat.
Again, like we were talking about in the pre-show, probably user error.
For the life of me, I couldn't find it, and that's why I decided I'll just go to the store, because I thought, I bet you I could do something about this via chat.
I couldn't find it.
Maybe it's plain as day.
I just did not see it.
It's hard to find.
I've stumbled upon it a few times, but I couldn't find it if you asked me to do it right now.
But it's there somewhere.
All right.
Well, that makes me feel a little bit better.
So anyway, back to Mark.
Blah, blah, blah.
Spoke to someone in chat, answered a few questions, and then just asked them for advanced replacement.
And we'll put a link.
A listener, Vortex, actually found the link that's specific to AirPods' advanced replacement.
And we'll put that in the show notes.
So anyway, back to Mark.
Just ask them for advanced replacement, and they set it up for me.
You pay some nominal fee up front, and they ship a replacement AirPod to you the next day with a return box, and then the money is refunded when they receive your faulty unit back.
I've used the advanced replacement service many times over multiple sets of products, and it's the main reason I keep buying AppleCare, because it means I never had to be without headphones.
Let me tell you, this is the first worldiest of first world problems.
But I went half a week or a week without my AirPods.
I knew I used my AirPods all the time.
I knew they made my life and my personal opinion much better.
I didn't realize how awful life was without my AirPods.
Again, I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but holy jamolies, it was genuinely burdensome not to have my AirPods.
And it was such a relief when they came back in today.
So yes, this is advanced replacement or perhaps express replacement service.
And again, we'll put a link in the show notes.
express replacement service is a benefit of apple care plus for airpods with express replacement service will ship you a replacement device so you don't have to wait for repair and this service is is it exists for other other device classes as well not just airpods the link we'll put in the show notes is explicitly for airpods but uh we'll put a link or you can find equivalent links for other things um
So anyway, Anonymous writes,
Then the knockoffs got better, and soon they were in real cases with real warranty coverage.
The fake but convincing AirPods won't turn on, and the next service step would be a replacement.
After a while, we got more tools to identify individual AirPods, which now had individual serial numbers as well.
All this to curb a cycle in which fake AirPods could be laundered into genuine working AirPods.
So to conclude, no part serial does not mean no new AirPods, and thus off to the depot they go.
AppleCare Plus extends the quote-unquote usefulness of a serialized case in this chain by a year.
It also wouldn't be uncommon for us to see other fake Apple devices at the Genius Bar carrying real serial numbers, often with AppleCare Plus coverage attached.
This blew my mind.
I should have expected it.
Blew my mind.
And so that made me feel a little bit better about the fact that when this thing is freaking dead...
And presumably they can't interrogate this AirPod to see what its serial number is.
Okay, maybe I am trying to pass them a fake.
But even if they can, because apparently the fakes carry legitimate serial numbers and they don't have a way to tell whether this is the actual one that we sold with the serial number or a fake one.
So I guess maybe when they send it away, they have other ways to tell whether they're legitimate, like x-raying the inside of them or something or whatever.
But yeah, dealing with counterfeits is an ongoing problem for Apple.
Yeah, and I think we don't fully appreciate like, you know, in in most nerd circles, like the extent to which they are, you know, that people try to defraud them and, you know, for a profit.
And this isn't, you know, this isn't just like, you know, somebody, you know, an individual.
Trying to like, you know, return used AirPods to get new ones.
This is like large scale operations, especially in China, you know, where like the black market and like organized crime is involved.
It's a really huge thing of like basically defrauding Apple out of.
you know, trading in counterfeit copies of their devices that say they don't work to get real ones and then sell them for a profit.
It's a it's a big thing.
And basically, as a result of that, that's that's oftentimes what is behind when Apple like further locks down parts pairing and repairs and Apple care covers and everything.
It's it's often to counteract whatever the latest techniques are of these people who who defraud them.
And so it's a whole huge cat and mouse game, most of which we aren't really aware of and don't really see, but it's going on.
And so I think the problem with all of this, though, is that the result is AppleCare is just going to get worse for Apple's legitimate customers.
There's not really an obvious good solution to it, except that AppleCare,
You think you could just walk in and trade stuff in and get them replaced in person in the stores.
And that's going to be slowly eroded over time as all of these basically scam and fraud defenses have to keep going up.
Bad people ruin stuff for everybody.
I mean, but the express replacement is good because they'll still catch the fraud, presumably, because you do have to send it back and they have put a hold in your credit card.
So if they get if you send in fake ones to, you know.
So someplace where they can check that they're fake, you're just not going to get your money back.
So it stops the counterfeiting, presumably, but also it helps you not be without AirPods for as long as Casey was.
So I guess that's the best workaround we have for this unfortunate situation.
See, you all made fun of me for my initial solution of my AirPods don't last as long as a plane ride.
I just bought a second pair.
I am so happy that I keep two pairs of AirPods because...
Not like, you know, if one, if the battery is dead because I haven't, I've forgotten to charge it for a while.
No problem.
I'll just take out the other pair.
It's fine.
If I accidentally leave one at the house and I'm out somewhere and I have my backpack with me, I have the other pair.
No problem.
I'm wondering why Casey doesn't have a house full of old AirPods like I do.
Well, I have – so my AirPods Mark 1, if you will, I had given to Erin, and she almost never uses them.
And I did that married person thing where I was like, hey, it's really stinky.
I don't have my AirPods right now, hoping that she would say, oh, yeah, you can just take mine back for a little while.
But that seemed a bit aggressive, even though she almost never uses them.
Like, I should be a grown-ass man who can last five days without my beloved AirPods.
And I did, but only just.
I mean, I could have gone to the attic and dug up some of my like OG AirPods that probably would have lasted 10 minutes at a time, but that would have been better than nothing.
But it just didn't seem worth the effort, especially because the attic is a trillion degrees right now.
And then finally, on the AirPods topic, a different anonymous person writes, it's not uncommon for my store to run into five sets or more.
of fake AirPods per day that we visually identify.
It's unknown to me how many we send out that are later found to be non-genuine products.
So here's the thing.
This is what Marco was saying a moment ago.
I don't want to really crack into the right-to-repair discussion because we've been through it.
It's not useful right now.
But if you look at it from Apple's perspective, a lot of the stuff that they do that gets iFixit upset is
I understand, this is Marco's point, I understand why and how they got there.
That doesn't make it right, but I get how they got there.
And this is a very tricky problem to solve.
And I had no idea how bad it was.
And this anonymous person said they were in a metro area, but they didn't specify specifically where, but it sounded to me like it was a roughly Richmond-sized metro area.
It was not like a Manhattan or anything like that.
So I didn't realize how prevalent this was and how widespread.
Yeah.
I bet most of those people don't know they have fake AirPods.
You know what I mean?
That's also very possible.
Like they just bought them online and they found a good deal on AirPods and they had no idea they were being sold counterfeit goods and also they don't work and they bring them in.
That's got to be the common case.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, back in the day, I don't know how much this is still the case, but back in the day, SD cards were very commonly counterfeited.
And so I once...
unknowingly bought a counterfeit one on Amazon, like a counterfeit SanDisk SD card right from from Amazon, you know, ships from and sold from Amazon dot com, like everything.
And so I from that point forward, I was very careful to only ever buy SD cards from B&H because I know they are also a very good high quality retailer and they're very strict with their supply chain, whereas Amazon is not strict with their supply chain at all.
And so you don't really know necessarily what you're getting on Amazon.
And I still buy everything else on Amazon, really.
But like, you know, the stuff where that kind of thing matters a lot and where they're highly counterfeited, I buy from more more authoritative sources like B&H.
I think now that Apple's products are that highly counterfeited, it's probably best for especially something like AirPods that apparently are very easy to counterfeit.
I think it's even more important than ever to buy Apple's products of those types from Apple.
I agree with you on paper, but have you seen the deals running on AirPods Pro 2?
I think right now, actually, on Amazon, they are like 80 bucks off.
Are they AirPods Pros 2?
I mean, fair, but they're like absurdly discounted.
So again, doesn't make you wrong, but if it were me, it'd be hard to pass that up.
anyway so yeah so in summary 30 bucks later i have effectively new airpods which is great for today but future casey's gonna be real mad when those airpods pro 3 come out i really want to upgrade and i look at my like two month old airpods pros 2 they're gonna be your backups then yeah when you drop the threes in the sink
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All right.
Tell me, John, about tabs in Tahoe, please.
This is something I mentioned on the last episode that there was a way to set a property list entry somewhere to revert the weird capsule shaped tabs in Tahoe to be more normal looking tabs.
And I couldn't remember if it was like a global one or app specific or whatever.
But anyway, Steve Strout and Smith pointed me to the two of his that I was remembering.
It is global.
It's defaults, right?
Minus G, which is the global specifier.
The key is NS Solarium window tabs, and then you set it to a Boolean value of false, and it won't use the capsule-shaped tabs.
Steve says it sets it at the app kit level, so it should affect all apps using the system tabs, but Safari does not use the system tabs, so it won't.
effect safari and that was thus the confusion about whether it was global global i just tried it in uh terminal and so they look the tabs look more normal but everything is still like extremely bright white so it doesn't like it doesn't change the ui back to uh sequoia or anything but if you want to try that out uh for as long as that option lasts uh have fun
And I think the Tahoe public beta is coming soon.
I think it was accidentally released to some people already.
So you could at least probably try it in the public beta if it's still there.
Yeah, probably tomorrow, I would guess.
All right.
Low-cost Apple laptops with A18 Pros.
Man Don Am writes, this would not be the first A-series chip in a Mac as there was... Oh, I forgot to bring this up.
This pissed me off so much because I thought about this when we were recording and then it completely slipped my mind to say something because we got sidetracked on talking about us, talking about something else, and then I meant to circle back and never did.
So anyway...
Amanda Nam writes, this would not be the first A-Series chip in a Mac, as there was the Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit, which used the A12Z from the iPad Pro.
I mean, technically, was that a Mac?
Yeah, I mean... Fair.
Yes.
I mean, you couldn't do a ton with it, but it was a Mac.
I mean, it ran Mac OS, but it was called the Apple Developer Transition Kit, wasn't it?
I don't remember if it had a Mac.
I believe that's right.
But anyway, yes, obviously, yes, there have been...
you could run mac there's better to say you could run mac os on a series chips before but to call this a mac obviously it's not a mac that people could buy in the general public and we had to send them all back to apple so you didn't get to keep them we leased it for a little while so we're saying it's not a mac but is it a robot or not yeah anyway um but it's worth noting that um that was the a12z which was way slower than the a18 and it was fine yeah and
Many different people had a few different things to write or to add.
Perhaps the shell would be plastic instead of aluminum.
I don't think that's probable, but it is certainly possible.
People have fond memories of the plastic iBooks, especially the toilet seat ones that came in fun colors.
So I think there's a lot of nostalgia for that.
Apple could tap into that nostalgia and make a really good plastic MacBook, but...
Plastic is not as good a conductor of heat as aluminum.
And with today's thin and light laptops, I think a plastic one doesn't have the strength or the heat conductivity to be an option.
So I'm thinking that's not particularly likely, but people really did love those colorful ones.
So keep hope alive, I guess.
I mean, honestly, I think when people are hoping for a plastic MacBook, they're not thinking about the iBooks.
They're thinking about the plastic MacBooks, the Intel ones from 2006 through... Yeah, well, there was the Icebook, too, like the white one.
There was a whole bunch of plastic ones, not just the toilet seat.
Yeah, but...
So right at the end of the plastic era.
So, you know, when we think fondly of the plastic MacBooks, what we are thinking of is those very first gen Intel ones from 2006 and eight, you know, and, you know, the ones where like the handrest would like get cracked or would yellow or things like that.
Well, at the very end, they still I think it was like 2010.
It was surprisingly late.
They made a unibody ish looking plastic one.
It was it was like the cheap MacBook MacBook.
you know, product that, you know, for businesses and education for, for like a year or two.
And it, it was a different white plastic case.
It was, I believe like basically one piece or in a very few pieces.
Oh yeah.
They did like a unibody plastic or something close to that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it didn't have any of the problems that the earlier plastic ones did.
It was just like, it was the cheap one.
And by that point, everybody else was like the entire rest of the line was using these cool metal ones and nobody really cared about those anymore.
But yeah,
They could do something like that.
So I think I wouldn't worry about heat because as we learned, there are like, you know, basically like safety requirements in most countries where they can't just bond the processor to the metal body of the laptop because it gets too hot and you can't have that on somebody's lap or touching somebody's skin.
But that's why aluminum is good because it lets the heat spread and not concentrate in one place.
Well, but so their usual approach to heat management is like they don't just stick the processor bonded heat wise somehow to the case.
They have a heat sink on the processor and a fan blows air over it.
And then there's vents on the outside.
Oh, surely to be fanless, right?
I think the A series Mac is going to be fanless.
Yeah, because if you look at the low-end, the MacBook Air is fanless, and that uses the M4 or whatever, but the way they do that is with an air gap.
They basically heat up the cavity inside of it and hope it cools a little bit by convection.
Yeah.
But the iPhone chip uses way less peak power than the M4.
So it's definitely going to be fanless.
But I think they could do a similar thing where they're not attaching it to the case.
So you don't really necessarily need the case.
You just need ventilation.
It can't be sealed.
Maybe you can get away with it, but aluminum would be better.
But here's the thing.
I think people forget exactly how massive by modern...
those plastic ones were, even the very last plastic one that you just described.
Forget about the toilet seat.
If you ever looked at the toilet seat, you'd be like, was this always this big?
Yeah, it was always that big.
The Icebook that people have fond memories of, massive, huge, gigantic, way bigger than you remember.
Even those old plastic MacBooks, including the black MacBook that you charged extra for, that last unibody one,
They're a lot bigger, especially on things like the screen, like how thick is the top lid that has the screen in it.
I'm not sure you can do a top lid like that with plastic.
And I don't think they're going to have an aluminum top lid and a plastic bottom.
I think plastic is extremely unlikely.
Engineering wise, it could be done.
But it seems like it would be, again, at this point, more effort for Apple to figure out how to make a viable laptop in modern proportions and performance with no fan out of plastic than would for them to just use aluminum, especially if they were using an existing case.
I mean, I think you're probably right.
I think plastic is a stretch in this case because one of the big benefits of using aluminum in this case is you get a lot of rigidity for a thin case.
Plastic, you don't get a lot of rigidity.
So typically, plastic...
uh electronics have some kind of metal frame inside of them and you know it doesn't necessarily cover the entire thing but it's like you know a frame a skeleton basically made of metal to add rigidity in various points um so they would probably need to do something like that and i can't imagine they would i can't imagine that would be worth the trade-off like i think they would probably if they want to have a different case construction that is cheaper uh
My idea that I said last time about just not doing it unibody, having it be in panels, I think is more likely.
Gross.
Gross.
But again, keep in mind, too, if they are going for very inexpensive, they are probably going to want to replace that Walmart $650 M1 MacBook Air.
Now, one option, I believe they mentioned this on upgrade, like one option is they could just keep using that old MacBook Air case, the teardrop shape one.
I said that on the last episode.
Stop crediting upgrade for things that I said.
Okay.
Oh, gracious.
So, you know, they could just keep using that case, which they are currently selling brand new in a $650 laptop.
So that is possible to just keep using that at that price point.
What I really hope...
is that they don't jack up that price point too much.
Obviously, whenever Apple has a low price point, and then they introduce a generational leap for that product, they almost always raise the price at first, and then eventually chip it down back to that product.
So hopefully, if they have to go above $650 for this new one when it's brand new,
Hopefully then after a year or two, it's right back down there or maybe even lower.
I think Apple could really get a lot of great market share if they could get it as close to that $500 point as possible because if you look at what is out there in PC laptops –
There's a lot of options at those prices, and they're not all garbage.
There are some decent ones that are around that price point.
And again, if Apple's making that low-end iPad for $300, they can totally do this with most of those same parts, just throw a keyboard and trackpad on there.
So we know they can do it if they choose to.
I really hope they do, and I think it could be a very interesting product.
I don't think, though, that that has to be a super cool, thin, and light product.
It really could just be that old MacBook Air case or it could be the M2 forward MacBook Air case like the flat one that we have now.
It could just be that case with lower spec parts in it.
I hope they're more creative than that and I hope they take the opportunity if they're going to do something new.
to really rethink a lot of those design choices to make it radically cheaper, not just $100 or $200 cheaper.
But that is not necessarily the Tim Cook way.
The Tim Cook way normally is you just keep selling the older one and the older one and the older one.
You cut $100 off.
Each year it goes older.
That's the Tim Cook way.
And that goes fine for a while.
But if they really want to dig down into that price range and get really much lower than where they are now,
They need something that's designed that way from the start.
So I'm still very interested to see what this product ends up being.
And I think it could be really, really cool.
And I think the disaster scenario for my hopes and dreams here is it's literally just the MacBook Air with an A18 instead of an M4.
And it's like $200 cheaper.
That I think would be the very disappointing scenario.
But I hope they do more than that.
We shall see.
We are getting a call that Jason says that he said it before you, John.
I'm sure he did, but I didn't hear it before I recorded it.
Oh, okay.
So again, if you're on this podcast and you're going to credit somebody with, I think I heard somebody say this, you heard me say it.
Okay.
Oh, John.
I mean, in all fairness, so Upgrade comes out on Mondays.
I usually make a point to listen to it before we record because we cover a lot of the same topics.
I make a point not to listen to it before we record for exactly this reason.
Well, because we cover a lot of similar topics, I try to listen to them before we record.
And so chances are I did hear about it from Jason before I heard about it from you.
I know, but you heard it from me most recently, and it's most relevant to this show because it's the show that I'm on.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my gosh.
Oh, my gosh.
It's not like a last modified thing.
It doesn't matter who said it most recently.
You touched it last.
Okay.
Well, it's in the trying to reach back into your memory.
I think recency might make it more prominent.
Oh, my God.
Primacy.
Is that the right word?
Makes it more prominent in your mind?
Moving on, gentlemen.
Another piece of feedback that a lot of people sent in.
Hey, maybe it'll run iPad OS instead of Mac OS.
i don't want that that's just an ipad with a keyboard we have those already yeah no but that's that's something that we've talked about for years that a lot of people want and the rumor mill being what it is it's not you know ridiculous to assume that maybe they got this wrong what we're talking about is and i basically an ipad with a permanently attached keyboard with a hinge like an ipad laptop for the entire history of apple selling various uh floppy or not so floppy keyboards that you attach to ipads many people have said i
I love iPadOS.
I would love to use this as a laptop, but the floppy thing isn't right, and it's heavy, and it's weird, and can't they just sell me an iPad with a permanently attached keyboard and trackpad, just like, you know, a regular laptop?
Only it's not a laptop, it's an iPad.
I think that's a product that some people still want.
I don't think enough people want it that Apple's going to make it, but this type of rumor is the type of thing that could be misconstrued by, you know, a game of telephone or whatever the other analogy of the people, lots of people are feeling different parts of the element and not knowing which part, you know, like...
you know a a cheaper device with an a series processor but but i honestly i think if it was an ipad they would probably say yeah but it's a touch screen and that really or there'd be like some kind of touch screen mac rumor so for all the people out there who want an ipad with a permanently attached keyboard and trackpad we hear you but i'm gonna i think this rumor is not that because i think if if we would know if it had like a touch screen or something
By the way, that would be the thing to call iBook if you were going to bring that name back.
I think the reality is that the iPad... For most of the people who want that, they're already using iPads and it's basically fine.
For people who want...
you know, inexpensive laptops or less expensive laptops, I should say, people who want less expensive laptops, usually there's something about iPad OS that makes them say, no, I can't do that or I don't want to do that.
That's not what I'm looking for.
So,
Ultimately, when people want a laptop, they they've already had the option to make an iPad into a laptop for many, many, many years.
So all the people who are satisfied by that already have it.
I think Apple could make a better version of that if they had it built in.
You know, they wouldn't need all these all this bulk for the case to attach to the iPad and the weird hinge and the counterweighting and everything like the experience of using an iPad with the modern magic keyboards.
I think, frankly, is terrible because they're so bulky.
That is true.
They're so thick.
They're so heavy.
It doubles the weight of the whole thing.
And most of that is structure and apparatus that you wouldn't need if you did make a combined product that just had a laptop base with a screen and an iPad.
I was like...
The resulting combo device, if it was made that way from the start to have a keyboard, you know, you'd put the battery at the bottom.
You'd have the thin screen like, you know, you'd make concessions that would make it far more compact and easier to mechanically operate.
So it could be better.
But I just don't think that the people who want to use an iPad as a laptop are so dissatisfied with the current options that this would gain Apple much market share.
Whereas, if you look at how many people want a laptop but don't want to pay...
a thousand dollars for it and you can go on like you can go to any store or you can go on Amazon or whatever and you can buy a not awful PC laptop for 500 bucks like that's a pretty big potential market to expand into so I think I hope
Apple really addresses that to try to expand the Mac market share meaningfully rather than if this ends up just being an iPad with a keyboard built in.
That's fine, but I think that's a much smaller incremental market above what they already have.
Finally, I'm contractually obligated to bring up what a handful of people said.
Cellular?
The A18 already knows how to talk to cell networks and cell modems.
I know, but still, I've got to say it again, because come on.
Keep trying to manifest, as the kids say.
It'll happen for us someday.
But see, we already have M4 cellular devices.
They're called iPad Pros and iPad Airs.
Mm-hmm.
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All right, so as we record, it was a day or two back, I think, that we heard news that Apple is suing John Prosser, the prolific leaker, for stealing their iOS trade secrets.
Reading from The Verge, Apple has sued the well-known leaker John Prosser for the alleged theft of trade secrets related to iOS 26.
According to the lawsuit, Apple claims that Prosser offered Michael Ramaciotti money or a future job opportunity in exchange for access to a company phone belonging to his friend, Ethan Lipnick, an Apple software engineer working on iOS.
All right.
I hope I'm getting that right, allegedly learnt Lipnick's iPhone passcode, used quote-unquote location tracking to determine when he'd be away from home for an extended period, and then accessed the iPhone running a development version of the mobile OS.
Apple says that Ramicotti showed the software to Prosser over a video call, which Prosser recorded, shared with others, and then used to create renders of the new designs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
wow yikes i think when we saw these demo videos where it's like oh he was being smart by not showing the info he has he's showing a recreation so that way you know someone whoever leaked it doesn't get in trouble because you could figure out what build they had or secret stuff in the background that you can only you know what i mean like like watermarking it or something yep um so that part was smart the part that doesn't seem like it's smart is the thing that he's accused of doing uh
Is pretty clearly outside the realm of just like, I'm just, you know, I just report things that people tell me.
It's more like a sort of a conspiracy to commit a crime, which is to access a Apple employees phone.
without their consent or whatever.
I don't know.
The details are fuzzy, and I'm sure it'll be hashed out in court.
But reading this whole story, I was thinking that if it was my profession to do Apple leaks, which I think is a perfectly fine thing, like any kind of journalist that you can get sources who are going to give you secret information and you publish it, that's fine.
But I would...
be a lot more careful than it seems like these people were being about what is and isn't the right way to do that like you know learn like i guess i mean i guess you live and learn this is how people learn but like uh what is covered and what isn't when do i become a criminal when do i not if i just accept anonymously leaked information and publish it uh you know is there other cases where that's a problem but like
You know, working with somebody to try to get access to company secrets yourself is now you're basically like a computer criminal.
Like it's not you're not so much a journalist or a leaker anymore.
But yeah, I bet these folks play fast and loose with that just because it's so the desirability of getting a big scoop and the value of it is so big to them that I can see people being tempted to do things like the accusations in this case.
Yeah.
When I first heard about this, my reaction was, Oh, that is so gross.
Here's one of the most valuable companies in the world going after a guy.
And that just feels super icky to me.
And then I continued to read more about what he's accused of.
And obviously maybe this is all fabrications.
Maybe it's all lie.
Um, like, like as an example, um, what did I read a second?
Where is it?
Uh,
claims to have a voice note sent by Ramos Piatti to Lipnick apologizing for the incident, claiming the subterfuge was Prosser's idea.
How convenient, right?
Like, that could be completely fabricated.
I mean, this will get hashed out in court, but, like, there is precedent for Apple essentially shutting down
leakers when they do something where they're basically the leaker is in the wrong, legally speaking, and Apple uses its weight to crush them.
And that's part of, you know, it's kind of like if a newspaper, like if reporters for a newspaper hack their way into Apple and took secrets out and published them,
Uh, Apple should sue them and should win and they shouldn't do that.
Right.
Uh, but that's, that's what these court, this court case will determine.
Now, obviously anything, any kind of court case, especially in this country is so lopsided when one company has infinity money and the other, the other, uh, the other person in the court case is essentially zero when rounded compared to how much money Apple has for lawyers.
But, uh,
So that part of it isn't great and fair, but hopefully we'll figure out what the truth is here eventually.
You know, like it's a tough business to be in.
If Apple leaks are your business, there's lots of danger.
And one of the dangers is the big angry tiger that is Apple that doesn't want leaks to happen.
Apple is usually, I think...
i'm not gonna say nice but like more hands-off than you would imagine but if any of the facts in this case are actually as reported here i can see apple saying this one we need to you know i'm actually the only one thing i feel bad about this this thing is that the the employee was fired the lipnick was fired like i know like he i'm sure he violated things by not properly securing blah blah blah but if he was like
duped into doing this i don't know maybe they have evidence that he was not as uh that he actually participated in this thing but like everyone makes mistakes like i don't think the guy who left the uh the iphone 4 in a bar he didn't get fired did he no i don't think so but so there's a few things there first of all i i think i can understand how this lipnik person got fired because clearly he left this pre-release phone or maybe not pre-release hardware but pre-release software and
in a place where other people could get to it.
And his passcode was not secure enough that other people discovered it.
Well, where was the place that other people could get to it?
In his apartment, but still.
In his house?
Like, ugh.
I mean, I hear you.
I do.
But, I mean, any Apple person I've ever spoken to that has gotten pre-release anything is...
Yeah.
And so he was allowed to wear it out because it had already been announced or whatever.
And I was, and I, he had his wrist like, or his hand on the table and I was like, Oh wait, let me, let me see that.
And like, let me touch it or whatever.
I just want to see what it felt like.
And he like jerked his hand back.
You can't do that.
oh, oh, okay, sorry.
I wasn't trying to be any kind of way.
It just, I didn't realize.
And he was like flabbergasted that I would even make a motion to like just pet the outside of this like watch band to see what it felt like.
It's like when I grabbed the mouse of the iMac Pro at WWC and got scolded by an Apple person.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A Mac that was out in the public in a place where people could see it, but like, oh, you can't touch it.
Right, exactly.
But to go back to what you were saying a moment ago, what I was starting to say, and then we got sidetracked, is that when I first heard this, yeah, it felt really gross to me.
But then, as I'm hearing more, and again, we don't know what the reality is, but if you're to believe what Apple is asserting, that this was a concerted effort, a kind of conspiracy, I think you said a moment ago, to get this information out of this device and out of this employee, I don't think I'm too upset about them going after Prosser.
I feel bad for them, but like...
F-A-F-O, man.
Like, I kind of get it.
I kind of get it.
I don't know.
Marco, where do you come down on this?
We don't know enough of the specifics yet to judge for sure, you know, who's liable for what and who should be prosecuted for what or whatever.
But...
In general, I think it's a very, very bad idea for companies to sue journalists like that.
That's not a great idea.
Most of the time it is occasionally, you know, you can occasionally have good grounds for that.
It is occasionally the right move or at least a valid move.
It's a very dangerous move.
And it's like they have to be you have to be really sure what you're doing.
And and I think it can it can very easily have a chilling effect like where I stand on on what has probably happened here.
I don't think there's anything wrong if somebody gives you information for you to report on it because.
Mm hmm.
Because, look, we do that.
We don't have the kind of sources that they do.
We don't have really salacious, here's what the next version of Iowa... Nobody gives us that information and we don't ask for it.
But if people tell us stuff and we talk about it on the show, it's not that far from that.
You can see a world in which...
If Apple sues Jon Prosser for this and wins, like if we talk about what Jon Prosser's videos had in them and we say, oh, look, Jon Prosser, this YouTuber, had this had this report that alleges these mockups of what the new iOS will look at.
And we talk about it.
Are we putting ourselves in danger by talking about it?
I think you've identified the line, which is in that scenario, we would have no participation in the extraction of this information from Apple.
Like someone posted it on a web page and then we're just talking about what we saw on a public web page, right?
So we're fine there.
Are we?
Prosser would be fine if he just received this information and published it.
But if he was conspiring with how to break into this guy's apartment when he's not there and look at his phone without his consent, that has nothing to do with journalism.
It has everything to do with like that's just forget about journalism.
That's just a crime, period, like going and go into someone's apartment and messing with their stuff when they're not in there, monitoring their location to know when they're not there and then going and getting their stuff.
That's, I mean, again, this is a civil suit, not a criminal thing.
But depending on how they executed this plan, it could actually be a criminal proceeding or maybe they got let in by a roommate.
But even if they got let in by a roommate, they're messing with other roommate stuff.
But in a civil procedure, this looks like
a conspiracy to like they're participating in to get the information if you're a journalist you can't be planning how we're going to break into apple's hq and get the secrets out you're not a journalist anymore when you do that you're just uh you know it's just industrial espionage you're just you're just a criminal you're a spy
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
So I do agree.
There is an obvious difference between if you are paying for the information, if you are hiring people to get things for you, that is a different level of involvement.
But we don't necessarily know if there's enough evidence that Jon Prosser was at that level of involvement.
This is what he's being accused of.
We'll find out in court whether they have evidence.
Right.
So I don't know.
this like it's too soon to say i'm sure they had good reason to claim what they're claiming i hope they have good reason to claim what they're claiming because i did see some of the evidence that's like i can see this again be interesting court case because in one of the conversations i think prosser's uh or whoever he was talking with says well at least you'll have like plausible deniability because i did this without all your consent and and uh or no i i forget which way they were going but they discussed this very issue of like essentially
is john prosser part of this like does he or are his hands clean and they had like a funny back and forth and like and a messages conversation that's in the the evidence and and that's uh submitted as part of this case oh what idiots and because they're debating about it and there could be like laughing and joking and sarcasm like i wonder how it's going to play in court of like well we were just kidding about that but i do have plausible deniability and i didn't participate and
Yeah, especially if like, you know, Apple can flip one of the people around on Prosser and they'll say, yeah, well, you know, get him to say that when he said that, I totally believed he was serious and not being sarcastic.
Like, that's the tricky part about like, you know, with text, there's always the problem of like,
is my intention coming across in text that's why people put emojis in and stuff and when it becomes a court exhibit trying to explain like imagine having to explain in court like texts that you sent people that could potentially be ambiguous depending on whether you're being sarcastic or funny or joking oh i don't want to be in that situation
not fun there was i think there was a 99 pi episode i'm not gonna be able to dig it up about like interpreting emoji in the context of legal agreements and stuff yeah fascinating and i don't remember the conclusions but it made me very uncomfortable because it's like when it's just when it's just a message thread who cares but like when this is potentially evidence of whether or not there was a crime committed and it hinges on whether you knew this thing or whatever and you make a joke about it and it's like but
were you serious or was that like did you put if you write ha ha after it or a lull or a happy like which one of those things mean you're obviously kidding and which one of those things mean you're just excited about the fact that you participated in this crime like it's i would never want to have to argue that i would never want my fate to hinge on the interpretation of that you know what i mean but i'm sure there'll be more evidence that comes out
Oh, thanks to the long form who immediately found the link for that 99PI episode, which is, it's not required listening by any means, but it's worth your time if you haven't heard it.
The other thing I wanted to talk about is Gruber took a look at one of the documents that was in the legal release, and it's saying, I'm not sure, this is an email, I'm not sure who to contact, but as a courtesy to the iOS 19 team at Apple, I wanted to share information that I have about an employee who leaked pre-release design details.
The iOS 19 information shared by John Prosser is sourced from Ethan Lipnick, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they have some redacted names that Gruber has done what appears to be a crack job, a really bang up job of filling in who he thinks these names are.
So this is the aforementioned Ramessiotti, Ian Zalbo, Joe Rosignol, and Michael Burkhart are all listed potentially in the redacted sections of this note.
Yeah, Gerald Rossignol is from, what, MacRumors, right?
Shoot, I should know this, and I'm drawing a blank.
I've seen his name a thousand times.
Yeah, those other names don't ring any bells for me, but obviously Gruber knows them.
What he was doing about it, this looks like one of those things where someone failed to redact a PDF, like they just put a black box over the letters, but when you could select, you know what I mean?
But that's not the case.
I think they did correctly redact it, and what Gruber was doing was simply matching the font in size,
And then typing in letters in the same font and size, seeing what names would fit.
Now, obviously, there's tons of names that would fit in those spaces.
But presumably, Gruber knows that these names are actually relevant to this particular case.
And it's a big coincidence if these are not the names that fit in there.
But we'll find out.
He also put a card down saying that he has a theory about who the tipster is, like who sent this email to Apple.
And he did his usual thing where he puts an MD5 hash of his prediction, and we'll find out in the future if he was right.
Do you think John Gruber will be the last person to use MD5?
I don't know.
I use it constantly, truly.
It still works fine for this purpose.
It annoys me that Apple deprecated the APIs on...
mac os because i use them as part of a hyperspace i'm not using them for cryptographic purposes i'm using them for other purposes and i don't care that they're you know easily cracked or whatever it's not you know when you're not using them cryptographically i wish the way i could turn out that warning and say i know i'm not using it for cryptography it's fine
Do you think somebody's going to like rainbow table attack John Gruber's tweets about it?
Gruber seems to think it's harder because he does like a full sentence and not a word.
But yeah, somebody, someone with a big farm of GPUs probably could crack this if they wanted, but I don't think it's worthwhile.
We'll find out soon enough.
All right.
Let's talk about some news from a couple of weeks ago now, actually almost a month ago.
Cloudflare has announced that in certain circumstances they will be blocking AI crawlers by default.
And so reading, they have like a marketing page blog post about this, and then they also have a news release from the blog post.
For nearly 30 years, the deal that Google made with content creators was simple.
Let us copy your content for search and we'll send you traffic.
But Search is now declining in favor of AI, and AI doesn't reward content creators the way that Search did.
Instead of being a fair trade, the web is being strip-mined by AI crawlers, with content creators seeing almost no traffic and therefore almost no value.
That changes today, July 1, what we're calling Content Independence Day.
Cloudflare, along with the majority of the world's leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content.
That content is the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it's only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it.
Yeah, I wanted to talk about this because this sounds like Cloudflare is being a hero, and I'm sure they have their hearts in the right place, but... Both of those things you said were not my initial reaction to this, but continue.
Yeah, because this kind of... This sat very badly with me.
So...
You know, the situation is that, yes, the kind of implicit deal between web search engines and kind of the ability to publicly crawl websites and publishers, that deal no longer holds in the world of AI.
Like, that is true.
And that radically changes the dynamics of bots crawling websites.
But the problem is...
that's going to radically change the dynamics of any ability for any software to automatically fetch the contents of a website.
Now, you might think, oh, who cares?
That's no big deal.
But...
I can't think of any major app I've written that hasn't needed to do that.
Tumblr did that for its ill-advised RSS importing feature.
RSS itself is something on a website that is hosted by the website.
And if you proxy your website behind Cloudflare, that includes your RSS feed.
So RSS readers will run into this problem if your site is too aggressively blocked from Cloudflare.
And podcast apps definitely do it.
Instapaper certainly needs to do it.
But RSS readers and podcast clients wouldn't fall under the category of, quote, AI companies, right?
Well, so here's the thing.
When Cloudflare protects you from things online,
They protect you from what they feel is bot traffic in whatever threshold they are or whatever heuristic they're running as like, this is suspicious or this might be an attack or this might be scraping all of your content.
But...
What if you just have a bunch of people hitting your RSS feed?
What if you what if there is like, you know, overcast servers for a while?
I had this problem where like overcast crawls millions of RSS feeds every day from six IP addresses.
I ran into this problem a couple years ago where Cloudflare was starting to throttle my requests.
But, of course, they wouldn't tell anybody.
They certainly wouldn't tell the website owners.
The website owners wouldn't have any idea what was going on.
And so a lot of the results would just be like, oh, Overcast just can't read these feeds that everyone else can read.
And it took me months to...
they had some kind of good bot registration program where you could register to be a good bot and you could bypass some of these limitations.
And it took months for me to get through that.
Eventually, I was able to find the right people and eventually I got it through.
But
When people put their website behind Cloudflare, I don't think they necessarily understand all the technical ramifications of what they're doing and potentially blocking things like, oh, we have this RSS feed or we have our podcast feed and we're going to block a whole bunch of apps from accessing it accidentally.
I don't think they intend for that necessarily or understand what they're doing with that.
So what's very, very important...
Cloudflare does by default and how Cloudflare brands what they do in the user interface.
Because what happens a lot is, again, people will think they're going to, oh, I'll block attacks to my site.
Sure.
I'll make my CDN cost cheaper by putting this in front of it.
Great.
And they don't realize what they're doing is causing a lot of problems for smaller apps.
And so when I first read this, it was kind of unclear.
Fortunately, it was not as bad as I expected.
It was kind of unclear.
It seemed like they were turning on AI crawl blocking across their entire network by default.
That is not the case.
They're doing it only for newly registered domains, and apparently it's going to be part of the onboarding flow where you are asked, do you want to block these or not?
But they're not retroactively changing it for their entire network, which is good because one thing they brag about in their press release is that Cloudflare proxies 20% of the web
OK, so think about the amount of power they have.
And again, I can tell you from from running an app that crawls a bunch of feeds from a bunch of websites.
Cloudflare is everywhere.
We use it to use it on ATP.
I use it for overcast like it's everywhere.
And the reason why I use it is not for attack throttling.
It's because it's a really cheap CDN.
It's a very, very cheap, and that's why a lot of people use it.
Cloudflare has a lot of power on the web, and what they just did
was show us that.
And if they actually did go a very, very small step further and turn this on for all of the domains by default and not require an opt-in on all old ones, they would be able to cut off crawling for tons of different apps from 20% of the web in one move.
Now, the web works best when the power is not that concentrated.
That was the whole point of the design of the web.
If you accumulate a whole bunch of power over the web, the best thing you can do is shut up about it.
Never draw attention to yourself or how much power you have and definitely never like overreach in a way that draws a lot of attention to the amount of power you have.
And you can look at, you know, some various events over the last few years that that show this.
I would say this even possibly applies to Apple's controversial CSAM scanning plan, where it's like, oh, we're just going to do this on all your phones.
What?
But you can also – Apple certainly gets it with any controversial App Store rejections, where it's like, oh, you can just declare an entire business won't exist, and it just won't.
Like, that's a lot of power.
Hmm, let's look at that.
But, you know, and with the web, you can see, like, whatever it was last year, two years ago, when Google started invading pages that they have their login integration with by putting the huge overlays saying, log in with your Google account, like, right over the page.
Ugh.
They just turned that on one day.
Like there was there was no, you know, checking with people.
There was no consideration that like you're literally just going to like turn your like little login embed into a giant thing that plasters over the page across thousands or millions of websites.
Google just did that.
They just turned that on because they felt like it and they wanted to juice their numbers or whatever, whatever justification they came up for it.
They just did that.
And that showed, oh, my God, they have way too much power here.
Ooh.
You know, you could also, you know, more recently, I think, obviously, the WordPress drama with Matt Mullenweg and that whole thing.
Like, it's like, oh, he has a lot of power over a lot of the web.
Maybe we should change that.
And you can even I would even look at like, you know, in the current political atmosphere.
The U.S.
has a lot of power over a lot of the web and a lot of the infrastructure around the web.
And a lot of other countries have been like, hmm, we used to be able to trust that.
Now we can't.
Let's start reducing that power.
Let's start diversifying and taking control of our own stuff.
Cloudflare has that level of power now.
I would say Cloudflare has a level of power similar to the United States in terms of power over the Internet.
It is a huge entity.
It controls a huge amount of traffic.
That makes me very uncomfortable.
A small group of people now, a very small group of people, can now make decisions that can impact huge swaths of how the web and how the internet and how internet connected applications work.
I really don't like that, and that makes me very uneasy.
They shouldn't have as much power as they do, and they just showed us how they could wield it in ways that they're a giant stepping around, and who knows what they're going to step on next.
They came very close to stepping on something really big here, and they don't seem like they noticed or cared or thought it was that big or thought it could be a problem.
And ultimately, where we're heading with this, and this is not Cloudflare alone.
This is kind of a problem with the rise of AI and the destruction of the search trade-offs, as we were saying earlier.
But where we're heading with this is the web used to be a place where anybody could really build anything or publish anything or build something that read things that were published and process them and different web apps to read RSS feeds and stuff like that or parse page content or whatever.
We are heading to a point very rapidly now where that's going to be over.
That's going to be shut down.
You're going to have huge swaths of the web blocking crawling from anything.
Google Search Index, maybe, but it could block crawling from any of the web apps you use.
If you use something like IFTTT or Zapier or use some kind of automation, your own curl scripts on your Mac, not to mention, of course, things like RSS readers and podcast apps, but like
So many automations and automation apps and apps that parse data off a website to do something, make a widget or something.
We're in an era now where those are all significantly at risk of not working anymore because everyone's going to start locking down their content and putting things like Cloudflare's JavaScript thing in front of it.
And so it's going to be harder and harder to make anything that interoperates with any of the rest of the web.
And what that's going to do
is make it much harder for small projects and small companies and small developers to get their stuff off the ground and to have their stuff work.
Because the big companies, they'll make deals.
The big companies will be fine.
Google will be fine.
They will make deals with everybody.
It'll work out fine for them.
But people like us are at risk.
And the tools that we use, the tools we make, the businesses we run, the apps that we make, the apps that we use, those are all at risk.
as these giants stomp all over the internet and and i i really am feeling very uneasy about all of that you know it's funny um i've noticed in the last couple of weeks so part of my docker um i don't know swarm not in a literal sense i think that's like a technical term in some context but my array of docker containers one of them is this open source project change detection.io and i'll put a link in the show notes i think i've talked about this once or twice recently and
And what this lets you do is it will periodically go and look at some web page, you know, maybe because you're trying to get an alert for, I don't know, if the TS5 Plus is in stock at CalDigit's website, which is one of the times I most recently used this.
And it'll ping that website every minute, every 10 minutes, every hour, every 10 hours, whatever you want.
And send a little alert when it changes.
And it even is smart in most cases with regard to stock.
And it'll actually parse out and realize, oh, it's in stock and send me a little, you know, push using pushover or what have you.
I love this thing and I use it for cases where I don't have, you know, a website doesn't have an RSS feed.
And I've noticed in the last month or so, and I never put it together until I heard you talking, despite having read about this, you know, a few days ago.
In the last month or so, I've been getting a lot of 403 errors on things that I crawl.
And they're not critical.
It's not the end of the earth.
But silly things that I'd like to know when they're updated, I'm getting 403s.
And I was working on earlier today, actually, trying to find a way to get around that.
And a lot of people have said...
That the Cloudflare, like, oh, are you a robot?
Yes or no?
Like that checkbox that I guess occasionally will give you a capture, but I almost never see that, that that could be causing a problem.
And there's some people that have developed some workarounds that seem to not really work, which from Cloudflare's perspective is great.
But for me, it's just a little, you know, dorky home labber.
That sucks.
Like, I want to be able to very gingerly and lightly crawl these things, and apparently they can detect that a headless instance of Chrome is going after these things, and they deny me, and that stinks.
Is it a big deal in my personal case?
No, it's nothing like what Marco was talking about.
Yeah.
It still sucks, man.
And I kind of hate it.
And maybe this isn't the same thing.
Maybe I'm conflating two very, very different events.
It's exactly the same thing, just a smaller scale.
And that just shows the problems that Cloudflare creates by having so much power over so much of the web.
Like when I was first running into the problems crawling podcast feeds...
I would email some of the big publishers and be like, hey, just so you know, Overcast can't crawl your site because of what you're saying.
And I would say, here's, go to this settings.
And the settings you'd have to go to would basically be like, turn off all protection.
Like, it was all scary and nobody would ever do it.
And thank God I was able to get registered as like an okay bot.
But...
Again, it took me months, and maybe I was only able to do it because I was so bothersome to Cloudflare's people, and maybe because I already had an app that had a good number of users.
If I was just a nobody starting fresh today, could I do that?
Probably not.
I fear that the era of...
The web is just collapsing in so many ways.
It felt like it would be forever.
It felt like it would be our entire lives where the web would be a healthy functioning place the way we always knew it.
And I think it's very much not already in lots of ways.
And it's just going to keep getting locked down more and more.
The last thing the web needs right now is to be made worse.
The web is struggling in a lot of ways.
Content on the web is struggling.
Economics on the web are struggling, again, largely because of AI, but also because social networks and different pressures and different competition from video and stuff like that.
There's a lot going on.
The only thing worse than publishing on the web right now is reading on the web.
It's really quite terrible on so many levels.
But the advantage of the web is that it is much more interconnectable and much – you can build upon it in ways that you can't build upon –
the app platforms nearly as openly or nearly as flexibly.
You can build things like browser plugins that will interact with other people's web pages.
There's different things.
You can have servers backends and you crawl people's APIs and process them like you were just saying.
There's ways you can build things on the web that are simply impossible to do in the world of native apps, especially on phones.
They're so locked down and isolated.
And that is getting eroded.
And when you look at what Cloudflare can do now, what they are already doing with their little bot redirects, like you were just saying, and then now when they do something like start blocking AI crawlers by default, that's dangerous.
That can really start stomping on lots of things.
That's why we're here on the web.
The reason we do things on the web instead of in native apps is to have that kind of reach and flexibility and power and...
If that starts getting locked down where you have to be a big company negotiating with everybody to get your stuff to work at all with anybody else's stuff, the web is dead.
That's killing what the web is.
So I really am fearful for the web.
And I find myself mourning what we have lost and hoping that we can somehow preserve what's left and maybe get some of that back.
But I don't yet see a path forward to do that.
You should probably be more scared of Google than Cloudflare.
But the good thing about all of this is that because the web is a platform that nobody owns, even Google, technically, there is an avenue to like essentially like if if if the currently somewhat benevolent, somewhat dictators like the big companies like Cloudflare, for example, like they're they're big enough that they can cause a big problem.
If they start causing a big problem and like the big companies need to make deals with them or whatever, it is actually technically possible for to kind of like what you were saying with like the EU and everybody doing when they're seeing that Apple is no longer that the US is no longer a trustworthy actor.
You have the ability to go off and splinter and say, OK, but we over here are going to do our thing based on these same technologies.
Obviously, there are things that big companies that can do to thwart that, in particular, if you control, let's say, the world's most popular web browser or the world's most popular search engine.
There's a lot of things you can do to thwart that.
But technically speaking, we do have a little bit of an out there and it is a somewhat competitive market.
Cloudflare is not the only company that does what it does.
So if it does something bad, in theory, its competitors could take advantage of it and yada, yada.
But anyway, all that said, when I saw this story briefly go by, immediately what I thought of
is Cloudflare saying that they're presenting this as, we're a tool that empowers people with websites to do things they couldn't do on their own, like withstand a DDoS attack and deal with bots and stuff like that.
And we're saying here, creators who are on the web, we're giving you this new tool.
We have heard that some of you don't like these AI crawlers.
taking your stuff and using it for their training.
And it's difficult for you to figure out how to stop that because it's not like things on the web have a trustworthy way to identify themselves.
That's what you were getting at before.
It's like you can say in these things, we'll block AI crawlers.
But what does that even mean, right?
It's not the type of thing that an individual small web developer has any chance of being able to do.
How do I stop web AI crawlers?
Well, you can't.
It's a really hard problem.
And Cloudflare is this big, powerful company with tons of money.
Let them take a crack at it.
You already pay them for your CDN or whatever.
Here's a checkbox you can check.
We'll block AI crawlers.
And this is a tool that you, the website owner, you are empowered to do this for your website if you choose to.
And we're giving you that tool.
And this is the relationship you want.
We're being a good company by empowering creators.
And I looked at it as saying, what you're doing, Cloudflare, is constructing a situation such that if you are the middle party,
that gets paid to allow AI crawlers to access websites.
You know what I mean?
That's basically what you were saying, Marco, is like, okay, if people enter into the situation and check the checkbox, what they're checking is saying, I now allow Cloudflare to decide what is and isn't a legitimate crawl.
That's always what they're doing.
But you assume that Cloudflare is benevolent and is actually deciding what is and isn't legitimate crawler according to your understanding of that checkbox.
So they'll block the AI crawlers.
Oh, but what if OpenAI says, hey, we'll make a deal with you, Cloudflare, and we'll pay you a whole jillion dollars if you put us on the allow list.
And so now we're not counted as one of those bad AI crawlers.
I mean, that's obviously the very first thing that will happen.
Yeah, but like, Cloudflare, wouldn't it be great if instead of AI companies getting to crawl all that content for free, instead they all had to pay Cloudflare?
And yeah, that'd be great.
Anyway, so this is like the worst case type of scenario, right?
We're presuming that Cloudflare wouldn't do this because part of their whole reputation and value proposition is that they are the defenders of the open web and all the things that you were talking about, Marco, or whatever, but like...
it's always dangerous to be in a situation where you're relying on the good graces of a very powerful company we talk about that all the time with apple and podcasts like if apple sort of turned bad on podcasts they could do tons of damage so far so good they haven't fingers crossed but that's a terrible situation to be in don't rely on like the kindness of giant companies with huge amounts of power and i'm not you know i think for the current leadership of cloud layer
probably has good intentions with this like most of the things they do as evidenced by how they're rolling it out but you're one bad CEO away from all of this turning in a second which is why structurally it's a bad place to be even if reality wise you could say oh it's fine everybody's doing the right thing this is actually a good move or whatever but like I don't want to be one bad CEO away from 20% of the web getting a man in the middle you know like collecting money in exchange for allowing AI crawl like it's just
It's not a good situation.
So again, I have some, I take some solace in the fact that the technologies involved in the web and the way that those technologies evolve and already exist allows for some routing around of this.
Um, and it does require for a real doomsday scenario would require multiple ones of these big companies to sort of cooperate in a sort of pact of evil where Google agrees to change Chrome in a certain way and Cloudflare agrees to do this and so on and so forth.
And historically, those big companies have been more at odds at each other than willing to do that.
So, um,
i think the web in the end will probably be okay just because as it gets damaged and changes and morphs over time it still finds a way like weeds in your yard to just find a new place to grow but i would feel much more comfortable if we had a little bit more diversity than we do now and
you know how how much how how big is too big is 20 20 of the web too big what is what is wordpress what percentage of websites in the web run wordpress it's some other big number like 45 or something yeah that's probably that's probably also too big or at least too big to have any single person be able to influence that 40 in the way that we had seen it was possible right and and again i'm heartened by the reaction to that which is like everyone's like
We don't want this to ever happen again.
So let's start figuring out how we can remove this single point of failure, single point of control.
We don't want that to be the case.
And again, with Cloudflare, if they start sort of turning the screws or trying to turn on the money faucet, I would hope the reaction of everybody would be similar.
Yeah.
I have a lot of, you know, I spent my entire career as a web developer.
I have a lot of faith in the resilience of the web just because I've seen how it has gone in cycles from being screwed up and then coming back and being screwed up and then coming back.
But yeah, when I see structures like this and, you know, like you said, Marco, like this brings attention to it.
It was always the case.
This is not like this is news.
We've known Cloudflare is big.
But as long as they're just sitting there and not doing anything, you don't think about it too much.
But when they do stuff like this, everyone's head comes up like little prairie dogs, huh?
Again, with Apple Podcasts, I hope they never do anything to make us think they're going to do something bad, but it would be better if this much power wasn't concentrated in this few people.
I think this is a general lesson of history and humanity.
Don't concentrate too much power in the hands of too few people.
That never goes well.
Even if it looks like it's going well for decades or centuries...
it always ends badly and it is better to more widely distribute that power, let's say.
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Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-
You didn't mean to.
Accidental.
Accidental.
Tech Podcast.
So long.
All right, so we have in the internal show notes the following for an after show.
Marco solved sunscreen.
I know.
I know what it is.
You do?
Hats.
European sunscreen that has that chemical we're not allowed to use.
I just bought a new sun hat, so it's top of mind for me.
Before you go any further, please send me the link for that, partially because I am interested in it for myself.
You want to link to the hat I bought?
yes partially because i'm interested in getting us on habit mostly because the entire internet will ask for that me being me i bought two of them um because i didn't know which one i would like better uh but anyway i'll send you them both yes oh my god okay uh no casey wins um so all right all right so i for a long time have had a huge amount of trouble trying to get a sunscreen that doesn't burn my eyes and
Now, you might think, why don't you just not put sunscreen in your eyes?
Spoken like someone who has never been to the beach.
Right.
And I thought, great idea.
And so I have been so diligent, trying to wipe my arm on my face or things like that.
Tried wiping with handkerchiefs.
Have you tried not sweating, Marco?
Right.
Yeah.
The problem is, you know, sweat and gravity.
So I I've just had a problem for years that like sunscreen just always finds a way to burn my eyes, even if I don't even even if I don't even have it on my face, like even if it's just like on my like ears and neck and stuff.
Somehow, if I make one little mistake, if I touch something, I touch somehow a little bit and then my eyes are burning for hours afterwards.
First, I mean, first I was like, okay, mineral sunscreen was the obvious solution.
You know, the way sunscreens work is they either have chemicals that absorb into your skin that themselves absorb UV rays so that they don't burn you.
Those are called chemical sunscreens.
Mineral sunscreens basically are lotions that contain very fine metallic particles, usually zinc or titanium dioxide.
And they basically reflect the sun off your skin as like a physical barrier that literally just reflects it off.
They both have ups and downs.
The main downside of mineral sunscreens, which is what I've been using more recently, is first of all,
Because it's just putting metallic powder on you, it has to kind of stay a little bit goopy forever.
Because otherwise the powder would just fall off of you.
So you kind of are like a little bit like tacky all day long.
If you have it like on your arms and you lean your elbow on a desk, you slide off.
Like it's that good.
That does not sound enjoyable.
Don't forget about leaving that sunscreen all over the interior of your car like your armrest.
It's terrible.
Yeah.
So anything you touch.
I made the mistake of putting sunscreen on my arms and neck and stuff, mineral sunscreen, and then a few minutes later putting a shirt on.
Of course, it gets all over the shirt in the process of putting the shirt on.
It's like, okay, that shirt's ruined.
Next.
And, you know, yeah, certainly if you like go into your car and you put your arm on the armrest in the car, you're going to have a big stripe of white, you know, goop.
And here's the thing just for people thinking about this.
I know a lot of people put this on their small children.
If you put this stuff, put physically, physical sunscreen, like physically blocked sun.
Mineral sunscreen, yeah.
If you put this on your children and let them loosen the backseat of your car, you will never get it clean.
like it is really hard to get i'm telling you from experience it's really hard to get this off of like the interior like the door cards i don't feel like that the the stuff that's on the door that plastic in between even if you don't have a fancy car you just have a cheap car and it's plastic you think oh anything comes off plastic real easy not this stuff it's it's a problem
Oh, and also mineral sunscreen, you know, it it doesn't burn my eyes, but because it is a bunch of metallic powder, it does occasionally just get in my eyes.
And then it feels like you have dust in your eyes.
It's also not great.
It is.
There are advantages like it is.
It is like reef safe.
If you are swimming somewhere that requires reef safe sunscreen, like most of Australia, you know, there's a reason why it's out there and it's good for that.
But like it's a pretty big set of trade offs.
And people who don't go to the beach a lot, the one place you may have seen this in pop culture is if you ever see something on TV or movies and they show a lifeguard with a big white stripe down their nose, that is the most extreme case of physically blocking sun from getting into your nose by putting an opaque white substance on.
Obviously, you're not entirely covering your body like you're a French mime or something with white stuff.
But like that's that's the extreme case of this.
And seeing what little kids with the stuff on their body do to the backseat, you would think their entire body was like the strip.
that you see on the nose of a lifeguard.
Yeah.
And they are.
I mean, to be clear, like you do get very white with mineral sunscreen because it is just coating you with white dust.
And there are tinted ones that like a lot of... They're mostly used if you're going to be putting... If you're trying to like use it as like a foundation on your face and you're going to be putting makeup over it, they have like skin tone tinted mineral sunscreens that come in various shades of brown and tan and stuff.
But they all have the same trade-offs of like you're leaving dust all over everything.
It's not great.
And I was thinking like...
When I was a kid, I had sunscreen all the time in the summer and I never remember it burning my eyes.
Like what what was different back then?
Maybe it was just mayonnaise.
Wow.
You are from Ohio.
Little kids, you know, their son is young.
Their cells reproduce quickly.
I spent every summer in New York.
Anyway, which Casey knows.
Yep.
Well, then you should have been covering yourself with mosquito repellent.
I mean, we were also doing that, to be clear.
You know what the best sunscreen in the world is?
Crisco.
Because when you start to sizzle, you move your ass.
Lewis Black for you.
So what happened is in the late 90s, we started getting chemicals to do full spectrum blocking because the original chemicals when we were growing up in like, you know, the 90s and 80s, those chemicals didn't block UVA.
They only blocked UVB.
And once we learned that UVA was also bad and worth blocking, we had to develop new chemicals.
And the only chemical in the U.S.
that is authorized by the FDA to block UVA and UVB is avobenzone.
sunscreens when we were kids didn't contain this well ababenzone is now in every u.s chemical sunscreen the only sunscreens in the u.s that don't contain it are the all mineral ones so ababenzone is very effective at blocking uva and ubb but is known to cause severe eye irritation in lots of people hmm
And so sure.
And I, this is why I went through every, I, I must have, especially at the beach house, I have 10 different brands of sunscreens trying just as I've tried to find that you were doing this.
You didn't like, I figured like your first YouTube search were thrown like Korean sunscreen in your face.
Like that didn't come up in your searches when you're buying 10 us only sunscreens.
Well, I didn't realize there was a difference.
But like, did you Google for it once?
Like I can, I'm getting, I'm constantly getting the, anyway, maybe my algorithm is different than yours, but I don't even have an interest in these things that I have literally watched.
Anyway, go on.
I'm surprised that you were able to find and purchase 10 US sunscreens without having non-US sunscreens thrown in your face by every algorithm on the entire internet.
Yeah, I mean, well, because most of where I was looking was stores and Amazon.
However, the second I involved, ChatGPT.
You know, you could just use Google and you would have the same thing.
Or YouTube.
Yeah, but it would have taken a lot longer.
No, you could have just written sunscreen, eye sting.
As soon as I involved ChatGPT.
I very quickly found out, oh, here – like I basically – I said something like, you know, my eyes burn my sunscreen.
What should I do?
You know, what are my options?
And it gave me the whole readout of all the different chemicals and what they do and why they're there and what are the tradeoffs.
And I said, oh, and by the way –
Other countries, including countries with very strong regulatory agencies like the EU and Japan, I know the EU's not a country, forgive me, like EU and Japan, like, oh, they have strong regulatory agencies and they allow more chemicals than the U.S.
does.
Apparently the process of getting them approved in the U.S.
for sunscreen is apparently onerous and burdensome and terrible and so nobody can really get new ones approved.
But
Other countries have solved this problem with newer chemicals that have chemical sunscreen and therefore none of the downsides of mineral sunscreens, but chemicals that just don't sting your eyes.
And so I'm like, okay, well, how do I acquire chemicals?
Obviously, Amazon doesn't have them.
I'm like, wow.
If only there were some kind of electronic bay that would include things from other countries.
Are you sure Amazon doesn't have them?
I can imagine you could find them.
Oh, I've looked.
They probably do.
I mean, maybe.
Although whether you get that or a thing full of Crisco is up in the air.
Like the AirPods.
Right.
Right.
And B&A does not sell international sunscreen, unfortunately.
But I went on eBay and I found a couple of recommendations from my glorious chat GPT research.
Yes, John, that's right.
And I got two recommendations or I got three different options delivered over the last week.
And I've been using them every day.
I'll try option A on my legs, option B on my arms, you know, that kind of doing all these tests.
I've had zero irritation, none.
It's like it's night and day difference to the point where now I'm actually like wearing sunscreen more, which most of us really should.
I'm wearing sunscreen more now because all of those downsides are gone.
And I also thought like, you know, if I'm going to be ordering like sunscreen from, you know, the EU or Japan or something like it's going to take weeks to get here or whatever.
Nope.
There are like U.S.
sellers on eBay that have huge stocks of these.
It says, you know, more than 10 available like that, you know, that kind of eBay seller.
And you can just buy like four of them if you want.
Who cares?
Like, you know.
I have solved it.
The US, I assumed we would have the same option as everyone else.
I was so wrong.
And I will put in the show notes the link to my two favorite ones.
One of them is, forgive me, La Roche-Posay.
It's like this fancy French, I think, brand.
They have one, the UV Mune 400, and that one is fragrance-free, which is nice.
It's expensive, though, because these are European, so they're tiny and expensive.
And then my overall favorite is Skin Aqua Super Moisture UV Gel from Japan.
I'll put them both in the show notes.
It runs about $20 a bottle, and it's totally fine.
It just works.
$20 a bottle, a little steep.
Yeah.
Yeah, but OK, it's Japanese sunscreen that I'm importing through an eBay seller.
Like, give me a break.
I got some Japanese toothpaste that way to try it.
I wasn't a fan.
I'll put a link in the show notes to one of the things that I just pulled out of my YouTube history about Australian sunscreen, which also has lots of, as with all these things for the many years that they've been bouncing around, like you'll see TikToks about them and everything.
It's always like the sunscreen that they don't want you to know about.
And this YouTuber is taking advantage of the same thing.
Fed or whatever, but actually goes into a little bit of detail and did kind of a unscientific personal test with different kinds.
But they do go into the most of the things you just described about the UVA versus UVB and reef safe and SPF levels and all the all the myths and the realities of like, because what you'll see very often is like.
In Australia, you know, they have the real sunscreen that works better.
This isn't so much of an eye singing.
It's about like, oh, a U.S.
sunscreen isn't actually blocking the sun.
But because Australia, there's so much sun, they have much better sunscreen than we have.
And we can't get the good Australian sunscreen here.
And anyway, this is a pretty good video.
Is that just Blue Lizard?
It's a long video about it, but it includes lots of details.
And part of it is what you said, like our regulations are crappy.
It's the same reason we couldn't have matrix LED headlights for so long, although that's finally changing.
Like we're not great at regulations and those things.
But part of it is also that there are actually different tradeoffs with the chemicals they use in every country.
It has their own has their own thing that they're super paranoid about and their own things that they don't care about.
And then I would say that on this whole topic of like buying it's not a health care product, but like buying anything that's going to be like rubbed onto your skin from like eBay or a sketchy Amazon seller or whatever.
There's always some inherent risk there.
I mean, there's risk buying, you know, American sunscreen as well.
But like.
It depends on how much you care about the eye stinging versus wearing a hat versus not going outside versus all those other things.
Of course, $20 a bottle is also a bit of a deterrent.
Obviously, what we should have here with the Matrix LED headlights is we should change our regulations to allow
these things in the u.s and solve this problem because i'm sure u.s manufacturers would love to sell us a new kind of sunscreen that they can advertise as not stinging your eyes because they all would advertise that and presumably they would sell it for less than 20 a bottle but in the meantime uh if you're desperate lots of other countries have it you can find it in various places
Did you check Canada?
That might be easier than getting it from Japan.
Like maybe you can find some way to get it from Canada through somewhat shady means that will cost you less money than $20 a bottle.
Well, I mean, obviously, like, well, at first I was just buying on eBay just to try it out.
But I was like, I didn't.
It wasn't that big of a deal.
These are coming from like the Japanese one came from Long Island.
The French one came from Columbus, Ohio, where I'm from.
So it's like this is like it arrived in like two days.
Like, so it wasn't it's not really a hassle to buy it.
When you think about eBay, like, yeah, eBay has, you know, randos like me occasionally selling some weird thing.
But like most sellers on eBay now are like professional sellers.
Like it's it's not that different from Amazon, really.
Like Amazon is a collection of a whole bunch of third party sellers.
So is eBay.
And it's many of the same people.
So it's not like eBay has grown a lot from where it started.
And it's now just kind of a general purpose shopping site in addition to auctions.
Yeah.
Did any of your sunscreen smell like cigarettes?
No, it's super professional.
That's my main fear with eBay is that everything I buy on eBay will smell like cigarettes.
I've been having good luck.
I've been buying lots of mice to try to deal with my mouse situation.
None of them smell like cigarettes so far, so I'm doing good.
Yeah, cigarettes are cats.
That's the other one.
Yeah, I avoided one of them because it has some minor yellowing.
I'm like, hmm, I know what that is.
Yeah.
But yeah, honestly, I could say like getting it like...
you're you're right obviously there are risks with buying stuff from you know unknown sources but like is healthy center 84 on ebay that much less credible than whatever the hell goes into amazon's warehouses like i don't know i don't i don't think it's that different to be honest you know when you look at the overall risk profile of like i have not been wearing sunscreen most days even in the summer even when it's bright outside i was gonna say that
When you said, oh, when we were growing up in the 80s and 90s, this is the sunscreen we use.
Well, we grew up in the 70s.
The sunscreen we use was none.
Right.
But like, you know, like the copper tone that I grew up using, like it was not it was not using avabenzone.
It was using whatever, you
know weird chemicals came before that and they might have had downsides but they didn't burn my eyes so i would use sunscreen whereas you know in the modern era i almost never wear sunscreen because i hate it so much because it's either i burn my eyes or i cover everything in dust and feel goopy all day and i can't even cross my legs because they slide apart like there's so many trade-offs with mineral and everything else like
So if it makes a difference whether you're going to wear sunscreen or not, then you're also greatly reducing a lot of risks on that end.
So I'm choosing to take the risk of Healthy Center 84 on eBay instead of skin cancer.
I'm interested in your idea that it doesn't sting some people's eyes.
Doesn't that chemical sting all human eyes?
Like, is there some person out there who's like, no, it doesn't bother my eyes at all?
If it bothered everyone else as much as it bothered me, I don't know why anybody would ever wear sunscreen.
I mean, it's like the soap tasting cilantro thing, whether it's true or myth or whatever.
But like, I honestly, I can't imagine sunscreen with this chemical going into someone's eye and them not noticing it.
But maybe, you know, everyone thinks their own experience is the same.
Like, yeah, I am very familiar with the eye sting of which you speak.
uh and uh yeah if you want to avoid it uh be very diligent about uh not sweating through your eyebrows and reapplying rewashing and reapplying or uh wear a hat on your head and sunscreen everywhere else or yeah find some uh ebay sunscreen even the diligence isn't always enough because these chemicals migrate they actually like they can move across your skin like it's you you just can't have it anywhere near your face like that's why it's just
oh my God, the rest of the world has us solved.
The answer is not of a benzo.
That's the answer.
My eyebrow mopping usually works for me.