Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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@ 24:10 (club twit version)
Jeff, “I love you” (in a listener-podcaster-kind-of-way ) but “I am not a libertarian!” and “Government is DANGEROUS!” immediately after each other just does not make any kind of sense. Just come out and say it: “I am a libertarian.” It’s nothing bad. Just a position. All fine. To be honest, all of us who like listening to you know it already anyways.
No one leans so heavily on late medieval innovators and turns out particularly politically progressive in 2022.
But, of course, I am pulling your chain. (Who am I kidding, he will not be reading this.)
Slow clap for Leo’s “…and norms? What the hell are you talking about, norms?” at 26:40 .
Liked last week’s episode, too, when Jeff took the rudder. It’s always good to the see the true, decisive rascal of the group take on responsibility and be good at it! (liked the democracy, felt fresh and unpredictable)
What can I say? I have been listening to this podcast for… at least 10 years now. More or less every episode. You guys are family to my ears by now. Like uncles (Leo / Jeff) and cousins (Stacey / Ant). But uncle Jeff to me is the libertarian Uncle Sam. Nothing wrong with that.
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Cool bit of eBike chat at the end. What are the rules in the US? EU/UK an eBike is limited to 25kph, pedal-assist only, 250W nominal. Throttle bikes like @Leo was describing would be a pedelec/moped and need registering/insurance/driving licence/mot etc.
Shame about safety concerns on US roads. We’ve just changed our highway code to flip the priority at junctions, roundabouts and so on. More vulnerable road users now have priority. Give way to pedestrians if turning into a side road, for example, or bikes on roundabouts. But there are still roads around here I avoid.
When we’re in the US, amazes me there’s nowhere to walk the dog where my daughter lives unless you want to walk in the gutter or on people’s lawns. No sidewalks. You have to drive somewhere.
Remember my first US visit on business, stayed in a Hilton on Long Island and the office was less than a mile away so a colleague and I decided to walk. Big mistake. Gave up after having to walk along verges, climb barriers and dodge 4 lanes of traffic. Ended up taking taxis 
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Regarding the new EU regulations, I don’t know we’ll be able to keep e2e “trust no one” encryption in place if everything has to be interoperable. They seem to be prioritizing interoperability over encryption which I think is a mistake (@Leo I’d love to get Steve Gibson’s take on this). I am also curious as to whether all features will need to be interoperable. If that is the case, all messaging apps will have to revert to the least common denominator. Regulators have been itching to kill encryption for years and I hope that this doesn’t make that happen.
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The press release I’ve seen only mentions messages, voice messages and files, so if they followed this to the letter you’d lose much of the functionality you get in Messages, FB Messages etc. if you were cross-platform.
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If I react to a message is that considered part of the message? If I can’t interoperate without breaking encryption, do I have to break encryption? Feels like they are just waving their hands and saying “do stuff” without taking into account the potential negative consequences. We’ll see, I suppose.
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Found the actually spec, called Article 7. No mention of reactions 
-
Where a gatekeeper provides number-independent interpersonal communications
services that are listed in the designation decision pursuant to Article 3(9), it shall make
the basic functionalities of its number-independent interpersonal communications
services interoperable with the number-independent interpersonal communications
services of another provider offering or intending to offer such services in the Union, by
providing the necessary technical interfaces or similar solutions that facilitate
interoperability, upon request, and free of charge. -
The gatekeeper shall make at least the following basic functionalities referred to in paragraph 1 interoperable where the gatekeeper itself provides those functionalities to its own end users:
(a) following the listing in the designation decision pursuant to Article 3(9):
(i) end-to-end text messaging between two individual end users;
(ii) sharing of images, voice messages, videos and other attached files in
end-to-end communication between two individual end users
(b)within 2 years from the designation:
(i) end-to-end text messaging within groups of individual end users;
(ii) sharing of images, voice messages, videos and other attached files in
end-to-end communication between a group chat and an individual end user;
(c)within 4 years from the designation:
(i) end-to-end voice calls between two individual end users;
(ii) end-to-end video calls between two individual end users;
(iii) end-to-end voice calls between a group chat and an individual end
user;
(iv) end-to-end video calls between a group chat and an individual end
user.
- The level of security, including the end-to-end encryption, where applicable, that the
gatekeeper provides to its own end users shall be preserved across the interoperable
services.
“the consensus among cryptographers is that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain encryption between apps, with potentially enormous implications for users”
I found the pedestrians have right of way a big change, when I moved to Germany in 2001. If you have pedestrian crossings at a junction, they usually get to go when there is no cross traffic, so everything turning into the street has to give way to the pedestrians.
Pedelecs are the ones that are restricted to 25km/h, here in Germany, an eBike can go up to 35 or 40km/h, needs a helmet, registration and insurance and cannot use bike lanes, it is a licensed road going vehicle. eScooters also can’t use the pavement, they have to use cycle paths or, if there are no cycle paths, the road. If they are in a pedestrian zone, they have to be pushed, just like bikes.
A friend of mine did a school exchange trip in the 80s and the family he was staying with lived in Beverley Hills. He wasn’t allowed to smoke in the house, so he tried walking in the street, the police turned up after less than 10 minutes and asked him what he was doing, he explained and they said having somebody walking in the neighbourhood made the residents uncomfortable! They told him to try walking in the woods. 2 nights later, he was walking in the woods and a mounted policeman came along the trail and said, “oh, you must be the German exchange student,” and carried on riding. 
At school, he wasn’t allowed to smoke in the playground, he had to leave the premises, so he went outside and smoked on the street. A couple of days later, he was pulled into the principal’s office. He was smoking on the other side of the street from the synagogue and that was disrespectful. My mate asked, where he could smoke and he was told, go onto the steps of the Catholic church on the other corner! Where is the difference?!?!
This has been strongly debated by rights groups in Europe, that the dropping of e2e encryption in the bill is a catastrophe, but it sounds like they weren’t listened to. In fact, the Germans are actually for increasing e2e protection - unless you are the justice minister, who wants to ban it.
Only for Telegram, I would have thought, which rolls its own encryption. The rest use off-the-shelf encryption algorithms, so it is only the transport part of the two systems that need to talk to each other and enable the public keys to be transferred.
Another one: around 1:25:30 - talking about Leistungsschutzrecht (anyilliary copyright) being introduced in 2014 and Google “getting into a lot of trouble for that”. How EXACTLY has that regulation impacted the value of Google in any which way since then?
(Thanks, yahoo)
I sometimes have the slight suspicion that those who decry the panic of others the loudest are actually the ones creating it in the world. Only a suspicion. I don’t tend to panic too much. “MORAL PANIC!” “TECHNO PANIC!”
With reference to the show title, I don’t know that any gamer would need the reference explained but just in case you do, here’s what you need:
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I’d love Steve Gibson’s take.
Regarding GDPR, Jeff was going on about it being a failure and where are the big fines?
Laws aren’t about big fines, they are about getting people or businesses to act responsibly. The fines are there, if the companies don’t act responsibly.
A big win for GDPR was the Schrem II decision in the ECHR, which declared Privacy Shield null and void, for example.
Also, a lot of the regulators work with companies that break the law. If they are contrite and go, mea culpa, put in place corrective measures, they will often get a small fine or a sort of probation.
Likewise, Microsoft 365 is illegal in Europe for schools and the civil service, because Microsoft is bound by the Patriot Act and the CLOUD Act (Google as well). They don’t get fined for that, but they are restricted, with whom they can do business.
WhatsApp also is not GDPR compliant and private citizens shouldn’t use it, but you most definitely cannot use it on a device with company contacts on it, otherwise the employer is liable to prosecution. Meta actually state that in their terms and conditions and, I believe in the app description. They have a second, not so (data) sucky version for business users, or private users who use their devices for company email accounts.
There was a mention (I believe by Jeff) of someone interesting he followed on TikTok, but I don’t see the reference in the rundown. Does that ring a bell? Do you remember what section of the podcast they talked about it?
Thanks in advance.
I didn’t catch who he said. Sorry.
Hmmm. He likes a lot of stuff on TikTok. I looked through the rundown and there wasn’t anything about TikTok so it must have been something he mentioned off-hand. For the life of me I can’t remember what it might be.
The only name I remember him mention was your son’s channel, Salt Hank.
RE: message interoperability, I like the idea of being able to use one app for all my chats but I’m also a realist who realizes that forcing every app to support every other major app is going to cause so many security issues the legislation would be reversed in the first 5 years just due to the shear chaos that would happen from security holes.
I am one that has gone all in on Apple and thus Imessage, but I do also wish that Apple support RCS as a fallback protocol. While the majority of my family uses iPhones and thus iMessage, my wife and sister use Android phones supporting RCS. When they text each other they get delivered and read receipts which to me are about the only features I care about when chatting. I live in a rural area, did my message go through (Ok, Good) has it been read? Then I can know that they are aware of what was said, and that I’m not double texting someone who is just busy.
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While the new EU rules appear like they MAY require messaging interoperability, they are too vague to do that without subsequent legal activities:
“The DMA also mandates large firms work better with smaller firms. Theoretically, depending on how lawyers interpret these bills, this could mean interoperability between chat services. For example, this could force Apple to make iMessage work with Facebook Messenger. However, the language here is somewhat vague, so it’s unclear how seriously companies would need to take that.”
Until the EU clarifies what this means, it’s doubtful you’ll see any of the messaging app developers taking it very seriously. The companies would likely have to create gateways between the different services on the back-end in order to make it possible to do something like allow an iMessage to be sent to a Facebook Messenger user. They could possibly maintain some degree of encryption, but the private keys for that would certainly be in the hands of the companies. It would not be “secure” as you’d expect today, but as defined in previous years (secure from people outside Apple or Facebook, etc). I’m sure this would be a very popular idea for all those agencies demanding back door access to messages.
I doubt you’ll see non-profit groups like the one behind Signal worrying at all about these new rules. Except for iOS, you can download and install Signal outside of corporate app stores for all of its supported platforms.