00:02:33
◼►
It has just straight-up gigabit, one gigabit Ethernet.
00:02:36
◼►
I guess I could – I'm just trying – I'm struggling to try to theorize a way I could do this test any better.
00:02:45
◼►
And I agree with you that the hard drives may be the issue here, not the Synology.
00:02:50
◼►
Yeah, like if you put like some kind of – I mean, I'm sure there's some Synology app that basically is like a network performance thing where it just sends data from nothing over the internet or over the network.
00:03:00
◼►
I think you can just do that with a shell script yourself if you want.
00:03:03
◼►
I thought iPerf 3 did that, but I don't know enough about it to know one way or the other.
00:03:06
◼►
So I am talking outside my comfort zone at this point.
00:03:18
◼►
If you're doing sequential reads from a giant media file with all – especially in the initial – like the initial speed when you do it a couple times and it gets into like the caches and everything, I think you should be fine.
00:03:29
◼►
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.
00:03:40
◼►
And any RAID that does not include a 1 and a 0 is slow, very, very slow.
00:03:48
◼►
And so it would not surprise me if actually all of these like old presumably SATA-connected hard drives can't actually deliver 1.2 gigabytes of streaming data over the network.
00:04:01
◼►
Yeah, I forgot that you don't have any RAID – even your backups aren't RAID 0.
00:04:05
◼►
I think we've talked about this before.
00:04:06
◼►
They used to be in the 8-base analogy, but I'm – I don't think I'm even doing Time Machine.
00:05:19
◼►
But either way, I really wanted 10 gigabit Ethernet so that, you know, I can go between the Synology and me faster than I was before.
00:05:28
◼►
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.
00:05:36
◼►
Anyway, so dongle adapter, thank you, et cetera.
00:06:32
◼►
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.
00:06:40
◼►
But hey, here's what we're going to do.
00:06:41
◼►
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.
00:06:46
◼►
And if enough of you buy it, I'll be rich.
00:07:51
◼►
With Formula One, ESPN, which is a sports network that's based here in America, and pretty much every cable package includes it, or most cable packages include it,
00:08:04
◼►
they are the carrier of F1 in the States.
00:08:07
◼►
However, they just basically regurgitate, I believe it's Sky Sports from the UK.
00:08:11
◼►
So, they take the UK feed and just blast it out through ESPN.
00:08:16
◼►
And that's been the case since I've been paying attention to F1 for like five years now.
00:08:20
◼►
Well, reading from, I think this is MacRumors.
00:08:22
◼►
Forgive me, I don't have it in front of me.
00:08:24
◼►
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.
00:08:33
◼►
The rights to broadcast Formula One in the United States are currently held by Disney's ESPN.
00:08:37
◼►
According to sources familiar with negotiations, Disney is apparently unwilling to match or beat Apple's offer.
00:08:41
◼►
It pays, Disney that is, pays around $85 million per year for its current rights, just over half of Apple's latest bid.
00:08:49
◼►
I think this is really interesting and really exciting.
00:08:51
◼►
I, as someone who's already committed to Apple TV Plus, I think this is great.
00:08:55
◼►
If I wasn't committed to Apple TV Plus, I would be very grumbly because that's another subscription I would potentially need to do.
00:09:01
◼►
But it is worth noting a couple of things.
00:09:03
◼►
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.
00:09:17
◼►
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.
00:09:28
◼►
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.
00:09:44
◼►
And that's, I think, $80 a year, if I recall correctly, a season for the standard version.
00:09:49
◼►
It's like 120 bucks for the fancy version I was just talking about where you get the multi-view.
00:09:53
◼►
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.
00:10:02
◼►
It was only ever available via test flight, but you could hook up your F1 TV credentials and log into that and get like an in-space multi-view.
00:10:10
◼►
So imagine what I was just describing, but more little rectangles and all over the place, you could get a 3D view of the track and where the cars are on the track.
00:11:17
◼►
We will put the link in this show notes.
00:11:20
◼►
And then the immersive ride-along thing, unfortunately, there's no direct link to that immersive video.
00:11:25
◼►
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.
00:11:32
◼►
But I can't link you directly to that video.
00:11:34
◼►
Apple hasn't discovered how links work yet.
00:12:05
◼►
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.
00:12:19
◼►
So I replaced it with the same model of toaster that had a couple of improvements.
00:12:23
◼►
Well, since then, there have been developments.
00:12:25
◼►
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.
00:14:02
◼►
And it said, by the way, if you don't want to wait and listen to this hold music, you can press one and we'll give you a call back on my guest.
00:14:32
◼►
I've talked about it multiple times in the show.
00:14:34
◼►
But every time it happens to me, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's the age we live in.
00:14:37
◼►
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?
00:14:42
◼►
We're 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.
00:14:51
◼►
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, you know, with cameras and video.
00:15:01
◼►
So this time they had like they SMSed me a link to a web page that asked to use the camera.
00:15:06
◼►
It's like they want to like live video of it.
00:16:28
◼►
They're, 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.
00:16:34
◼►
But I haven't seen it since, but I'm keeping my eye on it.
00:16:37
◼►
And then, by the way, so I got, you know, I said I'd press one for the callback.
00:16:41
◼►
Eventually, the iPhone callback thing worked, too.
00:16:44
◼►
Like, I pressed one, and it said that they would call back.
00:17:04
◼►
So mixed review for Breville customer service.
00:17:07
◼►
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.
00:17:14
◼►
I have gotten the callbacks many times in my life as well.
00:17:16
◼►
But anyway, Breville is, you know, 100% on.
00:18:37
◼►
It's probably using the same service where, like, you know, they texted me a link.
00:18:41
◼►
Just like John was saying, they texted me a link to this web app that used the camera to stream video live to them.
00:18:47
◼►
Which I kind of, like, I kind of felt a little bit uneasy about that, to be honest.
00:18:51
◼►
I'm like, if I knew that you were going to make me stream video to you as I, like, you know, walk through my house to show you the router and the utility closet and everything,
00:18:59
◼►
I'm like, maybe I would have, like, cleaned up the house a little.
00:19:13
◼►
Like, especially in cases where if I just say, like, my thing showed easier or what.
00:19:16
◼►
Like, they used to, before they had the ability to do this, they would just believe what you said, which obviously is a downside because people would lie to them.
00:19:22
◼►
But it also saved time if you're telling the truth.
00:19:25
◼►
And I'm telling the truth about what happened.
00:19:27
◼►
But anyway, like, I, in cases like Fios things, I think I would probably find it helpful.
00:19:32
◼►
But I have lied to Fios in the past, back when they used to be real angry if you aren't using their equipment.
00:19:37
◼►
And I never used their equipment, you know, like their router or anything.
00:19:40
◼►
But these days, they're way more chill about that.
00:20:30
◼►
Once you get it working, you almost, you never have to deal with them, which is good, because dealing with them is the worst.
00:20:35
◼►
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 into your house, you would think that's, like, well, they know about that, right?
00:20:50
◼►
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's broken or whatever.
00:21:03
◼►
Like, oh, you're not using the Files router?
00:22:00
◼►
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 case he had optioned AppleCare on it.
00:22:09
◼►
And we're going to send both AirPods, AirBuds, whatever they're called, jeezy peasy.
00:23:04
◼►
And I think there is a strong possibility that I had dropped one of – like, the right one in water at some point, which I didn't think about until –
00:23:10
◼►
This seems like something you would remember.
00:23:36
◼►
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.
00:23:45
◼►
So there was standing water in the sink and grabbing it immediately.
00:23:49
◼►
But I mean, hey, water damage is water damage.
00:23:51
◼►
Wait, you were standing water, like you had plugged the sink?
00:23:53
◼►
Yeah, because I wear – we're really going down the rabbit hole now.
00:23:56
◼►
All right, so I wear hard contact lenses because I have a weird issue called keratoconus.
00:24:00
◼►
And keratoconus means my eyeballs not literally but figuratively speaking are shaped like American footballs.
00:24:05
◼►
And so hard contact lenses puts a nice regularly rounded surface in front of my eyes.
00:26:31
◼►
And sure enough, the UPS came and dropped it on my front stoop and walked away.
00:26:35
◼►
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.
00:26:44
◼►
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 iTouches.
00:27:40
◼►
So, all told, this experience on the whole was good.
00:27:44
◼►
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.
00:27:52
◼►
Like, maybe they were repaired rather than replaced, but it looks to me like it was, you know, a refurb or whatever.
00:28:13
◼►
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.
00:28:22
◼►
AirPods Pro 2 are dust, sweat, and water resistant for non-water sports and exercise.
00:28:27
◼►
Products, including charging case, were tested under controlled laboratory conditions, have a rating of IP54.
00:28:32
◼►
Dust, sweat, and water resistance are not permanent conditions, and resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear.
00:28:38
◼►
So, I think, Marco, you just said a moment ago, to a degree, they are at least resistant, and that sounds accurate.
00:28:43
◼►
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.
00:28:49
◼►
Like, they're made to tolerate that, not immersion.
00:29:00
◼►
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.
00:29:05
◼►
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.
00:29:11
◼►
Why this is not offered in-store is beyond me.
00:29:13
◼►
I get why they may not want to do that in-store, but this was the way I should have handled it.
00:31:19
◼►
There are two aspects of your story that I noticed factoring into the reason why dead, dead, and untroubleshootable AirPods need to be serviced off-site.
00:31:27
◼►
Counterfeit products and AppleCare Plus coverage.
00:31:29
◼►
About a year or two after AirPods launched, my coworkers and I noticed a lot of fake AirPods coming in.
00:31:34
◼►
Sure, the first few waves of them were easy to spot.
00:31:35
◼►
The size or color was off, the case looked janky, and they generally had no serial number to identify them.
00:31:39
◼►
Then the knockoffs got better, and soon they were in real cases with real warranty coverage.
00:31:44
◼►
The fake but convincing AirPods won't turn on, and the next service step would be a replacement.
00:31:47
◼►
After a while, we got more tools to identify individual AirPods, which now had individual serial numbers as well.
00:31:52
◼►
All this to curb a cycle in which fake AirPods could be laundered into genuine working AirPods.
00:31:56
◼►
So, to conclude, no part serial does not mean no new AirPods, and thus off to the depot they go.
00:32:02
◼►
AppleCare Plus extends the quote-unquote usefulness of a serialized case in this chain by a year.
00:32:07
◼►
It wouldn't also, let me try that again,
00:32:10
◼►
it also wouldn't be uncommon for us to see other fake Apple devices at the Genius Bar carrying real serial numbers,
00:32:15
◼►
often with AppleCare Plus coverage attached.
01:02:36
◼►
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,
01:04:15
◼►
I think I can understand how this Lipnick person got fired because clearly he left this pre-release phone or maybe not pre-release hardware,
01:04:24
◼►
pre-release software in a place where other people could get to it.
01:04:27
◼►
And his passcode was not secure enough that other people discovered it.
01:10:57
◼►
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,
01:11:07
◼►
if you write ha ha after it or a lull or a happy,
01:11:10
◼►
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?
01:11:30
◼►
it's not required listening by any means,
01:11:32
◼►
but it's worth your time if you haven't heard it.
01:11:34
◼►
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.
01:11:51
◼►
The iOS 19 information shared by John Prosser is sourced from Ethan Lipnick, blah, blah, 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.
01:12:07
◼►
So this is the aforementioned Ramessiotti, Ian Zalbo, Joe Rossignol, and Michael Burkhart are all listed potentially in the redacted sections of this note.
01:12:17
◼►
Yeah, Joe Rossignol is from, what, MacRumors, right?
01:12:21
◼►
Shoot, I should know this, and I'm drawing a blank.
01:12:23
◼►
Yeah, I've seen his name a thousand times.
01:12:25
◼►
Yeah, those other names that don't, those other names don't ring any bells for me, but obviously Gruber knows them.
01:12:30
◼►
What he was doing about it, this looks like one of those things where someone failed to redact a PDF, like they just, you know, put a black box over the letters, but when you could select, you know what I mean?
01:12:38
◼►
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 in size, seeing what names would fit.
01:12:48
◼►
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, you know, a big coincidence if these are not the names that fit in there, but we'll find out.
01:13:02
◼►
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.
01:13:14
◼►
Do you think John Gruber will be the last person to use MD5?
01:14:04
◼►
Cloudflare has announced that in certain circumstances they will be blocking AI crawlers by default.
01:14:11
◼►
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.
01:14:17
◼►
For nearly 30 years, the deal that Google made with content creators was simple.
01:14:21
◼►
Let us copy your content for search, and we'll send you traffic.
01:14:24
◼►
But search is now declining in favor of AI, and AI doesn't reward content creators the way that search did.
01:14:29
◼►
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.
01:14:36
◼►
That changes today, July 1, what we're calling Content Independence Day.
01:14:41
◼►
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.
01:14:49
◼►
That content is the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it's only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it.
01:14:55
◼►
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.
01:15:06
◼►
But both of those things you said were not my initial reaction to this, but continue.
01:15:10
◼►
Yeah, because this sat very badly with me.
01:15:15
◼►
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.
01:15:33
◼►
Like, that is true, and that radically changes the dynamics of bots crawling websites.
01:15:39
◼►
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.
01:16:36
◼►
When Cloudflare protects you from things online, they protect you from what they feel is bot traffic in, you know, 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.
01:16:57
◼►
But what if you just have a bunch of people hitting your RSS feed?
01:17:02
◼►
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.
01:17:14
◼►
I ran into this problem a couple years ago where Cloudflare was starting to throttle my requests.
01:17:20
◼►
But, of course, they wouldn't tell anybody.
01:17:23
◼►
You know, they certainly wouldn't tell the website owners.
01:17:25
◼►
Those owners wouldn't have any idea what was going on.
01:17:28
◼►
And so for, like, a lot of the results would just be like, oh, Overcast just can't read these feeds that everyone else can read.
01:17:35
◼►
They have some, they had some kind of, like, good bot registration program where you could, like, register to be a good bot and you could bypass some of these limitations.
01:17:44
◼►
And it took months for me to get through that.
01:17:46
◼►
Eventually, I was able to find the right people and eventually I got it through.
01:17:52
◼►
Like, when people put their website behind Cloudflare, I don't think they necessarily understand all the technical ramifications of what they're doing and, you know, 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.
01:18:10
◼►
I don't think they, I don't think they intend for that necessarily or understand what they're doing with that.
01:18:15
◼►
So what's very, very important are what Cloudflare does by default and how Cloudflare brands what they do in the user interface.
01:18:27
◼►
Because what happens a lot is, again, people will, you know, think they're going to, oh, I'll block attacks to my site, sure, you know, I'll make my CDN cost cheaper by putting this in front of it, great.
01:18:36
◼►
And they don't realize what they're doing is, you know, causing a lot of problems for smaller apps.
01:18:42
◼►
And so when I first read this, it was kind of unclear.
01:18:46
◼►
Fortunately, it was not as bad as I expected.
01:19:09
◼►
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,
01:19:48
◼►
And that's why a lot of people use it.
01:19:51
◼►
Cloudflare has a lot of power on the web.
01:19:54
◼►
And what they just did was show us that.
01:19:59
◼►
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,
01:20:11
◼►
they would be able to cut off crawling for tons of different apps from 20% of the web in one move.
01:20:20
◼►
Now, the web works best when the power is not that concentrated.
01:20:28
◼►
That was the whole point of the design of the web.
01:20:30
◼►
If you accumulate a whole bunch of power over the web, the best thing you can do is shut up about it.
01:20:36
◼►
Never draw attention to yourself or how much power you have.
01:20:41
◼►
And definitely never like overreach in a way that draws a lot of attention to the amount of power you have.
01:20:48
◼►
And you can look at, you know, some various events over the last few years that that show this, you know, even I would say this even possibly applies to Apple's controversial CSAM scanning plan.
01:20:59
◼►
Where it's like, oh, we're going to do this on all your phones.
01:21:02
◼►
You know, but you can also, you know, Apple certainly gets it with like 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.
01:21:16
◼►
But, you know, and with the web, you can, 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.
01:21:32
◼►
They just turned that on one day like there was there was no, you know, checking with people.
01:21:37
◼►
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.
01:21:47
◼►
They just turned that on because they felt like it and they wanted to use their numbers or whatever, whatever justification they came up for.
01:21:53
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And that showed, oh, my God, they have way too much power here.
01:21:57
◼►
Ooh, you know, you could also, you know, more recently,
01:22:01
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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.
01:22:13
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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.
01:22:24
◼►
And a lot of other countries have been like, hmm, we used to be able to trust that now we can't.
01:22:30
◼►
Let's start, you know, reducing that power.
01:22:33
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Let's start diversifying and taking control of our own stuff.
01:22:36
◼►
Cloudflare has that level of power now.
01:22:39
◼►
Like I would say Cloudflare has a level of power similar to the United States in terms of power over the Internet.
01:22:54
◼►
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.
01:23:10
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They shouldn't have as much power as they do.
01:23:13
◼►
And they just showed us how they could wield it in ways that, you know, they're a giant stepping around and who knows what they're going to step on next.
01:23:22
◼►
They came very close to stepping on something really big here.
01:23:25
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And they don't seem like they noticed or cared or thought it was that big or thought it could be a problem.
01:23:30
◼►
And ultimately where we're heading with this.
01:23:32
◼►
And this is not, you know, Cloudflare alone.
01:23:35
◼►
And this is kind of a problem with the rise of AI and the destruction of the search tradeoffs, as we were saying earlier.
01:23:41
◼►
But like 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 like read RSS feeds and stuff like that or, you know, parse page content or whatever.
01:23:57
◼►
We are heading to a point very rapidly now where that's going to be over.
01:24:03
◼►
You're going to have huge swaths of the web blocking crawling from anything.
01:24:10
◼►
Google search index, maybe, but like, you know, that could it could block crawling from any of the web apps you use.
01:24:15
◼►
If you use something like, you know, I have TTT or Zapier or use some kind of automation, your own curl scripts on your Mac.
01:24:22
◼►
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.
01:24:33
◼►
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.
01:24:44
◼►
And so it's going to be harder and harder to make anything that interoperates with any of the rest of the web.
01:24:51
◼►
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.
01:25:01
◼►
Because like the big companies, they'll make deals.
01:25:11
◼►
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.
01:25:20
◼►
And I really am feeling very uneasy about all of that.
01:25:26
◼►
I've noticed in the last couple of weeks, so part of my Docker, I don't know, swarm, not in a literal sense.
01:25:32
◼►
I think that's like a technical term in some context.
01:25:34
◼►
But my array of Docker containers, one of them is this open source project, changedetection.io.
01:25:40
◼►
And I'll put a link in the show notes.
01:25:41
◼►
I think I've talked about this once or twice recently.
01:25:42
◼►
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,
01:25:51
◼►
if the TS5 Plus is in stock at CalDigit's website, which is one of the times I most recently used this.
01:25:58
◼►
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.
01:26:05
◼►
And it even is smart in most cases with regard to stock.
01:26:09
◼►
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.
01:26:15
◼►
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.
01:26:20
◼►
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.
01:26:26
◼►
In the last month or so, I've been getting a lot of 403 errors on things that I crawl.
01:26:35
◼►
But, like, silly things that I'd like to know when they're updated.
01:26:38
◼►
I'm getting 403s, and I was working on earlier today, actually, trying to find a way to get around that.
01:26:43
◼►
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.
01:26:54
◼►
And there's some people that have developed some workarounds that seem to not really work, which from Cloudflare's perspective is great.
01:27:00
◼►
But for me, as just a little, you know, dorky home labber, that sucks.
01:27:04
◼►
Like, I want to be able to very gingerly and lightly crawl these things.
01:27:09
◼►
And apparently they can detect that a headless instance of Chrome is going after these things, and they deny me.
01:28:41
◼►
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.
01:29:38
◼►
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.
01:29:52
◼►
That can really start stomping on lots of things.
01:29:57
◼►
The reason we do things on the web instead of in native apps is to have that kind of reach and flexibility and power.
01:30:03
◼►
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.
01:30:17
◼►
So I really am fearful for the web and I kind of – 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.
01:30:29
◼►
But I don't yet see a path forward to do that.
01:30:31
◼►
You should probably be more scared of Google than Cloudflare.
01:30:35
◼►
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 the currently somewhat benevolent, somewhat dictators, like the big companies like Cloudflare for example, like they're big enough that they can cause a big problem.
01:30:57
◼►
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 – it's kind of like what you were saying with like the EU and everybody doing when they're seeing that Apple is no longer – or that the US is no longer a trustworthy actor.
01:31:10
◼►
You have the ability to go off and splinter and say, okay, but we over here are going to do our thing based on these same technologies.
01:31:21
◼►
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.
01:31:28
◼►
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.
01:31:34
◼►
Cloudflare is not the only company that does what it does, so if it does something bad, in theory, its competitors can take advantage of it and yada yada.
01:31:40
◼►
But anyway, all that said, when I saw this story briefly go by, immediately what I thought of is Cloudflare saying that they're going to – 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.
01:32:00
◼►
And we're saying, here, creators who are on the web, we're giving you this new tool.
01:32:04
◼►
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.
01:32:18
◼►
That's what you were getting at before.
01:32:19
◼►
It's like you can say in these things, we'll block AI crawlers, but what does that even mean, right?
01:32:23
◼►
It's not the type of thing that an individual small web developer has any chance of being able to do.
01:32:41
◼►
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.
01:32:51
◼►
And this is the relationship you want.
01:32:52
◼►
We're being a good company by empowering creators.
01:32:56
◼►
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.
01:33:09
◼►
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,
01:33:17
◼►
I now allow Cloudflare to decide what is and isn't a legitimate crawl.
01:33:25
◼►
But you assume that Cloudflare is benevolent and is actually deciding what is and isn't a legitimate crawler according to your understanding of that checkbox.
01:33:36
◼►
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.
01:33:44
◼►
And so now we're not counted as one of those bad AI crawlers.
01:33:49
◼►
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?
01:34:01
◼►
Anyway, so this is, like, the worst-case type of scenario, right?
01:34:05
◼►
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.
01:34:15
◼►
Like, it's always dangerous to be in a situation where you're relying on the good graces of a very powerful company.
01:34:22
◼►
We talk about that all the time with Apple and podcasts.
01:34:24
◼►
Like, if Apple sort of turned to bad on podcasts, they could do tons of damage.
01:34:30
◼►
But that's a terrible situation to be in.
01:34:32
◼►
Don't rely on, like, the kindness of giant companies with huge amounts of power.
01:34:37
◼►
And I'm not, you know, I think for the current leadership of Cloudflare probably has good intentions with this, like most of the things they do, as evidenced by how they're rolling it out.
01:34:47
◼►
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.
01:34:55
◼►
Even if, reality-wise, you could say, oh, it's fine.
01:34:59
◼►
This is actually a good move or whatever.
01:35:00
◼►
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.
01:35:11
◼►
Like, it's just, it's not a good situation.
01:35:13
◼►
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.
01:35:27
◼►
And it does require, for a real doomsday scenario, it 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.
01:35:40
◼►
And historically, those big companies have been more at odds at each other than willing to do that.
01:35:46
◼►
So, 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.
01:35:57
◼►
But I would feel much more comfortable if we had a little bit more diversity than we do now.
01:36:02
◼►
And, you know, how much, how big is too big?
01:36:12
◼►
Yeah, that's probably, that's probably also too big.
01:36:15
◼►
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?
01:36:22
◼►
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.
01:36:27
◼►
So, let's start figuring out how we can remove this single point, single point of failure, single point of control.
01:36:33
◼►
Can we, we don't want that to be the case.
01:36:36
◼►
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.
01:36:44
◼►
So, I, I, I have a lot of, you know, I spent my entire career as a web developer.
01:36:49
◼►
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.
01:36:58
◼►
But, yeah, when I see structures like this and, you know, like you said, Marco, like this brings attention to it.
01:37:08
◼►
But as long as they're just sitting there and not doing anything, you don't think about it too much.
01:37:12
◼►
But when they do stuff like this, everyone's head comes up like little prairie dogs, huh?
01:37:15
◼►
Because, like, they're like, again, with Apple Podcasts, I hope I, I hope I didn't ever do anything to make us think they're going to do something bad.
01:37:23
◼►
But it would be better if this much power wasn't concentrated in this few people.
01:37:28
◼►
I think this is a general lesson of history and humanity.
01:37:33
◼►
Don't concentrate too much power in the hands of too few people.
01:40:39
◼►
Yeah, the problem is, you know, sweat and gravity.
01:40:43
◼►
So, 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...
01:40:52
◼►
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 and I touch...
01:41:00
◼►
Somehow, a little bit, and then my eyes are burning for hours afterwards.
01:41:05
◼►
First, I mean, first, I was like, okay, mineral sunscreen was the obvious solution.
01:41:10
◼►
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.
01:41:38
◼►
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.
01:42:13
◼►
Yeah, so any, yeah, anything you touch, like, if you...
01:42:17
◼►
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.
01:42:24
◼►
Of course, it gets all over the shirt in the process of putting the shirt on.
01:42:27
◼►
It's like, okay, that shirt's ruined, you know, next.
01:42:29
◼►
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.
01:42:39
◼►
So, and here's the thing, just for people thinking about this, I know a lot of people use, put this on their small children.
01:42:43
◼►
If you put this stuff, put physically, physical sunscreen, like, physically blocked sun.
01:42:53
◼►
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.
01:43:01
◼►
I don't know if you, like, the stuff that's on the door, that plastic material, even if you don't have a fancy car, if you just have a cheap car and it's plastic, you think, oh, anything comes off.
01:43:11
◼►
Oh, and also, mineral sunscreen, you know, it doesn't burn my eyes, but because it is a bunch of metallic powder, it does occasionally just get in my eyes.
01:43:21
◼►
And then it feels like you have dust in your eyes.
01:43:25
◼►
It is, there are advantages, like, it is, like, reef safe.
01:43:29
◼►
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.
01:43:35
◼►
But, like, it's a pretty big set of trade-offs.
01:43:38
◼►
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.
01:43:55
◼►
Obviously, you're not entirely covering your body like you're a French mime or something with white stuff, but, like, that's the extreme case of this.
01:44:02
◼►
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.
01:44:10
◼►
I mean, to be clear, like, you do get very white with mineral sunscreen, like, because it is just coating you with white dust.
01:44:15
◼►
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.
01:44:30
◼►
But it's – they all have the same tradeoffs of, like, you're leaving dust all over everything.
01:45:12
◼►
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.
01:46:19
◼►
When you were doing this, you didn't, like, I figured, like, your first YouTube search would have thrown, like, Korean sunscreen in your face.
01:46:25
◼►
Like, that didn't come up in your searches when you're buying 10 U.S.-only sunscreens?
01:46:28
◼►
Well, I didn't realize there was a difference.
01:46:31
◼►
But, like, did you Google for it once?
01:46:33
◼►
Like, I can't, 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.
01:46:40
◼►
And I have literally watched, anyway, go on.
01:46:43
◼►
I'm surprised that you were able to find and purchase 10 U.S. sunscreens without having non-U.S. sunscreens thrown in your face by every algorithm on the entire internet.
01:46:53
◼►
Yeah, I mean, well, because most of where I was looking was stores and Amazon.
01:46:59
◼►
However, the second I involved, ChatGPT.
01:47:04
◼►
You know, you could just use Google and you would have the same thing.
01:47:07
◼►
What, yeah, but it would have taken a lot longer.
01:47:09
◼►
No, you could have just written sunscreen, eye sting.
01:47:12
◼►
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.
01:47:38
◼►
Like, oh, they have strong regulatory agencies.
01:47:41
◼►
And they allow more chemicals than the U.S. does.
01:47:44
◼►
Apparently, the process of getting them approved in the U.S. for sunscreen is apparently onerous and burdensome and terrible.
01:47:49
◼►
And so nobody can really get new ones approved.
01:47:52
◼►
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.
01:48:04
◼►
And so I'm like, OK, well, how do I acquire chemicals?
01:48:10
◼►
You know, these obviously Amazon doesn't have them.
01:48:13
◼►
I'm like, well, if only there were some kind of electronic bay that would include things from other countries.
01:48:19
◼►
Are you sure Amazon doesn't have them?
01:48:51
◼►
I'll try option A on my legs, option B on my arms, you know, that kind of.
01:48:54
◼►
And like doing all these tests, I've had zero irritation, none.
01:49:00
◼►
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.
01:49:09
◼►
I'm wearing sunscreen more now because all of those downsides are gone.
01:49:15
◼►
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.
01:49:24
◼►
No, there are like U.S. sellers on eBay that have huge stocks of these.
01:49:28
◼►
It says, you know, more than 10 available like that.