The Chaser Report - Banning Raybans | Welcome to the Future

Episode Date: November 30, 2025

As the tech world responds to the security and privacy horrors introduced by the Meta Rayban glasses, Charles and Dom review a concept for a product that helps fight the good fight against creeps trying to record you with overpriced sunnies.---Order the 2025 CHASER ANNUAL: https://chasershop.com/products/the-chaser-and-the-shovel-annual-2025-preorderListen AD FREE: https://thechaserreport.supercast.com/ Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] CEO’s Super-yacht upgrade Fund: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to the future, future, future. Oh yes, we're once again looking at the world of AI and technology and above all Bluetooth to bring you the future today. And in general, the future turns out to be, well, perhaps a little bit optimistic than when we used to watch Beyond 2000 as kids. Well, maybe that used to be the case, Dom.

But today I've got a tech gadget that is just going to rock your socks. I'm so relieved because we were getting into a little bit of a pattern of going, oh, welcome to the future. Oh, it sucks. Yeah. Good, okay. Well, let's turn it around. Yeah, no, this is good.

And also, we should probably mention this is also the Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. It is. And these are the ads. Which you can pay to remove, by the way. Okay, so Dom. Yes, I'm ready. This Christmas, what is the hottest tech gadget out there? Normally, I know the answer to that question.

Has anyone invented anything interesting recently? Yeah, there's one thing that, and I'll give you a hint, Mark Zuckerberg was involved. Oh, you're not going to talk about the AI glass, the meta-glasses. The raybans. The raybans, yes. Yep. No, I saw MKBHD, Marquez Brownlee, actually said that they are pretty good now. Yes, yes.

I was genuinely surprised to hear this. So, and look, it's interesting because they have been heavily discounted now. I think they're a good product. I saw them for less than actual sunglasses cost either day. Yeah, there's just one tiny, tiny little floor that has sort of massively sort of curtailed their sales, as I understand it. That's not good. And it's just a tiny one. Okay.

But it's that they don't really look like glasses that are recording you. They just sort of look like sunglasses, right? Which you'd think would be a good thing, right? But actually, it just means that most of the use cases so far seems to be creepy men walking into women's toilets and things like that. Like, you know, like, or just taking a stroll on the beach and all this sort of stuff. Like, apparently, it's just, it's literally, like, only creeps seem to be buying them, right? And it's led to the point where there's a new variety of memes of people, like, getting angry at people for wearing Rayband-looking glasses, not realizing that they're not the meta ones, they're just normal sunglasses.

But getting, like, irate and sort of grabbing them off and going, how dare you record me? So let's just dial back a little bit for those who might not be aware of these. So these came out a few years ago, the first version. Yeah. And it was very obvious. They were a bit chunky. Yeah, they were quite chunky. Yeah.

The corner. So the first thing to note is these are not glasses that actually superimpose any computer graphics or whatever on in front of you. No, no. They're on the way. Those ones are on the way. In fact, I think Marquez tested some other ones, maybe from Samsung or someone that actually worked surprisingly well to do that. But this is just all that they do, and you can check. this while I'm talking, but they've got a camera, so they record what you're looking at.

Yes. And then they've got, they can play music next to your ears, so you can do a phone call on them and stuff like that. Yeah. But they're very good at, yes, subtle surveillance. The new version, as you say, don't look like there's a massive camera in them. I think there might be a light on some of them, but it's easily obscured. You could just literally take a texture, a black texture, and draw over the light.

And I think, whatever, the use case that Mark Zuckerberg hilariously demonstrated a few months ago was It's basically, you know, if you're looking at an apple. Yes. Right. And you don't know what it is. You say, hey, what am I looking at? Is that an apple or is that a piece of tech that's made by Apple? And the glasses can then say to you using their sort of speaker things.

That's an apple you're looking at. Yeah. And they were saying that it was very difficult to work out when you'd actually want to use that because surely, you know, if you're looking at something, you know what you're looking at. Or if you don't, you could also pick up the phone that you have that is in your pocket and do the same thing on phones now. And there were lots of demonstrations about how picking up your phone was almost always faster than using the celebrity tech. But the idea was there and there's something in it. And you can do things like if you're at a party, you can sort of go, hey, start recording now and, you know, catch five seconds of material.

Well, I mean, I would want them to tell me who the person was who came up to say hello, who I'd completely forgotten. Oh, that's good. See, that would be a very useful. Yeah, and I'm sure that could work. If you paired it with Google's pretty good. I mean, look at these. The camera in some cases is a little bit visible, but they're much more subtle than they used to be.

So they are much more subtle. So that is the problem that we are addressing today with a new tech gadget, which is a pair of sunglasses that are designed to detect. smart glasses. Oh my goodness, that's brilliant. Yeah. So what you do is you put on this, it's a little sort of black box

that you put on the side of your glasses. Right. And it has these sort of sensors on it that can detect whether... Isn't it even one creepy? Yeah, the cameras emit some sort of waves or there's some sort of detection thing. Like it's got sensors on it

which can sort of go, oh, that thing is a camera. Right. And what this guy who's made it is saying that actually... Oh, so I thought this is a hypothetical device. No, no, this is a real thing. I can show you it. It's pretty trendy. Just have a look at it.

I'm sure it's really going to catch on. Yeah, so this is basically like... It's about the size of a big, one of those big pencil sharpeners that does both sizes of pencil with wires ticking out of it. But Charles, the good thing about it, in its defence, Even though it's incredibly clunky and elegant, it's not faking it. No one will think that you're not wearing a glass.

Yes. Yeah, you're very obviously surveilling what's going on. But the interesting thing is, so the current version that you, admittedly, you can't actually buy it commercially. You've got to build it yourself. But somebody's posted online exactly how to build it. And they're prototyping at the moment. The first version is just doing a sweep. So basically, if somebody's in a room with a camera,

on their glasses, it can work out that that's what you're doing, right? That's very clever. But the next iteration, they've said, is what they're going to do is they're going to put a little transmitter on it. And apparently there are sort of certain frequencies of unseeable light rays that camera, that really disturb cameras. Really? Yes.

And so you can actually make something almost completely unviewable by a camera. I think they're called something like, they're called capture. They're called capture. resistant environments or something like that so it can create so the next iteration is going to create a capture resistant environment what a great idea

yeah um which actually was apparently invented back in 2005 when smartphones started getting popular and researchers sort of went oh we're going to have to work out a way to get rid of people taking photos at the time but obviously can we please do that at concerts and stuff rather than having to put our phones in pouches

yes very good but um okay The other slightly less technically complicated way. Oh, and then the other thing that it can do is that it logs into the blue. Oh, this is brilliant. This is perfect for Welcome to the Future. It logs in. So the smart glasses. Yeah, they talk to the phone.

And it can identify that it's a meta glass, like one of the raybans. By searching for the. By looking at the Bluetooth traffic. Really? The form of Bluetooth is a very modern form of Bluetooth. BLE, it's cool. And it transmits a unique user ID, a UUID, that actually advertises the manufacturer data and service.

Well, there's another less high-tech way you can get the same effect. I was just reading about the mess of ray bands. Oh, yeah. And apparently, I mean, there's probably a more subtle way to do this. But one of the ways you can get it to start doing a creepy video when you walk into the locker room or whatever is you go, hey, meta, start recording, a video. And so if someone does that,

Like, no one should ever be saying, hey, meta. Yes. That's just, there's so many problems with that. You just punch them. So, if somebody's just, you just, and maybe even this device could have a little fist that protrude, like, that comes out. Yes. Whenever anyone says, hey, meta, start recording a video. I feel like we need to amend legislation, you know, because there would be legislation around not being allowed to punch people, isn't there?

Yes, but there are certain circumstances. Yeah. So it should just be, could it become a common law? defense. Like in a box, if it's a boxing match, for instance, you're fine. So you could argue that you could legislate such that wearing smart glasses is the equivalent of throwing a punch. Yeah, it's self-defense.

It's self-defense to punch somebody in the face if they're wearing smart glasses. I reckon, look, I'm not advocating it yet, but I am advocating a change to the law because you know, you don't want to advocate violence, but I want to advocate for changes to the law to allow for violence in the future, is what I'm saying. It's an act of privacy, self-defense. The other thing you could do is just whenever anyone, you think anyone's wearing smart glasses, you could just go up to them and start really using very obscene language,

like shouting very obscenely. No, that's what goes most viral. Oh, damn, okay. All right, okay. No, we've declined enough as the civilisation. Okay, I've got another idea. Oh, yeah. This will work.

This will completely work to stop this problem. Yes. Nobody wears sunglasses. In fact, this is probably going to happen anyway. If Mark Zuckerberg is the sunglasses guy Sunglasses are done They're not cool anymore No one's wearing them

That will be very bad in terms of Eye health We know that you're supposed to wear You've got a pair here I can see You need to wear them because You know we live in Australia And also because I want to record things

Especially when I go into bathrooms This is how we're recording the podcast But it's worth it To all get cataracts or whatever Just to Maybe I managed to do it for a year or two Until Mark Zuckerberg gives up Yeah okay

Because he's given up the whole metaverse now, isn't he? Like, no, yeah, that's done. Yeah. I wonder whether, um, yeah, like, I thought you were going to sort of talk about how, like, there must be a more, like, because I still want to wear sunglasses. Okay. Well, the other thing you could do, Charles, and this is based on, like, the way nerds have

been treated for many years, so Mark Zuckerberg should be familiar with this. Yeah. Is that, you know how, and I never saw this done, but it must have happened a lot because it's kind of a meme, that the nerd gets their glasses stomped on. Yes. And so if you walk into a space and someone sees that you're wearing smart glasses, if they can tell there's a camera, maybe we just say, look, it gets stomped on. And they're quite expensive.

Those 500 bucks or something. Yes. Maybe that's just it. We've got to stomp on a few pairs of smart glasses. And maybe it's not so smart after all. You know, shoot one, educate a thousand type thing. Well, I mean, you wouldn't even need to stop them. You could just basically, if everyone carried a texter, they could just draw a texture

over the camera. I've actually come up with an even less elaborate way of getting rid of them. Okay. Which is that every time you see somebody with smart glasses, right. What you do is you go up and just talk really, really boringly at them, right? Oh, so like my shouting idea, but the opposite. Yeah, yeah.

So that there's nothing worth capturing. Yes. And everyone knows, oh, if you see somebody with smart glasses, be really boring. Like, ask them what their favourite podcast. is or something. You know, just something really that's just likely to, you know, just dullify the whole environment around them. Yeah, you could take out some sort of, I don't know, heavy policy document.

Yes. You could take out a transcript, actually, the AI-generated episode of this podcast. You could take out a transcript of the episode that we did on Saturday about microeconomic performance. People are paid for that. Yeah, definitely do that. Yeah, just being really boring.

I think this is something I'm going to be good at. Yeah, yeah, I think we could weaponise DOM. Yeah. We could create a little DOM to sort of help people talk about things. Yeah, because of the people on the podcast, I'm the one that bars people up and talks at them for very long time. Yeah, that's me.

Anyway, there you go. So it's not a welcome technology. I mean, I do love... No, but I like the detector. Yes, that's right. I think the simplest solution is the solution that's in front of us. It involves Bluetooth. It involves buying a new gadget.

at this Christmas we get a we all get sunglasses detector sunglasses what are they called the name is on GitHub so they're called

ban rays oh that's great banrays they're very good that's very catchy so you can yeah you can download all the software on GitHub

and then there's also prototypes available that you can build if you want and look if there's enough demand for it you know email at podcast

at chasercomcom to AU and look I'm I'm happy to build some prototypes. Amazing. There's an offer. That could be fun.

Ban raise. Ban raise. We're part of the Iconiclass Network. Catch you tomorrow.