The Vergecast - ARM, EFF, and SDCC

Episode Date: July 22, 2016

With a classic cast of Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Paul Miller, and Lauren Goode, we have a very nerdy episode of Vergecast this week. For starters, there’s the news about SoftBank buying chip maker ARM, then the Electric Frontier Foundation filing a lawsuit that takes on anti-circumvention rules. The gang also goes deep into nostalgia with classic consumer electronics. But we couldn’t leave it at that. Paul interviews our own senior reporter Bryan Bishop, who calls in live from San Diego Comic-Con to tell us what he’s seen so far at the convention. To top it all off, we go into the nerdiest part of the celebrity feud between Kayne West and Taylor Swift, which leads to the cast going through their own note-taking apps. 08:20 – Softbank buys ARM 24:45 – Paul’s "Gadget shhecrets" 29:20 – EFF copyright lawsuit 37:40 – Nostalgia note 44:24 – SDCC interview with Bryan Bishop 56:26 – Taylor Swift / Kanye West / Kim Kardashian feud 1:02:57 – Note app game Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. Our chief weapon is fear. Fear. Fear and surprise. All right. Hello. Welcome to the Vergecast. The Flagship podcast of Theverge.com. It's the largest fleet in our armada. It's a ship or it's a fleet?

It's the largest ship in the fleet. Oh. The flagship isn't necessarily the largest. It's just the one in charge. Yeah, this is the one in charge. But I like to think of it as the, I don't know. If there's any naval historians out there, please let me know what the flagship is and how that metaphor.

I'm pretty sure it's the one with the flag. Well, this is a podcast with the flag. This podcast continues. Well, I guess I don't want to give away for free. But anyway, look, there's a vodka. I like it. It cuts to the night. Nice.

It's called Cizzer. Nice. All due respect to the Copelo wine company that owns the actual trademark in Spanish. Anyway, I'm Neil Epital, I'm the editor chief of the verge. I'm joined by Paul Miller. Hello. Lauren Good is on the line. Hi.

Hello, Lauren. And Deere Bone is here. Hello, hello. So this, I will say to our listener. I think the Vergecast listener really loves the nitty-gritty on the show, the inner mechanics of how we do things. And I'm just going to say this. This was one of the craziest, most stressful, most insane weeks in Verge history because all the things were doing. So I'll just run through some of them.

You published a massive Mark Zuckerberg feature an interview today. Casey Newton did it. You should go read it. It's about the next 10 years of Facebook. It's really cool. And about Mark Zuckerberg's toaster. Yeah, he's got internet drone plane. He's got toasters.

He's talking about VR, AR. That stuff's just published today. I encourage you to read it. Maybe next week we'll get it. Casey's on vacation in Italy right now. Right. Which is a very decadent way to publish the feature. But maybe next week we'll talk to Casey a little bit with that.

So that happened. We premiered the Mr. Robot Digital After Show, hosted by the Verge. a wonderful, not at all, unwieldy title. But that premiered live last night after Mr. Robot episode three, it premiered at 1126 p.m., which means I went to bed at 2.30 a.m. last night. Wow. That show we're going to do every week after Mr. Robot. Mr. Robot's a cool show that I encourage you to watch.

And just like a little backstory on that one. Obviously, NBC Universal invested a bunch of money into Vox Media, our parent company about a year ago, over a year ago. A lot of money. A lot of money. It was about a year ago. About a year ago. So there's this like tight relationship between the two companies, whatever.

But the people who run Mr. Robot, turns out almost all their writers and producers read The Verge because they're big nerds. And they asked us if we could do anything about it. And the first thing they asked us was, why don't you just do special episodes of the Vergecast? Just do the Vergecast about Mr. Robot for half an hour once a week. And we're like, why don't we do a real show? You're like, the Vergecast is our flagship. podcast.

And they're like, what's a flagship? Well, no, because it was in that moment when we were deciding whether we were going to have this just be an audio show or a video show. Right. So we're like, look, we're taking the Vergecast to be an audio podcast because most people listen in their cars. Mm-hmm. The fact, I firmly believe, without any evidence. But we'll make a new video show for you. Because Mr. Robot people are proven TV watchers.

Clearly we know they're watching video. Although if you're out there and you just download the audio of Mr. Robot week to week and listen to It is a radio play. Please let me know. So USA, crazy enough. They're like, yeah, just do a video show however you want. So really neat. Very trusting.

I don't know how you watch the Vergecast and you think to yourself, we will continue to let these people do whatever they want with our brand. But that was the first episode. It's cool. We're trying it out. Let us know what you think. Please, if you're a Mr. Robot fan, please watch that show and talk to us about it. And it's you, Emily and Russell. It's me, Emily and Russell.

There's an IRC channel. There's an IRC channel, V-Corp on FreeNode. Hit it up. The IRC channel last night, rocking. Just rocking. Yeah. Oh, man. Do you want to hear some IRC drums?

Yeah. So we have a great producer, showrunner of the show. This guy named Banked Anderson. His brother, huge nerd, volunteered to run our IRC for us. His brother Micah. So Micah lights up the IRC last night. We're like tweeting about it. Get in there.

Someone came into Free Node and kicked him from the channel. Yeah. It took super off step. And Micah had to, like, go in there and battle his way back to being a super op. Oh, it's just like IRC. So, like, deep, deep IRC drama, blowing up. But it was fun. If you're like an old school and gadget podcast or early, early Vergecast listener,

remember that we had IRC channels lit up during those shows. And it was like kind of a throwback only with a major cable networks in actual property. What we were talking about while was, like, reading crazy IRC messages. So that's really fun. Then on top of that, I don't even think that's the whole, that's like the two big ones. And on top of that, this weekend is the Panorama Music Festival in New York that we are presenting. And you've been just hydrating like crazy. I'm ready to rock.

We're going to roll and roll and roll and roll. No, I'm too old for that. But it's Arcade Fire, Kendall Kumar, LCD Sound System, on the headline air, a bunch of other acts. We want to see my wife and I are old. We're just going to calmly rock out to the national. We're just going to the middle of the afternoon, just hold hands, eat pretzels. I had to tell you this, Nelai, but you can calmly rock out to Arcade Fire, too. They're a band for Olds now.

No, no. It's really sad. So is LZD's out system, but I think they're going to put on a question. Yeah. Anyhow, what's cool about that, and I hope you've been watching our YouTube channel or the site itself, we have this massive installation in Panorama. It's the biggest one. Actually, Panorama is on Rosewood Island in New York. The same place is Govall, actually.

And if you're driving down the FDR, you can see the Verges Lab. It's called The Lab. You can see it from the highway. It's so huge. And it's lit up. There's a big verge sign. And inside of that, we ran around with a company called Meta, which is like a, I didn't know how activations were made. And now I know.

Brand activations? I know how brand activations were there. Yes. You hire a really cool company called Meta. which is awesome. A student named Justin Bogdino, who ran around New York, found all the coolest digital artists in New York,

and had them all install a bunch of stuff in this massive 70-foot GEODIC dome that plays like VR 360 video all around you while you watch like robot arms dance and stuff. I have a question about panorama. Yeah. How do you go to panorama? You can take a...

It's on an island. Right. So you can take a... I'm not a strong swimmer. Well, Paul, you're screwed. If you don't swim, you can't see. I can tread water just fine. But as far as covering distance.

There's a ferry. There's a bus. And there's the cable car thing. And you just buy tickets. The tram. Tram. Like tickets aren't sold out or something like that. Tickets, I do not believe the main, I think the special VIP tickets are at, but the GA general admission tickets.

Cool. You can still get them. Which, because most people are listening to this on Friday. Right. You just get them right now. Yeah, just go. It'd be cool. And a bunch of verge people are there.

We're talking a bunch of artists backstage. We're going to do a bunch of videos where we set up a huge VR rig backstage. We're going to put artists in VR and see how they react. So we'll be periscoping, Facebook living. Not periscoping. Probably just Facebook living. Probably making videos, taking photos. Snapchat, maybe.

Snapchat. So you'll see us all weekend at the Panorama Festival, which is very exciting. And it's been, Deider, I would say this has also been a year-long project in the making. Right? We started talking about this easily last year, if not more. Yeah. So it's our first go at presenting something at music festival. It's our first go at doing something like The Mr. Robot Show. It has been just a bonkers week of running around.

But on top of all of that, there was tech news this week. Sometimes. Who knew such a thing would happen while we're so busy doing verge stuff? So we've got to get right into it. Biggest tech news of the week actually flew under the radar. unless you're a big nerd. But SoftBank bought Arm, and that means very little to some people

and everything to some other people. I think my first reaction was like, oh, you could buy Arm. You can buy a giant chip company that doesn't manufacture chips but designs them. They don't even really design. It's, well, Paul and I are talking about it. Has an architecture that is popular.

Yeah, so I've been reading the Wikipedia article on... Paul threatened to just read the Wikipedia article for the show. Without footnotes, it's 8,500 words. This is about the armed architecture specifically. But, yeah, the biggest, the way arm touches most of our lives is through chips that are manufactured and mostly designed by Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung. and those companies basically license the instruction set of Arm, but hardly anything else. Yeah. And I guess that's why Arm is a company that can be bought.

Yeah. And they are not bought for, I mean, it's a huge sum of money to normal people, but at the scale that we're talking about, they're $31 billion. Right. For a company whose name is synonymous with the thing that powers everything that's not a laptop or a desktop. Yeah. That seems pretty small. Yeah. I mean, it was only $31 shave clubs.

So there's, so SoftBank bought it. SoftBank is fundamentally a Japanese carrier. They're also in Sprint. But Arm has been the sort of Switzerland of the mobile industry. They make this instruction set. They do have, as Lauren was saying, they do have chip designs that some people use. But the big players that we think about Apple, Qualcomm,

Samsung, they license just the instruction set and make their own processors around it, obviously with some connection to the main arm design. Right. So Apple has its A series. Samsung has Exinos, Qualcomm has Snapchat, and those are all arm chips, but special in their own significant way. Right. And, yeah, the most important thing is that instruction set and you can...

But there's weirdnesses across Arm... I don't know. I've been tracking. I feel like, I don't know. I'd love to hear what Deeter and Lauren have to think about this. Before I just say random stuff about compilers. I think that I really, I can't like even begin to pawn this off as my own thought. But Vlad Savov did a really good article about this the morning after and quoted, I think it was Tom Goodwin, who had pointed out that in a lot of the major tech. companies today. It's not actually about owning hardware or owning vehicles or owning, I guess that's

the best way to describe it, right? Like owning hardware. It's actually about owning information and owning sort of the infrastructure. Here's the quote actually. So Uber owns no vehicles. Facebook creates no content. Alibaba has no inventory, right, but it's one of the world's most valuable retailers. Airbnb has no homes. So this is like if you want to sort of slide this in there with that. Arm doesn't have chips, but it has the information and the infrastructure that enables that to happen. And that's a really big deal. Yeah. So, I mean, we all have this, Neelai called Arm, like the Switzerland of, you know, chips.

And that's like, I think that's true. There's not a lot of people that have historically distrusted arm. So Apple and Samsung can be comfortable using fundamentally the, you know, same instruction set or architecture for their chips. because they just, you know, the arm stuff is good, and they figure they could just use that and not have to worry about competition down the line. The big question is now that they're owned by SoftBank,

which is in part a big carrier who has some skin in the game in, you know, what happens in mobile, they own Sprint, is that going to change? I kind of think not, but mostly because I think that softbank has shown itself to be really smart and I mean other than buying Sprint really just savvy so like in addition to buying Sprint San Bifert wrote this story they also bought or they bought a huge stake in this company called Supercell who makes Clash Clans they sold that for a bunch of money to 10 cent they also were an early investor in Alibaba and

they also made a bunch of money on that so like they've sort of of managed to make really smart purchases and do stuff with them. And, I mean, they would have to be incredibly stupid to hurt arm status as like a impartial creator of instruction sets and have them start favoring, you know, one phone over another. Well, so that in the short term, it doesn't really benefit them to create any kind of conflict of interest, I think is what you're trying to say. I was going to say, yeah, long term is, I don't know, maybe a different story. Yeah, so the reason they bought it, their stated reason is, obviously, everyone's stated reason for everything that isn't mobile but related to mobile, which is we're going to make Internet of Things.

We're going to put the stuff everywhere. We're going to put a chip in it. And that's great. I mean, you know, on the most optimistic timeline, the Internet of Things is a good idea, and it'll work, and our homes don't get hacked. But if they do create a conflict, what I was thinking about the most is Apple has a totally vertically integrated stack. There's no reason that the A series of processors can't slide away from arm in some way because Apple controls the operating system to make the hardware. No Apple consumer gives a shit about whether the A series processor is truly an arm processor or some weird Apple variant. Right. Right.

But then the flip side of that is we've been hearing just rumors. It's like idle speculation, and it comes up a lot that Apple is eventually going to walk away from Intel in the MacBook. Yep. Which we've, I mean, the current MacBook, Dieter, you have one. I have your old one, actually. Your old one is very slow. Your new one, only slightly faster. It's like, there's no reason that they couldn't put a really fast arm chip in that.

Certain arm Chromebooks. Certain arm Chromebooks. There's the MFAP. Certain ARM Chromebooks are... Certain ARMCrom-Books. Yeah, are well known to be very fast. Yeah. So it's definitely, for that size of computer,

Arm does seem to be pretty great. I would rather take an Intel Chromebook over an armed Chromebook basically any day of the week. I mean, I want to spend a large portion of the show talking about my dream of owning a Chromebook pixel running Android, running Android apps. Because they just released support for it and it's out.

Well, it's out of the dev channel. And by the way, Neela, I have one on my desk. I hate you. Like, I mean, I really like you. Everyone in the comments now is going to be like, video. Bring that video. So we can see the thing on Deeter's desk. It's kind of buggy.

It's more like their apps that just aren't friendly to it yet. So there's a bunch of games that don't work. They haven't quite in the build that I'm using figured out like screen resizing for Android apps. So you either have to choose tablet mode or portrait mode. It's like okay. And it's a sort of thing that I would use in the same way that I use a Chromebook, but just have a few apps that are more convenient to have an Android instead of Chrome. But you can see it.

You can see the future. I was just talking to somebody else about this earlier today. Like using it, you're like, man, just a little bit more polish, another rev of the software. And the only reason I need a traditional proper. laptop is Photoshop and video editing. Yeah. But then you'd get, you'd get like a hot IMac. Think about it.

Yeah. Yeah. No. No? No? I'd get a... No, I'd get a... Lauren. Well, because you would basically do that stuff at home. If I'm going to get a big-ass desktop computer, I'm going to get something that can run

on HDC5. That's true. That's actually kind of a moment, right? I mean, there's a huge split going on here between what's happening with desktop PC's desktop PC, I think Cantar Research released, it was like last week desktop PC sales are ticking up, and depending on whether you measure Chromebooks

in it, it's either like 1% up if you don't measure Chromebooks, and it's 5% up if you measure Chromebooks. I mean, that's where I'm at. It's like I got to put my money away to get VR rig. Yeah. It's a hot graphics card, like physically hot.

Get some alien wear. Yeah. Yeah, my apartment is not warm enough, and I want it to be warmer. Lauren, why would you get a desktop? I mean, would that work for you? That's kind of a big question. I don't feel the need to get a high-powered PC yet for the sake of VR. I honestly don't because just in the untethered experiences I've had at home,

I use it for like a half hour and then I'm like, okay, I'm good with this for now. It's kind of the way it goes. Actually, the Mr. Ro, people try to do VR simulcasts today and it just like glitched out. It was really exciting and cool, but the stuff isn't ready yet. It can't drive demand until it works. Yeah, and also, I mean, I feel like at this point, if I was going to get a high-powered desktop at home, or just got an IMac, I mean, it would be for like a sense of focus on stuff at home. Like, I would just need something really, really, you're totally right in that this is being segmented out.

The PC market is sort of being segmented out in this way. I don't even know if we'd call it PCs anymore because of it. We're really talking about mobile, but like just you just need something really light that you can take with you on the go and cover events and do all the crap you have to do on the fly. But then like you'd have a desktop for editing your photos and maybe storing some stuff locally and doing editing and premiere or doing like whatever it is that you feel like you just can't do from a 12 inch MacBook. Yeah. I desperately need a new MacBook Pro. My MacBook Pro is good. This is why I have Dieter's old MacBook.

because it's like, maybe I can just hold over, but it's too slow, and I definitely, the keyboard is just not right to me. I want to love that keyboard so much. I want to feel like it can make me so fast, but it's just one tick too small. Did you have that problem at all? Did you get used to it? I totally got used to it. My problem is, apparently there's a known issue with the space bar where it doesn't, it gets a little sticky on the right-hand side, and I'm experiencing that. But I want to finish the thought that you started, that you're like implied there's a future coming. and the future is soft bike screws up arm Apple's like eh and they moved to some other instruction set

and then they could use the same processor architecture on a Mac and on their phone and you know on the iPad and then wait for it you could just take your iPhone and instead of having a Mac you could just slot your iPhone into a keyboard and monitor

oh my God that will never happen Well, it's a solution so far. I've just been so janky. Yeah. I mean, look, Deeter, I know that folio dream is real for you. Yeah, it really was. Deere got really maddeny because we talked about the folio last week. Oh, yeah, we didn't talk about.

Yeah, and you were wrong. I was super right. Super wrong. All right, you guys ready to talk about compilers? Yes. All right. It's fine. Time for this show to go off the rails.

Crazy thing that Apple did, and a lot of developers are kind of freaked out about. But this is something that happened with Swift. is when you deliver your, there's actually this really good chart that I will try to explain out loud to you, but when you deliver your apps to Apple's App Store, and I don't know if this is already in effect or it's something that they're implementing, you don't deliver them stuff compiled specifically to a platform anymore. You deliver what is called Bitcode, and they compile it to target different architecture. And one of the reason Apple is doing this is like there's, you know, there's a difference between Arm and Arm 64, right? Yeah. So instead of having you make the ultimate binary that lands on a person's device but has support for multiple architectures, they can just take your bit code and then compile it themselves and give a slimmer binary to each person. How are developers feeling about that?

It sounds like they lose a little bit of control in the process. Some of them are pretty freaked out about it, especially because there are other things that you would do that would be complied. piled and very architecture-specific that would probably be a little difficult with this. So is bit-code, what's the difference between bit-code and source code? Is Apple able to look at a developer's source code if they want to? No, well, bit-code would be pretty far down the chain. Source code is what you type with your hands. And then bit-code is a bunch of compiler steps later, which Apple makes LLVM,

which is kind of one of the most popular compilers now. It makes it all this possible. Well, Apple's scale, let them get away with almost anything, right? I mean... Yeah, it's their scale, but also they do really, like you said, they have a whole tool chain. And right now they have a programming language that you could write Swift

and basically put it into an Apple black box and then Apple could make it run on anything. Yeah, so... If they want to. I mean, there's just the rumors about what Apple's doing with its processors next are all over the map. None of this stuff is confirmed or real, but there is the notion that Intel will win the modem for the next iPhone instead of Qualcomm, which currently has it, but then

Intel will win the processing contract or the manufacturing contract for the next processor, because currently Samsung has it. Intel gets back in the game that way. Then there's the idea that they're going to move away from Intel on their other product lines and armchips and MacBooks. I just want power PC back. Yeah. We never saw the G6.

Man, that's where that Cizzer Vodka Joe came from. That song. I'm just letting you know. Really? Like a G6? That song. Man, let me tell you. Sliken Cizzer in my ride. Years of confusion as like, what a rappers are such dummies. Don't they know there was never a G6 processor? It's about it.

Never mind. It's a plane, Paul. Yeah. It's a plane. And a mythical processor. That we never got. I mean, that, so all I'm saying is Apple is really good. at these process for architecture transitions. And if they are thinking about, if they were up until now considering moving everything to Arm, which they have at least the history of being able to do in a smooth way, the fact that

Arm is now owned by a carrier and potentially a competitor because SoftBank gets in all these businesses and wants to do all the center of things stuff, that actually is a bump in the road. It's a bigger story than just they spent $31 billion on a bunch of engineers who file patents on instruction sets. I'm just writing my editorial that says Apple moving to arm is user hostile and stupid. God damn. It's time for an advertisement. The Vergecast, as you know, is supported by Citicards with Android Pay.

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Oh, is it my time? It's your time. For your usual segment. My usual segment that I do every week called Gadget. Secrets, which is my brother, my brother, and me reference, because Justin McElroyd does Edward Snowden character where he talks like that about secrets. Oh my God. This is different than gadget secrets.

It's this thing. It's this really cool. Edward Snowden and Bunny, who is a famous hacker and has been working on building like a completely from scratch, open source computer, built of all open source components, not just operating system. That's what you want. That is exactly what I want. Andrew Hwanger. Yeah.

But I know him as Bunny. Edward Snowden and Bunny. Bunny in the news twice today, actually. There's more Bunny News? Yeah. But do this one first. They're making an iPhone case, kind of, that it goes on the back of the phone, and it also, plugs into the phone, which it would require like basically custom modding of the phone,

you couldn't just get this off the shelf. It goes in through the SIM card slot of the iPhone. And the idea is that it could detect if the iPhone is using any radios when it's not supposed to. And so like journalists, if they're going into some like country that might be trying to track them, can know if their phone, even in airplane mode, is maybe like sending out signals or something like that, if they've been compromised. And it can also somehow shut it off. It's like the most technologically advanced and interesting tinfoil hat I've ever seen. It's literally a tinfoil hat for your phone.

Yeah. With like an e-ink display on the back. Yeah, of course. It says like a weird D-pad that, like it's got like up and down. Yeah. I guess it's like how arrow keys are laid out on a keyboard as a little triangle, where you typically don't do that for d-pads. I wish I would have done a little jogstick. Yeah.

I wish this was a Sony clee in the back of my phone. It's like those pawn cases, except instead of blocking you from... Sorry, guys, I'm so brain dead right now because I'm really hungry. Instead of blocking the waves, it's telling you that they're there. It's oversimplify this. Right. That's, yeah, which seems just weird. I mean, I guess I'm not, am I not paranoid enough?

You're definitely not paranoid. I feel like if I put my phone in an airplane mode, it's fine. Well, you just have to test the one phone. Like, do you need to sell a device? Well, I guess this would somehow, like, fend off future hacks. that other people come up with. But yeah, you'd think you could just or just buy a factory fresh phone?

I don't know. So wait, I'm reading this now. It alerts users to any unauthorized output when the radios are meant to be off. So that means when you manually turn off your radios, if they are still, for some reason, being used, it just shuts it off. Yeah, so the CIA is hacking.

It's not like at the app level. It's not like app permissions. Like there's some app. that's pulling data from somewhere. It's like purely in the hardware. It's in the radio connectivity. If somebody like hacked your phone to somehow like pretend to turn off when you turned it off but actually still work or or yeah, keep broadcast. So it would be a very, it would be an operating system level hack.

It would be a pretty deep hack to be able to do anything. But apparently it was Edward Snowden when he met with like reporters. like originally had them turn off their phones and put them in a refrigerator. Just. Yeah. I mean, like it's, but it's even farther than it.

It's like hardware level because it, you take out your SIM card. You put the SIM card into the, this extra case. And this has wires that go into your phone and know what's up somehow. I love this gadget. It's pretty exciting. I mean,

this is a, this is a sort of wild stuff we need to see more of in the gadget world. Yeah. I'm into it. Okay. We should do the other Bunny News. So Bunny the News twice today. This is a story that I'm super into

and no one else will be into. I have no idea what you're talking about. So I'm going to learn. Where are you going with this? Bunny. Set top boxes. No, it's not set top boxes. It's copyright law, guys.

It's my thing. So Bunny, Andrew Wang, has a company called Alpha Max. That company develops software to basically rip video streams and re-edit them on the fly. That company and the EFF, the Elechronic Frontier Foundation, filed a lawsuit today, God, this is so nerdy,

but I'm so excited, to invalidate section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which if you are a huge nerd, you know is one of the most troublesome laws as it relates to how we use computers, particularly the internet. So 1201, people have gone to jail because of 1201.

What's the 1201 saying? 1201 is the anti-circumvention component. Oh, so this is like, DVD John. Yep, DVD John. I mean, it's just like... You print out the DVD thing, yeah, yeah, yeah. What was it?

It was, you print out the code to decrypt a DVD and, like, just writing it down, and it's not that long can, like, send you to jail. What if I think about it? Yeah. And this is, like, a big... Deider, like, I would say 2004-ish. It was so... It was so in the news that, like, people were getting the DVD encryption code tattooed on themselves. I mean, like, fuck you arrest me for this.

Isn't there something also going on with this and tractors? Oh, yeah. Farmers want to be able to modify their John Deere tractors. Yeah, so there's a lawsuit about that. So basically, the way it works now is that if something is copy protected digitally and you break it, that's illegal. Right. And that applies just down the line to even the weakest protection. And there are also, there's similar laws about locks, right?

Like physical locks? I went to a hacker conference and locks are also sort of have this weird protected status, right? Yeah, there's a whole bunch of... Basically, this is an argument about metaphors and you pick the metaphor you want and you pick

the legal regime around that metaphor. And then you try to apply it to the internet and always breaks down because all the stuff is just encrypted with numbers. And if you guess the number or you route around the number, you go to jail. Like, that's the answer. But there's a bunch of

of because it's not a lock, right? So a lock on your shed, I know how to break your lock, I go into lock, I take the tools out of your shed, I've actually stolen them. Broken and entered. I have them and you don't have them. Right. And there's no argument I have for like, I'm making fair use of your lawnmower because I just fucking took it from you.

So before I was a journalist, I was a grad student and I was like the tech guy who helped use tech in the classroom. and I worked for the cultural studies department and like there are professors that wanted to use literally like 30 second clips of you know old ass movies as examples in their classroom and they didn't want to have to like mess around with the DVD and I had to go through this whole rigamarole with the legal department

and they told me no and we just ended up doing it anyway but I just wanted to rip like 30 second clips that they could use in the classroom and I had to do it on the sly And there's like not much of a clear use of fair use than like a graduate school professor showing a 30 second clip from a movie from like 1932, right? Right. That's how that's like it was a crazy time. And like what's bonkers to me is that this rule is still just sort of hanging around and people aren't up in arms about it anymore because. Well, so what's happened. So what's happened is really bad, right? So there's an exception to. the rule, which is every few years, groups of concerned citizens can petition the library of Congress to make certain uses acceptable.

So, like, every three years we report on this, and those rules, it's like, it's backwards. Instead of saying, everybody has permission and if you do something illegal, will get you. It's everything is illegal unless you mount a lobbying campaign to get permission. Right. So things like unlocking tablets has been granted an exemption, but that, exemption will expire in three years and then it'll be illegal again. The DVD stuff for academic research has been granted, but it'll expire and you've got to go beg for it again over and over and over and over again. This is all the DMCA, digital money and copyright, was

passed in 2000. You just think about the state of the internet and technology in 2000 versus now. And Neilie's hair. In my hair, which I believe at that time I had blonde streaks in my hair. This is a fact. Think of how much more knowledge you have now. I mean, this was the stuff when I was in college just, like, riled me up. I was like a boing, boing reader. Yeah. Every day, just like ranting about the copyright law. It sent me to law school on the force of rage and conviction.

And then law school beat that rage and conviction out of me. Right. And I became a lawyer. Right. And now you've got a website and a flagship podcast. Both of those things. And you're putting the line in the sand. You're planning the flag from the flagship.

Let me tell you. In the sand. How many DVDs have been cracking me. No, this is one of those moments where, again, it seems like a small thing, but in the history of technology, this is one of those things where the copyright system of the United States is so far behind reality that if you actually, if you get rid of something like 1201, you say, you can make use of the media that surrounds you. Here's a good example. Adobe tried to send somebody to jail ages ago for daring to crack the encryption. on PDF from like being telling people how to interoperate with PDFs right that's ridiculous and it's finally come to the point where I the way I look at this right now it's we're we're just at a place

where all of the media has moved online all of the media is now protected or DRM'd in some way like if you think about Spotify everything on Spotify is DRM'd so if you are that teacher deeter was talking about and you want to like grab a song clip you're effectively bypassing the protection measure of Spotify. Spotify could put you in jail. If you live in a world where everything is streaming at you all the time and DRM'd all the time, then you live in a world where any fair use activity becomes illegal. So this lawsuit is being positioned as a First Amendment lawsuit because the copyright law is making actual First Amendment use of media completely illegal, unless you go and beg the Library of Congress for permission everything.

And is Bunny's case somehow an ideal case? Yeah, because, man, this is like super weedy. It's super weedy. So the way that you get around it is I'm trying to, I'm going to say a bunch of legal words in the wrong order and then people are going to email me. He's got, he's not, he's not Napster, right? He's not trying to say, well, most people are doing something illegal with my thing, but there are substantial non-infringing uses, so it should be made legal, right? Like, that's how Napster lost. The court looked at it and said, well, yeah, but most people are just stealing shit.

He's got a service where he's trying to, like, develop software, tell people mix and remix video streams. And that if you just look at it on the face of it, it probably should be legal, right? Like, you put in four YouTube streams and you, like, make some fair use thing out of it without having to jump through a lot of hoops. You can't really do that right now. So it's ideal in the sense that there's a real product here that is a good idea that has. expressive uses that aren't just straight up stealing shit. I think that puts it in a good spot. Cool.

But this is just one of those things where, obviously, I'm very excited about it. Can you tell? I'm like lit up. Wait, so they just shipped off the lawsuit? I mean, EFF, literally two hours ago put out this press release. Cool. Bunny the news twice today. Just protecting your phone?

Buy Bunny's laptop. I don't know if it's still available. All right. So that was my big one. And then I wanted to talk just next to it. Just a little piece of nostalgia note. VCRs. Yeah.

Out of production, though. They're going away. Well, last in Japan. Do you think that's the last ever? I haven't dug in this. How many VHS types do you still on? I own a ton. My little brother.

Yeah, they're all sitting on a bookshelf in Chicago. Has a huge library of VHS. And he has one, like a VCR slash DVD player, but then he also has a dedicated VHS player. and then he also has a dedicated DVD player. He's pretty into the format of VHS, I would say. It's funny because that VHS look is kind of everywhere again. Or have you been watching Stranger Things on Netflix?

No, I want to. That's like the ET rip-off, right? God damn. No, I would say it's inspired. Dieter, have you been watching it, Lauren? I'm waiting for a unicorn chaser show for it. It's like dark, right? No, Stranger Things, Lauren.

Have you been watching it? No. Oh, my God. Okay, everyone's screwing up. Hmm. It's, it's, it's just, it's like eight hours long. It's like an eight hour. It's like an eight hour movie.

It's like an amazing mashup of Stephen King and Stephen Spielberg. So there's like that ET vibe. And, but like John Carpenter. Like, it's crazy. It's so good. I do want to watch it. But I'm very busy. It's a show set in the 80s and the entire aesthetic of it is super 80s,

but it's not about the 80s. I feel like I've been seeing like music videos randomly pop up that just have a VHS filter on them the whole time. It's just that whole look is coming back right now. That whole, I mean, it's because people my age have disposable income. Wait until you see what Deli's hair is going to turn into. It's going to be great. Oh man. I'm getting it died tonight.

I'm going to get a perm. Lauren, did you ever have a perm? I did. Oh my God, I'm so embarrassed. I did. Yes. In like the third or fourth grade, I cannot believe my mother let me. do it, but I did.

I read an article the other day that in Japan, like late 70s, L.A. is coming back in style. And personally, I love all of this retro stuff. I think it's super cool. I think we should all be living in like a John Carpenter movie, but like minus getting killed. What is

everybody's favorite VHS? Oh, Jurassic Park. Short Circuit. Toy story for me. Do you have Toy Story in Vichets? Oh, I really like major league.

Ooh. That's a good one. Ferris Bueller's Day Off. That's a good one. It was Jurassic Park for me because it was the first one that we got that was in surround sound. We bought like this special newer stereo VCR and the first Dolby Surround tape that we got was Jurassic Park. What? Yeah.

I don't know that was a thing. All the way. Like the last generation of VHS players was like very fancy. This is great. And they were like stereo. I have you beat. We had, my brother and I used to make a lot of. movies, like horror movies.

And we were obsessed with, so you bring up John Carpenter, we were obsessed with like the Halloween series and Nightmare and Elm Street and like basically everything we could possibly watch. So we like scripted Halloween 6. This is one summer thinking like Halloween 6 was never going to come out because I think at this point we were on Halloween 2. And now of course they're like 10 or 11 or something absurd. I think that the series is no longer existence.

We actually like rounded up all of these people and shot a 45 minute Halloween 6. like a Panasonic VHS camcorder. And then we had two VCRs, so we edited the movie by basically split, you know, splitting them together. Yes. And like cutting that way. This was like so, this is, you know, three, pre, final cut pro. There's no copy protection.

Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we were shooting this. We were shooting this ourselves. Shot for shot when I was like eight. You redid Psycho? We remade Psycho shot for shot.

Like we full on sweeted Psycho. when I was like eight or nine years old. That's amazing. What camcorder did you use? I actually found a Panasonic camcorder and an antique shop like not long ago, and I was so tempted to buy it. I think I'm going to go back and get it. It's like one of those full-sized ones?

Yes. I mean, it was pretty big, you know, and it had like the top handle. Oh, yeah. And, you know, the physical button that you would pop on the side, you'd press on the side in order to pop the like, you know, envelope-style slot out to put the VH. It was just, it was so cool. And then in order to, like, if you wanted to, like, you'd put it. apply effects to the video, you would toggle like a physical button back and forth.

Yep. Yep. In order to apply, you know, the high contrast or the negative style. Like, it was so cool. Do you know a camcorder I always wanted, like, just the most was the red one they used in Back to the Future? Oh, yeah. The red, the red JBC that we already had.

This podcast is just completely old people talking about things they wanted in the 80s right now. But I wanted the hell out of that camcorder. And if anybody can talk to me, about where I can acquire the red JVC camcorder from back time. Right now. Because that is the thing. Probably can on eBay.

Backson, that's the one. Paul's got a picture right there. I mean, just look at that thing. Now we just have these stupid phones. They all look the same. Well, didn't Kodak come out with like a true actual film camera recently? Yeah, a bunch of people have it. And the Instax is like huge.

Every party I go to is like people taking polar heads. What? Why are we not at ComicCon right now? The folks at Comic-Con. got to see the NES Classic Edition. It is so tiny. I want one. It is the tiniest little thing.

Oh, no. I want it. Welcome to the retroverse chest. I'm so mad right now that I am not. We just fall into our youth. In person with this thing. It's so little. Is it on the website right now?

Yeah, it's on the website. We got to look at it. There's like a million pictures and it's not enough to make me happy. I once spent like two hours wandering around this neighborhood in Osaka where I didn't understand anyone or could read street signs or anything just trying to find a bar that someone on TripAdvisor said had an NES. And I was like, I will find this bar just so I can play NES for like an hour. The wine store by my house has an NES in it. And I have never seen a more effective marketing gimmick in my life. Like you walk in there

and you're like, yeah, I'll just go play the first level of Mario. And then they're like, would you like to try this wine? You're like, oh, that's delicious. Of course I would. Do you want to buy a bottle? And you're like, hey, why the hell not? I'll take six. I came in here to buy water.

I don't understand why. I just bought four bottles of one. It's great. So speaking of Comic-Con, actually, Paul spent some time on the phone with one Brian Bishop, who's at Comic-Con, getting a little report right now. All right. I'm here with Brian Bishop. Well, I'm not even literally here.

I'm over the phone. Call with. Brian Bishop who is at San Diego Comic-Con. Is that correct, Brian? I mean, it's not technically a phone call. It's Skype, but I am in San Diego at Comic-Con, and we are speaking, yes. Let's not nitpick. This will take forever, Brian.

Okay, so up front, I've never been to a Comic-Con. I think I've been to San Diego. I'm not sure. I am kind of scared of Comic-Con in general. That's a totally reasonable reaction. I have. Yes. And if you are,

and if you're going to pick one to be afraid of, this is the one that you should be most fearful about. This is the scariest. This is the scariest one. It is, it is big, it is large, it is all consuming,

it is brand-tastic all over the place. There are people everywhere, dressed in weird things. And it's just like if the humanity is overwhelming, to be totally frank, but what is really kind of cool and beautiful about it. And I, every year we come,

And I think, boy, this is overwhelming. It's such a crazy show. There's so much going on. But by the end of it, I come back to the same point, which is like most of these people that are here are here because they love a story or a character or a series or, you know, whatever it is. They love it so much that they just want to come be part of it and express that with other people, whether it's dressing up or just geeking out and buying stuff. And outside all of the cynicism that is rightly earned, that part is kind of amazing and beautiful.

But it's also really hot this year. So maybe that changes it by now. How much of it is like, I just love this whole culture versus I love this one thing. I got to be at Comic-Con because of this one thing. Right. I think there's definitely like a certain type of person that is wired to enjoy this scene. You know what I mean?

I think because people cosplay, they'll cosplay as, you know, multiple characters, a different character every year. They're always building a new costume. But there are people that are very clearly all about one, you know, series. They're like hardcore Star Trek people. They're hardcore Star Wars people. There are things like that. But I think there's a general type of person that is into this kind of thing.

But everybody seems to have a particular focus or favorite, even if it's not what they're dressing up as in that particular day. I think you really see that in these crazy lines with a whole H panels, where it's just like 6,500 people in a room, getting hyped about some small piece of news that's happening and just being super nerds about Captain America in a good way. And I think that's when you kind of see that delineate because people have to put enormous amounts of time

into picking what panel they're going to line up for and spend half a day for. So if you really, if you love Doctor Who enough to like spend the night in line overnight to see that, Dr. Who, then you must really be a hard. For Hoovian, excuse me, I did it wrong. What's the proper nominclature? I believe it's Hoovian.

A Hoovian. All right. We'll fact check that. So, yeah, what's the most hype thing that's been announced or unveiled or revealed so far? what's really funny is that my whole thing that I've been talking about with the you know this down here is that this actually feels like a quieter Comic-Con than last year last year was like this supernatural event where it was like Star Wars was coming back and all these things were happening and this feels like an off year

I think the you know Saturday is going to be the biggest day at the convention because that's when Marvel and DC are having their panels and obviously people are really hyped for suicide squad which is coming out next month and and uh dr strange is coming out this year and supposedly there's going to be some footage of the new spider man shown during the marvel panel so i think amongst like the traditional comic con people saturday's looking like the big day with those two panels but what's odd is that it's just those two panels normally it would be spread out over three days or so with multiple studios showing things and right like this year it's just Warner brothers with their DC stuff and and marvel and that's kind of it Paramount's not here sony's not here um a lot of the big studios just are

sitting it out this year, which is kind of interesting. Just because they don't have anything to share or they're not into fans? Well, that's the thing. They do have stuff to share, particularly Fox, who basically dropped out this year. And there's kind of this ongoing conversation in terms of how much buzzed you really get out of Comic-Con, right? You know, in the 2000s, people started, you know, studios started coming here and it was a great way to sell their movies, and it kind of took over the entire convention.

But now you have this thing where it's, the last five years or so, it's kind of been to diminishing returns and they're not really sure if it does all that much. You know, Disney spent a bunch of money on Trond Legacy, which, you know, didn't do that great. Scott Pilgrim, like, got huge crazy buzz back in the day of Comic-Con, did not open at all. And so you see, like, the studio's kind of strategically sitting it out year by year. But this year is so interesting because Fox has, you know, a new Wolverine movie coming out. They've got Assassin's Creed. They've got movies that they should be selling here, and they're not.

You know, they're saying it's because of privacy because these exclusive clips got leaked online. That doesn't really make sense because that only helped Deadpool last year. So there's basically, it's, you know, studios seem to be slowly inching away from Comic-Con as an investment. So is there, like, cool, like, niche stuff that's filling that void on, on on Saturdays? It's a ton of TV. There's a lot more TV stuff I've seen, you know, just in general than, like, I think there's ever been any year. That's been a trend that's been happening, but it seems to be really accelerated this year. But I'm also excited to see what that's going to mean for, you know, just the texture of the show in terms of this being artists get a little bit more

attention. Does this mean, you know, properties aren't, you know, smaller properties aren't going to be drowned out by, you know, whatever huge sequel is being pushed? It's, you know, that's always the weird thing about Comic-Con is the balance of swayed so heavily towards movies and these big, like, temple things that when it goes away, there's opportunity for, you know, smaller things and just surprises. I mean, it's really weird today. There's a panel for the Snowden movie today. I'm going to a screening of it right now, which is not the kind of movie that you'd expect to be at Comic-Con,

but it's happening. So there's there is room there. Well, and TV focuses a little bit more on the, I want to call minor characters, the characters that couldn't carry a movie all by themselves, or at least used to not be able to carry a movie by themselves, right?

So is that kind of exciting that it's bringing more people deeper into these worlds? I mean, I think it's certainly for all these fans, in particular, Luke Cage is going to be a big thing. I know that we haven't talked about. People are really excited. That series, I think, launches in September. But these are like, you know, ancillary characters.

If you love that world, you love that they're getting time to shine because they wouldn't carry a movie. And so that's like they're getting to go and, you know, build out the texture and the richness of these universes in ways that movies can only go so far because at the end of the day, every Marvel movie has to ultimately serve the next Avengers movie or, you know, what have you as it moves forward. Right. Okay. So what's the, the, the, the, number one costume. What's the look? Like, I feel like typically,

after I look at the photos from very far away from any Comic-Con, on Flickr or wherever, there's like, okay, this thing happened this year and then it totally swept the... What I'm thinking is Overwatch. Is everybody dressed as Overwatch, or is something larger in the world that I don't know about? What's really weird is we were expecting a lot of Pokemon. We thought that was going to be the thing.

We're expecting Pokemon and Ghostbusters. I've seen no Pokemon, and I've seen one person dressed up as Kate McKinn's character. What we've seen a lot of, actually, is Ray from the Force Awakens. Like, everywhere you look, there is rays everywhere. I saw a mom dressed as Ray, pushing your kids in a stroller earlier today. And that's just kind of cool, because that character in that series, that's, you know, except for, you know, the Leia character, there was never a lot of strong women in that series to have that character be adopted so readily.

by young women and fans is kind of remarkable. But no Overwatch. I'm happy for Ray. Are you, wait, are you interested in Overwatch? What? Yeah, is Overwatch a thing there? Not that I've seen.

I mean, this is the first day. There's like three days ago. This is why I wouldn't be accepted at a Comic Con. All right, well, just keep an eye out, okay, for me. There's still time. There's still time. Okay.

Anything else you're looking forward to specifically? You know, one thing It's also been interesting this year is, you know, we cover a lot of VR, obviously, on the site. But this year there's been a ton of virtual reality experiences. Pretty much every, like, themed activation or brand tie-in. But that's a petty cab driving by, if you could hear that. It's very exciting. But all these things are incorporating VR, which traditionally, you know, these promotional times have been pretty weak.

But some of the ones that I've seen have actually been really, really fun. Most notably, the Mr. Robot one, we saw yesterday. that Sam Smail directed, that was really, really well done. And it wasn't just a gimmick. It wasn't just kind of like a brand-tying thing. It was actual storytelling, which seemed like a big step forward. And so that's something that I like coming, keeping an eye on. We're going to be seeing more of in the coming days,

hoping that we see some more examples of work like that. Because I think that's something when you have an opportunity. By the way, the X-O-1 is just driving in front of me, by the way, Paul, that just happened. I'm sorry I'm not on video camera. But now, whenever you have, like, all these people, like, shoving money into this stuff to promote their thing, but creative people get a chance to work in new mediums, cool things can happen.

So I'm hoping we see more of that. Is that stuff just for showing off on a show floor? Is that stuff that people are going to have on their home headset soon? Most of it is usually just like promotional stuff where they tour it around. I think the Mr. Robot thing will get released. There was a simultaneous, like showing quote unquote, of it today where they filled people up in Petco Park near the convention center here, and they could watch it at 10 p.m. or 10.30 p.m.

And then everybody that had the Within app downloaded could also watch it at that same time. And so everybody could watch it around the world. But now it's gone, and they're being very coy about when it's going to come or not come out again. It sounds like eventually that will be released. And I think we're getting to the point now with all these experiences, that the reach is just not big enough

or you're taking it to like South by Southwest or Comic-Con, and that's it. You know, ILM, X Lab, they released that trials of Tattoo Weeking they've been showing around finally to the public. That's just the way. If they're going to do these a promotional tie-ins, they just need more eyes on them. So I think we're going to see more of that coming on in a month and years ahead.

Yeah, maybe I can attend a virtual Comic-Con, then I'd feel safe. I mean, I can just, like, hit my phone and live stream to you from the show four, but I'm worried it might give you, like, you know, an anxiety attack because it's a little upsetting there when you're in middle of it all. Well, yeah. All right. Well, I hope you stay safe.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Thank you for taking some time from your busy panel covering, Pokemon searching adventures. Thank you, Paul. You've got it anytime. What character, if I was going to dress up as a character before I left, who should I pick? You mean an Overwatch character? Okay, never mind.

You can be Dad 76. I'm like Dad 76. So that's the thing. Overwatch fandom has gone so quickly, so fast. There's like derivatives of the characters where, like, there's Dad, and then like, Dad is, or Soldier 76 is Dad. And then Diva is like this nerd who like eats Cheetos.

And so like you'll see people out of their, I think maybe you don't have good enough I to know if you are seeing an Overwatch character. That may be, that may be true. I may be true. I think I'm just going to start taking pictures and sending it to you. And we can play like Where's Overwatch. Yeah, yeah.

I'll do that. Okay, sounds good. Thanks, brother. Thanks, Paul. Talk to soon. I got to tell you. I had a great time talking to Brian. Brian is so great.

Just got married? Yeah. Just living his best life. And all the news from Comic-Con. Man, did I love hearing about that? A lot of surprises. So we got to end on this. I have a lot of thoughts about this, too.

This was some of the biggest news of the week, actually. Paul brought it up to me while we were doing the rundown. I didn't even think about it. I've been trying to write an essay on it. We actually have to talk about Taylor Swift and Condé West. There's a million reasons why we should talk about it. It's funny in a context of all this copyrights. stuff that we're talking about.

I mean, there's this whole feud. It's actually fascinating that, like, Taylor Swift runs this, like, perfectly controlled media empire, and you get to crack past the facade of it. But what's crazy to me is that Kim Kardashian used Snapchat when she actually has a television show, a massively popular, huge television show with which to reveal, to do nothing but reveal deception. I mean, the point of a reality show is to create deception and then reveal the depths of deception. Could you even put it on a reality show? I feel like I want to get past the lawyers of an actual network.

So this is what I'm saying. But the other thing is like her doing it enhances the power of her personal brand because it feels like it comes directly from her and not from a TV producer. Whether or not there was a producer involved in her Snapchat, she would tell you no, I guarantee you that lots of other celebrities, like carefully hone and have people manage what they put on Snapchat. But putting this on Snapchat made it a different kind of celebrity feud than you would typically get from, you know, a reality TV show or like a magazine quote or something. It was a powerful moment. So, yeah, I mean, like it ate the internet for basically a day.

I just have to confess something to you guys. I've been using a professional TV producer to run my Snapchat. So when you see, when you see, when you see, when you. You see me Snapchatting that I actually wore two completely different sneakers to the gym this morning because I was so goddamn tired when I got up. That was my producer doing that for me. I'd like to confess something to you guys as well. I've been recording all of my phone calls with you. And if you cross me.

It's all over. Wait, so let's just, I know, so this story is fascinating. It's fascinating at a thousand levels, right? It's fascinating on just the pure plot points, right? Kanye West calls Taylor Swift says I'm writing a song. I'm going to say that we might still have had sex. Taylor Schultz was like, that's cool. Then he releases a song, and she's like, that's not cool.

And then he releases the song with like one more lyric that he may or may not have told her. Right. And apparently she was made aware as soon as the phone call ended that it was being recorded. And then her people jumped into action and said, no, no, no, no, you can't do that. But before the song came out. All of that's crazy. Just that. And that's like every, we ran through that story and how it worked.

And every other site in the world ran through that story and how it worked. And if you missed it, I don't want you to do and go read the internet. It's there for you. But let's just pull apart the various platforms and tools that these two massively powerful celebrities chose to communicate with. Kim is running quick time movies on a MacBook, recording it in Snapchat on our iPhone with the rotation all fucked up. Right. So the Snapchat's sideways with the MacBook. with the MacBook, and you can't change it.

And I saw, I didn't see it on Snapchat. I saw somebody's Twitter tweet of the video ripped from the Snapchat. Yeah, and it's on YouTube. It's all over YouTube. And then. Taylor Swift, like, pulls up her notes at, searches for an essay that she definitely wrote sometime before Tim's, and screenshots it. I don't know if you've screenshots it, but the craziest thing, have you seen this?

Yeah. Yeah. If you, you can barely make it out in the full color version, but if you desaturate it and play with the levels and stuff. Paul's app, ruddering the notes app. It's clear. I didn't, I didn't do this. I saw someone else that had done this.

The line, you know, when you scroll something, it kind of fades away at the top of an iOS app or on Mac and stuff like that. It says because it's something like. It's the previous draft. Because it doesn't exist. Yeah. She wrote an essay claiming that a recording doesn't. exist. At least that's what it appears that she... No, that line is in there.

Wait, I'm looking at it right now, guys. Yeah. So there's... This is the notes. In notes. This is a notes. And I'm right under... I mean, this is like, you have to be such a nerd and know how translucency operates

in iOS. And the notes app works. And the fact that all these celebrities are screenshoting the notes app to put on Instagram or to put a longer essay on Twitter, just the sheer amount of media capture

re-capture, re-transmittal that's happening in this feud that would ordinarily have happened on the pages of like People magazine is fucking wild. Right. So the text is that is scroll, it's like

almost completely off the screen. It's just a little bit there. It says because it doesn't exist. But that line is in that. And that's above the where is the video or that's below one that I never asked be a part of? So there's the essay that she actually wrote. Yeah. So you think those were just notes that she was prepping?

So she had like a previous draft and scrolled up in the previous draft, the last line of it is like peeking out through the menu bar transparency in the iOS Notes app. It's amazing. Because that line is. I actually like can't see this in the image. It just ends at search and I can't. Yeah. It's there. No, it's in there.

You got to. Oh, I see. I see. I see. Right. Yeah. It's the whole thing. I just want to talk about that for five minutes.

Just the fact that literally two of the richest and most powerful people in the world have chosen to argue by Snapchatting MacBook screens. Are we old because have we posted an essay that's just written in a notes app? We should. Like that's clearly a medium of the future. Phil Schiller was like tweeting links to like New York Mag Stories that are like, all these celebrities are using Notes app. And Schiller's like, notes. Everyone loves it. It's great.

That is one of those things. It's like this emergent behavior. Do any celebrities use... Do you ever write a note? Do you ever write a note when you're kind of drunk and then you read it like a couple days later? And you're like, what? Well, Lauren, I think we just figured out what the next segment of the Vergecast is. All right. One of these days we're going to go through, we're just going to tap on a random note in our notes list.

And we have to read it. We have to read whatever it is. I'm ready. I mean, I'm ready to do it right now. I'm ready right now. Let's do it. I use simple note. I don't actually use...

I use notes. All right. All right. Here we go. I'm scrolling. You guys can see this, right? Getting some good momentum up. I'm going, I'm going deep.

The Google keyboard. Just bugging out. All right. By the way, what app are you guys scrolling in? I've got simple note. Wait, something else. I just found something. I just found something really old and crazy.

This is something I wrote for the startup I used to. work for it. I'm going to, I'm going to see. Let's see. Oh, wait. Is anybody ready? I came to one, but I can't do it because it's too boring. Okay. Paul? Yeah. Go ahead. But some men came down from Judea and we're teaching the brother. So when I take notes at church, I copy and paste from my Bible app into my notes app.

There you. So this is Acts 15. You're just going to read us a Bible verse now. I don't have to read the whole thing. Okay. Mine is equivalently insane. Ages, I don't know, I don't, simple note doesn't give you dates, but this is just clearly a note from when I was the acting managing editor of Vox.com. So from two years ago at least, the first line is just, is there a typo in the Declaration of Independence? It's clearly me working on this story. And it's just a list of proposed headlines about this. Are we worse citizens because the Declaration of Independence has an extra period? We misplaced one of Jefferson's commas, and now we're all jerks.

That's what I got, Dieter. That's a moral that you know, it doesn't have to be late at night for you to be drunk, Lauren. Okay, all right, all right. You ready? Are you ready? Yeah. I went way back. Yes.

Title of this note is Nexus Q review. Whoa. Is the first line, what is this? What is this odd circle that does nothing? NY Video, David, Brian review, Dieter on Android feelings. Oh. I feel like Dieter on Android feelings is a component of literally every Android device review that we have.

I thought you're going to say it's literally an element of every note. I mean, that's, you know, I also have two stars next to widget resizing, which has nothing to do with it. There you go. That's the one feature that device did have is widget resizing. All right, Lauren. Okay, mine, you can tell that I thought I was being really deep when I wrote this. I was thinking very deep thoughts.

And it's not from that long ago. It's from December of last year. It can sometimes be difficult to say with tech products, whether something falls short because what's new is actually no longer new or because what's new is just not very good. I feel like Lauren is just clearly smarter than all of us. It's pretty good. And then I tried to use that in a column and it didn't fit, so I had to kill my darling, but that's okay. Lauren, I think you could put that line at the beginning of literally every product review.

It's true. And then I tapped on another one. Oh, that was our old holiday. Wasn't our old holiday gift guide from 2014? Oh, we were talking about categories. I did open one before. That was like, I took me a moment to figure out what it was. It was like, no jewelry, don't eat.

take out contacts and I was like what? He was like doing to myself. And then Bring rifle. Wear rings. Bring Vaseline. No, and actually then What?

Wear a knife around thigh. Then below that it said Fremont surgery centers So I realized like someone must have called the night before. Just a reminder. Like don't wear jewelry and don't eat and like all this stuff. And then yeah, that was. kind of a funny one until I figured that out.

I have something about smart mirrors. I don't even know. So you're a notes at person. Yeah, yeah. Everyone tells me it's great, including Phil Schiller on Twitter. No, let me put it this way. Let me put it this way. I'm a G-Dox person, and then Notes is like my side piece.

I see. Wow. Yeah, if I need to like open it, sorry Phil, but if I need to like, you know, open something really quickly and I don't have internet connectivity or it's just late at night and I'm on my phone and it's just I want to jot a bunch of thoughts down before bed. I'm going to notes. And I like notes a lot. But if I need to actually take notes for like posterity

and going back and writing an article off of and stuff like that, I'm going to G-Dox. So I just, I'm like a simple note person through and through, and it's not for any reason other than an ancient app called Just Notes on the Mac. But they changed it so that I have the old version I refuse to upgrade. It like had it, it has an icon in the menu bar where I can just click it and it opens a field and I can just start typing, and that turns into a simple note.

Huh. But that's all I need in this world. I use it because of notational velocity. Ah, there you go. Okay. I feel like we really didn't talk about the fact that celebrities use weird mediums. But my point is...

Does anyone remember... Sorry to interrupt. Go ahead. But does anyone remember since we were talking about stuff from... I guess we were talking about the 70s and 80s, but the 90s that a bunch of rappers, like, used to take, I don't, I feel like maybe it was in a bunch, but there were rappers that used to really antagonize pop stars and it was like a thing. Like I remember like Eminem used to

talk junk about a bunch of pop stars and Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Right, because they were fake music and the rappers made the real music. I remember this. Right, right. And like, and there was a lot of drama around all of that then. I mean, there's drama around a lot of other lyrics as well, which were incredibly controversial and in a lot of ways, like horribly sexist and violent. But like,

I feel like history is just repeating itself. Yeah. But now it's amplified because of all of this social media. Definitely. Like, without question. But it's also all music is pop music in that way now. Like,

all music is just deeply, deeply produced and packaged and marketed now. That old piece where it's like, I'm a real musician and you're, you're being manufactured by Swedish, producers. It's like everyone is manufactured by Swedish producers now. We live in a world of Swedish production.

All the biggest rap hits have like a pop star hook or something like that. Where's the protest music? Are blending. I just want to know where the protest music is. Yeah, I feel this is, yeah. Anyway, look, sadly, unfortunately, I have to wrap this up

because I have to go to fancy fancy panorama party where I'm not speaking but I'm introducing Dan Frummer of RICO who is speaking. Which is cool. So I'm excited to go see Dan. But if you're in New York, come to panorama, we'll be around. Come say hi to us.

If you're not in New York, watch Mr. Robot. Listen to Lauren's podcast. Lauren, I'm on your podcast next week, aren't I? Yay, you are. I'm so excited. Listen to too embarrassed to ask. I'll be on Lauren's podcast next week. We have a bunch of other shows.

Control, Delete. This week, Walt and I just complained about smartphone apps for an hour. It was one of the funniest. hours in my life. That's out. Chris Plant, host What's Tech, which is wonderful. Emily and Liz do Verge ESP, Entertainment and Science podcast. And Paul runs a little thing called Circuit Breaker that you should check out constantly. It's true. And Deter runs a thing called the Verge. So that's pretty cool as well. You can follow us everywhere. We're at Verge. We're on Snapchat, Instagram, the whole thing. I don't know. I feel like YouTube doesn't get enough love. Go to YouTube. Watch some of our stuff. That'd be great.

And I want to think. We didn't talk about a lot today, but review of the Modo Z. Yep. Great video at Welch. Incredibly good video review. Really quick, I want to thank Centrali Corporation. Let me introduce you to Centrali Corporation. Centrify Identity Platform is a next generation

identity management solution that protects organizations against cyber threats. Check out their white paper. Know you want to do that. Or sign up for a free 30-day trial atcentrify.com slash identity. That's it. It's a Verchast.

We'll see you next week. Cyber is the future. Cyber is the future. Paul. Bye.