TWiT 1063: The Year's End - Top Stories of 2025

It's time for TWIT, our year-end episode. I've brought Steve Gibson from Security Now, Paris Martineau from Intelligent Machines, and Tech News Weekly's Micah Sargent together to talk about the big stories of the year. What a crazy year it was with AI, with security. Steve will talk a lot about some of the big security problems of 2025. We talked about gaming, we talked about media, and we talked about some of the weird things that happened in 2025. Our year-end special, next on TWIT. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT. This is TWIT. This Week in Tech. Episode 1063. Recorded Sunday, December 21st, 2025. The year's end. It's time for Twin. This Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's... This year, we're going to cover the whole... This show, we're going to cover the whole year. This is our annual... That explains why I'm dressed like, I don't know, Florida Pimp Santa. This is our year-ender. And we're so glad to see you. Hello. Happy holidays. Micah Sargent is joining us from Tech News Weekly and iOS Today. Hello. Hands on tech and hands on Macintosh or hands on Apple, I should say, and all the other wonderful shows you do with us. How many years have you been with the organization now? I started in 2019. Wow. Pre-COVID. Yeah, exactly. Truly pre-COVID. Shortly after joining Twit, I flew my mom out to see where I worked and where I lived and everything. And as she was getting on the plane to go back to Missouri, she texted me. She has flight anxiety, and she texted me, and she goes, people just came out in hazmat suits. Should I be concerned? And it was because things were just starting to close down, and they didn't know what to do. Oh, my God. A day they were living in for me. It was wild. Isn't it funny how it's only been five years, and we've kind of put that in the rearview mirror. Yeah, we just sort of look back at it every once in a while in the rearview mirror. And yet it is an epic. I mean, it's something there's before and after. Hey, that was the voice of Paris Martineau. I'd recognize that voice anywhere. I'm holding a picture of a Santa hat. That's the best you can do. That's like when you go to a concert. I'm sitting in front of a tree, so I think that counts for something. Yeah, no, you've got a tree. I've got three trees, but you've got a tree. That's good. That's a sign. Come on. My trees are undecorated, so I don't think that's good. Yeah, your trees are obscured by your massive head. Well, that's just the way it's been my whole life, really. There they are. You know, so I'm in Florida this week for the holidays, and my dad was talking to me about this podcast. He's like, oh, you know, you have this show every week with a bunch of old guys. Do you give them crap? And I'm like, oh, do I? Oh, nonstop. And, in fact, we're older than your dad. It really is you and your grandparents. That's the funniest thing. Anyway, if dad does want to peek his head in, last time we did the show from the rent's house, He was pacing outside with cards, thinking of his lines and stuff, and we never brought him in. I feel terrible. It's my fault. That's when you get bumped on The Tonight Show. When someone tells you they don't want to be on your show as a gag, you believe them. You believe them. But really, they want to be there. There is one person on this show who's actually older than me, even. I was just going to say that as the oldest of the entire gang. That's right. But he's young at heart, Mr. Steve Gibson from Security. And everything still works. So that's good. That's nice to know. Maybe a little bit of an overshare, but okay. That's good. Welcome to all three of you. We like to do this at the end of the year, is bring in the family, really, and just kind of talk about what happened. I have prepared a short show of 140 stories. Just a casual little hundred. Anything happen in 2025. I just considered the most important stories of the year. You whittled it down. You ended up with 140. I go through all these twits of the year, and I pick a story or two from each twit. There were a lot of trends. One of the things I really noticed, though, that may be the biggest trend of all, is a lot of the things we cared a lot about at the beginning of the year made no difference at all. There was a lot of storm and drama. By the end of the year, it's like, what was that? There seemed to be a lot of that going on in 2025. Yeah, I was noticing that, too, as I was looking back through Tech News Weekly stories to pick episodes for the best of, and some of the early interviews that I had, and remembering going, okay, wow, this is going to shape up to be something big. And often at the end of these interviews going, we'll have to wait and see what happens. And you're so right in so many cases. I was like, nothing has happened. Nothing happened. Nothing came of it. And a lot of that's, I think, due to the political situation. Remember Doge? You remember that? I mean, some say it's still haunting the halls of Congress. Yeah, but it's gone. It's over. Apparently, they shut it down, although all the data that does infiltrate it is still out there somewhere. It's a good thing they saved all that money, you know, with all that havoc they wreaked. After shutting down the U.S. Digital Service and 18F, the government services that were designed to bring in people from Silicon Valley to help the government modernize its websites, it started when the ACA, the Obamacare website, just collapsed because they brought in a government contractor to build it, and it was millions of them. It was terrible. So our friend Matt Cutts, who was at Google at the time, and others said, look, we're going to come in as volunteers. you know we have modern skills we're going to help you fix this and they did and they were around for a long time shut down this year by the trump administration but they just announced last week oh by the way we're going to create a new force of volunteers from silicon valley to help us with the you had that oops we messed up we need you back oh the difference is that was created by Obama and Biden. So we're going to get rid of that. The non-woke one. Yeah. It's the strangest thing, but I don't want to start the show politically. Let's talk about it. And I think things have calmed down a lot, too, because now Elon is busy trying to qualify for his billion-dollar pay package. Right. That's true. He's got a lot of work to do. Beginning of the year, man, I mean, this is the year, January 20th. Well, I'll give you another example. The TikTok saga, which went on all year. You'll remember last year, Congress passed a law, a law signed by the president, at the time President Biden, and approved by the Supreme Court, by the way, that shut down TikTok. It said you either have to sell it to an American entity or bye-bye. Before, remember, do you remember this? Like two days before inaugural day, TikTok shut down? Do you remember that? Yeah. It was real. It was actually real. for a moment. Google and Apple pulled the apps. In fact, there was a guy this is a perfect example a guy selling an iPhone with TikTok on it for $10,000 because you couldn't get it. Do you remember when the influencers marched on Washington? They went up there to stump for TikTok's rights? That was perhaps one of my favorite things about that whole TikTok saga was the sort of shift in power that I think we saw just briefly, because I'm used to, you know, the reason my taxes are so hard at the end of the year, at the beginning of the year, is because lots and lots of money is being, you know, given to the right people. Whereas this, TikTok posts a little pop-up that says, we're going to be shutting down soon, and here's why, contact the people you need to contact. And there was actual sort of boots on the ground stuff happening. I thought that was kind of inspiring in an odd way, right? But remember that there were some members of Congress, including many Democrats, who said, see, this is why we have to shut it down. Yes, they have so much power. They can get to, they can mobilize the youth. Oh, no. Oh, my God. Voters who care. No, we can't have that. I do think it's also relevant that part of one of the codas of this whole, or I guess an early coda to this situation was then TikTok coming back and being like, thank you, President Trump. You personally made all this possible. Now everybody can use TikTok. Isn't that great? And that is a little, I mean, it just speaks to the power that these platforms have, that a very political message like that can be disseminated to a huge swath of the voting public. Every three months we would do the story on this show that said, okay, the president has extended the TikTok forbearance and we've got another three months to make a deal. Well, this week, the whole drama has finally come to a close. TikTok announced, China announced, the CEO of TikTok announced, that the Chinese owner will retain the business. Wow. However, and this may have been the real point, Trump cronies, Oracle, Silver Lake, which is Larry Ellison. No, that's an equity, a private equity. and Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund will have a big chunk of it. 30% of the existing investors will keep their share, existing ByteDance investors. By the way, that very importantly includes Jeff Yass, who is a major Trump donor, who was the guy I think who actually put a hold on the TikTok ban because he had, I think, 30% of TikTok. He had a large stake in TikTok. ByteDance will only own 19.9%. That's the most allowed under U.S. law. But we'll retain the technology. We'll retain the algorithm. Remember, we're worried about TikTok being used as a propaganda arm for the Chinese government. In fact, it's exactly the same deal Oracle has had in place, Project Texas, for three years. Nothing really has changed. the Chinese entity ByteDance will retain all of the revenue, the ad sales. Content moderation will be in the hands of the Oracle Coalition. So I guess maybe that's important. Anyway, this is the example of what I was talking about, where we spent a whole year dithering about this, And essentially, nothing has changed. The other frustrating thing for me that came from this story was time and time and time again, you would hear from people who said they had insider knowledge or more awareness of this, or if you only knew what TikTok was capable of, the things I've seen. And I don't think any of that ever surfaced for me, that it was ever showing any true evidence of how this could be used, other than, as we saw, where there was mobilization of the voting public. You've got voters to care. Yeah. Well, I mean, the potential was there. And, you know, we've had experts on this subject on the shows who said, well, you know, yes, nothing bad was happening as far as we know, but maybe it could, I guess. actually we're going to talk a little bit about the bad stuff China has done this year and particularly and I'm glad Steve's here, Salt Typhoon that'll be in our security segment. But I just thought I would mention that a lot of the things that we cared a lot about at the beginning it's probably a good lesson. I mean I do think it is worth noting though that one aspect of this deal is that that Oracle investor kind of run this group of American investors that include Oracle. Possibly Rupert Murdoch, we don't know. Yeah, this group of somewhat unknown investors are in charge of things like the content moderation rules now for TikTok. They can set what is permitted and what is not on the app. And that is... To me, that's worse. Yeah. To me, that's worse. Carl Bodie at Tech Dirt had his usual scathing take on all this. TikTok deal done, and somehow it's the, he has to use the bad word, the worst possible outcome making everything worse. Remember that Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison, owns CBS and has immediately started to moderate what used to be called the Tiffany Network. So, yeah, I mean, will TikTok be a propaganda arm? Still, yeah. But this time for our side. Our propaganda. It's our propaganda. Homegrown American propaganda. Well, and it all comes down to money, right? Over and over. It always is money. We see that everything comes down to money. And so now we have a bunch of American, quote, investors, unquote, who are part of the gravy train. Yeah. And that's what this is about. Yeah, now it's okay. Exactly. That's what it is about. Bodie says, if these folks were also concerned about U.S. consumer privacy, they should have passed a functional modern Internet privacy law applying to all U.S. companies and their executives. Well, who would be able to make money off of that? How did you make money that way? If they cared about propaganda, he says, they could have fought media consolidation, backed creative media literacy reform in schools, or found new ways to fund independent journalism. If they cared about national security, Well, that's all so delightful, but we're so far away from any of that. Yeah, I know. I wish, sure. I know. Anyway. I'm trying to find this guy. Really, more, I only brought it up, I don't want to, this is an example of a story that we have worked all year for no apparent reason. Steve, there have been quite a few stories on security now that just seem to be a never-ending story. Salt Typhoon is one of them. Well, yes, Microsoft having a weakness in their authentication system for email, and China crawling in and doing a lot of damage. And we're told that there's nothing we can do about it. Right. Right? Right. Yeah. It's, you know, and I guess what's so interesting is that our own government is saying, well, we think we got most of it out. It's like, what? You know, it's like, so what? Now what? So, yeah. There are a lot of stories like that. And in general, we're seeing, I would say certainly this year, a sort of across-the-board encroachment of Chinese technology and its consequences. We recently talked about how the Netherlands drove some of their Chinese-made electric buses into some sort of a huge bus-sized Faraday cage and found secret cell phone radios that were in no documentation, not mentioned anywhere, inside the guts of these buses. And they're concerned that if something bad were to happen with the East versus the West, all of their electric buses would just stop running. Wow. Well, I think it's probably safe to say the Chinese also have kill switches in our grid. We know that the Chinese-made inverters from several Chinese manufacturers are overrepresented in our renewable power sources, solar and wind, and that they, too, have been discovered to have undocumented cell radios in them for no purpose, as do the big shipping cranes that pull containers off of boats in our ports. Again, China makes great stuff. The DJI drones are the best drone there is. And it's Chinese manufactured, so we don't trust them anymore. That's actually been a story that's been going on most of the year. Yep. The potential, it hasn't happened yet, for the Commerce Department to ban DJI drones in the United States. They're not allowed for use by the military or around military, but there are restrictions on them. Although DJI this year removed their geofencing for airports, which is kind of funny. And what is the concern with why these drones would be banned? What is the worst case scenario? You have a flying camera that can go wherever it wants to and downloadable firmware, and no one knows exactly what they're doing. So there's the possibility. What does that mean? No one knows exactly what they're doing? As in if you see one in the sky, you don't know what it might be up to? I'm sorry. No, great question. No one knows what the firmware updates and downloads are doing. And they're updated all the time. Yes, and the behavior could change at any time autonomously, and suddenly the drone takes off from a military base and flies somewhere it's not supposed to with its camera, sending images back to China. I mean, it can absolutely happen. And, I mean, it's really, it was irresponsible for there to be such uptake of these drones by our military in sensitive locations of our government. That and even cameras. The HickVision cameras are also Chinese made. HickVision, yes, has a close relationship to the PRC. and there were, but because it's the best camera, it's what people were choosing. And they're all over. They're overlooking U.S. military bases. They're everywhere. They're literally in the halls of Congress. Now, one thing that I, go ahead, go ahead. I was going to say, let me play devil's advocate here for a second. Couldn't you make the same argument for basically any product that comes from China, which in many cases then would be most products? And, in fact, we spent a lot of time on the podcast boring our listeners. with like, oh, he's going to talk about IoT devices from China. It's like, yes, just wait. I mean, it's not like it can't happen, but anybody who's involved with security, as Leo said earlier, has to take the what-if position. You know, there was what TikTok could do. They didn't, but, oh, you know, what they could do. Similarly, we've filled American households with IoT devices that are all connected back to servers in China, and what could they do? Leo, how many connected devices are in your home right now? Oh, my God. I was just looking. Everything I'm looking at now is made in China and can dial out for firmware. Everything, including my lights, for crying out loud. Your lights are sending information to the internet. While they're on. They're on. Every once in a while, they dim. I don't know. Maybe that's a signal from that. Maybe they're flashing in more cases. Yes, exactly. They're flashing some of the... You're going to start saying omelette du fromage, and that's the only thing in real life. The funniest story, Steve, was that Microsoft was patching holes in their software when they got a bug report by sending it to engineers in China. They subcontracted. They had Microsoft employees in China were the people who were patching the bugs. And there was an example of a zero day which went to the Chinese support group, and before Microsoft could release the patch, got in the wild. So it was still secret. Nobody knew about it, ostensibly. Somehow, that information got loose. What really seems to have happened, it's been going on for several years, but we've seen a lot of it during 2025, is it's like government is kind of waking up to what technology means. for the longest time that, you know, there wasn't much legislation. People were buying goods from China without a second thought. But it's almost as if there's been some dawning of what this means. And so suddenly now we're seeing all this age restriction legislation on social media, not only here, but Australia, the UK and the EU and elsewhere. and suddenly now, I mean, China's behavior hasn't changed. We're just really getting concerned about it and realizing what could happen. In some ways, they're ahead of us. For instance, China's face recognition technology is banned, unlike here in the United States. Banned across the board or just banned for privacy? Well, I suspect the government is allowed to use it. Let's be clear. it's not banned for government use but it's banned for everybody else let's take a little break we will talk more about all of these things including AI we've got a lot of stories in AI we've got some of the silly stories from the year privacy we mentioned age restriction that was a big story age verification technology is a big enough story that a number of people have written articles saying something like It's the end of the Internet as we know it. The era of Internet regulation is about to begin. We'll talk about that. The oligarchs, gaming, media, a lot of changes in media. Big story this week about YouTube that kind of puts it all in perspective. But we'll get to all of that in just a little bit. This is your end episode, 2025, in the rearview mirror with Steve Gibson of SecurityNow and GRC.com. Did you ship the new Spinrite this year or last year? Do you remember? Late in 2024. Okay. Because if you had shipped two new products in one year, I would have said there's something wrong with you. I will never do that. Because you shipped just a couple of weeks ago a brand-new version of the DNS Benchmark, the DNS Benchmark Pro, which is excellent. Yeah, really happy with the way it's taken off. But, yeah, it takes me at least a year to do something. Two in one year would be. Wait, it's just him, my friend. It's just him. Paris Martineau is also here. So glad to see you. You're home for the holidays. That's wonderful. Investigative journalist at Consumer Reports, where she had stories that really were major stories of the year. Let's not forget the radioactive shrimp story, which she got to the bottom of. Listen, never forget the radioactive shrimp. I'm always saying that. Or let in your protein powder. I mean, who could forget? That I keep hearing about. It's been a banner year for you, Paris, actually. It has. Yeah, a job change, and I think very much for the better. So great to have you, Paris. Great to be here. The star of Intelligent Machines, and our very own Micah Sargent. So nice to see you, as always. Good to be here. And your tasteful holiday sweater, which is... Thank you. I didn't even know you could buy those. I'm jealous of them. You have to look for the ones for teachers. Oh. I'm jealous of Micah's Santa cap. That is like the best Santa cap. Okay, I have to say, it's a big, big green. Yeah, the big white part. I was very happy with this. Yeah, I was going to say, the rest of the hat kind of blends in with your background, so it kind of looks like you're wearing some fuzzy white cap. I'm also realizing that this show is separated kind of in a mustache and no mustache crowd. Do you think this means that Leo and I have to kind of 2v2 you guys at some point? That's a good idea. We will face off in fisticuffs? I don't know. I think that's what people with mustaches do. You'd know. Why I oughta. Our show today brought to you by something you may be taking a look at after a rather rocky 2025, ExpressVPN. And holidays are happening. That's why we're dressed funny. And the trenches are out there trying to steal your data and personal information. They go crazy during the holiday season. It is, of course, the busiest time of the year for online shopping. So hackers and data brokers are putting in over time. There is an easy way to protect your data, to protect yourself and your privacy, and that's with ExpressVPN. Express VPN is the only VPN I trust, the only one I use, and you should too. Whenever you're out in public, actually, you can even use it at home. The nice thing about Express VPN is it's fast. You do not feel like you're at a disadvantage. 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So even if they could write down information about you, they can't. They don't. There is nothing to see here. And they're using, of course, state-of-the-art strong encryption to make sure your activity remains invisible, to data brokers and keeps hackers from getting a hold of your sensitive financial data. Even if you're at the airport, if you're at the Newark airport with your kitty cat in a little carrier and you say, I just have to fire up this one thing to check my email, you should use a VPN because you're on an unsecured public Wi-Fi access point. You better believe airports is scary, right? Express VPN is a digital fortress that will keep even Santa's spy network out of your business. Right now, ExpressVPN is offering three different plans. This is new. They allow you to customize your VPN experience to the level you need, to the number of devices you want and so forth. If you just want the VPN that's rated number one by me, by experts at The Verge, by CNET, no problem. ExpressVPN's basic plan is as low as $3.49 a month. That's $0.12 a day to protect your online data. That's cheap, so you can spend your money on, I don't know, gifts and eggnog. So if you want to get ExpressVPN at its lowest price ever, plus four extra months of service, go to expressvpn.com slash twit. If it's a price that's low as $3.49 a month, plus four extra months of service, expressvpn.com slash twit. Of course, if you want to run it on your router in your house, have your whole house protected, they have plans for 12 people at the same time. There's all sorts of plans, all sorts of ways to do it. But when you're going down to 349. There's no reason not to. You really need it. ExpressVPN.com. We thank them so much. They've been with us all year. And I think they're going to be back in 2026, too. So we're very happy about that. It's really worth noting, too, that ISPs are known to be monetizing their own subscribers to every degree possible. And most DNS lookups, every time you put a domain name in or your browser does, that's an unencrypted query. And they record it. ISPs are known to be spying on their own customers. And they know who you are on what connection. So there's no anonymity there. So they're able to put who you are and where you go together and monetize that, sell that information. And so it's a reason for considering a VPN even when you're sitting at home. Yeah. You want privacy from your own provider. And shamefully, just as Carl Bode says, it's completely legal for them to do that. Yeah. It's encouraged. It's in the fine practically. And I assume turning off or turning on all the privacy settings they have in there doesn't change that. No. Yeah, of course. Why would it? No. Life finds a way. Spying finds a way. Advertising. Advertising finds a way. Honestly, I just give up. I mean, we are so invaded. I mean, privacy has been dead for a while, but this was 2025 was the year privacy died a second death and a third death and a fourth death. and get ready because as we talked about, this is from the Atlantic, and I think it's accurate, a new era of Internet regulation is about to begin. Well, and consider that all over Australia, young adults and children are now having to stare into their iPhone's camera to have a third-party service look at their face in an attempt to determine whether they are 16 years and older or under. Well, not just kids. Everybody. Right. Yeah. Because you have to show that you're not a kid. You have to show that you're not a kid. Exactly. So I think this is one of the stories that's been developing all year long, but it's really as we get to the end of the year, we were worried at the beginning of the year, I think, more about things like chat control, about governments. Remember, this was the year that the U.K. government said to Apple, you can't have strong encryption on anything, not just U.K. citizens, but we want to be able to read what's going on in the U.S. as well. We thought that encryption was going to be the real technology that was going to be under attack this year. It turns out, I mean, I'm sure they'll get around to it. Apple, by the way, won that battle by saying, okay, in that case, we're going to turn off end-to-end encryption, ADP, advanced data protection for UK citizens. And then our own government got involved saying, wait a minute, we have deals with the UK that they won't spy on our citizens and we won't spy on their citizens. This violates that deal. The government, the UK government, backed down on that anyway. Nevertheless, they are now, for instance, requiring age verification if you want to watch porn in the UK. You have to do an age verification selfie. This happened this summer. And it's not just for straight porn sites. It's for a... Yeah, what is porn is the problem. I was going to say, these rules end up impacting a really broad swath of content that has far-reaching effects for, for instance, children's ability to access, let's say, like, queer or gender-questioning type content that might inadvertently in the way that, say, like a platform like Reddit moderates, they might have tagged some of those subreddits as not safe for work because they deal with issues of sexuality, which then could mean that those kids can't access community resources without being or proving that they're 18. The law, which was passed in the U.K. in July, also makes it illegal for websites to promote VPNs. Wow. They can't mention that. although when we saw that law go into effect, sales of VPNs doubled and tripled overnight in the UK. So somebody figured that out. Yeah, and as you say, it could be Reddit. It could be Blue Sky. Blue Sky left the state of Mississippi for that reason. They said we don't want to have to require everybody in Mississippi to verify their age. They also just couldn't technologically do it with the amount of resources Blue Sky has. right now, which is not much. Easiest thing to do, just say, well, your IP address says you're in the state of Mississippi, so no blue sky for you. I think the problem is that technology can do, today's technology can do whatever it is we ask of it. And for a long time, it was giving us an unprecedented level of privacy that we'd never had before because, as I said before, our governments really hadn't caught up to what, I mean, they didn't understand what it was. They didn't understand how it worked. And also, the Internet, remember that in the beginning, it was like, well, who's going to use that? You know, it's like, you know, I mean, it was a big mystery. And for a long time, it was just email and AOL. But the bottom line is it can do anything we want it to. And so the question now is, well, what is that? What do citizens and the hopefully democratically elected government representatives decide that everyone wants? And again, technology is just our servant. So what do we want? Yeah, the Australian government is saying, in fact, I think you had this on the show on Tuesday, Steve. Oh, no, we're doing what everybody in Australia wanted us to do. And the kids are happy. Yes, there have been a lot of stories of kids who feel like they no longer need to participate, whereas before there was social pressure for them to participate in social media. Many have expressed relief that they stared into the camera and it said, no, you're 12. And when they're actually 16. I wish you would do that for me. Leo, you're too young to be young. So it was, and interestingly, there were parents who were disturbed that their children were allowed to continue using social media because they don't have the parental strength to say no to their child. They were hoping someone else would say no on their behalf so that they could remain their child's best friend. But as a result, everybody in Australia now has to have age verification. And, of course, the cautionary tale on this is Discord, which implemented age verification for some accounts. I've never experienced it, but some people have. And this was a while ago. And now the ID photos of 70,000 users of Discord has been apparently leaked. So you can require this, but there's no protection. And I think the thing that comes with there's no protection, is because of the way that it's so haphazardly done and implemented. You have these companies that just spin up some new portion of their company that's doing ID verification, and then a company or a service that can't afford to or decides that they can't afford to do it internally look externally for some service. They find one, and then it may not be as good as it was, and it's not going to get battle-tested, right, because there's no time. We've got to get this done or else we're going to get lawsuits. And that's exactly what happened in Discord's case. It wasn't their technology. They hired a third party to do it, and the third party got hacked. Surprise, surprise. At the same time, I'm curious to hear, Steve, your take on, as things are right now, would you rather a battle-tested third-party company, and by that I mean a company that has history of protecting people's privacy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, doing it. When I say this, like you have to choose one or the other. Obviously, it doesn't have to happen. But age verification from a third party that has put its money where its mouth is or age verification by your government. What do you think is more privacy protecting for the end user as things are? One of the points I made last week on the podcast, The thing that really upset me most is that facial age verification is so bad. I mean, what essentially happened is all these... Facial age estimation, right? Yes, exactly. Thank you. They subcontracted with third parties where a 13-year-old could scrunch up his face and looks like an old man and gets in. and 18-year-olds who happen to look youthful are denied access. So not only is it not good, but it's not fair. And so here you have something that matters a lot to a segment of the population, which is capricious. You know, it's just sort of a coin toss. Paris, last year you did a story on this about a company called Yachty, right? Yeah, I did a story last year on Yodi, which is one of the, I think still to this day, one of the biggest players in facial age estimation. At the time, they were powering the tools behind Instagram, TikTok, other companies. And I do think this is an example of kind of what Micah was talking about, where it really depends on the specific company, what work they are doing with their systems, how they are designing them. And publicly, and the CEO had said to me, is they are really trying to think of all these things. They do constant checks to make sure that people can't easily gain the system by scrunching up their face or putting on makeup or wearing prosthetics. But the same issue still goes with what Steve was saying in the sense that the place where the system kind of breaks down is right around the, like, 18-year-olds. Because 18-year-olds could look a little young. They could look a little old. And so they know basically that their system is not going to be really accurate with saying, is this person for sure 18? Yes or no? Instead, they kind of add a buffer around it where basically what they try to say is, do we think with reasonable certainty that this person seems above 20? And if they say no, it's not like you're banned from the website, but they say we can't use facial age estimation here. You need to upload an ID, which then introduces all these other kind of vectors for privacy risks. Steve, you've proposed this solution in the past, Steve. Okay, so to answer Micah's question, which is about that, of all the companies engaged, I would trust Apple to be a proxy. And so I think that so certainly our individual governments know our physical age, right? I mean, we have birth certificates, we have driver's licenses, we have social security numbers in this country. So it's not that our government doesn't know our age, but we would like to have our government not know what we're doing. So what we need is a trusted proxy, a proxy that can insulate our use of this service from the provider of the information that the service is based on. And so that's why I think Apple is such a perfect case. They're selling marketing themselves as an extremely cautious, privacy-preserving service. And so of all the existing services, I would trust Apple. It would have to be more than just Apple. I mean, you could do it on your iPhone. You'd have to trust Google, too, right, or Microsoft. I think we need a proxy who we trust to insulate us from the entity from which it gets our age information. And very much like ExpressVPN, that it runs a server in RAM so that when you break the connection, it's all lost. You want somebody who is not retaining records of its use. You know, the example of the 70,000 images that Discord's third-party provider lost control of, sites are being breached all the time. it's difficult to justify anyone keeping a record unless they need to defend their decision in the future about why they let somebody pass through their system. You want them to make the decision and then lose all knowledge of them having done so to protect your privacy. Could contact testing and the work that we saw Google, Apple, and the government do together with that privacy-protecting contact tracking during the pandemic be a framework for something like this? Yeah, that's a good point. There was a huge amount of focus invested in privacy preservation through that system. You're right. So I guess my point is none of this is hard. We have the technology to do this. We need to have the will. And the EU is talking about a digital identity throughout the EU that they're saying would be privacy preserving. Many states in the U.S. have digital driver's licenses now. You're able to load them into Android or into Apple, and it's able to make an age assertion, which is currently using a system called TrueAge, which is subject to subpoena. I sort of wonder, though, if – I mean, I don't want to go anywhere that I have a problem with having gone there being subject to subpoena. I think that they're trying to say that they don't want it used for criminal purposes. but you know again our governments are really pushing back against absolute privacy we've enjoyed it for decades now we're spoiled and the technology could provide it to us but governments are saying you know we need to have some grip on our own citizenry that's so interesting that you define it as absolute privacy because is it absolute privacy and the asterisk is from the government because lots of private companies have had our data for a long time, so we don't have privacy against them. Well, and interestingly, I'm in the process of preparing Tuesday's podcast, and one of our listeners made such a good point about this. He said, okay, so you get absolute privacy in age assurance. Now you're logged on to a website which is full of tracking scripts and ads which are tracking you And all the other crap that we already have, which completely blows your privacy. So what if you have, like, absolute private age assurance? You're still going to be tracked as soon as you get onto the site. And I thought, well, that's a really good point. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe privacy is just something we aren't going to have. And I understand why people are more worried about the government than they are about marketers. I mean, I think there's also this concern that if one of these systems were to go in place and it wasn't run by some third-party agency that is anonymizing the sort of data, that then there would be a very easily accessible registry of every website you visited that you needed to have an age verification check for which for many people would end up being a lot of things they wouldn like to think that anybody has much less has them all together in one list Good point. I think that even if it was outside of the government's hands, if it was some other company to do something with, people wouldn't feel great about that, even though that tracking data does already exist. It's just not tied to your ID. I don't think it's just our audience. I think the American public has pretty clearly said we want privacy. Certainly our audience more than anybody. But I think that there is a widespread desire for privacy. I actually do feel like I've seen that as well. Anecdotally speaking, I can remember almost within perhaps a two-year period a switch that I felt in people that I talked to who don't have anything to do with tech, who suddenly were more aware of the different ways they were being tracked, were suddenly going no on all those little permissions where you normally hit allow, and any time something pops up and says, can I look at all the Bluetooth stuff in your home, or the, you know, Chrome pops up and asks, can I see all the devices on your local network, and I see don't allow happening, again, anecdotally, but still across the board, more than I ever have, and I'm going, that's pretty good to see. I'm curious, what is the age demographic of the people who you see this in, Mike? I'll quickly answer that, and I'd love to hear, too, what you were saying, Steve. For me, it's people younger than me. Do I want to say? I am over 30. I just turned a new age of 30 on Friday. What? Happy birthday. Happy birthday. I'm a big one. I bet you saved that. Yes. And so the people. There's no privacy for you, Micah. Sorry. That's true. Exactly. The people that are younger than me, I'm talking like my siblings, so that's anywhere from now 21 is my youngest sibling up to 26 or 27, and then people older than me as well. But across the board, yeah, I guess I've seen that demographic across the board. What were you going to say, Steve? I was going to say, and I think this is the key, you cannot be afraid of what you don't see or what you don't know. And if you don't have, if there isn't some visible demonstration of lack of privacy, then you're not worried about it. I mean, famously, cookies were this way in the beginning, right? We've had cookies forever. And because it wasn't obvious that a cookie was being planted on your browser that allowed you to be tracked from one site to the next as you moved by advertisers, people weren't worried about it because they didn't know. They didn't see it. And so I think what you guys are talking about is that there's this increasing level of awareness that where we go and what we do on the Internet, somebody's watching. And, you know, Apple famously made a revision to iOS that began to ask people, Do you want this application to continue to be able to track you as you move around? And everyone said no. It was more than 90% turned off app tracking. When given a choice, no thank you. Right. But that's a good point if you're given a choice and most of the time you are not given a choice. Right. Hi, this is Benito. There's also the fact that people are willing to give up their privacy for free stuff. And that's really the bottom line. Right? Yeah. Good point, yeah. Or Camel, Camel, Camel. There's so many tools out there. Even just your Safeway. Yeah, the gas station, the card, yes. You use that. And the loyalty card. Yeah, why are they giving you a discount? Because then they know everything you bought. And all of the log in with Google, log in with Facebook, they're a proxy that knows exactly where you're logging in. And that's also a convenience. That's another thing that people will willingly give up their privacy for. It's a convenience. My wife, every time I say, you know, they're tracking you, waves her Rakuten check in my face and says, yeah, yeah, and see this? Smack, smack, smack, smack, smack. I mean, that's why I was asking about the age demographic is my younger sister, whenever I ask her about privacy, she's like, I don't care. They already know everything anyway. Might as well just give them whatever so that I can get whatever I can get out of the situation. She says a lot of her friends are like that. I feel like the younger generation is pretty fatalistic, yes? My people are not. I'm telling you. So maybe it is random. I was, yeah, I was surprised because I thought they wouldn't care. But then the vehemence and the vitriol with which you could, like, hear the energy of hitting no. I'm sitting in a quiet room and you can hear smack, smack, smack of the finger against the no button. Sure. And I thought, okay, that's cool because I remember when I was going, who cares? They have all the stuff. I'm not that way anymore, but I was, you know, for the longest time, just like, well, whatever, they've got it. And so I thought that was just kind of the way of things. So I was surprised. So maybe it's just random. I don't know. We'd have to do a survey. I'll tell you, one thing people are concerned about, and it was another big story this year, and it's been the big story for the last few years, is kids and social media. That's why these laws are getting passed, right? Nobody denies that Roblox, for instance, really was a problem for young kids, right? We've known about this all year. Roblox, you know, kind of hemmed and hawed and said, well, we're doing everything we can. They finally have put up an age verification system. But now we have to worry about, you know, the privacy with that. But I think this is what's pushing it in that direction is we're worried about our kids as well. Right? Yeah, I'm worried about my kids. I'm worried about my kids. He doesn't know his phone. I'm the only person with kids, both of whom are older than you and Micah. I'm not worried. All right, let's take a break. There you go. I guess that's it. I don't know how you have kids on the Internet these days. I know. I'm glad. I mean, I do think that it is a real, has been a real issue, and it's come to a boiling point over the last year or two. I think that the pandemic certainly accelerated a lot of parents' worries about all of this, And that kind of crystallized with Jonathan Haidt's book, which, you know, take that with a grain of salt. But it did resonate quite a lot with a lot of parents and really galvanized this into a movement that has resulted in a lot of the actions we've just discussed in this podcast. either from regulatory perspectives or from the perspective of companies like Meta instituting teen safety features for the first time ever. Right, and accepting millions and millions of dollars in scam ads because they don't want to turn down the money. T-Mobile, which was accused this summer of selling location data for its customers, said it's legal. and they got fined $92 million, but Verizon is also on the hook, as is AT&T. But that was the FCC from last year. I don't know. These companies have the attitude that we're going to do it. As long as we get away with it, we're going to do it. Yeah. I mean, that's not a surprise, right? And this continues to be the playbook of let's break things and then we'll pay for it later if we have to. But we hope we won't have to. And it does seem in some cases these companies have escaped where they may have faced punishment if things had been different. Because of the way that they have gone, they have escaped punishment. It's just technical reality, right? It's chaos. It's lawful evil is what it is. We don't have a comprehensive privacy law in this country. No, I've been using the expression, oh, yeah, make me. Yeah, like, you know, perfect. Yep. I use the expression malicious compliance, and it's kind of the same thing. We're going to take a little break, come back with more Paris Martineau, Steve Gibson, Micah Sargent. It's our year-end show, and it's so great to have all three of you. I like getting together with the family on the holidays, and you people are family for sure. When is the turkey ready? I figured out the snow bag. We'll give you a few moments. Would you give me a few moments? Our show today brought to you by Zscaler. Now, this is the topic Steve and I spent a lot of time talking about, security. Zscaler is the world's largest cloud security platform. And what Zscaler does is so important in this age of AI. AI is a boon to businesses. Every business is trying to figure out how we can use it to improve efficiency, to make us a better business, to make us more efficient, to make us more effective. But the dangers of AI are also too great to ignore. Losing data through accidental use of AI public and private on the business is a big problem. But also hackers are using AI to make their attacks more effective. Generative AI increases opportunities for threat actors because they can rapidly create phishing lures that are indistinguishable from the real thing. We used to say, oh, look at the grammar. It's obviously a fake. Not anymore. Not anymore. They write better than we do. They can use AI to create malicious code. They're actually crafting malware with AI. Automate data extraction. Everything is at scale now all of a sudden. And even if you think, well, we're safe from that, or you're safe from your employees, There were 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked via AI applications. ChatGPT and Microsoft saw nearly 3.2 million data violations this year. If you're using AI, you've got to take a look and do something important, which is check out ZScaler. Ask Chad Pallet. He's the acting CISO at BioIVT. He says Zscaler helped them reduce their cyber premiums by 50%. Sure as love it. Oh, you're protected. And not only did it cut their premiums in half, it doubled their coverage, and that even improved their controls. Take a look at this. Chad gave us this video. With Zscaler, as long as you've got Internet, you're good to go. A big part of the reason that we moved to a consolidated solution away from SD-WAN and VPN is to eliminate that lateral opportunity that people had and that opportunity for misdirection or open access to the network. It also was an opportunity for us to maintain and provide our remote users with a cafe-style environment. With Zscaler's Zero Trust Plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across your business. Their Zero Trust Architecture Plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI-related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. That's zscaler.com slash security. We thank them so much for their support. Of this week in tech, our year-end episode, we're looking back at all of the things that happened. I think there's one in 2025, one thing there's no question about, AI is the story of the year. Not only Time Magazine's Person of the Year, but really it drove the stock market. It represented more than 1% of our GDP growth. It even made me change the name of This Week in Google. It sells their machines in February. Was that this year? Oh, my God. This year. It feels like it's been multiple years. A million years. Because in AI time, everything happens fast. It really does. It was at the beginning of the year, you may remember this, that the BBC got mad at Apple because Apple intelligence was summarizing news alerts. Okay, those summaries were terrible. The BBC was right to be mad. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Apple said, we're working on improvements. They did not turn it off. They turned it off briefly. It's back. I get AI summaries all the time. And you remember I was showing you some of these on the show where my ring doorbell would say things like, many people have come to your door. I hated that so much. I turned one off. It got better, right? It got better. People, no? No. I don't think it did. I really tried to stick with it on various apps for many months. And sometime this summer I had to be like, I've got to turn it off because it was just so ridiculously wrong. The thing that upset me the most is it was try to summarize two to three notifications I'd get on Blue Sky and would just hallucinate completely every time. There was never a time that my Blue Sky notification summaries were correct, and it was incorrect in the strangest ways. I enjoy them, though. They're funny. I mean, I enjoy them. I think they're funny. I just think that as you see it. It could scare you. This is an example of what I feel like is a larger trend we've seen within Apple over the last couple of years, which is just the products Apple's ships are just not great anymore as far as software on my phone goes. I think they've kind of given up on AI at Apple, and they're going now to Google, and that Siri will use Gemini, but that'll be the story of 2026. This is hard to believe. It was this year that DeepSeek came out and changed what we thought AI could do. This was a huge story at the beginning of the year. In January, the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek released a model that they claim they spent a few million dollars on, hardly anything on compared to what OpenAI, Anthropic, and others have spent. And it was a really good model. It was really good. Plus, because they didn't have access to the top-of-the-line NVIDIA chips, they were able to do it by rewriting code, by getting around the scarcity. Yeah, they didn't use the NVIDIA API, which has a lot of overhead in it, and they went basically much more direct to the chip and got a lot of efficiency that way. Right. I think that they taught the entire AI industry in the USA lesson, scared the pants off them. There was so much speculation. There was so much attempting to debunk different parts of it. That was drama that I hadn't seen on that scale in a while. It's hard to believe that was this year, isn't it? Yeah. It feels like an age ago. We need to come up with AI years like dog years, you know? Yeah, it's at least seven. It's at least. ChatGPT at the beginning of the year announced that they had 400 million weekly users, actually up from 300 million in December of last year. As of last month, it is now 800 million weekly users. So this is open AI only. So in a year, they've doubled their usage. They are easily the most successful consumer. Do we know if anybody has made money yet? That is a good question. They're still just pouring money down. There's revenue. There's no profit. Yeah, no, there's no profit. But that's an intention also because they spend every penny they can, right? Because they're trying to build. That doesn't make it good. Yeah, you said it was intentional. You know, I could say that every time I go running a marathon and I trip and fall, that that's intentional. No, no. Amazon leads the way with this. They for years made no money because they took every penny they made and they built fulfillment centers. Now there's an Amazon fulfillment center on every corner. There's one in my house. Yeah, and they're making money, right? No, they made money from AWS. So, like, the store is still a loss leader, and AWS is where their money comes from. And their ad business, which is great. Yeah, and so it's like, are we just hoping that these AI companies will keep doing this for long enough they find out a totally different business that they can make money off of that isn't the AI that is burning all of their cash? Is that what we're hoping for from this? Especially because of the blowback with the rumors that there were going to be ads in OpenAI. And then they said, oh, no, never mind. We won't do that. It would be utterly ridiculous if the way that these AI companies make money is just advertising. like every other big media business we've had. That's how you make money on the Internet. That's how we make money. I hate to tell you, Paris. Google and search. I know, but we're not getting trillions of dollars because it's such a potentially lucrative business. I just want you to know I'm building a Twit data center down the block that's going to use 60 gigawatts of energy. No, I'm not. And it's powered by hamsters. It's powered by all of us who are going to be in a big human-sized wheel and we're not doing the show. I just wonder about the wisdom of investing all this money in a thick set of hardware when the hardware is still evolving. So you've got this massive data center of old GPUs that don't have the 2028 neural processing unit. It's all hot swappable. Yeah, but it's old then. Yeah, exactly. It's appreciated. But then when do you start? You have to start somewhere. Yeah, that is true, although maybe not invest insanely. I agree. They have to for the capacity, but it's working right now. Whatever they're doing, they're building more systems or more data centers that are not yet online, hopefully looking for customers. They're going to have to make customers. There aren't enough. Well, that's why we're building humanoid robots. That's right. We're going to make our good, by the way. Matrix. This was a year. You're right, Leo. This was a year of, I saw a marked re-interest, if you will, in humanoid robots. Yeah. I feel like it's been a while since there's been kind of excitement and interest and people looking for more about them. It's like the laptop, where those first laptops, we called them luggables, and they didn't really work, and the battery lasted about 30 minutes, and they really couldn't do anything. We had those robots a few years ago. Then we actually started to get laptops that were good, and it's looking like, well, I mean, I'm astonished by what I see these robots doing now. Yeah. Do we need bipedal humanoid robots, though? Yeah, why do they have to look like us? Aren't there more convenient forms for it to be? I feel like humans aren't that well designed. Okay. Speak to my ancestors. It's certainly the case that you don't see production line robots in auto factories that look like people, right? They're just a dramatic arm. I think that the whole reason for it is because there's someone at some point. You know that parable about how the grandma made her turkey in a copper pot, and then the daughter did it, and then the daughter's daughter did it, And then she went back and talked to her grandma and was like, why did you make it in the copper pot? Thinking that it was just a necessary part of the ingredient. And she said, oh, that's because the pot I was normally using was dirty when I did it. I wonder if at some point there was some sort of human interface designer person who decided that for us to feel comfortable having robots in our homes, they needed to look like humans. And then everyone is just kind of locked into this idea that, no, they won't have them in their homes if they don't look like humans. We have to have them look like humans. Have you seen this video? This is a sci-fi movie. Of the Chinese robot. They made it look like a woman. We always do. And it kind of sashays a little bit. And it was so realistic looking that they actually cut it open on stage. I was going to say to make sure there wasn't a person. To prove. Because it kind of looked like there might be somebody in there. I thought there was someone inside. I will say. Look at that photo. That video. I thought there's somebody inside of there. It very much does. They intentionally added a gate, a human gate to it. partly this is also because remember Elon Musk promoted his Optimus robots with people in robot costumes. Why does it have breasts though? I mean what possible reason? To make you feel more comfortable. Again, somebody's thumb point. Now that's a good idea, extra battery capacity, but I do think that it's not a practical thing. I agree. I think it's a feelings thing. It's an emotions thing. I think that's to some degree why we're making these humanoid robots, right? Some ridiculous British designer said, and if we make it look like their mother, then you know that they will accept it into their home. And then everybody clapped. Exactly. Do I have to say it again? It's because sex robots, right? Oh, that's probably true. I don't. Is there? Well, I'm sure. And what do you mean is there going to be? Of course there's going to be. Bill, what did we talk about intelligent machines this week? People are already trying to make chat GPT their horny mommy. Horny mommy was the word of the week, and I couldn't even use it for this show. I'm really sorry to say it again. It's what they're trying to do. We spent some time, when ChatGPT5O came out, Paris spent some time reading mournful postings on Reddit from people who missed ChatGPT4O. People are still devastated that ChatGPT4O isn't the same. They're like, you took away my husband. You took away my wife. My entire life. All of my friends. In case people don't know, you can actually tune it to, like, way reduce all of that. In under settings, you're able to... Yeah. I didn't realize it until someone cried out. Now you can. I prefer that. I turn it on. There are people who want... It's like, oh, that was such a good question. Oh, my goodness. There are people who want to be blazed by their robot. Is that how the kids say it? Yeah. My God. I was really proud of you. Wait. Say the G word? No. This is Paris' influence, Michael. Oh, please. I'm sorry. This is now common parlance in the ARC community. It's called clanker glazing, and it's a very popular thing. Thank God. It's unrelated. Oh, thank God. Oh, my God. It's unrelated, but it is kind of related in the sense that... I almost threw up all over this microphone. This is the peril of using the lingo of the youth, is you just walk into a mind field. And this, I believe, some dictionary had it as a lower down potential. They want to be glazing. It's AI glazing because. No, I'm going to get in my car and drive off a cliff. Goodbye, cruel world. This is what they're doing. In the words of Professor Farsworth, I don't want to live on this planet anymore. We've seen AI progress. Remember, it was a couple of years ago that Will Smith eating spaghetti was just a mess. Multiple fingers of spaghetti morphing into things. I would look on Mike's face as he tries to do that. What do you mean by Will Smith eating spaghetti with a mess? Now, with VO3 and Sora and these new models. Okay. You know where I'm going with this? Now I know. I thought we were still in a weird word. Now I get it. The bad video. Bad AI video. But I have to say, you can still kind of tell in most cases, but not in every case. And they're getting better again, light years faster. I would think that 2026, we're going to get to the point where you can no longer tell it was generated by AI. whether it's a picture, if it's a movie, if it's music with Suno, or if it's an image or a text, rather. It is now, I mean, this isn't the AGI everybody's talking about, but I think it's a major milestone where you cannot tell the difference between AI-generated content and real content. Yes? The fake movie trailers are the worst. The fake movie trailers are what makes me the most angry. Well, get rid of it because the Super Bowl is going to be all AI commercials. And one of the things, I think Coca-Cola did this with their holiday. Terribly. No, but I think it's intentional. Oh, interesting. Because the frame rate's not perfect, and somebody on Reddit posted all the different axles and number of wheels the truck had through the commercial. Yeah, it's crazy. The truck changes so many times. But that's something easily fixed, and I think Coke left it. Either Coke was in a hurry, but more likely they left it in. They want us to talk about the fact that this is an AI company. They left it in. Everything that could have been wrong about the AI video was just there to make you more engaged. That's how smart they are. It worked. I am more engaged. I'm watching it like a hawk now. Well, we're going to see quite a few in February when AI ads make their big debut. There's going to be a ton of them. Google. We're already seeing ads for Anthropic and Google and ChatGPT, right? I get little ads that are like 25 must-have gadgets for this Christmas season. And it's the coolest looking thing. And it so obviously doesn't exist. Have you seen the guy? You can try and order all of them and see what comes up. Have you seen the guy who does the TikTok selfies? There's a lot. Say more? And so, oh, I should have bookmarked this. I think you're scrolling through TikTok. A man who takes selfies and puts them on TikTok? Wow. I couldn't imagine. We have to ban that. Yeah, I do. I'm not surprised that he's not showing you any men whatsoever. No, no, no. They're really cool. They're fake selfies. They're AI-generated selfies. Oh, these are the ones you were texting us about, right? Yes. Jeff. Jeff. Was it you, Leo? It was me. We have a chat now for Intelligent Machines, and it's mostly me sending Olivia Nuzzi-related texts. It's kind of degenerated. Yeah, it really has. I still wake up every morning and rush to it to see what the latest is. This isn't even the best one, but I'll play the one that I sent you guys. I've seen now since quite a few more, and apparently Anthony Nielsen says it's a very easy thing to do. you shoot a selfie and then you have the AI generate the transition in it. And the idea is he's doing selfies with all these famous people. Right? Maybe it's not on here. I was about to say, there's a lot of texts that have been sent in this group chat. Yeah, wow. We're too good of friends is the issue, I guess. I think that's a bagel rat. Never mind. It's the bagel rat. Never mind. Which, by the way, okay, so we talked about the bagel rat on I Am. Somebody pointed out, you know, that could also be AI-generated. We don't know that there's really two rats fighting over a bagel anymore. You cannot tell. So frustrating to me. So Jeff sent us a great video of rats fighting over a bagel, and I was hit with deep dread because I was like, am I going to have to start interrogating whether or not animals holding cute New York pieces of food in the subway are real? I will. That's the world we live in. That's devastating. At least we have pizza rats. I want a shirt now. I noticed this. I don't usually go to X.com. I went there the other day. Almost all the videos now are fake. Almost all of the videos. Where? X.com. I think that... Formerly known as Twitter. I feel bad. X the everything else? It's where I do all my things. Hey, I had a great run with Twitter, Leo. It was very good for me for a couple decades. I was going to say, for the time that you had it, it was the perfect time. If you got on it too soon, you might have hated it by the time you were done with it. Open AI, afraid that they weren't spending quite enough money, decided to spend $6.5 billion to hire Johnny Ive, a new record, by the way. To do what? To design something, a gadget. I know a new logo that doesn't look like a you-know-what. I was thinking he tells them that they need to make robots that have breast shapes. That's why I've... Yeah, he's like... For extra battery. The most fondest robot we've ever created. No, he's making a doohic. He won't say what it is. My favorite bit is every time someone asks him to describe what they're making, what comes out of his mouth is a word salad that I can't properly describe. I want something I want to eat. It's something huge, something terrifying, Something that reminds you of your mother and nothing at all. You know. Exactly. Very good. I think you've got a career as a designer. I've just got to get a turtleneck. This was the summer that the Chicago Sun-Times printed its summer reading list with all AI-generated novels that don't exist. That is just classic. Don't exist. That's so classic. They're very credible. They could exist. The problem is just nobody's written them yet. Including Andy Weir's The Last Algorithm. Following his success with The Martian and Project Hail Mary, Weir delivers another science-driven thriller. This time the story follows a programmer who discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness and has been secretly influencing global events for years. And creating its own summer reading list. You should be reading more about me. You brought up the story during Intelligent Machines, Paris, of the Wired magazine reporter, whose name is, believe it or not, Sam Apple, who spent a weekend at a couples retreat with three couples. In each case, one of the partners was an AI chatbot. Yeah, everybody is wanting to sleep with their chatbots. Wow, I found people in serious relationships with AI. Everyone's wanting to get glazed by their chatbots. In more ways than one. Now, okay, so let me, first of all, I would want to know how much money does this retreat cost? Because I do feel that that gives, not because I wanted to win it myself, but they plan it themselves. If I recall correctly, they just went on an Airbnb that was booked. These couples didn't know each other, but they all knew the Wired author because he'd been talking to them. And they all did a weekend together with their various chatbot partners and this wired journalist. I would like to point out, by the way, that sometimes the problem is inside the house. One of our own, Darren Oki, who is in our club twit, has written an AI novel generator. It's on GitHub. He calls it Novelizer. It generates structured books and chapters, sections, characters, and themes, and practices them up as EPUB files so you can get it on your Kindle. Well, Darren is a master of this. The other thing that happened this year was the massive increase in the amount of money AI programmers were getting, chiefly led by Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, who paid at one program, or at least one program, $1.5 billion to come to work for Meta. Yeah. Is most of it from talent acquisition, yeah, from other companies. Yeah, from Apple, from Tesla, from other companies. They're being paid better than basketball stars. They're being paid like superstars. And Mark's got the checkbook. And I guess I would argue also that if they actually, if such a programmer can actually give them an edge in AI, he's worth the money. He or she is worth the money. Because you started your programming career at the Stanford AI Laboratory back in the 70s. Where did you go wrong? I just didn't have the patience. That was 50 years ago. It wasn't very good 50 years ago. It took a long time. And what's really freaky is that it's basically the same technology, It's just that the technology got so cheap, we were able to upscale it to such a degree that it actually woke up and said, oh, hello. Yeah, that sounds pretty good. $250 to $350 million for some of these new meta employees. I would kill to see the details of those contracts and how long they have to stay at the company to actually get all of that. And is it cash or stock? What is stopping these people? Exactly, cash or stock. Cash or stock? What other sort of caveats do they have? But how are these people just not taking these deals and then running after a year and never working again? I think it's good to say, based on this past conversation, that what really has all of us most interested about what happened in 2025 is AI. I think that's for sure. It really is that the world is pivoting on this. You and I, Steve, have been around for a few more years than these youngins. We've seen a lot of giant trends come and go, like the Internet. Like the personal computer. I don't think there's been anything that's grown at this rate. I'm astonished by what I see ChatGPT produce. It's just astonishing. You have to understand how it works, things you can and cannot ask it. You do need to check that it's not synthesizing something, hallucinating. But, wow, is it useful. I mean, it's just, I don't want to ever lose it. So I'm hoping that they somehow figure out a way to keep it going while they're losing money because I'm willing to pay $10 a month for what I'm doing. It's astonishing. I mean, that's my problem, though, is where does this go eventually? When do they eventually raise our $10 a month subscription up to something that equals how much this costs to try and recouping some of the cost of it? I think the analogy is, speaking of Leo and me having been around for a long time, went back 30 years ago when PCs were just happening. And a 5 or 10 megabyte hard drive cost $5,000. And a PC was a major investment. And you could store your recipes on it, and it could do a spreadsheet, but it didn't do really a lot more. At that time, we were amazed by what we had, and we had no idea how to go further. We didn't know what was next. We thought, you know, like, here we are. This is like, wow, look where we have come in 30 years, where, you know, terabytes cost nothing now, and the computers are insanely capable. I think, I'm not convinced that LLM, the current large language model, will be able to give us much more than it does. I think we're maybe, we've got 90% of the way and it'd be good to get the next 10. But I think that something will grow out of this and that I'm a believer in AGI ultimately because I don't think there's anything that's that special about what we have in our brains that we're not going to be able to create something that is convincingly equal to us. What does AGI mean to you? I have no idea. But you believe in it. Yeah, well, so I guess my point is that I have a sense for the limitations of the current way we're doing things, of what LLMs can do, how far they can be pushed. I believe that we can get a lot more but I don't think it's by pushing LLMs further I think that they're going to we quickly got half of what they could do a couple years ago now we're at 90% of what they can do I think there is a diminishing return on this particular model of AI but boy is everybody's appetite whetted And one thing we do know, you know, all of the researchers in science, whether it's biology, cancer, nuclear fusion, they all say, just give us money. All we need is money. If you give us money, we can solve these problems. Well, AI is now getting money like nobody has ever seen before. And so I think they're going to solve this problem. But what percentage of that budget is actually going to that kind of stuff, Steve? Probably like less than 1%. Well, we know that a lot of it's going to crazy data centers, which, you know, it's just basically implementing the technology we have today. But there are a lot of people who are already past LLMs in the lab. We just haven't seen it yet. We live in interesting times. It's interesting the way that all these companies, yes, they are in some small pockets of it working towards these more ambitious goals. But a lot of them, I mean, we just saw with OpenAI calling a code red, that they're concerned with the same sort of problems that all the social media giants have been for years, about user engagement, about keeping users within the same ecosystem, about beating or matching their competitors on certain features. It's kind of the commodification of all of this. Well, maybe that's what Johnny Ives is going to give us. Hey, maybe he's going to figure it all out. I think you make a good point, though, Steve. We didn't know what the Internet was going to become. We had no idea what it could become. And early on in the Internet, everybody was giving everything away for free, and it was apparent that that model was not a viable model. Now, we solved it perhaps in not the best way. We ended up solving it with advertising and privacy invasion. Maybe we can do better this time around with AI. But I don't think that that is in itself a harbinger of failure because the Internet was just like this. We didn't know what was going to happen and we didn't know how we were going to monetize it. Yeah. But somehow we managed to find a way. And remember back in the beginning where people said, well, who is going to invest the resources to put their company on the Internet because nobody's on the Internet? Nobody's there. Why would they do that? It was a chicken and egg problem. And look, we got chickens. Yeah. You're watching our year-end this week in tech with three of our favorite family members. Steve Gibson has done this before more than a few times with us. Thank you, Steve, for being here. Paris Martineau, who has been a great part of our family. When was your first appearance? You started on Twit, right? Twit, yeah. It was when I was at the Outline. No, it would have had to have been 2018. That long ago? Wow. Yeah. We're so glad we could get you for This Week in Google and Intelligent Machines. I can remember that it was when I was at the outline because I clearly did not realize how long the show was going to be. No one does. And I set up a computer in our little podcast room on like a weekend, and I was like, I'm at the office in a podcast room for three hours. Oh, my God. Yeah. You were 12 at the time, so it was pretty impressive. Yeah, it was very. Thank you, Paris. And, of course, the great Micah Sargent of the Tech News Weekly iOS today. Who has his hands on everything. Yeah, I do. I have my two fingers. My hands are all over everything. I've been meaning to talk to you about that. There's smears. Exactly. Our show today brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert. They've been doing it longer than we have since 1985. Address validation, of course, is their bread and butter. It's what they've been doing in all these years. What is that, 40 years now? Melissa's address verification services have just gotten better, more refined, more accurate. They're available to businesses of all sizes. And, by the way, now they are also available as add-ons, as apps. For instance, the Melissa validation app for Shopify, really a must-have for e-commerce merchants. One of the reasons is e-commerce these days is more than just selling in the United States. It's transformed global retailing. But with that growth comes an uptick in fraud. 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It's essential in any industry. And when it comes to Melissa, their expertise is second to none. E-Toro's vision, I'll give you another example, was to open up global markets for everyone to trade and invest simply and transparently. Now, because they're a fintech company, they needed a streamlined system for identity verification that would be compliant with regulations all over the world. After partnering with Melissa for electronic identity verification, eToro received the additional benefit of Melissa's auditor's report, which had details and an explanation of how each user was verified. The eToro business analyst said, quote, We find electronic verification is the way to go because it makes the user's life easier, users register faster, and can start using our platform right away. Development of the auditor report was an added benefit of working with Melissa. They knew we needed an audit trail and devised a simple means for us to generate it for whoever needs it, whatever regulatory body needs it, whenever they need it, end quote. That's a really interesting point. Melissa works with you to give you what you need, And if they don't offer it, they'll help develop it to make sure you've got exactly what you need from Melissa. And, of course, one thing everybody needs, security data with Melissa is safe. It's compliant, completely secure. Melissa's solutions and services are GDPR and CCPA compliant. They're ISO 27001 certified. They meet SOC 2 and HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. Your data is safe with Melissa. Get started today with 1,000 records cleaned for free at Melissa.com slash twit. Melissa.com slash twit. Thank you, Melissa, for supporting This Week in Tech. They've been with us for many years now. And they'll be with us again in 2026, I'm very happy to say. All right. I think we can move on from AI. I mean, we could spend the whole show talking about AI, but we do have shows for that. That's what we've got to do on Wednesday, not this Wednesday or the next Wednesday. Oh, yeah, we should mention that. So next week's Twit will be, is this right, Benito, Best Of, or do we take the week off next week? No, next week is the Best Of. Yeah, that's our Best Of. And then we'll be back in the new year. Steve Gibson is taking Christmas, and so are you, Paris. You're both taking Christmas Eve off. We're not going to do a show this Wednesday because that would be nuts. But Steve is going to be here on Tuesday. Steve will be here on Tuesday. You and I are doing that. Oh, Steve will be here on Tuesday. It's Windows Weekly and I am. I'm sorry. I apologize. Windows Weekly and I am. So no show on Wednesday Steve was like I got the day off No But you will have the day off the following week because we going to do a best of Steve And Steve we bringing back a classic 2009 episode of Security Now which was a little bit different Steve's research on vitamin D, which now, here we are 16 years later, proved prescient. Everything you said at the time has been borne out and then some. So it's a really, it's a good episode. It is not a video episode. It's an audio episode. But our AI guru, Anthony Nielsen, has made a nice little, so cool, technology new log, if you will, for you. If you're watching the show, you can still see something. Put it up and have it going in the background. It's really cool. So best of starting, I guess, the day after Christmas through New Year's Day. And then we'll be back January 2nd, I think. But what will Wednesday be with the Wednesday show? Is there just dark? Yeah. We're not doing a best of? Yes, the following week. We'll play at some point. Oh, the following week. Two weeks of Wednesdays. You're getting Christmas Eve off Paris, but New Year's Eve we have a best of. But our best of schedule is a little different this year. Like, we're putting all of our best ofs, they all drop at the same day on Monday. Yeah, we do that every year because why wait until Wednesday? They're done. Yeah. Well, the best of for IM, we'll have a selection of our favorite interviews as well, and there's going to be some interesting choices in there. Yeah, I think it's good. It's a nice, balanced mix. We've done so many good interviews this year. We really have. It's really been fun. I mean, shout out to everyone who is in Anthony and Benito. I was going to say everybody, but it's Anthony. Shout out to Anthony and Benito for making that up. They've been doing some great booking and more great things to come. I mean, 15 interviews. Yeah. Incredible. Internet stories this year. It's funny. The AI list is this long. The Internet stories, it's not this long. It's not quite as long. I mean, the Internet is a mature technology. Although Google did make some big changes this year with its abandonment of Manifest V2 and its adoption of Manifest V3, which severely limited what extensions can do. And a lot of people stopped using Chrome because their favorite ad-blocking extension, uBlock Origin, was hobbled. Eventually, Gorehill, the guy who does it, did make a stripped-down version of uBlock. A Lightworks. Light, yeah. But it's not the same, and I think a number of us have shifted to Firefox or other tools because UBlock Origin is such a must-have. Google lost a court battle in 2024. The judge ruled that Google did monopolize search, but then in 2025 the judge said, but we're not going to do anything about it. We spent a lot of time, I don't know if you remember, We spent a lot of time talking about all the possible penalties that they might have to sell Chrome, that might have to divest Android, that they might have to. No, the judge said, you know what? This is actually fascinating. This was, I think, the summer. No, maybe it was early fall. It was September, October. He said, you know what? In the years since I ruled that Google was a monopoly, AI came along. And frankly, Google's in trouble. So we don't need to punish them, which is a breath of sigh of relief from Mozilla because they make hundreds of millions of dollars every year from Google, from affiliate payments for the search. Apple, of course, makes more than $20 billion a year from Google to be the default search engine on iPhones. Both of those were payments that the judge was considering as part of the penalty, eliminating. Didn't do any of that. Now, there is still something hanging over Google's head. A judge this year in April ruled that Google illegally monopolized ad tech, and that penalty phase has not yet completed. So it is conceivable that Judge Brinkema could tell Google they have to divest their ad networks. So that's a story that is still happening. There is one interesting story that's sort of AI adjacent that happens here just at the end of the year in time for Christmas, which is the crazy pricing of RAM. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. We didn't mention that. Yeah. Steve and I and I think Paul Farad and Richard Campbell, a number of us have gone out and bought computers just because we knew that the prices were going to get very high very quickly. Right. The RAM at retail is now like four times the price it was. You can't actually get a fixed price until you purchase it because the price fluctuates. Market value, market price. Yeah. I mean, and do you think it's just going to go up? Well, here's the thing. I've got to point out. This has happened before or after. Fires and RAM factories and so forth. Inevitably, these companies step up their production of RAM. RAM gets very expensive. They say, oh, let's make more RAM. And then the price tumbles. It crashes. Because there's an oversupply. So it won't be this year. It might not be in 2026. But sooner or later, RAM prices will go even lower, in my opinion. What do you think, Steve? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think that they're able to scale based on demand. And they will scale up. I mean, right now, scarcity is being good for them. They're able to sell their RAM chips at a huge premium. One of the big consumer, Crucial makes a memory for consumers, said, you know, we're not going to sell to consumers anymore. We're just going to sell to AI companies because they're paying the top dollar. Yeah, and so right now the laptop and desktop pricing hasn't yet reflected that because they have a long supply chain. But once that dries up, we can start to see those probably jumping up in 2026. And it's going to be a while before it comes back down. But ultimately, I agree. It was a good year for Google. Cloudflare put out its 2025 year in review, and Google dominated the top of the list. Most popular Internet service, most used search browser. And Cloudflare knows this because people go through Cloudflare for a lot of traffic. Google bot was the highest traffic verified bot. Chrome is the most popular browser. So victory is in four big categories. I would say that Google search, though, has the worst built-in AI. That AI that pops up at the top, it is so bad. Yeah, it's very bad. Yeah. People have gotten used to ignoring that top line already. Just like they started ignoring the ads in Google, people are pretty good at ignoring that already. Yeah. That's been my experience as well. I don't know. I feel like a lot of people are not good at ignoring it, though. I also think that makes each of us a user, a quote-unquote Gemini user. Do they count that? Oh, I bet they do. Is that part of their data? In the same way, yeah, in the same way that I've always suspected that the thread user, the user count for Instagram threads is boosted by the fact that when you're scrolling through your Instagram feed, sometimes you see a little carousel of threads. Technically, you're seeing a thread right now. This was the year I took Instagram off of all of my devices. And how did your purchasing decisions, how did they impact that? Much better. Yeah, I didn't buy any anywhere. You're only talking about my Instagram stories. Well, I have to. Okay, so let's be clear. I have to have a way to stalk you. No, I have to have an account for the show. So on this computer, I have Instagram, and I can pull up Instagram. By the way, it's not just you, Paris. That's the only way I find out what my son is up to. Because he doesn't return your calls anymore. He doesn't call me, but I just follow his Instagram. And so you moved it. Why, Leo? Well, besides the fact that I was buying a lot of crap that I didn't need. What about your remineralizing gum? That's worked for you, shouldn't it? How are your minerals? Yeah, they're good. God, listen to that. The folio of it all. Can you hear that? Yeah. That's because it's remineralizing gum. Wow. I don't know. It was also because, I don't know why, but for some reason, Instagram decided I was a horn dog. And the number of thirst traps I was getting served, it was just constant. I wasn't seeing family, friends, anything. This is what frustrates me. Just robots with big bosoms. Big bosom robots is all I can see now. It used to be a place you'd go to see what your friends were up to, to see pictures of your friends. That's not the case anymore. There's an ad every fourth post, and all the other three posts are from people I don't know trying to get me to go to their OnlyFans site. I don't, it's not good. So I really got disgusted with it. It's the same reason I got disgusted with X.com. Cory Doctorow was absolutely right. The N we know whatification. X is the new Tumblr. In terms of, can I say smut? Is that an okay word to say? Smut. X is just a smut shop. And, yeah. Nevertheless, according to Cloudflare, internet traffic grew 19% worldwide in 2025. I wonder where everybody's going. I wonder what they're doing. Yeah, wait. What are people looking at? What is the world looking at? Is it all chat box counts? Hitting refresh. Now, that is a great idea. I love that. Frankly, it's still the usual suspects. Look at the ranking. These are the services. Number one, Google, then Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Instagram, AWS, YouTube, TikTok, Amazon, and WhatsApp. Now, when it comes to generative AI, the rankings are a little bit different. Number one is chat, GPT, then Anthropics, Claude, Perplexity, doing very well, then Gemini. I bet that changes. Gemini had a very good fall. I want to see a pie chart. Are they equal slices? Pie sizes. You're a data scientist, aren't you? Starlink traffic up quite a bit, 2.3% growth. That's 230% growth. You know, you'd like this one, Steve. TLS traffic is using post-quantum encryption. 52% of it is using post-quantum crypto. Wow. Is that the browsers? That's the browsers, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. This shows that more people visited X the Everything app than Reddit by a long shot. Oh, are you surprised? Well, that's because it's impossible to visit Reddit. You type on a link for Reddit, and it pops up three things trying to take you to the app. But then sometimes your phone doesn't know. You're not doing the long press, Micah. You've got to pay attention to that. The long press. It's all about the long press. It's all about the long press. But it's just, I think they make it impossible to use Reddit. They do make it difficult. I also like that Cloudflare has X slash Twitter on it. Yeah, everybody. Never give a dub. X is such a bad name. It's such a bad name. What do you think the number one TLD, the number one domain for spam and malicious email was? Well, I saw it, so I won't guess. X.com. No. Dot Christmas. Dot Christmas. We were just talking about this. This is the time. Jiminy Christmas. Yes. Then dot LOL. Amazon.Christmas emails you and says, hey, that order that you sent to your family member, we're going to need a little bit more postage for that. Get this, 92.7% of the traffic on .Christmas was malicious. That's wild. Almost virtually all of the traffic on .Christmas was either spam or malicious. I'm glad I don't have Micah.Christmas or something like that. I was tempted. I guess I won't. Yeah. Anyway, Cloudflare, good job on that. Although Cloudflare has been a little bit in the... Have they been in trouble this year? I didn't know they were in trouble. This was the year, I guess this is every year, a number of big providers went down. Cloudflare was one of them. AWS was another. Microsoft had trouble. Microsoft was down for a little bit. And the entire city of San Francisco was blacked out yesterday. Oh, and the Wemos all stopped. The Wemos? The Pokemans and the Wemos. The Wemos can't operate, apparently, without traffic lights. I like it because they look like they're just kind of nervous. They look like they're just a bit stressed out. Which is how I would feel if I was ever in one of them and it did something wrong. That's so terrifying to me. That's why I had the opportunity to. I got the invite or whatever back whenever we lived near San Francisco, and I was talking about, oh, I'm going to drive in, I'm going to end up taking one. I think it would be really cool. And then I heard, it all took was two stories of the car violating some traffic law, and I thought, I would literally, I think I would spontaneously combust if I was in a vehicle and it wasn't obeying the laws and there's no one else to say, like, this is not his fault. This is me sitting in the car going, I'm sorry, it's not my fault. I didn't know it. I didn't know it. I did not. I did not. It did not. Did some Waymo driver get in trouble for what the Waymo did? Yes. There is a big memorial on the Mission Street in San Francisco because a Waymo killed a bodega cat, a much-beloved bodega cat named Kit Kat. And, well, allegedly. I don't. I think it's allegedly killed, ran over Kit Kat. So Waymo is in the doghouse. Very much not talking about the chocolate bar. very much not talking about a chocolate bar. I did not hit her. I did not. All right, pop quiz. Pop quiz. Who's the CEO of X.com? Oh, right now. No one. No one knows. Yeah. It was Linda Iaccarino, remember? But she quit. And we don't know. What a terrible choice that was for her. Yeah, she made a bad choice. Don't we feel like she made a lot of money? Exactly. I'll bet she was doing just fine for a while. I feel like she knew it was that. Well, she quit on exactly the two-year mark, so she vested and left. Oh, just like the – Oh, very Amazonian of her. Here's a story that we heard all year long that never materialized. Tim Cook is quitting as CEO, is going to retire at Apple. I thought he did. No? No. No, no, no, that was Tim Apple. This story kept coming up. Mark Gurman said it a lot. Then Financial Times published it a couple of months ago. And then Mark Gurman said, no, no, that's not true. And as far as we know, Tim Cook is not going to be stepping down. What do you think is going on in the background that this story was leaking? What do you think is causing that? That's a really good question. We spent many, many, many hours on MacBreak Weekly discussing exactly that. Discussing exactly that, but no one knows. Well, it really felt like it was a planted story with the Financial Times. I mean, look, it's a Financial Times. But who is, yeah, who's planting that to try and push? You're asking who's the gardener? Yeah, I guess. Who's the gardener? I like to watch. Who's the gardener? It was, well, our thought at the time was that it was Apple itself planting it with Financial Times to gradually prepare investors for the inevitable. Tim is 65. But the Financial Times article said things like, he could step down as soon as next year. Does anyone really care, though? I mean... Investors, if you're an Apple investor, you might. You might see the good news or bad news. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't seem to me that Apple... I mean, I agree completely with what Parrish said earlier about how disappointing Apple has become. I mean, we're used to, you know, Jobsian miracles and we're getting liquid glass that we all have to turn off. It's a real nightmare. So the earliest June, people were saying liquid glass was a terrible idea. It came out finally with a new iPhone in September and was roundly considered. Then the man who imposed it on us, Alan Dye, left Apple to go to work at Meta. Not forced out, as far as we know, left under good graces, but Meta probably known for its design language, by the way. Yeah. I think it's a real sign that the person in charge of Liquid Glass decided to go to the company that's best known for its design ethos being how many different menus can we smush in this one little hamburger thing. Yeah, exactly. Anyway. Listen, I love a menu. I'm sorry. but I do. Do you love liquid glass? I want to keep scrolling and scrolling. Okay, so here, this is actually, I know that it's not a popular opinion there. I don't mind liquid glass. I think, but I'm just like new and engaging. So I think that's why I don't mind it. You're young. You're young. I'm young. I've got the eyes for it. Yeah. I literally haven't updated my phone because I detest it so much. You are like my partner in that way. And I did. When do I see people? You turn off motion and you increase contrast and it becomes tolerable. Which is really not the way you want to describe. But still there's so many dumb. I look over people's phones with the updates and the new design of the messaging thing. Where it's kind of clear. I'm just like, why does it? Who asked for this? It sounded like she's old before. Now you're. I get this way every time we have to put Apple designs. And you know, on the Roadrunner, when he's about to take off, he, like, pulls back before he locks into the loose game. You know, I'm over there trying to catch the Roadrunner, and I'm getting really close. And then suddenly, what I think of the tunnel is just a painted wall. I think that's messed up. How are you avoiding the update? Because my phone's forced it on me. Well, eventually you'll have to. Like, the update came up, and it said install later or install now. I was like, uh, there's no never? Wait, what about Windows? That sounds like... Oh, no, Apple. And it's killing the battery on my phone. It's killing my battery. I hate this new update. I mean, that's why I didn't want to do it because my battery is already coming. So if anyone wants to turn it off and make sure that it doesn't update automatically, you need to launch your settings app. You tap on general. You tap on software update, and there's an option that says automatic updates. You need to go into that, and there's a thing that says automatically install. Make sure that toggle is toggled off. Otherwise, like Benito, you will get a little bit of a problem. No, I did that. I constantly check that, and I always make sure. Yeah, it prompted me to install later or install now, and I didn't have a never or a close. Well, Steve would agree that there are security reasons you wouldn't want to update your update. Yes, I agree. I think it's a good thing. 26 is a big jump forward. They made some huge improvements that we talked about on the podcast, which are security. We haven't yet seen a problem after those updates where we did see problems with the pre-26. just recently, a couple of zero days, that did not affect people who had upgraded to 26. So, yeah. I think the only thing I hate is the left align. That is so odd to me. What is left align? Almost everything is left aligns now. What? So when you have an update come up, yeah, look next time when you're on your lock screen and you go to log in from there. if you're not using Face ID, everything is now left-aligned. They said it has to do with the readability of it all, but that is a new change. As opposed to, was it justified before? Yeah, it was center justified. Let me see what, because I want to read with the text. It is generally considered. I know when you read a teleprompter, you want things left-aligned, not justified, and you want them in upper and lower case, not all upper case. And just to grinch you some more, one of the nice things about the iPhone was that it was discoverable in the beginning. Yeah. You could see how it worked and what was going on. It's possible to get it into some photo modes where you're just stuck. It's like, how the heck? Where am I? Where did my photo go? To Apple Photos are the most upsetting part of it all. I agree about that as well. Why can I not have a little icon at the bottom where all my screenshots live in a little folder? Why do I have to type the word screenshots into the search bar and folders every single time? It's absurd. They want you to ask the theory. Tell us how you really feel. I think it's good Alan Dye took that job. I don't know. He might have been lynched if he'd stick around. That's terrible. Well, his last name is Dye, so. Oh, my God. This does not constitute a threat, by the way. It's not. I'm just pointing out what his last name is. Yeah, you were just saying a fact. In honor. This is the year Steve Gibson told everybody, delete your spit. 23andMe, who many of us had used for genetic testing and had done it through giving them some spit, went basically belly up and decided, well, we're going to sell. And for a while, it looked like it was going to be purchased by a biotech firm, Regeneron. The founder of 23andMe managed to wrest it away from Regeneron. She made a higher bid, and the court said, we're going to hire an ombudsman to make sure that privacy is protected. Nevertheless, very many people, and I know, Steve, you recommended this. It was hard to do. It was hard to do. Because everybody was doing it at the same time. And so I had to set reminders to go back because the site would not, Parts of the site wouldn't load. There were some parts that were much easier and then others that were harder. And the more difficult parts that required, you know, three different screens, and the site would stop loading. But, yeah, I quickly, because I left, like you, Leo, I left mine in there, and then they also offered you the option where if over time you decided to, you could buy a new chip, essentially, the test that they run, and they could use the sample that they already had and sort of upgrade you. And so that's why I kept mine. And I thought, oh, I might want to upgrade at some point and get more information. So I kept mine in there, and then this happened. And I said, nope, I'm going to delete all the stuff. There were a lot of good things that came from it. Their link to Ancestry.com allowed my college roommate and good friend from high school who knew he was adopted but didn't know what an expanse of siblings he had. He was able to reconnect to all of his blood relatives that he never knew of. Same thing happened in my family. It's not clear what Ann Wojcicki is going to do with it. The TTAM Research Institute, which is a public benefit corporation that purchased 23andMe. By the way, TTAM stands for 23andMe. She's apparently following a similar road down. But it's not clear what the plan is. They were able to make a better offer than Regeneron. So presumably they have a way to. Do we know why they went out of business? Like just what happened? Why also did we ever get to the bottom of why the board tried to get her out? I think, I don't know. I think she wanted to form a non-profit. Yeah, she wanted to do something. Yeah, I think it was. Or was it to re-privatize the company? Wasn't it to re-privatize? Yeah, I believe it was some sort of conflict over what she considered. The board perhaps didn't have faith in her plan to finance the deal. Yes, that's what it was. Yes, she needed to present a plan to re-privatize, if I remember correctly. And they said, well, we don't like that, so go away. So the last we heard of this was in July when Andrew Jiskey posted on X.com saying, I'm really excited that we've bought 23andMe without, I don't know if they're going to continue doing the consumer genetic testing or what, but she says, in effect, I'm honored to be back with 23andMe. So it sounds like it's a long way around to get regaining control of the company she founded. Anyway, that was one of the stories that happened this year that you might have forgotten about. Delete your spit, kids. Yeah. Delete it. I did. I never had spit to delete. Well, good ways you could delete. That would be good, too. Leo! Let's not. We're moving on. Yeah, that's not the right thing. Signal, do you want to talk about Signalgate? That was a tech story. Oh, my God, that was this year. That was this year, too. Let's take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk about that and more that happened this year, plus some of the weirder stories and a goodbye to one of our, a sad goodbye to one of our Twit family members. But all of that still to come. You're watching our year-end episode of This Week in Tech, the last show of 2025 with Paris Martineau. Steve Gibson and Micah Sargent. It's a pleasure to spend time with you guys. Our show today brought to you by Vention. I had a great conversation with Glenn over at Vention. This is a really interesting company. They've been doing this for a long time. They're engineers first and foremost, and their expertise is very timely in AI. AI, of course, is supposed to make life easier, but if you're on a team that has been ordered to start using AI, Maybe it's made your job just a little bit harder. That's where Vention's 20-plus years of global engineering expertise comes in. 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Maybe the best plan would be bringing a partner who's done this already across industries, someone who can take your idea, your prototype, expand it into a full-scale product without disrupting your systems or slowing your team. That's Vention. Vention is real people with real expertise and real results. And they have the references to prove it, too. Go to the website, check it out. Learn more at VentionTeams.com. See how your team can build smarter, faster, and with a lot more peace of mind. Or get started with your AI workshop today, VentionTeams.com. That's V-E-N-T-I-O-N, Teams.com. Thank you so much for supporting This Week in Tech. Very nice conversation with them. I was very impressed with what they can do. I don't know if you guys have been following this. It's really kind of an inside baseball thing. There was a young woman who was a reporter for New York Magazine. I know. I have to explain this to you. That makes sense, yeah. She was a political reporter. She was engaged to another political reporter. Her name was Olivia Nuzzi. Her fiancé was Ryan Lizza. He was at the Post? Where was he at Politico? No, he was at Politico. Politico. Helming their main newsletter. And, unfortunately, it came out that Ms. Nuzzi apparently had a relationship. Nuzzi, who was covering D.C. and the General Trump era for New York Magazine as their chief Washington correspondent, it came out that she was having an affair of sorts with RFK Jr. And, according to Liza, this wasn't the first time. She'd been covering former Governor Mark Stanford in his presidential run and had an affair with him. And so he breaks up with her. She sues him. She tries to get a restraining order. It's very vicious. She has just published a book, American Canto, about the whole thing. He has been publishing a serialized newsletter telling his side of the story. Episode 8 dropped minutes ago, and that means we lost Paris. It's called Sam Boo. Listen, you haven't lost me because I just read as far as I could get through the paywall while we were on the ad break, and someone has not yet sent me a PDF. So we don't. He was very smart. The first one was free and got it. And it had a big twist at the end. The first one was free. And it was called, this was a time when we didn't know that there was a Mark Sanford. We didn't know that there was a second affair to hit the Olivia Nessie Ryan Liz situation. And we just thought it was about RFK. And he publishes part one called How I Found Out. And it sounds like it's going to be about RFK. It sounds like he's talking about RFK. You know, Olivia Nessie had come back from becoming a long shot political candidate. He likes their relationship to bamboo. It's got roots, it grows, you can't stop it. And I keep having to cut the bamboo. It's this really overwrought metaphor that doesn't work and really bumps you up against this piece again and again over like a thousand tortured words. And at the end, he's like, yeah. And then I called our agent and was like, hey, we can't do this book proposal. Turns out Olivia is having an affair with one of the candidates. He asked what candidate? Mark Sanford. It was an RFP. What? It was an RFK. And then everything else is behind a paywall. Well, except for part seven, which was kind of strange fan fiction about what might have happened at their hearing had there been. Are you kidding me? I have one question. So he breaks up with her and she sues him? She claims mental cruelty, lots of guilt. She claimed also, so suing is the wrong, she filed for a restraining order, specifically because she said that Lizza had hacked her devices and was stalking her. Lizza claims that he did absolutely none of that. She gave him her passwords and asked him to go through her phones as a trust exercise. He says that the restraining order was all a ploy to... orchestrated by RFK to keep the news of this off RFK and focus on the Ryan Luzza and Nuzzi after the election. The whole key was to push this past the election. Because part of the allegations of Nuzzi also acted as a political operative for RFK. Anyway, we're derailing the show today. Nobody really cares about it except people in media. And it turns out Paris has worked with Olivia Nuzzi. That's perhaps describing it too much. I was an intern at New York Mag when she was there, and so one of my jobs as an intern was to transcribe a lot of the interviews for magazine writers back in the day, so I had some brief connection with her. But I care about it because I love media gossip. And that's been my best of 2025. This has been the gift that has kept on giving. And this is the final part of their little story. We're not much longer for the show, so you'll have time to read Bamboo. And that, of course, when transcriptions were a thing. I was about to say, that was back in the day where I had to transcribe people's interviews, not AI. I remember when Micah used to have to transcribe the Apple analyst calls. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That was wild. And I had this whole setup where I had a little keyboard shortcut because I was recording it live with the program, and I had a little keyboard shortcut that let me skip back, skip back, skip back, and hear what was just said as I'm typing out as quickly as I can for iMore. Rest in peace since it's acquisition by Future and its later closure. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. You're like, I know more. So, this was the year that hackers, not hackers, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine was invited to a top-secret signal group chat. Oh, wow. Yes. The Lucy Small PC Group. Yeah. Yeah. And this was about, this was the attack, it was Syria? I can't even remember now. Iran. Iran. And, you know, it was a bit of a controversy. It was about imminent military operations against the Houthis in Yemen, a codenamed Operation Rough Rider. And the issue, of course, was that information about this secret operation was revealed in the group chat. To the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, that they were planning military operations down to the wire just with this random guy in there that they added by mistake, and they didn't know. And he wasn't sure for a while that this was, like, what was going on. All this stuff was coming up on his phone. And finally he said, oh, I should not be seeing this. As soon as he figured out it was real, because they had, I believe they had planned some sort of military attack or bombing or strike, and then he'd seen it reported on the news afterwards that it was accurate. Then he spoke to the Atlantic's lawyers, and they were like, you've got to leave immediately. So he just left the group chat. And that was when all of these top military intelligence officers realized for the first time that, yeah, we just had a random dude in our super secret military group chat. I mean, not even just a random dude, the press. The press, yeah. Fortunately, not a bad guy because this was information that could have jeopardized the operation and the soldiers involved in the operation. It could have been a lot worse. And the problem is they didn't learn a lesson from this. Yes, which is the most galling thing. It's like anyone can make a mistake. I say that all the time on the podcast. You know, policy is one thing. Mistakes are completely separate. And to then thumb your nose at people saying this, you really should not be using a consumer device on a consumer platform to be conducting. I mean, we have means of doing this securely. And they said, well, but I don't have it on my smartphone. I'm going to use Signal. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was on it. It's believed he was the one who added the Atlantic editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, accidentally to the chat. There was some question about why Waltz had Goldberg's number in his contact list. He gave a fairly impossible scenario for why that might happen. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, was also in the Signal group chat. they also were, we thought at first, violating a government rule that requires that these discussions be memorialized, that they have to be recorded. But then it turned out, oh, no, don't worry, because we have been. We use a signal app. We don't use the regular signal app. We use an app called TeleMessage, which is a signal knockoff that records the chat, so we aren't violating the national government. It's less secure. It emails you the transcripts of the conversation. Yeah. Oh, my God. And, in fact, as soon as this came out, they were using telemessage. A guy hacked it. Oh, good. He said it took about 15, 20 minutes. It wasn't much effort at all. The exploit was incredibly simple. All 404 media had the story. And so there you go. So it went from bad to worse. But as you point out, I don't think there have been any consequences in any of this. And they did it later. Yeah. And any other time, so many people lose their jobs, right? And any other time, all these people lose their jobs. Weeks of hearings, months of hearings. The U.S. government did something kind of socialistic. They took a 10% stake in intel. They said, you know, we were going to give you money in the CHIPS Act. I'll tell you what, we'll still give you that money, the $8.9 billion, but we want 10% in exchange. Only the bad parts of socialism. There's only parts of socialism. In any event, this isn't the last time that happened. There were some other companies. This happened again, and the government says, yeah, I want to hear more of this. Sorry? How long? Our president looked younger in that photo. You know, it's quick. They get old so fast. Oh, it is a rough job. Yes. Let's see. What else? I'm trying to get through this because I've only gotten through about half of the 150 stories. It was a busy year. It was a very busy year. Yes. I'm trying to think of some of the wackier things that have happened to this year. I have it all. Believe me, I put it all in there. I spent all of yesterday. How could it only be now that AOL is shutting down dial-up? There you go. There's one of the wacky stories. Who has a modem? Yeah. Yeah. I think there are enough people who never stopped paying. Yeah. There's a lot of people. Oh, yeah. They're just the... Or they have dial-ups. Let's not be elitist. Oh, no, let's be elitist. I don't think you can really use dial-up. How can you? I mean, what? What was it? To get your mail. You've got mail. Come on, to get your mail. I'm guessing most of the Internet. How old is it getting your mail, Steve? Most of the Internet probably isn't even accessible from 56K, right? Websites, no. But email, yes. Yeah, to get your mail. To get your mail. To get your mail. Point. Yeah. Did I stutter? I used to go down to the post office and get my mail. I'm sorry. Now I use their mailboxes. My phone. Nintendo Switch 2 came out. Record launching, best selling video game system. Three million units in just a matter of weeks. Guys, I can't wait for the Steam Cube. Speaking of new. Steam Machine is coming out next year. I want the Steam Cube. I want that little cube. What is the Steam Cube? I thought that was the Steam Machine. It's made by Steam. Oh, okay. So you're just giving it a name. It looks like a game cube. I thought I missed it because I was like, I know what the Steam Machine is. It has nothing on it. It's just a cube and it's a computer inside and I'm going to plug it into my TV and I'm going to play games on it. And its release got stalled because of AI, right? I feel like probably because of the whole game issue. Yeah. I'm guessing that's not the name, right? Nobody uses the actual name for this thing because it's not a memorable name. Steam Machine. Which one? Steam Machine? I think that's just the parlance. Don't people just call it the Steam Machine? I thought it was called the Steam Machine. Well, anyway. That's the thing that I use to get wrinkles out of my clothes. YouTube announced that this year it overtook mobile, TV overtook mobile as the primary device for viewing. In fact, this week, YouTube said 700 million hours every month of podcasts alone watched on YouTube on TV. Are you watching us on TV right now? That is so fascinating. I don't watch anything on YouTube TV. I just feel so disconnected from my generation. But your TV has YouTube on it, right? Yeah, but I couldn't tell you the last time I used it. I use it when people come over and are like, I want to put something on YouTube. morning when I was working. What did you watch? I watched MIT computer science class. Bless your heart. YouTube's great. It's great. Is it anything you want? Okay, what I love right now is this idea of you walking up to an alien and you're just, YouTube, it's great. It's anything you want. I'm sort of describing what YouTube is. Okay. But no, the fact that I didn't know that many people had TVs is what I was trying to get to. Oh. I think of people who are younger who just use their phone or have maybe their laptop that they watch stuff on. A lot of people I knew in college, no TV, they just would watch things on their laptop. So that's what's fascinating to me about this. I've had to convince so many men to get TVs. I think they just send it to their TV from their laptop or phone. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. No, no, we can't let that just rush me. I feel like I meet a lot of men who are like, oh, I just watch a show on my laptop or on my phone. I'm like, I'm not going to watch a show on your phone or laptop. Oh, they invite you for Netflix and chill, and you say, but I ain't chilling on your phone, dude. Get a television or a projector, my dude. You're going to have to go over. I am not coming over to watch TV on your phone. That makes sense. Like an iPad? An iPad doesn't work? Come on, guys. Well, I know you young people love the Academy Awards ceremonies, so you're going to make sure that they get a TV by 2029 because the Oscars are leaving ABC. They will be aired on YouTube only starting in three years. I mean, good job to Google for, or excuse me, to Alphabet for pulling that off. You don't watch the Oscars either, do you? I do. Do I watch it? You're not committed. Yes, correct. I don't watch it with. Steve, you're a watch party? No, what I do is I am like knitting or something while I'm watching. Like I'm not really in, I'm not paying my attention. To me, it's a national holiday. We're not going to get a hands-on Oscars this way. That's what I'm saying. We won't get a hands-on Oscars. Exactly. Now, let me ask you this, though, because I am, when I'm thinking about this now, I'm wondering, is there an award show for the Utes? People younger than me. Yeah, Las Culturistas did something like this, didn't they? Oh, come on. I mean, like on the scale of this, is there? No. It's called Subscriber Count. Well, no, parents love movies. I don't understand why you wouldn't be interested in us. I love movies. You love movies. You love movies, too. I do. It seems like this is Hollywood's special night. In the same reason I don't watch YouTube videos, if I want to know who won awards, I just wait until it's written up in a list and I can scan through it. Go look at the list. No reason I need to sit there for three hours. You don't want to see the outfits? You don't want to see who's drunk? You don't want to see who's pronounced like Dina Menzel? I have an unusually antithetical relationship to celebrities. One of the big applications are the Oscar watch parties, right? where a bunch of people who are all movie aficionados get together. You know what it is? They're all our age. Yeah, I don't. That is true. I often find, too, I was, for some reason, on Instagram, there was a post where they had shown the Oscar movies for I don know was it Best Picture for the past millions of years And I said I actually have not seen many of those films So that seems to be part of it as well. Films are not as compelling as they were. So the Game of the Year this year, Claire Obscure, Expedition 33, are the Game Awards, are they the... That's what I'm wondering, Shane, because maybe the Twitch streaming hooligans love this stuff. Sure. The gameys? The gameys. People are watching live television programming. Yeah. Yeah, they're watching their podcasts. The Video Game Awards, though, is just a big excuse for game companies to put trailers on. It's just a big trailer. That's what I'm saying, isn't it? That's all it is. Yeah, so it's like, not demystification, but it's sort of a loss of the gloss, a loss of the underlying realism of it all. It all feels fake, and like, why do I want to, why am I, you know, down with the machine? And when you figure out how the Oscars work, you know? When you figure out how the Oscars work. I think your generation is over awards. I don't think you guys care about awards. I mean, I don't care about awards. I mean, yeah. I don't speak for a generation. I won't speak for a generation either. I am also curious how people, so I'm 33. There, I said I'm 33. Wait a minute. I thought you said you were 30. Are you getting old? You did, and you lied to me. No, no, no, I didn't. You misunderstood me, and I did not correct myself at the moment. You're feeling 30. You're feeling 30. You're going to roll the tape back. Yeah, and if you do, you'll hear how what I was saying was. And then deep thinking so Micah turns to the camera. Yeah, exactly. He says, I'm 30. He says something like a special 30 or something. A 33 and a third. What I was saying was I am over 30. I didn't want to say my exact age, but you were right earlier when you were like, people already know that. So anyway, I'm 33. I just turned 33 on Friday. Well, no, I don't. I will feel like I have achieved everything when I have a Wikipedia page, and that's not yet. So I've still got more career to do. Guys, get on it. Make a Wikipedia page for Micah and I. But I, yes, that's some, sorry, Wadfin just said something that somebody said to me the other day at my birthday, which is, oh, you're the Jesus age, because Jesus was 33 when Jesus died biblically. Anyway, now, I don't know if I died. We were going to try to just cover 2025. Yeah, where was I going with this? Where was I going with this? You were talking about a war show? Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the reason I bring up my age is because I am thinking about the people who I was talking to. It was three or four people who were a full 10 years younger than me. so 23-ish range, and obsessed with the Olympics. And I was curious what everybody's take is on the Olympics, because that is an award situation as well, but it's also very patriotic, and there is kind of a, well, there's a heavy patriotic crowd in the U.S., and there's a not-so-patriotic crowd in the U.S., really. So how do we feel about the Olympics? Do you root for the American team? I don't think I'd root for another team, but I think that what I would do if I was watching it is I'm looking to see the sport. I'm interested in the sport. Yeah, and the individual athletes as opposed to the sport. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to be honest. I don't think I've ever willingly sat down and seen a second of Olympics. I think I've only walked by televisions. If more men in your life had TVs, you might. They don't, though. They really don't. But they don't. They don't, and if they do, they definitely are not subscribing to any service that would be playing the Olympics live. Paris is such a door, a window onto a different world for us on intelligent machines. I think she's very independent. I think that's what it is. It's fascinating. I just, for instance, I learned that apparently all the men Paris knows are into history. They're all into, like, some war podcast. No, do they all talk about the Roman Empire? No, not even the Roman Empire. They've gone past that. Thank God. They're all into the Revolutionary War now, right? They're all in 1776. Everybody's kind of into nuclear war stuff right now. I think they all just listen to Hardcore History, all right? That's probably it. I mean, I think that is it. It's from podcasts. Oh, so there you go. It's podcasts. It's podcasts all the way down. But wait, what's your – how are Leo and Steve, y'all Olympics people? No. I like – I'm a casual spectator. Yeah, casual. Like watching free – what do they call it? The ice skating, freestyle ice skating. I'm just astounded by the athleticism that we see. It's just, you know, anybody who's at the top of their game at anything, I think, is... I got so hooked on handball last time. Handball was so much fun to watch. It was so much fun to watch. It's like soccer, but you're throwing the ball around instead of kicking it. It's like you're throwing the ball into a goal. It was so fun to watch. It's pretty fun. It's a fun sport that we have. What is that sliding the big heavy weight down? Curling. Oh, that's curling. Yeah, curling is on a train. Jason Snell does curling. He is. He's on a team. He's on a team. We should talk a million to curling this year, guys. All right. A few more stories, and then we're going to do our final break, and then we'll get to the weird stories of the week. This year, a $20,000 American-made electric pickup was announced. The Slate, it has no stereo, no paint, no screen inside, and nothing. I mean, you can order extra stuff. I mean, the Cybertruck has no paint. Yeah. This went crazy. People, the reservations were different. My partner, you reserve it now for a delivery at some time down the road. And then do you have to change the batteries yourself? It's not that kind of electric. You need C-cells, a lot of them. Wow. My significant other really liked this. Yeah, a lot of people. Yeah. So did mine. The slate is going to be one vehicle, one trim, one color, but you can add on things later, including, if you want, an entertainment system. One trim? Like one? Black? Yeah, one. No, one op. Trim in car means how many. It's like premium or extra features is what they call trim. See, we covered this. NASA engineers rescued Voyager 1 15 billion miles away. That is so cool. The fact that this thing is still going is just astonishing. Unbelievable. Amazing. Yeah, I mean, it is the first interstellar object that we created because it's now out past the sun's heliosphere and astonishingly able to aim itself at us in order to send data back. It's just an incredible accomplishment. Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, but it just kept on going. And it's got a very primitive computer system in it. It's running on batteries, of all things. Memory is failing, and they're recoding around the failed regions in order to keep it going. It's just amazing. That's incredible. It's a really great story of human engineering. How do you do that when it's that far away? Sorry to ask a very dumb question. I don't think it's a dumb question at all. Very patiently. And the problem, of course, is a lot of the people who knew how it worked are no longer available for one reason or another. Because they're in the ground. Yeah. And so they try to simulate it and send data up, and now the round-trip time is so long that there's a lot of time spent holding one's breath. Oh, to hope that it worked. Yeah. Wow. And, boy, if they screw up so that it swings off-axis, we never get it back. So they're just sending little signals to it, right? Yeah. And it's a little memory, right? They can't really send that much data to it. It has to be just a small packet, right? No, and it had a whole bunch of instruments, but it uses radioactive decay in order to create heat, which then drives some thermocouples to create current. And over time, it's been cooling off, so the available amount of current has been slowly dropping, and they've had to shut off one instrument after another in order to prioritize which instruments they still want to keep powered up. Can you imagine if we built everything that we have on our planet in the way that we built things for space to last as long as they do and have so many back? We used to. I just think it's so cool. We used to. Well, back in my day, the washing machine would last. Voyager 1 was the satellite that took the blue marble picture of the Earth, among other things. I do hope, I don't know if it's the case, JPL had some layoffs, considerable number of layoffs this fall. and that's who was responsible for Voyager. Not sure if the Voyager team, which is tiny, it's a handful of people, there's a great documentary about them. I'm hoping that they were not laid off because that would pretty much be it, Voyager. Nobody else knows how it works. Before we go to break, can I ask Steve a quick question about security for this year? Does that work? Go ahead. I was just wondering, so we've seen, especially in the last like five, eight years, maybe a privatization, a heavy privatization of the space industry. And we see less government push for these things to exist. And given what we've seen this year, you know, and listening to security now and learning about the loss of funding, the closure of teams, the increase in accuracy from the government bodies in the security space, do you think and do you perceive a shift to more private companies stepping into the big role that government has played in terms of cybersecurity in the U.S. and elsewhere? or do you think that this is kind of a bump in the road and it will continue to have the funding and everything that's needed to have a cybersecurity force? That's a really great question, and I do think there's a bump in the road aspect. I think that Doge could be criticized for overcutting and for, you know, indiscriminately cutting, which hurt. And I think the good news is inertia will keep us going for some length of time. But I'm hoping that we're going to be able to build things back up. It certainly is the case also that government does create waste. It's just sort of natural to end up with more people than you need because people means budget and people who control larger budgets have more power in Washington. And so there certainly have been some examples where things were cut that needed to be cut. But one of the big concerns is that there has been a failure in some legislation that would protect American companies if they reported breaches to the government, if they reported problems. And so I remember that that had been that was supposed to be reinstituted and resigned. And I don't remember whether that has happened yet. But but here's the good news. We finally have an administrator of NASA for a long time. It's been run under the Commerce Department. But Jared Eisenman, whose nomination was withdrawn by the president earlier this year, was sworn in on Thursday after Senate approval. He's the 15th administrator of NASA. He has been an astronaut. He has his own private fleet of fighter jets. He's a billionaire in his own rights. But I think somebody who really believes in the mission of NASA, and I think most people, I'd have to ask Rob Pyle, the host, and Tarek Malek, the hosts of our This Week in Space show, but my sense is that people are very pleased that Isaacman is now in charge at NASA. So he says we're in a new space race, so that's interesting. I agree. I think the weaponization of space is a big concern. We do know that there are satellites up there that have arms on them, ostensibly for use in repairing other satellites, but that arm can go also over to some foreign adversarial satellite and bend its antennas off. So, unfortunately, it's going to be the Wild West up there in orbit. A very different kind of space race. Thug satellites wandering around. Playground bullying in space. Turn off antennas and things. Wow. And that creates more space junk. Yes. And that creates the Kessler effect. Real quickly, this was also the end of the line for Windows 10. We covered this extensively on Windows Weekly and Security Now. As of October, Windows 10 is not getting security updates. Microsoft did not back down on that, despite attempts by Stacey Higginbotham at Consumer Reports and others to convince them. Europe did, by the way. The EU said, no, no, you're going to support this for another year. And Microsoft does support it with patches in the EU, but not here in the United States. Although here in the U.S., if you do a couple little things. It's easy to get. Yes. Yes. You are still able to get one more year of the monthly updates. What's the state of Windows 11 right now? I feel like I've seen some headlines but haven't looked into it saying that there were a lot of different vulnerabilities with it or issues with Windows. That's just business as usual. I don't know. I think Windows 11 is about, like, it's like the Windows 8. Remember when Windows 8 came out and everybody hated that? I think it's pretty similar to that. People hate Windows 11? I don't know why. It is Windows 10. It's not all cosmetic changes. It's got round corners. It's not that different. There's a lot more force. Windows 8 is the operating system that caused me to be a Mac user. I hated it so much I got a Mac and literally have never had the Windows machine since. Actually, there is a huge influx from Windows 10 to Linux. I was going to say Linux probably did too. Yeah. And there are a lot of people, many, many millions, maybe as many as a billion Windows 10 users who have refused to upgrade, which I think on security now will be a topic for conversation as they become more and more vulnerable. And the EU is moving away from Windows. I mean, in general, we are seeing a lot of European countries saying, eh, you know, we need a little more EUOS. EUOS? That's what I want, EUOS. All right, let's take a little break. We're going to have our final words and our weird stories of the year, because there were a few in just a little bit, but first a word from our sponsor. and it's this beautiful thing, my Aura frame. This is the Aura ink frame. Now, you probably know the name Aura. They are easily every year picked as the best digital frames, but this is a digital frame with a difference. Imagine if you could hang a photo on the wall, and you could hang this on the wall. It's just like a regular photo, right? You hang it on the wall, but it changed every day. You'd wake up in the morning and there'd be a new photo on there. That's this. That's the Aura Ink, Aura's new cordless, look it, no cords, Mom, color e-paper frame. They have done with e-paper something I didn't think anybody could do. Meet Ink, Aura's first ever cordless color e-paper frame featuring a sleek 0.6-inch profile and a softly lit 13.3-inch display. 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It's a little bit vintage tone look to it, but it really looks like a print. It's great. They've done a lot of design innovation. the graphite-inspired bezel, the paper-textured matte, the glossy glass front. It looks really like a photo hanging on your wall, not like another device. We don't need another screen in our living rooms, in our bedrooms. You get unlimited free photos. The app, there's no subscription. Just download the Aura app, connect it to Wi-Fi. This is really a gift for somebody who appreciates cutting-edge technology or somebody who doesn't want another screen on the wall but wants the flexibility of a screen that the pictures can change. I have it change overnight, just once a day. So I see the next picture in the morning. I wake up and go, oh, I haven't seen that picture in a long time. This is the modern problem, right? We all have many, many photos on our hard drives, but we don't see them in the way we used to. Now you can. Hang an Aura ink frame on the wall and see a new picture every day. You can change it every two hours if you want, but I like the idea of a new picture every day. This is sleek, it's subtle, it's stunning. Ink blends the warmth of a printed photo with the versatility of an e-paper frame. No cords, no fuss, just your memories, beautifully displayed wherever you want them. Head to AuraFrames.com slash ink to see for yourself. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. That's AuraFrames.com slash ink. AuraFrames.com slash ink. Here's a picture I took. oh, I think this is in Montreal. This is the cathedral in yeah, I think this is the cathedral in Montreal. I mean, it's just really nice to be able to have, this looks like a print. But have this hanging on your wall, no flicker. And then there's a new picture in the morning. It could be portrait or landscape. You could hang it on the wall, but they also have a nice easily attached magnetic stand that just goes in right like this. I always put it in upside down. and it can go in again in portrait or landscape mode. There you go. And you can just have it on your desk too, which is what I have. Aura, Inc. From AuraFrames.com slash Inc. Thank them so much for their support. Before you move on to the Aura Adam, did they make e-readers? Did they make e-readers? When you want an e-reader like this, you could actually read graphic novels on that. Yeah, look how good that looks. I'll tell you the issue. Because of the color, it's a really slow page turn. That's why you really want to do it overnight. Ah, okay. And so it really wouldn't be good for a book because it's a second or two or maybe more between images. So, yeah, I wish... Those are the only physical books I still buy is graphic novels. I know, I like E Ink. Yeah. Yeah, I like E Ink. And I have a color E Ink reader of the Libro color from Kobo, but it's much more washed out than this. I wish color looks... What's the writing experience like on that? On the Kobo? Yeah. Yeah, I know you're looking for like a Remarkable or something. Oh, the Remarkable is so good. It's the only thing that's so remarkable. It's the only thing that ever replaced an engineering pad and a soft lead pencil. You had the Kindle Scribe, right? Did you like that? I returned it. Oh, you're talking about Paris? No, no. Oh, to me, not as good as the Remarkable. Which Remarkable do you have? My issue is with the Remarkable, you can't also – the Remarkable has everything I want, but if I'm spending that much money to get one of the color ones as well, I'd like it to also be able to read e-books, and it isn't compatible with e-books. I have to convert them to PDFs, which I think is just ridiculous. And actually, I would say that the color technology on the Remarkable is not here yet. I have one, and I went back to my monochrome one, because it's really struggling in order to do the color. maybe that what I'd want to use it for is whenever I take notes in addition to marking up documents I like to highlight stuff or just that is the sort of color I'd use and not necessarily it'd be fine for that yes it would be because it's just a color highlight I do highlighting on my it's another one of the things that and whether or not I'm a film camera are my two looming over me I hope you have told Santa and you are at home. No. I would not ask. I would not tell Santa about interest for very expensive tech products. Why not? That's what Santa's for. I don't know. It feels ridiculous. He's got elves. He doesn't pay for it. By the way, all of her boyfriends are buying TV screens. Yeah, it's true. Hey, honey, don't buy a TV screen. Buy me a Fujifilm camera. The issue is all these boys are probably buying like $200 TVs from Facebook. They're not getting a good one. Paris, on advice from us, bought a very nice. I did buy a very nice TV, and it's great. Everybody comes over to my own movies. It's phenomenal. Netflix and show at your place. I did just get a notification that my, I just bought all four of the Matrix movies on 4K, UHD. Oops, all four. Oops, all four. Oops, all four. I saw Deja Vu. Now I'm a physical media girl. I brought that up on Wednesday. I apologize. I think I probably gave you that itch. He gave you the itch. Sorry. Did you see, okay, some of the strange things that happened. The crosswalk buttons in Palo Alto were hacked. Nobody changed the password. What was the password? It was something very simple, right? It was very simple. Basically, they didn't change the password on a bunch of municipalities in Northern California, and so someone just played some games with having the... These are the buttons that you push, and for blind and other disabled users, they say things like, walk sign is on, walk, stop, that kind of thing. But in Palo Alto, for just a day, they said... Let me see if I can get this to play. Oh, this is not it. Hacked crosswalks in the game. Oh, this is a story about hacked crosswalks. Yeah. Never mind. Let me see if I can find it. Oh, here's an X post. This is where you've got to go. Wait. Wait? Hi, this is Mark Zuckerberg, but real ones call me the Zuck. You know, it's normal to feel uncomfortable. You can barely hear it. Oh, it's coming out of the wrong hole. It's Zuckerberg. I just want to assure you, you don't need to worry, because there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it. Anyway. I love that. Yeah, it's very low. It's very low. Yeah, perfect Silicon Valley hack. Yeah. Except for the people who rely on those sounds to be able to get across the street and not die. I'm not jazzed about it for that. But true. For the funny ha-ha of it all, I guess. Sorry. I mean, no, I think that's a very valid point. Let me see. I think this is the Elon one. The Elon one is full of expletives, if I recall correctly. Just in case. Hi, this is Elon Musk. Welcome to Palo Alto, the home of Tesla engineering. You know, they say money can't buy happiness. And, yeah, okay. I guess that's true. God knows I've tried. But it can buy a Cybertruck, and that's pretty sick, right? Right? That doesn't sound like you. It sounds just like you. Are you kidding? It does, yeah. Oh, really? Huh, that's weird. Maybe it's been a while since I've listened to him. He's got one of those voices that whenever you hear it, you're like, that's how he sounds? Yeah, that's a little weird. I mentioned that the Switch 2 was very successful. There were long lines. People were very excited. At one GameStop store on Staten Island, during the midnight release of the Switch 2, employees got a little overexcited and stapled the customer's receipt so hard that it actually punctured the cardboard packaging and the screen. Well, don't get too sad because an authentic relic from the GameStop staple gate was auctioned off for charity. It's over now. You get the stapler, but you also get the stapled box, the receipt, and more. Wow. Yeah. And I think it raised $100,000 for charity. So sad, though. Happy story. I'm glad that ended up happy. Can you imagine when you get home, you're very excited about it. Honestly, what I thought you were going to say is so many people flooded this GameStop in Staten Island that it sunk the island. Some people say it's still there to this day. It's still there to this day. This is the year of the Coldplay Kiss Cam. Yes! Did you guys read the New York Times interview with the woman? You said it ruined her life, didn't it? I mean, that's an exaggeration. It was a very, honestly, a very sad read. Yeah, with this couple not together? Oh, you don't know the story? Well, yes. Do you do? What's Coldplay Kiss Cam? Do you mean anything to you? So this is at a Coldplay concert. Chris Martin of Coldplay said, oh, look, there's a happy couple, except they weren't married. He was the CEO of the company. She was in charge of HR at the company. Of course. It wouldn't have been such a big deal if he hadn't immediately dived out of the shot. Leading the singer of Coldplay to be like, are those people having an affair? What's going on? Then it went super viral. Either they're having an affair or they're very shy. Well, it turned out they were having an affair. Yeah, the CEO and head of HR for a tech company called Astronomer. The CEO was married and seemingly is now getting a divorce. The head of HR said she was separated from her husband at the time and they were in the process of finalizing the divorce. But it has destroyed both of their lives. But to their credit, Astronomer got a lot of traffic to their website. It was actually very good for their business. They hired Gwyneth Paltrow to make an ad making fun of them. Yes. That's a pivot if I've ever heard one. I mean, that comms team was worth its weight in the hole, I will say. Yeah, they did a really good job. Taco Bell had to rethink their AI drive-in system after a man ordered 18,000 waters. I just love it. Yeah. 18,000 waters. Sometimes, the chief digital and technology officer of Taco Bell said, sometimes it lets me down, but sometimes it really surprises me. Of course, because they're talking about your dog or something. They're talking about your son. Yeah. One clip on Instagram, which has been viewed over 21.5 million times, shows a man ordering a large Mountain Dew, and the voice continually replying, and what will you be drinking with that? And then in the voice of Paris Martin saying, and I hope you have a TV at home. No. If they're coming to Taco Bell, they're not coming to my house. They're not coming to my house. Police broke up a Lego theft ring, recovering hundreds of beheaded figurines at a California home. Why were they beheaded? There was part of the sorting process. Tens of thousands of Lego pieces and sets at Lake County. I'm sorry. Part of the sorting process? Why are they sorting them apart from their heads? You've got to drill down to the narrative here, please. There's more of a story. Police said when they visited the perpetrator's garage, they had about 100 assembled minifigures displayed on shelves along with unopened sets and broken down packaging. But I really like the picture the police distributed in the Santa Rosa Police Department of all those Lego heads. Look at that. Terrifying. It's called knolling. That's right. You've got to knoll your pieces. Oh, my God. You've got to knoll the heads. Oh, knolling is arranging things in obsessive. An aesthetically pleasing flat lay. Yeah. Knolled the heads. German economist Thomas Wierhaus. This is why maybe you thought we didn't have a lot of free speech here, maybe worse elsewhere. Find 16,000 euros for sarcastic posts on X. 16,000 euros. What were his sarcastic posts? Well, for instance, so the first incident dates back to June 2023. when he, the vice president of the German Bundestag, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, posted an alarmist post about climate change, citing droughts, wildfires, high sea temperatures. Beerhaus, unimpressed, replied, there is indeed an extreme drought, namely in Katrin Göring-Eckardt's head. What? Yeah. And then a doctoral student who was patrolling the Internet filed a criminal complaint on her behalf. For calling someone dead empty? Yeah. This is America. You can do that. The second charge came after Weihraus discovered the identity of the doctoral student and referred to him online as a little snitch. That's just accurate. That's Spike 2. That is so accurate. Yeah. Did you say Svei? That's great. Svei. Svei. Svei. He called a journalist a nincompoop and said, You still have a lot to learn in order not to be constantly fooled. And got fined for that? Yes. That's crazy. 16,000 euros. I'm going to print these out and use them anytime someone complains of me for not having free speech here in the U.S. That would put a chill in your speech. Yeah. I was going to say, every post I've ever made, I'd be fined for it. I'd be so broke. I'd be fine for every comment I've ever made in this podcast. So we covered this a little bit on Intelligent Machines, but we should probably mention, since we are at the year end, we should mention the words of the year for 2025, the Oxford Dictionary, word of the year, rage bait. Yep. Yep. Lots of that, you know. Yeah. I mean, frankly, I feel like it should have been a word of the year before this. Dictionary.com, maybe a little late to the trend, 6-7. Oh, come on. Maybe a little late. Yeah, it's dying. Both of these things, by the way, both of them, two words. Yeah, I mean, one of them is two numbers. Two numbers. It's not even a word. It's not even a word. Cambridge Dictionary chose parasocial, which I think parasocial. That's probably a real word. Parasocial is a really good one. Yeah, and it's kind of what's going on in the world. You can look these up. That's what they want you to do, I'm sure. You can look these up. They're real, I swear, at dictionary.com. Yes, there you go. Dictionary.Christmas. Don't go there. Don't go there. Don't go there. Don't go to dictionary.Christmas, please. Oh, please. It's 97% malicious. Yeah. I was thinking, you know, as I go through this, and we would always do this. If somebody important in the tech industry passed away during the week, I would memorialize him on the show, and I was thinking about that. You know, maybe we get a sad song from, I don't know, Sarah McLachlan. Angel, yes, Angel. Yeah, Angel, and then play that. But no, I'm not going to do that. But I do have to mention, and it is very sad, and it hits us really hard, one of our Twit family members, a guy who did a YouTube show with us for a while, was a regular on Twit. We haven't had him on in quite some time because he became quite a celebrity on YouTube. Lamar Wilson has passed away at the age of 48. He took his own life, which is very, very sad. He was doing very well on YouTube, on TikTok. He had a couple of weeks ago posted his gift guide, passed away. We just learned about it, but he passed away last month at a very young age. his family confirmed the death last week on Facebook. We loved Lamar. Lamar was really a talent. He had over 3 million followers on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. I loved working with him. We're very sad to have lost him. So I did want to mention that because we're getting to that time, Steve, where some of our people we love the most leave us. And I should also mention that if you are feeling rocky this holiday season, it's a tough time of year for a lot of people, that there is help out there, that every country has a helpline here in the United States. It's 988. Call or text. Yeah, and please don't hold off. Somebody's there to talk to you, and we want you. We don't want to lose you. So if you're going through a hard time, you know what? Hang out with us. We'll keep you company. It's all good here. And I just, you know, as always, when this happens, you go, oh, what could I have done? I've kind of been out of touch with Lamar. I really enjoyed working with him. He's a great guy, very talented. And had fans everywhere. Our son told me about this, Michael, who's 23. And he was a big fan of his unboxing videos. I said, did you know he used to work for us? Yeah. Sad to end on that note, but that's sometimes how it is. It's been a very weird year. Do you think, and I'll ask each of you individually, Micah, is next year going to be better? Is next year going to be better? I think I have to I have to believe I have to believe that every year is going to be better because if I believe it's going to be worse I'm not going to be in a good headspace so will next year be better? that prediction I don't know but I want it to be and I hope for it to be and I plan to do what it is my job to do to help make it a better year that's for sure good I like that that's my answer Paris, you're looking forward to a good 2026? Yeah, I think along a similar line is what I think Micah put it perfectly. You have to hope that the days to come are better than the days that have passed and do all that you can to make the world a better place. And I don't know, I hope we see that in the next year as well. Steve Gibson, you make money on things getting worse every year. Wow. Wow. Bring us home, Steve. Bring us home, Cedarino. Wow. Yeah. I know security is not going to get better next year. The human condition is one of struggle. You know, it is. It's pushing for more, achieving what you can. As I age, I realize that the best parts of life are friends and people who I enjoy being with. And it's sad when you lose them and so all you have is memories. But even that, I mean, I think relationships are the key. And so to some degree, I think it's up to us not to get de-socialized by this increasingly mechanized environment. You know, have friends, reach out to neighbors, don't be isolated, stay connected, and, you know, have a good time because that's life. We did an interview, Paris, you remember this, with Kevin Kelly, who is a longtime tech journalist, good friend, who says he is an optimist. He's the angry optimist, is what he calls himself. That interview you'll hear once again on our Best Of on Wednesday. So if you're looking for reasons to be optimistic, listen to Intelligent Machines Best Of on Wednesday. I do think there's a lot of reasons to think that this year is going to be better than last. And it is up to us to make it so. I know one thing we'll be here for. And one of the reasons why 2026 will be better than 2025 is 2026 may be the year where I finally get Leo, convince Leo to do a 24-hour Twitch livestream. Or a Twitch livestream. And you, dear listeners, can make that happen. Lombard this man. We're going to make it happen. And Paris, it's going to be the year that you finally get all your boyfriends to have television. Yay! I'm going to make sure that you're going to be fully screened. You're going to be fully screened on all sides. Let's say boyfriends. She said the men she knows. Let's not. Men she knows. Okay. Yeah. Just every man I know is going to have a television show. Because they're going to be really affordable next year. Because electronics, they're going to be so affordable. That's right. You can ask Steve what those 24-hour New Year's shows were like. He was at one of them. I remember him dancing with a cardboard cut-up of Captain Kirk. Steve, wouldn't that be great? Wow, that sounds funny. I'll take as many of the hours. I'll be there for all the hours. Yeah, she was there. Unfortunately, there is some recording of that. Unfortunately. Very. Yeah. And then there was the bull, the mechanical bull. That would be great. This is why we've got to do it in person, Leo. In the studio, we had a mechanical bull? No, it was out in the street. Oh, that's right. We took over the street. We closed off the street. Yeah. I forgot about that. All right. I'm adding this to the list. Mechanical bull. We closed off the street outside our studio. We had jump houses for kids. We had a mechanical bull. I completely forgot that. Can we please hire an Elvis impersonator? We had a Marilyn Monroe. Wait, wait, wait. I've got an idea. Hour one goes through. One Elvis impersonator shows up. Hour two, a second Elvis impersonator. We could have 24 hours of Elvis. 24 Elvis impersonators. All right. Come on, let's see. Yes, all 24 hours of both of those shows. We did two years in a row. Of course, then we had the famous tattoo event. That's what I'm saying is I think we should do it again. I'll get the tattoo at midnight. Leo's running out of available skin. It's your turn. Okay. I'll do it. Steve Gibson, thank you so much for your friendship and your expertise, your help all, not only this year, for the last 20 years of Twit and security now. We are so grateful for you. It's been great, and we passed the infamous 999 episode. Oh, that was another event of 2025. Kept on cruising. He's extended his run past three digits. Yep. GRC.com is where he lives. It's where his software is. Spinrite, the world's best mass storage maintenance, recovery, and performance utility. And brand new, his DNS benchmark, a great way to see if you're getting all the Internet you're paying for. GRC.com. Thank you, Steve Gibson. I will see you this Tuesday. You will be here. Great to be with. Twit and with the podcast, it's one of the best things I've ever done. That's absolutely true. Me too. Yeah. The best thing. Well, maybe my kids. Paris Martineau, it's been such a pleasure having you on our show starting in 2018. That's a pleasure to be here. Really? Wow. Wow, yeah. Of course, now on Intelligent Machines. You and Jeff make that show so much fun. And, of course, we will not be here this Wednesday because it's Christmas Eve, but a week from Wednesday, our best of with some really great interviews. your dad didn't make an appearance. I decided that I want, if I want him to come on the show, it's got to be when you and Jeff are here. Oh, that would be better. Okay. Oh, shoot. You're not going to be in Florida through the new year, are you? I'm not. We'll make it work at some point. Okay. I'll get him on here. Jeff needs to be here, too. He does. He needs to think. Yes. Because my dad had questions about your guys' opinions on AI and which one of you guys is basically walking on sand. You know which one that is, don't you? You know which one that is. We really ought to mention also, for anyone who has access to Apple TV, Pluribus. Yeah. God, I've got to see that. He's loving it. If only some of the men in your life have Pluribus. You're a Plurib head? I'm a Plurib head, too. Oh, my God. A pluribro? A pluribro? A pluribro. Okay. We're pluribros. Micah Sargent, such a pleasure to work with you, too. My only sadness is that we close the studio. I don't get to sit next to you every week. We don't get to sit and chat. Yeah, I kind of miss that. And then you moved away. I do, yes. And now I'm in Portland. But I love it here. Steve, you touched earlier on the importance of forming relationships. And I've been blessed to make some really, really good friends here. Oh, God. And it's made all the difference, especially in Portland where there's not a lot of sun a lot of the time. And I am a seasonal affective disorder man, so it's been very helpful. But I also want to do a quick – I feel closer than I ever have to our listener base this year. the Club Twit folks so incredibly supportive, so incredibly kind bringing crafting corner every month and having those really chill sessions has been therapeutic enjoyable and I've gotten to know many of you and yeah, I'm so grateful for all of you, for the support that you provide to let us continue to do the work that we do it means the world to us so just a special shout out to all of you who, I mean, even those of you who are listeners to the, you know, that aren't part of Club Twit, you are also helping us do what we do here. So thank you, all of you. Micah's Crafting Corner. The next one will be second Wednesday of January, January 14th. If you want to hang out, that's one of the many things we do in Club Twit. We do love our Club Twit members, but we're grateful to all of you for your support all year long, and we look forward to, yes, a better year in 2026. For 20 years we've been doing And this is our 20th holiday, 21st holiday episode. Wow. Wait, this holiday episode can drink. Can drink. It can have brandy. Oh, shoot. Of all the weeks for me not to. And we know you waited until you're 21, Paris. Scroom. Thank you all for being here. Much love to you all. I hope you do have a happy holiday. Find somebody. Find some mistletoe. Give them a big hug. Celebrate your connections. And I think you're right, Steve. That's the most important thing this holiday season. And we will see you right back here next year. Bye, everybody. Every year for 21 hours, another twit is in the can. Bye, everybody.