[00:00:13] The season is upon us whether you like it or not. If not political, it's tech. Happy to have you along. The U.S. House moving towards forcing radios in cars and Gmail is about to fill your inbox with all kinds of political spam. We'll get to it. I'm Sam Bushman. Jay Hill with me. We keep an eye on tech so you don't have to. Brought to you by NetworkProvidersInc.com. Hi, Jay.
[00:00:41] Hey, Sam. AM radio. Can you believe it? Yeah. Are we still talking about that? Yeah. The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation requiring automakers to require them to put no cost without charging buyers an additional fee radios in every vehicle. That's because they wanted to make it a subscription service, Sam.
[00:01:07] Well, and they say that it's, you know, hey, it's really good for, you know, broadcasters and emergencies and all that kind of stuff. And I agree with that side that it is good to have all communication capabilities the best we can. My problem with it is that, you know, they're charging subscription for radio. You know, I don't know why we would put an AM radio and everything. Why don't we put shortwave and everything? Well, AM is more popular. Why not have the more the better?
[00:01:33] And what does it cost to actually add an AM chip or a shortwave chip or whatever to a car? Or a digital radio chip. Or a satellite radio chip. Or a... And we can keep going, right? But I don't know that we ought to mandate this to be in vehicles. Right. And I don't know that we should mandate it without any cost. I don't see any problem with saying, hey, if you want a radio in your car, it's 99 bucks more. Or whatever. Now, I know they can charge crazy fees and all that kind of stuff. And they need to be... You know, we need to realize there's supply and demand.
[00:02:03] If you tell me 99 bucks to put a radio in my car, I'm going to go, yeah, do it. Right. If you say, oh, it's going to be, you know, $2,000 to add a radio in my car, I'm going to go, you guys are not. It's all doing aftermarket radio. Thanks. They won't add a radio for a reasonable price like that, though. It'll be $399 or something like that. Well, and then we ignore them and we all buy cars without radios. And eventually they either drop the price or we go to aftermarket and get our own radios. Or we simply don't have a radio. Sam, that's too free market. Come on. You're not thinking that.
[00:02:25] Well, why can't I have an internet mandated internet thing in there so they can listen to Liberty Roundtable Live or, you know, some of my other shows or Tech Watch Radio or whatever we've got. Now, that should be mandated. Hey, we got to mandate that. Yeah, of course. So my point is that it creates this disparity. And whenever people go to government, they want to pull the lever in favor of one group or the expanse of the other creates winners and losers. And I really don't like it, Jay. I really don't. And I think what we need to do is accept the free market.
[00:02:51] And if people want AM radios in their car, then, hey, they should make it an affordable option. If you want to have that, then do it. Just like everything else in society. It's one of those things. If they charge too much, go to aftermarket. Or if you don't have a radio, you say, I just don't have a radio in my car. So be it. Yeah, but it's one of those things for car makers, for the manufacturers, why you wouldn't include an AM radio. I mean, it's got to cost, what, a dollar for the technology when you're already including an infotainment or entertainment system in the car anyway.
[00:03:22] Yeah, what you're saying is the speakers and the chat see and all the stuff is already there. What does it cost to add an AM chip and a button to get to it, right? Yeah. It's so cost-cutting that some account, some bean counter somewhere is going, man, we could save a million dollars. If we cut AM radio out of a million cars. Like, come on. That kind of, it's the encrappification. Cory Doctorow has a different term for it, but you know what I'm talking about. Where they're just cutting corners for no reason.
[00:03:49] Instead of adding value and adding things that cost them almost nothing to make the car buying and owning experience better, they're doing the opposite. They're short-cutting things and they're putting things behind paywalls. And you're already paying, you know, $40,000, $60,000, $80,000 for a car. And it's just incredible to me. And I think that we're going to see. Yeah, it's kind of like if I buy a steak for $40, then I say, I'd like some steak sauce. And they're like, that would be a quarter. Yeah, exactly. No, that is going to be $3 for your steak sauce.
[00:04:18] The cost of a bottle for a tiny little bit. I mean, so it's insane. And I would just appeal to the free market. Let car companies choose what they want. Let the society of supply and demand choose what they want. If aftermarket radios become a big business, so be it. And in my car, I would like all the technology. I mean, you remember in the 90s and stuff, even in the early 2000s, it still is a little bit, but not near as much, I don't think, at least what I see. But like Crutchfield Magazine and aftermarket radios and stuff, that used to be a big scene.
[00:04:46] I mean, everybody almost was pulling their factory dash radio out. It was very uncommon even in somebody who had a car to still have the factory radio in it. And half the time, even if there is a factory radio, it doesn't work in older cars. Yeah, and so people were doing a lot of that. But they made that super hard because they built in these screens and all this other stuff. So you can't just pop a radio out with two clips and have a custom wiring harness and just drop in another replacement. It's a lot harder today than it was 20 years ago.
[00:05:15] Well, and that's the problem. And I would prefer all the technologies. I want AM, FM, shortwave. I want a texting service where people can text my car. I want everything. Right, absolutely. I think the more the better. I want AI at my fingertips in my car. The problem is we're tech guys, though, Sam. We like all that stuff. Other people just be like, oh, my gosh, what is all these buttons and all these options for? There you go. Google's gone out of control, Jay. They just have this time. They've crossed lines in the past over and over and over that I speak of.
[00:05:44] They lied and said they weren't chronicling your house and your data and different things. They've still got my house on Google Earth or whatever. It's got a tent in my front yard. That thing got set up for two days because we were seasoning our tent with water so we can go camping. And those idiots took a snapshot of that. And now it looks like I'm this redneck with a tent in my front yard all the time. It's just bogus. There goes your house value. Anyway, they claim they didn't do any of that stuff and they lied and got caught. And now they're going off psychotic again, Jay. They are. They want to put political ads into people's inbox.
[00:06:16] It's impossible to miss election season already. Signs show up in your neighbor's yard. Mountains of flyers pile up in the mail. We're already seeing that right now with the midterms. Your inbox fills up with political messages asking for donations or votes. In the past, you could easily just throw these into your spam folder and not hear from them. But Google's new verified sender program for Gmail lets politicians skip your spam filter and go straight to your inbox, whether you like it or not, they say. Luckily, there's still ways to get rid of them. The program ensures that you can't escape political advertisements.
[00:06:46] Google recently unveiled their Gmail verified sender program launch on September 8th. Once it rolls out, verified senders, including politicians, can bypass any previous filters that would have sent them to your spam or junk filter. Now, I don't know about this because if you blocked a message, it shouldn't bypass that. We'll see, Jay. Maybe if it's heuristically.
[00:07:05] But they say that, according to Google, this system helps eligible verified political committees in the United States reliably deliver policy compliant and non-abusive messages about Gmail to Gmail accounts on an ongoing basis. If you send me a message I don't ask for unsolicited, it's abusive. I agree.
[00:07:25] But also, what's kind of cool about this is if it is verified and you really have people that are going through these processes to get this done, that means the unsubscribed links will usually work. For example, if you use Constant Contact and you go through an unsubscribe on somebody who uses Constant Contact, they blacklist your email. Like, it's very hard to get back on their list if you do that. Yes. And if you violate their terms or anything else, you get kicked off. And it's a very controlled, regulated thing.
[00:07:53] And it still hasn't done enough to stop spam. But, you know, it's a good start. Your point's right. What I don't like, though, is this idea that I have to opt out of something. I don't like that. It shouldn't be like that by default. But with email, it's kind of email was always built that way, though, I think. Email was always built to accept everything and then filter from there because, you know, the Internet was more trusting back in the 70s, you know, really before Internet was around in 80s and 90s. And, you know, before spam really took off on email, it was meant that way.
[00:08:23] Anybody could contact you. It's kind of like your postal address. Anybody can send anything there. And you can't really stop it. At least you could set up automated filters and block lists and things like that. Yeah, and I would like to be able to stop it with regular mail, too, because I get all kinds of – I mean, three-quarters of my mail in my snail mail is just bogus. I know. There's no good way to opt out of that stuff, either, really, on that. There should be. Anyway. The post office. Get it done. Anyway, shame on Google for this, in my opinion. I think it's a bad plan, Jay.
[00:08:52] Yeah, they say they're going to refrain from sending anything that resembles spam, including unsolicited or repetitive emails. So if you didn't sign up for it – Well, then if you send me something that's unsolicited, how do you pretend it's not spam? I know. I know. But – I don't get it. We're playing games and trying to change the word what spam means. And for me, it means go to Hawaii and eat good food. They also say that they have to meet all of Google's mass email guidelines, which includes proper domain authentication and message formatting. All emails must include the unsubscribe link and the canned spam compliance. It's –
[00:09:21] You've got to have your DKAN records and all that other stuff in place and your DMARCs and everything else for all this to work, right? Exactly. They're finally letting you change the most important thing about your Gmail account, and that is how to keep political emails out of your inbox because political emails can bypass your spam folder, they say. So, you know, I think overall this is going to be a positive.
[00:09:43] Even if they get by – you know, what it means is unsolicited email can come through because they're going to check all these boxes. It's going to be DKIM and SK or SPF and all these things compliant. Yep. Special privilege for the few at the expense of the rest of us. Yeah, but they're also going to actually adhere to a lot of – when you get real spam, real unsolicited, people don't care, running their own mail servers, they don't care about unsubscribed links. Even if they're in there, all they really do is verify that you are a real person, right? That's right.
[00:10:12] So we've been trained in the last 20 years sometimes to not even use the unsubscribes because all you're doing is telling them that this is a real email address that's monitored by a human. But the real unsubscribed messages from people who really care, the people that are going to be sending these emails, will work and will actually get you off of their list. That's right. So there is some good news to that. And again, email is, in my opinion, one of the greatest communication channels ever devised. Still is. A lot of people hate it because they can't properly respond to things.
[00:10:41] If people respond in different threads, then topics get separated and it's just everybody gets too much mail and there's too much spam and it's too hard to give up. People don't want to spend hours and hours babysitting it. And so it's fallen behind in a lot of ways for a lot of these reasons. It has, but I think people aren't trained properly on how to use email. I see a lot of people who, and the web is designed this way to get you to give them your email address because you have to sign up for an account everywhere. You have to give them this code.
[00:11:09] Things will pop up if you try to navigate away from the site. Hey, 10% off, just give us your email. And so everybody's giving away their email address when they should protect that a little bit more. Or they should have a special address or something for the stuff they don't really care about just to get a code and protect their real email address a little bit better. It's people's lack of care. Companies are working on that. There's a lot of email services now that say we can give you aliases. And when you sign up for something, I'm going to sign up for Google, just say.
[00:11:38] Then I would give it Google at whatever or G, whatever it would be at whatever. And I'd have all these different aliases that I could see what came from what. And there's a lot of progress in that area being made, too. Yeah, there's a trick. And I'll tell you something in my own experiences from yesterday. I was trying to use a JotForm and send to a person's Gmail address. And it just wouldn't go through. It wouldn't go through. We even tried other Gmails, and it was going through to them.
[00:12:02] But somehow, it wasn't that they had blocked it on their end, but they had somehow opted out of emails from JotForm. Like they had told JotForm to unsubscribe or whatever. So JotForm had blacklisted their email. But because Google has this really cool feature, if you have a Gmail address, you should know about this. Whatever your username is at gmail.com, after your username and before the ad, you can put a plus sign in anything you want right there.
[00:12:26] So you could say, if it's John Doe plus TechWatchRadio at gmail.com. It'll still go to your box, but it allows you to filter and do things. Yeah, and then you can use labeling and everything else and auto and pass things to certain places. Yeah, and you can also see. It's brilliant. You can also see who exposed your address or sold it, right? So if you use that, and then all of a sudden you're getting spam on that email, you know who did it. But what was cool, and this was a really neat feature, and it worked, because that email address had been blacklisted or whatever. It wasn't getting through.
[00:12:56] We just added plus and a couple of characters and put that in the JotForm, and now the emails are going to them like they should be. And it was a great solution for a problem that you might encounter. But I bring it up to say, if you have a Gmail address, you can use that plus whatever and filter your emails a little better, kind of track things. And also, you can have one that you just say plus spam, and you just automatically archive or filter that stuff out so it doesn't come to your box.
[00:13:22] But you're still getting it in case you ever wanted to look back for a code or a discount or something else, too. Or if you ever need it for some reason. Amen. Anyway, we'll keep an eye on that, though. Very interesting. What on earth is Latvian, Jay? Latvian? Is Latvia the country, right? Yeah. So Latvian-led elephant clicking? What the heck's that stuff, Jay? It's a scheme. GOP, let's see.
[00:13:52] The Latvian initiative dubbed elephant clicking is reshaping social media dynamics where workers, mostly from outside the U.S., are paid to amplify Republican-themed content on major platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. So this goes along with that Gmail spam kind of thing. Now you've got outside-of-the-United-States actors from Latvia that are literally getting paid to push propaganda and promote the agenda of the elephant.
[00:14:21] That's the Republican Party. That's why they call it an elephant, right? Well, yeah. I'm sure that this, because Democrats would never do this. They're going to have a donkey version soon. No, they would never do that. Come on. They won't go to Latvia. They'll go to some other country, though. Spearheaded by an individual known as Servius, financed with hefty budgets, reaching $900,000 monthly. Maybe we should move to Latvia and run one of these things for the GOP, Jay. I could probably spend $900,000 monthly if I had it. You into that? Yeah. But you've seen this before.
[00:14:49] You've seen these giant racks of cell phones where people will click on YouTube videos over and over to drive up their traffic and stuff like that. So that's what they're using. In this case, they're calling it elephant clicking because it's a Republican, but they're trying to drive up traffic. That would be called donkey clicking if it was the other side. The problem with that. I don't know what the third-party clicking would be, but there you go. Yeah. Well, they won't have it because they won't have the money for that anyway. Oh, good point. Yeah. So they're locked out. Yeah.
[00:15:18] But with AI, I might be able to get my AI bots instead of allowing people to do it. I'll just do the bots, you know? Yeah. I can't imagine that it's all there. Plus, anybody who sees this, if they see traffic from that domain in an inordinate amount, it's going to be very easy to filter that out on TikTok or YouTube or anywhere else and just ignore those clicks. Yes. It's always that race war, that arms race. It's the cat and mouse game. It's always been there, always will be. There it is. We just thought we'd bring it to you. Not that we're into the politics of it from a technical point of view.
[00:15:46] When you start seeing that, you'll know what it comes from because we keep an eye on tech so you don't have to. That's why. Now, Hunter Biden is spinning the laptop scandal. I think we mentioned this before, but I want to mention it again. You got a cryptocurrency called Laptop, and it's Hunter Biden. And as far as I understand, he's getting rich. So now Trump's got his cryptocurrency, and Hunter Biden's got his cryptocurrency. So there you have it. There's also a zero click.
[00:16:12] Well, anybody that's got the money and the time and the know-how. And these people just pay it all to happen. But you've heard of WeChat. It's really popular in China. In fact, it's kind of the communications preference of China. If you want to communicate with China all the time, you have to go to WeCom and get kind of a WeChat version. It's WeCom. But anyway, they got this worm. It is. It's a zero click worm capable of spreading through WeChat now. And researchers say they developed an AI-assisted zero click worm.
[00:16:42] And it can basically spread across iOS and Android and is basically capable of, what do you call it, compromising WeChat. That's amazing because especially that it can spread across iOS as well because we usually see that as kind of the gold standard. But the problem with that is WeChat's not just a communication thing. It's like the cash app of China. Yeah, people use it to pay their electric bills and to do everything. Don't worry, though.
[00:17:11] WeCom said they've already fixed it, Jay. But I brought it up because it just shows everybody's getting beat up. Yeah. It's pretty incredible. You know, something to be on the lookout for. I don't have WeChat, but I've never been to China either. So probably if I did, I had. But NVIDIA is getting even bigger, Jay. They're buying Hugging Face for $13 billion. NVIDIA is acquiring the major open source AI platform Hugging Face for $13 billion,
[00:17:37] dramatically expanding their position beyond AI chips and into AI software and model development. NVIDIA is still going head-to-head with Apple to be the biggest company in the world. And this is one step toward it. A $13 billion purchase for them? That's like, you know, it's not that big. It's like you or I buying a car. I don't know how to respond to this, Jay, because NVIDIA is getting so big. And none of us could have predicted it. It almost came out of nowhere, it seems, right? It really did.
[00:18:04] I mean, there's people that predicted it because you saw a bunch of people jump on it pretty early. Obviously. But I'm just saying, for the most part, it was a nothing company. Oh, yeah, they did, you know, video cards. They've always been big. Whatever. Yeah. But they really stole the spot. I'm just saying, comparatively speaking, right? They used to be big. Yeah, if you want a video card, then, hey, NVIDIA is big. Yeah. But now NVIDIA is at the heart of everything, including the whole AI boom. It's a totally different discussion. They really are. They really are taking off. It's like Sam Bushman's fame versus Taylor Swift's fame, you see? It's like that. Yeah.
[00:18:35] Exactly. Virtually nothing when Sam Bushman wins. Sam will be the rising star, though. He's going to be the NVIDIA of tomorrow. Ha ha. The FTC and 22 states sue Amazon over alleged auction manipulations, Jay. I have not heard about this. Yeah, it's leading to higher consumer prices. And the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC. What auction are they manipulating? eBay? Or what are we talking about?
[00:19:03] Well, they say modifying its auction system. Amazon has an auction system? Yeah. I did not know that. Well, it's not really an auction system that you play in, I don't think, Jay. Okay. It's undisclosed surcharges and stuff. Oh. So, in other words, they manipulate prices and they look out and troll the Internet and change their prices based on other prices. And it's kind of like a silent auction behind the scenes that you don't participate in. You just pay more for. Well, that is true. 20 billion. 20 billion.
[00:19:30] They do have a back-end system for buyers on the same product, sellers and buyers. Right. Where they're trying to match up. And generally, in the past, they've done a really good job of matching up sellers to buyers to get everybody the best. And it's really their advertising system behind the scenes that makes this. And so, the FTC is saying, hey, the FTC fails to grasp even how it's happening. And so, Amazon says, you don't even know what we're doing. And the Federal Trade Commission is saying, you're right.
[00:20:00] That's exactly the point. The fact is, we're seeking civil penalties. It's going to be hard for them to prove. And we want restitution. Restitution to who? There's violations of federal and state law. All the people that got ripped off. So, if you buy on Amazon, you probably get some money back, Jay. I don't know. It's so massive. It's hard to. I don't think it'll go anywhere personally. I think Amazon will win this. Because as you wisely point out, what auction? Nobody even knows. What are you talking about? Yeah. Nobody even knows. And you've got to have consumers that are harmed by this thing. Well, they claim there are. Well, I know.
[00:20:29] But they don't know that they are. Then you've got to prove how, Jay. Right. Well, if you don't get their algorithms, how are you going to prove how? Exactly. And are they just going to subpoena it and turn it over or whatever I guess? I brought it up because that's the battle. And I think they will subpoena it. I think they will turn it over. And there's a good chance that the government will extract money. They will. The question is, will the attorneys see it? Yes. Will the government see it? Yes. Will the average consumer that got ripped off see it? My guess is no. Not noticeably. No. Even if they get some credit or something. You won't even notice.
[00:20:59] It'll go in your Amazon account. You'll spend it tomorrow. Anyway, I just found that interesting. It is interesting. But I think that, again, it'll just be like a line item. It'll be Amazon's been more in advertising next year than they will in any kind of penalty. You're right about that. All right. Lake Ontario. Donald Trump wants to rename it Lake Ontario I heard about that. So Google made the change. But MapQuest is not making the change. And so MapQuest's decision to retain the name Lake Ontario,
[00:21:29] despite the presidential order to rename it Lake of America, has led to a dramatic surge in app downloads for MapQuest. Isn't that interesting, Jay? It's interesting, but it's just kind of a protest thing. I don't think people are actually switching to MapQuest. They're just downloading it and installing it on their phone as kind of a we don't like Donald Trump renaming the lake sort of thing. I don't think that people are actually moving to MapQuest.
[00:21:56] I mean, people are using Apple, Google, maybe Waymo. But they're not using MapQuest. They're not doing that. MapQuest just did this as a publicity stunt to say, hey, we're standing in solidarity against Trump. And you got all these people that are just jumping on that bandwagon. But I don't think they're going to really switch to use to MapQuest. So it's just a protest. Anyway, I just I just found that it'll be very short. That that's happening. It's just people take strange actions for weird reasons. And you watch the blogosphere and the social, you know,
[00:22:24] it is cool that you can kind of put your finger on that stuff. And you get kind of a windsock that shows you the direction of things are going and who's influencing what that is kind of cool. And on a tech side of it, it's cool. But I don't think that that's going to make much difference to MapQuest. It's not going to increase their market share or profitability. I'm surprised MapQuest is even still around for that matter. I am, too. I mean, who use it? The last time I used MapQuest is because I was printing road directions out before I had a GPS, you know. So it's been a long time. I didn't even know they were still around, like you said.
[00:22:54] Very strange stuff. All right. Congress is moving more towards what they call new rules for kids, social media and AI. And other countries are doing the same thing, too. The Senate Commerce Committee advanced the Online Kids Safety Act, and they want to deal with children's privacy, AI systems, make sure there might be minimum ages for things, and so on. And I'm just not comfortable with the government involved in all this, Jay. I'm really not.
[00:23:23] It's kind of a parent's role, but I get what you're saying. I do think that it's a good idea for kids not to be on social media. I agree. But whose responsibility and who's, you know, is that? And it's not government. Yeah. I agree. And I think that, you know, for example, a lot of my kids didn't have social media until they turned 18. But one of my daughters was really good at creating calligraphy and stuff like that, and we let her at 16 create an account on, what's that thing called? Pinterest? No.
[00:23:53] Etsy. Oh, yeah, Etsy. Etsy. And so she created an account on Etsy. That's not great social media, though. Well, you can debate. Well, we can debate that. That's like neighborhood marketplace kind of stuff. Yeah. It's kind of a store, but then when you interact with people, it kind of gets social media-esque. Yeah, that's true. Then you back that into, what's that other thing called? Pinterest, right? Right, Pinterest. And then you want to promote it on Pinterest, and now is that social media? Well, not the same as other ones, but kind of. And then pretty soon you back into. Yeah.
[00:24:22] Then you've got to have a Facebook account and Instagram. Yeah, there you go. Anyway, very strange stuff. We're flat out of time. There's too many great tech stories. I want to just talk forever because we love tech. That's why we keep an eye on it so you don't have to. Check out NetworkProvidersInc.com. They've got a help desk, strategic consultants, security, and a whole lot more. Would love to be your tech partner. That's TechWatch, funded and sponsored by NetworkProvidersInc.com. Make it a great day, will you?