AI Wearables, EvilTokens Phishing and Airport LiDAR

Hello, everyone. Happy Friday, and welcome to the latest edition of the Techstrong Gang. We're going to have a little chat about all kinds of things, including a little AI and a little cybersecurity.

But let me introduce our guests today. John Schwartz, as always, good to see you, my friend, and good to see you at home. Yes.

I'm so glad to be home. I went to Las Vegas yet again this week, and we had some Wi-Fi problems, as was evident on the show the last couple of days. So I apologize for that, but I'm happy to be home.

Yeah. I think we need Wi-Fi 32 by now, right? I think we're up to six maybe, but at some point it's pretty clear that we need better Wi-Fi.

Jack Palmer, how are you doing, my friend? Doing very good, thank you. And I do have good network, non-Wi-Fi, wired optical networking.

So we're all happy here. All right. There you go.

Tracy Reagan has had her share of Wi-Fi issues over the years, but I think- No, it has not been Wi-Fi issues. It's been processing on my PC because I've always got so much stuff running on it by the time I get to here. So now I reboot.

So I'm good. So we just need bigger PCs and better Wi-Fi is what I'm hearing so far. Yeah.

I've learned I can't run a compiler, and an editor, and a video thing. And my camera. Very good.

And finally, Jeff Rich. How you doing, my friend? What day is today?

Today is National Quesadilla Day, so be cheesy and have one. Wow. Cheese.

We never lack for cheesy on the Techstrong Gang, so that's good. Let's just dive into- ... the latest and greatest from, believe it or not, but while everybody is in Washington and New York talking about AI and the cloud and data centers and massive amounts of infrastructure, other folks have been talking about AI at your fingertips, essentially.

And Meta's out talking about some device now that you're going to wear that runs their little Meta Muse AI agent. And Qualcomm had a conference this week touting all of the advances that they have at the processor level, all of which seem to be aimed at things that you're going to carry around, that are going to all run AI, and maybe that'll take the load off the back end of the data centers. But John, is the world changing while no one's looking?

It is, but I think it's going to take time. Oh, by the way, the two CEOs that you mentioned from Meta and Qualcomm, they weren't busy enough where they weren't at the President and Gi's state dinner last night. So anyway, I just want to point that out.

They're still politicking. So at Meta, they did an announcement at their headquarters. And they did a lot of hardware announcements, but as you said, Mike, it's the Muse Charm.

So it's this handheld device that's roughly the size of an Apple AirPods case or kind of this smartwatch without the strap. And it's not going to come out until December. There's no price yet.

It's kind of an early edition of it. And the idea is that what they want to do eventually is seriously toward something, I guess I've been seeing ambient computing is the phrase to use. This functions kind of as a physical interface for the Muse AI agents.

So we're going to have a two-inch touchscreen, 5G connection camera, top right fingerprint sensor, and three microphones. It's basically the idea, according to Mark Zuckerberg at the announcement, was that the users of the Charm are going to be able to interact with AI without unlocking a phone or launching an app. So that's the idea.

So it's not going to be an immediate threat to smartphones, but I think what it does is it signals a shift towards ambient computing, where the phone stays in a pocket or bag. Apple and Google, my sense is that eventually they're going to be forced in some way to more deeply integrate AI assistants into their lottery hardware features. And so this is, again, it's a consumer play by Meta, but it's kind of a long-term play and it's aimed at the consumer.

And I also think it's taking into account what OpenAI's going to do, which I believe, I think it's going to be next year. They have this screen-less, pocket-size AI device. So yeah, it's baby steps towards maybe a new way to do things, but then again, with billions of iPhones and Samsung and Android devices, this is hardly going to make a dent, but it is the beginning of a dent.

You bring up an interesting point because I have encountered this, or at least thought about it in the past, where every time I'm trying to use my smartphone and an app, I'm always stuck between the apps. I got a half a piece of information on one side and then something is on the other, and it's just cumbersome and it doesn't ever quite lead to this, what I call a seamless experience. And I'm wind up pulling out a piece of paper to write down a number because it's on the wrong screen, and I can't cut and paste it in.

And so I'm just wondering, maybe, I don't know, Tracy, are we ready for a better mobile end user AI experience? What do you think? Okay.

I am definitely not the demographic for these products. So I literally, on the day that the Apple folding phone- Oh, yeah ... showed up, they released, I happened to go to Albuquerque, and so I went to decide to stop by the mall, and I could not believe the line of people who were there waiting to spend $2,000 on a freaking phone that folded.

Was there really a line? Did that actually happen? One of the, yeah.

There was a massive line, and it was so big in the morning that some of the employees at the other stores couldn't get to work. Oh. So obviously there's a market for this.

" I didn't hesitate. But I think that the Qualcomm story has something that made me at least a little happy. I recently did a rant and wrote a LinkedIn page on smaller domain models, but this idea that Qualcomm has that you can run AI more locally is a direction I feel like we should be going.

My biggest concern about what we're seeing from these types of devices is the privacy issue. Yep. I don't really trust AI right now to take my data.

It's not about AI knowing about the world around you. It's about knowing you and taking that information. So until we understand who owns that, I would be a little hesitant to connect myself up to them.

But as much as having- Yeah, I was going to say, I'm not going to be a shill for Meta. They actually did address that and vowed, like they always do, right? To protect data and to honor privacy, but I think that's going to be a major sticking point.

I'm glad you brought that up. Well, we still don't know who owns copyrighted data, right? That whole discussion is still out there, and I feel like that needs to be answered before we move too far in giving AI where we are and what we're doing.

I think it's kind of creepy, to be honest. Again, I'm not the demographic. I wouldn't drop $2,000 on a phone that folded.

Jeff, what do you think about the security implications here? Oh, I think the baby steps John talked about, they're baby steps towards the edge of a cliff, I believe. Because, as much as, to Tracy's point, I like the fact that you can localize AI.

But we're doing that, let's say Jack, Tracy, and I are at a function, all right? And I walk up to Jack, who happens to have some of this wearable tech that's activated by voice, right? " Boom.

My information is now being processed with location and who I'm talking to, and there was never consent. Sorry, Jack, I didn't mean to make you an evil person in this case. We still got a long way to go, so keep going here.

Yeah. Okay. It'll be my turn to be evil next.

But there's never any consent. I don't know where it's being stored, who has access to it, how it's being used. I don't know what terms and condition that Jack clicked through when he signed up for all this, being the evil person that he is.

So my big security and privacy concern there is how my information is now, without my consent, out there in the public, and I have literally no control over it once that happens. So I think that's the big downside to the app. Plus, how geeky can we get these VR glasses to look?

The new Meta glasses- Yeah ... I'm sorry, it's not a fashion statement, certainly. But beyond all that, I'm just very concerned that we are turning into a surveillance state and buying into it, not just letting it happen.

We are buying into it. And for those at a minimum, Tracy and I, I'm assuming you're in that school, Tracy, based on what you just said. No, we're not buying into it, and we don't want to have it happen involuntarily.

Well, that's- It's almost like Facebook on crack before we had privacy on Facebook. I think you guys are missing a key thing here, and I'm going to take Jeff's analogy and move it one step further. This is not a baby step off the cliff.

This is the coyote chasing Wiley the Road Runner, and he's already off a cliff dangling in air because this is a device that has access to your data with no security controls on it. And we've been down this road before, and it doesn't end very well. That whole thing of, we want to give access to a device where you don't have to unlock it, is just insane in my book.

So that's one part of it. And then the other part you guys are missing, at least for this little, whatever they called it, a keychain thing, right? Mm-hmm.

If you own a car that was built past 2010, you went from a key to a key fob that's about the size of what we used to call a USB thumb stick, which are now miniature. It's this giant, big chewing gum-sized pack, and if you have two cars, now you have two things on your keychain. You're going to walk around with a bundle like this in your pocket.

I throw all that out. I take one key and put it in my pocket. I don't need the rest of this crap, right?

Right. They're going to have a cellphone, and their glasses, and their little keychain device, and their AirPods case in with them. It's just that's kind of- Okay, so I'm going to start a business for man purses.

Yeah. So I'm going to make an ageist statement though, too, though. I don't think Meta necessarily cares what we think, our demographic.

I think they don't give a damn. I think they're aiming for the younger audience, which really, I spend a lot of time at airports. These people are insane.

They are glued to their phone. They can't look up entire flights. People don't even take naps on-- I think this is going to be their little personal companion they're going to take with them everywhere.

They're going to be surveilled everywhere, and they don't really care unless they are victimized by some sort of identity theft. Well said. So wait.

Let's pull that apart for a minute there because let me toss this to Jeff. Is there any reasonable expectation of privacy outside of my house? Because these days, at least officially, anything that happens in public is for public consumption.

Anything that happens on a public network is for public consumption at some point. So do I have any expectation of privacy? " Well, privacy is close to being dead.

I'll grant you that. And we are facilitating it and buying into it. Even when that happens, that doesn't mean that you need to know everything about what I'm doing, what I'm eating, where I am, what I'm wearing, at any given time.

If I'm in a public place and there's information that's relevant to whatever else may be going on, then by being there, I give tacit approval to use the data, where I am, what I'm doing. But that doesn't apply globally, and I have to be able to predict the circumstance. If I believe that there's a location that has more cameras than I want and a restaurant that tracks my eating habits, I can avoid that.

But if someone else has a device that's capturing all my information, I cannot. Meta's actually just set us on this path years ago with Facebook. In a sense, we were volunteering where we were.

We were telling everybody what we were doing at that exact moment. So I think they've conditioned people to think this way or not even think. " Mm-hmm.

Right. " Well, that will just go away because we're just going to start buying stuff on a wink to the AI. Oh, yeah.

That's their number one, that is their source of income, is advertising. So you know things are going to be suggested to you every moment of the day, and it's a fear of missing out element that Facebook has drilled into our heads. Like you have to be part of something that's big or special, and that's what they're going to appeal to, and I think the people who use this are just already well on their way to that path.

I have more of a fear of what government will do with it. We're getting bigger and bigger government here in the last two years with the ability to do things that we never thought they could. And if you've been to China, you realize that they track everything you do, even the people that you associate with, and you can be put on a blacklist for associating with somebody that the government doesn't like.

That data can be used by the government, and so start tracking who we associate with, and we're not free anymore. We're borderline here. It's a scary time, and I think that tools like this make it easier for a big government to do more with that data.

I'm glad you mentioned that, Tracy, because I thought this is almost like an Orwellian type of device. Right. It's almost like a narcotic.

I think the point of Qualcomm's chips, though, are not just going to be used in this type of stuff. Remember, they're going to be used in cell phones, and we've now gotten to the point where we're very dependent on our cell phones, and there's pluses and minuses to every technology. Moving AI and, as Tracy was pushing the last couple of weeks, going to small language models that you can use on your own device is a very interesting thing when you look at the amount of spend that, particularly the corporate side, where I'm looking at it, the amount of dollars it takes for each engineer.

We used to joke about token maxing, and then it went to a, "I'm out of tokens, and it's the third day of the month. " Right, Tracy? Absolutely.

There's the ability to do this stuff locally and not pay for somebody else's CPUs to process the LLMs is very interesting. But I also look at it and I say, how many hardware devices has Meta created over the years, and how many of them have been successful? And it seems to me that Meta and Zuckerberg really just want to get into the hardware business because they see huge profit margins and the ability to make it.

They view the Apple model of the iPhone as the hook to get somebody permanently built into your ecosystem. And so it feels like they're chasing the hardware, not because there's true value there, but it's really a way to capture you into their environment. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. We got no robots. I want a robot.

Not a Meta robot. I'm not sure I want a robot either. But we got to move on.

But I would just say the following thing, there's definitely room for improvement on the experience that we have every day. But to Jeff's point, the cost of that may be a lot higher than the price of the device. So we'll leave it there.

Let's shift the gear, though, to some other interesting things that were happening in the land of AI and security, and Microsoft was talking about how they helped take down a phishing-as-a-service platform that had been built using vibe coding tools and some AI stuff, and basically there's this thing called, I think it was Evil Tokens or something to that effect. But Jack, what's going on here from your perspective? And the thing that I want to know about is, so what if we take down all these platforms, but they're using AI tools to create them?

Won't they just spin up another one? Well, at first, we have to give credit, whether it's the organization themselves or somebody at Microsoft or somebody else. You got to love the name Evil Tokens for a phishing-as-a-service group.

That's just a great name. Right. It's not GPT-49 or whatever the usual sort of objectory is.

Evil Tokens really makes you think about it. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

It's a phishing-as-a-service. They've been around for a very long time. I think the big news is that they were, and God, I hate this term, vibe coding.

So basically, they're using AI assistance And while in my book it's interesting, and it's mildly interesting, but given everybody else is doing this, it'd be stupid for the attackers, the bad guys, not to use AI to speed up what they're doing as well. And also because primarily they're not native English speakers, but their targets are native English speakers, so they're using AI to get better at the social engineering part of the game. So phishing service and social engineering.

So I would expect them to do this. Yes, they're going to pop up more and more and more frequently, and it has since the very first bad guy decided they were going to use computers to attack you, it has always been a cat and mouse game, a leapfrog game of we get better at defending, they get better at attacking, we get better at defending the new attacks, and it's just a continuous cycle and I don't see that changing anytime soon. I just see it becoming a tighter loop, an OODA loop- Mm-hmm ...

as we get better and better at both attacking and defending. To me, this all feels like theater because it kind of reminds me of the bootleg takedown when the cops would show up and they'd have their axes and destroy the warehouse full of beer, but meanwhile there was 30 other warehouses full of beer around the corner. Oh, and the cops would go to the speakeasies at night when they were off duty.

Yeah. So I guess, Jeff, my point to this is I feel like the era of the great takedown may be coming to an end because the bad guys are using not just AI tools, but they have immutable infrastructure and blockchain, and all kinds of interesting things that make it difficult, if not impossible, to take them down. Those tools are there, and for the big-time bad guys, you're right, that's what they can do.

But we need to remember that it wasn't simply one organization doing this across the board. They sell this service. So there are greedy small timers that are still going to be able to be taken down.

It's no different than if you're a detective or you're walking a beat, you're not going to catch every bad guy, but you're going to be able to find all the ones that are stupid and lazy because it's easier to do that. So I don't think that the era of takedowns is over. And it is a cat and mouse game, but we need to find a way not to necessarily get in front of it, but to start using AI to do more real-time, and I don't even want to call it defense, real-time resilience, so that even if something does show up, here's what we're going to do to get around it, rather than waiting until evil token...

Even though they've been around a while, really the issue has been since February or March of this year until now. Rather than waiting six months to say, "Ha ha, we got them," I think we need to be more adaptive, and that means there is no more wait until the given Tuesday of the month before we can put something in place to prevent it. All right.

Well, how aggressive can we be? Jack, let me ask you this. Is that the future that he's describing, is that basically law enforcement or even a private company will have thousands of AI agents at their disposal, and the minute that anybody determines that there's a platform out there that is up to something that is of malevolent nature, they'll just launch their AI agents and take them out?

If you've ever looked at your mailbox and you see that you get the same spam 14 times in an hour, or you get 100 flavors, variants of the exact same thing over the course of a week, it's because it is a numbers game, right? And there's maybe a tenth of a percent of people who will fall for any given particular attack. So if you send out 1,000 of them, you maybe get one hit.

If you send out 10 million or 100 million, you get a lot of success there, and it's just a numbers game. So the attackers just overwhelm. They just throw everything that they can at the world and see what works and what doesn't, and the ones that have more success, they keep going for it.

So the more agents and the more things that we have out there detecting these things and finding them, is the higher probability we are will catch it and defend against it. And we had a discussion a little while ago about, I think the administration put an executive order in that said essentially authorizing offensive attacks against these folks. Digital attacks against these types of attackers.

And nothing else has worked. Will that work? I don't know, but that's what's coming next because it's just a volume game, and there's just so much of it, it's very hard to deal with.

When I hear this story, and I didn't get to read about it because I just didn't get a chance. What happened to MFA? I guess MFA is not the end of the story, right?

It's not who authenticated it, it's what device authenticated it, and I feel like now, hearing the story, is MFA even worthwhile anymore? Is it stopping anything? Part of it, Tracy, is that MFA is not mandatory at so many places.

So, Microsoft has done a big push this year to go and move everybody to MFA, to actually to find a passwordless authentication for all of their consumer accounts. But they're still struggling on the corporate side to get the corporate world to move that way. And if you log into your banks, most banks these days still use SMS-based MFA, which is just about as insecure as no MFA at all.

So until we can get the world, the vast majority of accounts on MFA instead of passwords, we're still going to have this problem. Well, and even then, if I may, when you lose your token or forget your MFA, what do you have to do? It's a password-based reset or an email-based reset.

There you go. So you really can't eliminate passwords. All you can do is try to put them on the back burner.

I guess one thing I am a little worried about with all these takedowns is it's going to be like the drug wars, right? We're going to take down all the dealers that's sitting on the street corner who don't do much anything other than small-time business. But the real people behind it all and the folks that are driving it all will never get touched.

Is that likely to be the scenario, Jeff? It's kind of worked so far. Whether it was bootleg or drugs or illegal firearms, all of those, there is a certain amount of whoever's enforcing it, a given percentage of them are going to be on the take.

Just like the cops that shut down one beer warehouse and then went to the speakeasy that evening. There's an example of that, because they knew where the others were, and they knew we weren't going to touch those. So because of that, I think the cycle will repeat itself.

It's going to be relatively faster, and the big players are, by the way, in this case now, many of them, if not most of them, are nation states. So how do you deal with that? Even if you know who they are, how do you deal with that without making an international incident that could escalate into a big cyber war?

Well, it's funny- And very quickly, John, particularly on the nation state issue, you also get things where it's very common in certain countries, Russia, China, North Korea, where there are groups that are actually run by the government that are offensively attacking their adversaries. There are also groups that are criminal enterprises that are allowed to operate under the tacit permission of the government, as long as they don't attack Russian entities or Chinese or North Korean entities. So they're allowed to operate as long as they're not from with Russia, as long as they're not operating inside of Russia.

It's effectively the CIA rules. You can do whatever you want outside the country, we don't care, but don't attack us. And it's like with what Jeff and Jack were saying about numbers games.

Criminal enterprises always find a way. These guys are like entrepreneurs. They're clever.

They figure out a way, and if there was a single bullet solution to a lot of what we were talking about, whether it's spam, drug running, prostitution, whatever, they always find a way to adapt, and now we just have a velocity scale and attack surface that's larger. And maybe if there is some sort of counteroffensive The government's proposing preemptive sleuthing. Maybe that provides some sort of inroads, but I just think these things will continue.

We talked about getting rid of, eradicating spam years ago. It's still around. So- I think we have to look at a different way.

Mike is right. You take down one, another one will pop up. " It doesn't say what device did it, what application requested it.

Was it normal for this person to do this behavior? Kind of like what they do with your credit card transactions. If some weird transaction comes up of somebody renting a car somewhere that it shouldn't be, I get a notice.

So I think there's ways to solve this technically, and I believe in technology, and maybe AI is a helpful tool for doing that. Maybe. So someday that Muse charm thing is going to protect me from all of this, along with my rabbit foot and the piece of garlic that I carry around.

I'm walking around- Yeah, like a little crime alert. It'll point out a potential scam right around you or someone who's suspicious, right? Oh, good.

They'll know as much about the person who's trying to steal from you as they know about you. I call it- So Tracy, the first- ... digital pepper spray.

Digital pepper spray. What I want to do is carry a small EM pulse device. I like that.

I was going to say, Mike's going to be the first customer of your man purse, because he needs it to carry not only his Muse device, his iPhone, and his earbuds, and his car keys, but he also has to have the rabbit's foot and the garlic in there. Man purses are it. Man, they're going to be really popular in the next 10 years.

No. You've totally missed it. Cargo shorts are coming back, baby.

Utilitilts. They've got hooks for everything. All right.

I'm going to shift the gear to our last topic, which promises to be as much fun as the previous two. But there's a new report out about how airports are now using LIDAR, the technology that archaeologists use to go for ground penetration discovery of various things that we couldn't find before. They're using it in airports now, and they're using it to track everybody's movement, and the idea here is they want to optimize the flow.

Now, odds are pretty good that if this is being used in airports, it's probably being used elsewhere already. And if not, it soon will be. But Jeff, this starts to feel like one of those double-edged sword things.

What's going on in your mind as you look at all this stuff? And by the way, Sunday is also World Tourism Day, so... Yes, and I didn't have that because that's one of those it's hard to have a good background for.

That's why I went with quesadillas, but it is World Tourism Day, and it's celebrated in most major countries. You may notice if you look at the map, there is not one celebration in the US, and I'll just leave that there. But getting back to LIDAR and the double-edged sword.

It is nice that finally lasers are making our life easier. That's really what this boils down to. I like the fact that you can do flow control, whether it's boarding a plane, entrance to a concert venue, entrance to an Apple store when a new device comes out, whatever it's going to be.

Flow control can be a very good thing, make it very efficient. I would like to be able to take advantage of that under certain conditions. What I am concerned with, the other side of that sword is right now with this device, which is in a number of airports, one near me at DFW, you are represented by a geometric shape, and that tracks where you're going and can predict from that where you're going to be and where there has to be flow issues.

My concern is, at what point do you just turn the dial up a bit and say, "Oh, now I can see that because of the iPhone that you're carrying, I see who you are. " And I see it on my watch. " Are we only a step away from that?

And then beyond that, back to the privacy issue, it feels like I'm just jumping up and down, with the privacy theme today, but that does seem to be the theme of the day. And maybe that's where we are as a society. At what point do you buy into that?

So Jeff, a couple of days ago, Minority Report was on, and I was watching it, and one of the big selling points in that movie was surveillance. So I feel like this idea where you have a live bulletin board next to you, and the person in the ad is animated and starts reaching out to you saying, "I understand. I know that you're interested in this.

" And you're literally being poached. And I almost see us heading in that same direction, whether it's at an airport, a sporting event, on a highway, where we actually drive by the billboard and it actually addresses directly to you as you drive by it. All right.

Jeff? I don't really think LIDAR will be used for tracking us. So I realize it's possible.

But anything that tries to build a digital twin or a model of what's happening around an airport to make it easier to get in and out and to get in lines, as long as it doesn't identify unique individuals, I am all for. Yeah. I was going to say, I'm surprised it was at DFW.

It's really needed at United Terminal 3 and SFO for anybody who's been there. Oh, yeah. No kidding.

That's where it's really needed. I was there last night. I know exactly what you're talking about.

Yeah. So none of you seem overly concerned about the security or privacy implications of this, per se, on the assumption that you can't necessarily readily identify. But we've already seen how big tech is really good at coordinating multiple signals to determine who you are and where you are.

So if they can know that somebody of your height and weight is running around an airport and they can ping your phone, they will correlate that. So Jeff, is this just another example where privacy's out the window? Well, I think it certainly can be.

That's what I meant by dialing up one notch, going from 9 to 10 with this, or maybe it's only 8 to 9. I'm not really sure where we are on the scale. " That's all it takes to notch that dial up one.

How do we stop that? Or how do we even know it's happening? Mm-hmm.

Well, the thing about this is we actually have been doing this for quite a while, just not with the same accuracy. Back about 15 years ago, when Bluetooth became sort of the de facto standard in cell phones, there was a lot of work being done. A lot of companies started selling Bluetooth geofencing and geotagging, where you could define an area like a supermarket or a shopping mall, and the systems were designed to track your phone and try to inject an ad into your phone by Bluetooth or to track your movements inside a supermarket.

That was actually a lot of work being done 15, 20 years ago when Bluetooth first hit. But it's not as accurate as LIDAR, and it doesn't have the range and everything else. I think as Jeff pointed out, the problem is the cross-correlation between your Bluetooth, your Wi-Fi, your Mac address, whatever other radios you have on the cell phone.

It's very easy to pinpoint the location of the cell phone. Now you've got not an image, but a digital twin, I think Tracy called it, of the person. It is definitely valid and useful for doing things like flow control and anticipation, modeling and anticipation of problems of people moving and other things moving in the airport.

But yeah, it can get used against you. But LIDAR isn't the only thing that's going to be used for this. Many different signals are being correlated, and it's just one of many.

And so is it the LIDAR moving it up a notch or taking it past 10 to 11? Or is it just creeping incrementalism like we're only at seven, but one, two, three, four, five, and by the time we turn around in a year, we're now at 11? I don't know.

But it's there. I think this kind of technology works for these kind of spaces. And in terms of knowing where you're at, at airports in particular, there's cameras everywhere.

And what's really going to be insulting your privacy is your man purse with all the gadgets you got in it. So I hope that the... We've been talking about using technology to improve the lives of everyday people, not just we as technologists and how we work.

And I think this one could be one. So I don't feel like the privacy issues are as much of a concern, because you could regulate that and say, you can't use LIDAR to identify a unique individual. You have to go to the cameras they already have set up to do that.

I'm also probably maybe the only one that travels with a Faraday bag. But- ... okay, apparently I am.

The rest of us actually want the text from the airplane that says you're late. Well, there's certain value in that. And I'm not saying I go completely dark when I'm in there, but since you've brought up the man purse in three different segments here, you might as well make it a Faraday bag as an option.

" Yeah, you give up certain things. And Jack, to your point, we give up a lot of our privacy for convenience. Right.

And there's nothing wrong with that, but I think we're starting to do it subconsciously. We are no longer thinking about it. Can I have Faraday cargo pants?

Can I get that? You might even need them. There you go.

I think, Jeff, what you're referring to in particular is there's the old saying that we used to say that's basically if you're not paying for it, you are the product. Yes. Right?

And that's Facebook, 100%. That's Facebook. That's everything.

That's Facebook. Meta. You are not paying for it, you are the product.

And you know what? Meta will find a way to monetize this. Oh, absolutely.

This is what the charm that has all in-- This is part of the charm- It's the charm of the charm ... the charm of the charm. Exactly.

So, in exchange for the convenience and flow, which I'm all for, there is a trade-off. There always is. And there could be some sort of commercialization or monetary elements.

Maybe you can opt out eventually. But believe me, like OpenAI, Apple, despite what they will say, they're all going to try to figure out a way to take advantage of this. So when I leave my house in the morning, should I just look up and wave because I might as well say hi?

It's Truman Show all over again. You don't have to. Now, you may drive an older car, and I'm not making a value judgment on that, but if your car is less than five years old, it's already being tracked.

Mm-hmm. " And I took a look and I said, I won't give the brand name, "There's a tire store about a mile from you. " And then it dawned on her, "Wait a minute.

" Ah. So Mike, that's already happening. Okay.

And it's because why? You dropped a pin on it, or did you stick one of those Apple things in her buttonhole? No, it was the car.

The car broadcasts where it is. Oh, damn. Ask yourself this, Mike.

Does any of the 12,000 satellites that Elon Musk has running for Starlink floating around in low-earth orbit, do any of those have cameras in addition to everything else they have on them? I would say probably, and some of those cameras are probably working for three-letter agencies, right? Probably.

Mm-hmm. Or the Amazon drones flying over us, dropping our neighbor's lunch into their pool. Yeah.

That too is going on. Everything that we're doing in technology right now has a potential to really be a privacy issue. Yeah.

But I think when it comes to AI in general, because some of the recent news on copyright law is going to start opening up this conversation. Mm-hmm. Right?

Because privacy's going to follow right behind it. I think what I want to have with all of this, though, is an off button. " Can I have that?

I think it's possible. And I think we- Don't allow tracking. Right.

Why not? we can turn this into a happy Friday discussion rather than it's all terrible and we're all going to be killed because AI truly is going to kill us all. Mike, you just described having a Faraday bag.

And I don't sell Faraday bags, I'm not trying to refer anyone to them, but it's not that difficult. You can make your own, actually. " That was directed towards you, Mike.

" Then the challenge is going to be, and I think that's where regulation needs to go, rather than trying to get in front of technology, because regulations will never get in front of technology. We've proven that for- Right ... centuries.

" Look how long it took Google to allow us to have incognito mode. That was a forever discussion, right? It took a long time before we could just cruise and search the internet without somebody knowing what we were doing.

So I think this is going to be a much longer conversation. It's going to take a while, Mike, before you have your off button. Well, here's the thing.

Just remember, Mike, that the Faraday cage is for your man purse. It's not the tinfoil hat on the head. There you go.

I'm sure somebody will be selling those. I guess what I would want, though, especially at one of those conferences, is I want to be able, some way to be informed of somewhere around me, or the people that I want to talk to, and somewhere around me are people I don't want to talk to, and I want to know where they both are at any given time. What do you say, gentlemen?

Go to DEF CON. Let me know how that works. All right.

If you are of a certain age, you probably will remember a television show. " Guess what? We're all living it now every day.

I want to thank our guests for sharing their thoughts and insights. As usual, John, Jack, Jeff, Tracy, have a great weekend. Thank you all for watching the latest episode of the Techstrong gang.

Stay tuned for the rest of the replay of the Techstrong TV lineup, and we, of course, will see you all Monday.