Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the Nocyllic Aspodcast, who's todapodfeet.com, the technology geek podcast with an ever-so-slippable bias. Today is Thursday, July 16th, 2026, and this is show number 1106. We're fresh back from Macstock and about to leave for Houston for a week, so again, you're getting the show early, and that means there will be no live show this weekend. I've got some thoughts about Macstock this week, and Eddie Tonkoi has another awesome article about audio recording. We also have a special treat, Bodie Grimm of the Killawap podcast donated a fascinating interview that he had with Max Patton from EVs for All America. Bart rounds us out with his solo security bits to keep us safe and secure. I gotta tell you, the community really came together this week to give us a great show. Every year, I like to reflect on what I learned or experienced at Macstock. My goal is to make it interesting for everyone, not just to become a fun I had, and you weren't their post. It might encourage you to go, but even if Macstock isn't something you can attend, I so wanted to be interesting to you. Last week, I wrote a blog post about how worried I was that my spreadsheet's workshop was going to be a dismal failure. In the post, I described how it was going to be incredibly difficult to demonstrate even a handful of concepts in three different spreadsheet apps, one after another. I was also very worried about whether the screen resolution of the projector would allow people to see what I was doing, especially from the back of the room, and whether the overhead chandeliers would wash out the display on the projector screen. Both of these are big problems during Macstock presentations, and I wanted to do everything possible to mitigate those issues. From a content perspective, I was worried that whatever I taught, individuals would be disappointed because they would wish that I had chosen something else in the vast array of things you could do with spreadsheets. My presentation was on Saturday, and on Friday, several no-silicast ways came up and told me that they had read my article. They told me they were sure it was going to be great because they were so excited that I was going to teach and insert something here that I was not going to teach. And off a lot of them mentioned pivot tables, which by this time I had decided not to teach because it was too complicated. Spoiler, they worked up an extremely well and exceeded my expectations. Let's start with the easiest thing, and that's the pre-work I did on screen resolution, and it really paid off. You may recall that the projector is 1920x1080. I practiced my presentation, doing all these demos, at half resolution, which is 960x540. I asked you to go set your computer to 960x540 and realize that it feels like sitting in the center seat of five seats on an airplane trying to eat your dinner with a sport. While I also practiced with three quarters resolution, which was 1440x810, just in case that was easily visible from the back. All before the time I was to present, I asked Steve to go to the back of the room and tell me what worked. I was delighted to find out that the 1440x810 resolution was quite viewable from a distance. One of the problems I was going to have to solve is that Google Sheets had a bad habit of showing formulas in Wii Tiny Text, even though I pre-formatted all of myself to 24 point, that's one of the reasons Steve could read it from the back. To combat this problem of the Wii Tiny Text during the live demo, I used the Accessibility Zoom tool by holding down the control key while scrolling up and down to zoom into particular areas. Several folks told me afterward that it was a huge help. I wish every presenter doing anything live other than slides had done this, because for the most part, whenever somebody was showing their Mac desktop, it was impossible to read the screen at 1920x1080, even from close to the front of the room. In my preparation, I had mused on whether having maybe black spreadsheets with white text would be better with the overhead light shining on the projector screen, but surprisingly, it turns out that people who had dark, especially black slides, had the most washed out materials. I just got lucky on that one because it wasn't possible to make the spreadsheets black. In my article, I explained that to help people keep track of what I was doing, I made three separate desktop wallpapers for the three separate spaces, and they each said the name of the tool vertically down the slide. I had a green background that said Excel, read for numbers, and blue for sheets. People told me afterwards that it really helped, and many said they're going to drop that trick themselves when they do presentations. That made me really happy. When it came to the content, it appears that I held their attention, which is half the battle. People asked questions, they provided some tricks, I didn't know, and several times they helped me when I made mistakes. Rina Applement taught us all a great trick. If you control tilde in Excel or Google Sheets, all of the computed cells will toggle between showing the formula and showing the result. This turned out to be really handy to show people a formula after I typed it. When I was trying to do V-Lookup, I messed up the formula, but it was great because people were paying enough attention to holler out and tell me what I did wrong and help me. It was kind of an audience participation game, which they seemed to enjoy. Luckily, I had explained before I started that I always struggle with V-Lookup, so it wasn't a surprise when it went haywire. Steve told me he thought one of the things he liked about my presentation was that when things weren't wrong, I didn't think it was a catastrophe, I just rolled with it, and so that felt good. My plan was to teach how to transpose and to create dropdown menus for people to choose from towards the end of my workshop, but I decided not to show either of those things. I looked at the clock and I saw we had 15 minutes left, and I decided to show the audience pivot tables instead, since you know what, that's what they really wanted. I didn't exactly teach pivot tables, but I did get to tell them the story of the baby named database, how I found the end of Excel, and I showed them what I did learn from using a pivot table to analyze it. People told me that it gave me a good sense of why you'd even want to do a pivot table, and I think that was a great trade-off and allowed me to end on time, which I think is what people really, really appreciate. I got a lot of good feedback from the session, but I got to say my favorite might have been from George Brooks. He made a point of taking me aside to say, "Alison, your session confirmed my belief that I really don't want anything to do with spreadsheets. Isn't that awesome? I love George." Well, in the original article, I talked about trying to figure out the best way to view my notes while I was teaching. You know what worked great? Paper. I had separate sets of pages for each topic with sections for each spreadsheet app, and it was super easy to glance down to keep track of where I was and not fiddle around with an iPad as I'd originally planned. The paper was kind of a backup, but I grabbed it when I started and I thought, you know what, this is going to work perfectly. I had a great time teaching this session, and I think writing that article beforehand was really cathartic and helped me get over my fears. I'm on deck to teach the same workshop to both the Silicon Valley Mac users group run by Lyndon Charles Gouchet on September 21st, and at a later date to the Tucson Mac users group run by Bob Wood, should be a lot of fun. And as always, Steve recorded the entire thing on video, and he will be producing it in the next week or so, so you can see it too. Alright, let's switch gears a little bit, and I want to tell you some cool chart stories about other people, because it turns out other people are up on stage, not just me. Anyway, while I'm not a big fan of using slides to tell stories, and I also think AI-driven content is getting way over done, I was surprised to see that there were a few people's charts that maybe think some of this can be really cool. Joe from the North Woods was explaining how she compartmentalizes her life, including her home, in a way that helps her be intentional about how she wants to spend her time. She explained being tempted to buy a new Xbox to Gamemore, but she doesn't want to spend her time gaming. She wants to spend her time doing other things like being out in the North Woods. She redesigned her home to have a room for reading, a room for prayer and reflection, a room for exercising, and a studio for podcasting. She had an AI create a graphics that showed her in each of these rooms, and it was really beautiful, it told the story she was trying to convey. By the way, I highly recommend subscribing to Joe's podcast and YouTube videos, where everything good starts with small steps. Start with smallsteps.com Dave Ginsburg had a really classy set of charts, with great graphics telling the story of the last decade of Max Doc and Apple to coincide with his celebration of 10 years of his in touch with iOS podcast. Here's from Alabama, Steve and I were sitting together and we were kind of chatting about how they looked like they were AI generated. And then we talked about how awesome they looked. It was really okay because they were great charts, and again, they enhanced his narrative. I chatted with him for a bit about it after the show, and he said it was actually pretty hard to get them to look as good as they did. Dave Hamilton from the Mac Geek app won the AI category though. His charts were fantastic. They were simple, and they flowed really well to tell his story as he talked. But what blew us away was at the very end, he told us that AI created all of his charts directly from prompts. He didn't just have a draw graphics, and put them into a program. He had AI create the entire thing using his iPad, as he sat on the back patio, sipping a cup of tea. It was amazing. Brett Terpstra did a talk on Markdown, and while I will confess that I didn't follow everything he taught, his charts were crazy cool. He started by telling us all to go to a URL to view his charts, and I put that URL in the show notes. Okay, that's not so amazing, but get this. The charts on our devices advanced when he advanced the charts on his computer. How did he do that? If you wanted to back up a slide or go to a previous section, there were little arrows that would let you do that, but then you could catch up with Brett, and they would be back in sync with him and keep moving along with him. You could even bookmark a slide to come back to it later. As he's Brett, he also, very briefly, explained how he achieved this sorcery. He was teaching us about the power of Markdown, and told us that the entire presentation was one simple Markdown file. He gave us a link to it, which again is in the show notes, and to create the fancy H.O.D.
HTML pages, he used reveal.js from revealjs.com. Well, you know, I got curious about how this could be done so I followed the link to reveal.js and installed it myself locally on my Mac. Well, it's definitely high on the nerd scale. It wasn't actually hard at all. You install reveal.js via the node package manager, NPM, and it creates a working version with an index.html file that you can open in a browser and see the slides moving. The index.html file is all in HTML, but adding a single element to it, you can point to a markdown file that has the actual content. It's really easy to put words on the chart, say, a hash to make a title, asterisk for bullets. But Brett's charts also had these bright arrows to go right or down to designate moving horizontally through the charts or vertically. That's a weird concept, right? You can embed charts within charts using this idea. I was curious how that part worked, and that's actually also pretty easy. As you write the simple markdown document, you type a set of characters to separate each chart from the next. In the index.html file, you identify, or you define, I should say, which characters you want to use for horizontal versus vertical navigation. For example, Brett uses three carrots to put the next slide to the right and three hyphens to put a slide vertically below. I was pretty chuffed to be able to follow how he takes simple markdown and makes beautiful slides. It was one more piece to the puzzle, and that's how are we all able to see a slide advancing from a URL we were watching on our own devices? All I heard him say was he used a socket server with a multiplex plug-in. I had no clue what those things were, but in a quick search, I found the GitHub project for the multiplex plug-in with the instructions and all of the tools. I have to confess that I ran out of time to get a socket server running myself, but I've given you the links to leave this as an exercise for the student. This is what I love so much about Brett Terpstra. He lives in a world where so many things are possible, and I learn so much every time I get the opportunity to be anywhere near him, whether he's talking on stage or one-on-one. If you'd like to see all of the cool stuff that Brett does, go to BrettTerpstra.com. Now, there were so many great presentations. I can't begin to describe them all. I really want to, but I just can't do it. But there was one that stood out above them all. Mike Potter, the gentleman who runs Backstock, managed to get David Pogue to come speak to us on Friday night, and he was amazing. Korky Heath lives in town, and he does a lot of the coordination for the social activities like meals. He created a plan for a bunch of folks to go out to a place called Portillo's for dinner. It's a classic beef steak sandwich and hot dog place for Chicago. And the plan was we'd be able to make it back in time for David's stock at 7.30, because it was kind of a not a fast food place, but you could get in and out very quickly. But as we were getting ready to leave to race out and race back, Korky saw David's standing ground, talking to his own folks, and he decided, why don't I just invite David to come along? David said, sure, so Korky drove him over, and then David hung out with us, showing off Kool-I-O-S 27 C-E-A-I stuff. And he really seemed to enjoy the fun of being with a bunch of nerds. It was awesome. I think getting to know the crowd informed how he gave his presentation, because at one point his presentation, he said he was going to smarten things up rather than dumb them down, because it was clear. We were up for that challenge. I can't possibly capture the amazing experience of hearing David talk, but he spoke for about two and a half hours, all about the things he learned in his research for his book, Apple the First 50 Years. He told story after story, giving us fun tidbits that didn't end up in the book, and telling us a lot about how hard it was to research, and especially to publish such a book. Every once in a while, he would break into one of his silly songs about Apple, using a keyboard he had on stage. I don't know if you know, but he sings too. He was hilarious and engaging for that full two and a half hours. I mean, so much energy. And then he spent another two hours signing books for people. He talked to each person as though they were the only person in the room, and then he put a unique signature in each book. And he posed for a photo with each person. He could have been not possibly been more gracious. I have a few more things I'll talk about that I learned at the show, but I'll save those for another time. I can't thank Mike Potter enough for creating such an amazing event year after year. As always, it's the people make the difference at Macstock. I asked anyone who self-identifies as a Nocella Castaway to come up to take a family photo for us so we could show how many people come to the show. It warms my little heart that so many Nocella Castaways come to Macstock. (upbeat music) - Remove the safety net. Performance craft, when you stop fixing it in post. Hi, this is Eddie Tonkoy, the in-house nerd for everything behind the scenes on my wife Jern's character-driven queer love stories, including audiobook narration and production. In the last few segments, I've been talking about the capture side of V3. The recording chain, mic technique, consistency, and choosing a book voice on purpose. That work made the microphone more predictable. It started hearing the same voice in the same way every time. And once that happens, something slightly uncomfortable follows. The mic does not only hear your good choices consistently, it also hears your habits consistently. So this segment is the next part of the V3 mindset. If the earlier segments were about getting the microphone to behave, this one is about getting me to behave. Not by becoming precious or theatrical about recording, I am still me in a room reading into a microphone. But by removing the little safety net in my head that says, it's fine, I'll fix it later. The safety net I removed was not really gear. It is easy to talk about tools here, but the safety net I really removed was an assumption. The assumption was, if something slips into the recording, a click, a breath, a rushed restart, a slightly panicked retake, I can repair it later. And yes, often I can. But over time I realize that if my workflow depends on repairs, I start recording in a way that creates more things that need repairing, it becomes normal, it becomes baked in. Future me inherits every rushed breath, every messy restart, every that will do. Future me is already doing the editing, I don't need to make his job harder. V3 is me refusing that deal. Not because repair tools are bad, but because every strong fix costs something somewhere else. Time, clarity, or that faint, processed feeling, you only noticed after living with the audio for hours. So rather than recording and hoping, I'm trying to record in a way that future me can trust. The paradox is that being close helps and distance does not save you. This still feels backwards to me, which is usually a sign that I should test it rather than argue with it. I used to assume that if I wanted fewer breaths and mouth clicks, I should move further away from the mic. Surely distance would make those little noises smaller. The problem is that mouth clicks are tiny, bright, horrible little events. My microphone was quite happy to hear them from across a four meter room. Getting further away did not make them disappear. It mostly made my voice smaller compared with the room. Moving closer did something more useful. It made my voice much louder compared with the room noise, fans, distant traffic, trains, motorbikes, all of that. The background stayed roughly where it was while the voice came forward. Breaths and mouth clicks did not magically go away, but close mic technique made the real problem clearer. It removed the excuse. If I want fewer distracting breaths and clicks, I cannot solve that mainly by hiding from the microphone. I have to create fewer of them at source. That is why this episode is about the performance habits, rather than repair tools. The repair tools get their turn later. Here, I am trying to give them less work to do. So breath control means giving myself time on purpose. The simplest breath advice I can give is also the hardest to follow in the moment. Do not rush. Not because rushing always sounds fast, often it does not. The problem is that rushing leads to snatched breathing. And snatched breathing is noisy. The whole performance starts to feel like I'm trying to get through it. So I have started doing something that feels almost indulgent while recording. To take longer pauses than the listener will ever hear. That is not dead air for the final audiobook. I will trim most of it later. It is working space for me, space to reset, to breathe properly, to read ahead, and to arrive at the next sentence rather than collide with it. The habits are simple, not easy necessarily, but simple. I breathe more slowly and deeply as a baseline. If I am breathing shallowly, the narration tends to get shallow too. The voice tightens, phrasing gets pinched, the press "B" and "C" in the press "B" in the press.
become more obvious because they are grabbed rather than placed. I plan breaths for the hard bits. Long sentences, names, numbers, emotional lines, careful articulation. Those are all places where I try to breathe before I need to. And when I fluff a line, I do not punish myself by rushing the retake. That one matters. When you make a mistake, it is very tempting to jump straight back in as if speed will erase the mistake. For me, that is exactly when breath noise and mouthclicks show up. Because I restart before my body has reset. So the rule is, fluff the line, stop, pause, breathe properly, then try again. It feels slower while recording, but it is faster overall because the retake does not carry that faint strain of someone trying to recover from the previous mistake. With mouthclicks, repeatable habits beat clever tricks. Mouthclicks are infuriating because they feel so small in life and so enormous in the edit. I have tried lots of the classic tricks, some help a little, some help briefly, some are more folklore than reliable technique. What I have settled on is less glamorous, make my mouth more predictable and only use a light de-click as a backstop. Hydration matters, but for me the way I hydrate matters more than I expected. Gulping water is often not helpful, it can make my mouth feel as if it is trying to correct itself, and weirdly, that can increase mouth noise. Warm herbal tea taken steadily is more reliable. I avoid milky or sugary drinks close to recording because for my mouth they are not predictable. Some people swear by green apples and I have found that soda with a tiny touch of lime can sometimes help, but those are maybe tools for me. I do not build a process around maybe. Warm herbal tea is boring and boring is what I am aiming for. I have also learned that sometimes the problem is not a dry mouth, sometimes it is the opposite, and if I simply spit too much out, my mouth decides it needs to replace it and then we are off again. So do not tell anyone, especially not Joan, but I have been known to use a clean sock as an inemergency saliva sponge. I am not recommending this as a universal best practice, I am just admitting that audiobook production is less glamorous than people think. Tongue position is a habit that actually stuck. The most useful mouth click habit for me has been tongue position. Between sentences, I try to keep my tongue floating rather than pressed firmly against the top or bottom of my mouth. When the tongue rests firmly, it can create little suction points and when I move to speak again, those suction points release as clicks. So the habit is between sentences, tongue floating, relaxed. Before I start speaking, mouth slightly open, tongue set, then go. That does not solve everything, but it makes the starts of lines cleaner. It reduces that first syllable click problem, which is especially annoying because it happens right where attention is highest. And again, it is repeatable, that is why it belongs in V3. A light D-click is a backstop not a lifestyle. I am not pretending I never use tools, I do, but the way I think about them has changed. In V3, a light D-click is a backstop for the little clicks that still slip through. It is not the main plan and it is not a reason to stop paying attention. If I am relying on heavy D-clicking all the time, it usually means something upstream has gone wrong. Hydration for T, tension, mic position or simply recording too long without a reset. At that point, I would rather fix the habit than keep paying for it in the edit. So I make it routine. To make all of this less dependent on mood or memory, I use a spoken opener at the start of a session. It is partly a warm-up, partly a level check and partly a reminder to myself about the behavior I want before the book starts making demands. It goes like this. Before speaking, Peter paused, breathing properly and placing each word with care, his head steady and his gaze fixed. Bright birds perched briefly on the rail as red leather shoes crossed yellow stone. Susan's tongue stayed floating between lines mouth slightly open before she spoke. She sold simple shells by the silent shore, never rushing, never forcing the sound. In New York, unique, unmistakable, every vowel opened cleanly, every consonant landed and the voice stayed calm, close and clear. The opener exercises the mouth, reminds me what I meant to be doing, and gives me a quick check that the session sounds right before I start the book. I keep it in the recording file too, because if there is any session drift later, it gives me a useful reference point. So where does that leave us? If there is one idea I want to land here, it is this. Once Mike technique is consistent, the next upgrade is not more processing. It is better behavior. Close Mike technique does not remove the need for performance craft. It makes performance craft matter more, because the microphone is finally hearing me clearly enough that I can improve the right things. Next time I will talk about gain staging, leaving headroom keeping tone stable and making sure my performance is not being driven by a meter. If you want to know more, come and ask me over in the Slack community at podfeet.com/slack, where I and all the other lovely no-silicaster ways enjoy friendly, positive online conversations. Feel free to message me, Eddie Tonkoy if you have any thoughts, questions or techniques you are using. It will be nice to share ideas. You can also find our work at www.jerntonkoy.com/jenkoy.com where you will find Jern's character-driven queer love stories, the audiobooks I produce for them, and bonus material for our subscribers. I will be back soon to talk through some more of my workflow, but for now, happy recording and happy reading. I love these contributions for Eddie even if some of the tech parts aren't exactly the way I would do things, but I learned a lot from him in this one in particular. I've been suffering a mouth-click problem that for some reason doesn't show up in the no-silicast. I think it's because aphonic fixes it, but it comes out in my videos for ScreenCast Online. I'm hoping to talk to him a little bit more about how he gets rid of that click and how to prevent it in the future. I did figure out that floating tongue trick kind of all on my own was if he hears people go, "When they start a sentence, that's what he's talking about. Don't just float your tongue before you start a sentence before you start recording." Anyway, I love his contributions and there's a lot more coming. Hello, no-silicast-a-ways. My name is Bodhi, and while I'm not your host, I am bringing you an interview today. I had an opportunity to sit down with Max Patton. Max is a host of Directly Current, which is a podcast about EVs, but it's also about policy, and they talk to industry leaders, and they talk to everyday people, and Directly Current is a part of EVs for all America, and EVs for all America is a bipartisan group, and their stated goal is to break down the partisan EV divide. So, this is a really good conversation. Max does a great job explaining kind of how we got here in the first place, so I hope you enjoy it, and without further ado, let's welcome Max to the show. Thank you, Bodhi. My pleasure to be on here. Yeah, I'm looking forward to chatting about this. So, I'm going to be honest, one of the listeners of this show, Gene, he emailed me and he's like, "Hey, have you heard of this organization, EVs for all America?" And I said, "No, I have not." And he's like, "Would you like me to facilitate getting somebody on your show?" And I was like, "Absolutely, Gene does a lot of things in California, so he's kind of connected, and here we are." So, first, thank you to Gene. Second, Max, what is EVs for all America? Sure. Well, I'll give also a shout out to Gene. Thank you for making that connection. And yeah, happy to be on here. I'll say EVs for all America is an education kind of focused, non-profit, and we do a lot of polling, market insights, and research, again, though, non-profit sector. Our goal is effectively destigmatizing EV adoption from a partisan point of view, and looking it roadblocks to adoption that exists and will I sure get into detail about some of
of those and kind of lobbying to get those removed. And so we have market insights and data. We have a sister group, the American EV Jobs Alliance that actually does more of our lobbying arm. We're just the kind of neutral education arm and we look at trends like, hey, more Republicans are buying EVs. Isn't that interesting, right? And that's not some, you know, often times it's data people wouldn't expect. And so we, you know, get rid of a lot in news stories and we actually have a podcast we do that I host. It's a roughly monthly schedule loosely called directly current. And that's more on the policy end of things. So we speak to guests on how the EV transition is going in the US, we talk to analysts and consultants and look at the US as compared to China and everything that's going on in Europe and the state of the world. And it's very fun, especially for the policy wonks out there. So that's a great time, but always a pleasure to nerd out about EVs. So great to be on here. - Yeah, so we'll talk about the partisan thing real quick and then we'll kind of move past it. I will say just from the interactions I've had with the people in the community, right? And in this EV community and kilowatts community, I have a nice mix of people from a variety of different political backgrounds, right? But where did we go wrong that we made how a vehicle has propelled a political thing? Like it drives me crazy. You don't, it doesn't matter how you get your car from one place to another at what power is it. But for whatever reason, it is such a, like if you own an EV, you're this person, if you own a gas guzzling truck, you're this person. And in reality, both people drive both of those cars. - Yeah, that's a great point, right? Why should a power train be political? - I'm gonna give my boss Mike Murphy's dump speech. He's the kind of Republican pollster and politician who started this whole thing. And his philosophy of it is it begins sometime around 2010, 2011, I wanna say, with the Nissan Leaf in the US market. So not the great leaf we have today, this was the very much the compliance car. For its time, very innovative, right? But that hatchback, affordable vehicle they made, to market it, they had this series of ads with a polar bear in it, where there's a guy who gets a leaf in his driveway, and this polar bear who's really sad about the ice caps melting, swims all the way, and ends up, you know, in this guy's driveway, not to attack him, but give him a big hug. And isn't that sweet? Oh, he bought a Nissan Leaf, he's a friend of the polar bears. And my boss, Mike loves to point at that ad. It's just a moment of time showing, hey, particularly in the early days of the EV transition, who were you trying to get? You were trying to get the Prius customer. You were trying to get the left of center kind of progressive folks, who believed in climate change. It's not to say, you know, climate change scientifically, objectively, I think many listeners of your show, regardless of their political orientation, can see what is in that. Unfortunately, in the US, we don't have a partisan consensus on it. Like, I don't think it's a partisan issue in lots of the rest of the world, in the US it is. And I think companies like Nissan and Hyundai, in the early days, didn't quite understand that. Because if you talk to them in Korea or Japan, they would say, oh, climate change is not this polarizing thing. Here in the US, as all of us US listeners can probably relate to, it is polarizing. It should probably shouldn't be, but it just is. And unfortunately, the EV movement very early on got caught up in this idea of kind of a holder than thou, like greenwash marketing and saying, oh, EVs are great for the environment, aren't they? And like, you know, I happen to think, yeah, they are better for the environment. Even if you have cold power generation, there's been studies that show, oh yeah, EV power drains are more efficient. So we don't delegate that. I believe they are. However, there's so many other benefits, including cost of ownership, driving experience and other things. And we saw Tesla's success in the early days was largely deviating from the environmental trend and just saying, hey, this is a great vehicle. We want to lean into that and hope the rest of the industry really adopts and sees that. I think they have come around on it, but we still see a times a partisan divide that I'm happy to go into more detail on. Have you noticed a shift in just in general in politicians when it comes to, you know, their, I guess there, I guess it would be more kind of Republican politicians if we were talking about the dismissal of EVs, but have you noticed a shift in the last few years? 'Cause I'll be honest, I went from in 2000 and whenever the roadster came out, was it 2012? I was sitting in a bar with a friend of mine who was my captain at the time, my boss. And we, he sees it, Elon's on TV, gets in the car, drives away, he's like, that'll never last. And I was like, no, no, I think there's something to this. And I'm gonna use him as a bellweather, right? - Yeah. - Very conservative guy. He drives, he has a owns a painting business, still owns a painting business. He drives an F-150 Lightning. He's had several in his, the time that I've known him. He went from, that'll never happen. This is a stupid idea to, now we talk about, like he knows what an E-Rev is. I mean, he's a, he's a seven year old man who had no interest in an EVs when I met him. And now he knows what an EV Rev is. And he's asking me questions about whether the new F-150 Lightning E-Rev will be good for his business and save him money. So I think there has definitely been a shift, but we're still not there. So have you noticed anything in the political space with the politicians, where there's, maybe somebody who is an ardent detractor of EVs has kind of mellowed on that a little bit. Yeah, that's a great point you're bringing up there. There's so many of those anecdotal stories of people who, regardless of their politics, just drive an EV and thwart a mouth. Suddenly, it's their favorite thing. Especially folks in the contracting realm turns out electric trucks with the power export, all that stuff can actually be really good. Even if they have their limitations, they'll look towing. That's not the only thing people do with trucks. So I would say, yeah, a lot of this is a little bit overhyped in the media. Republican politicians have actually been mixed on EVs. You're right, that's the stereotypical conservative perspective has been, oh, EVs were Obama mobiles, then turned Biden mobiles, right? It became politicized in that way. And so it became kind of normal for Republicans to just bash on EVs because that was something for the lives. That's changed a little bit in the sense of, well, you actually saw in the period of the early 2020s, I guess the first part of this decade now, it sounds weird to say, but there was a huge investment in factories and battery plants, particularly in the Southeast. And that has to do with taxes and not having to be subject to union laws, but for better or worse, lots of companies decided we're gonna invest in America. And of course, there was some incentives and there were some government pushes like the bipartisan past Infrastructure Reduction Act to do that, basically giving huge tax credits and incentives for companies to invest in America, particularly as they went about in the next generation transportation, building EVs, both the batteries and the trucks and the cars themselves. You saw huge plants, like Hyundai's plant in Georgia. Kia has one there too, Ford's huge blue oval project in Tennessee. You have poll star and volvos, effort in South Carolina. Very interesting too, given that company is owned by Gilly, a Chinese conglomerate. And yet there you have American jobs in the South being created for EVs. And so what you've seen as a trend is lots of governors and people more local and politics, even at the level of some representatives and senators, though sadly not that many, those Republicans realize, hey, these are jobs in my community. And I actually, I like the extra tax dollars. And so we have seen that flip a little bit, unfortunately, I don't think when you get to the national level and you look as more like US senators, the US representatives, not state level governors. Those folks, I think, are still very partisanized in Congress. And it's still very popular to have a partisan narrative for EVs see last summer with the one big, beautiful bill act. We actually were hopeful that maybe some of these Republican senators would see, hey, there are things in my state going on that are huge for manufacturing. And those, they were addressed on the floor. But unfortunately, when it came to voting time, they still voted mostly along party lines to pass legislation that, in my personal view, was really bad for the EV transition and undid a lot of the progress we made in the early 2020s. And so those factories are still there. They haven't disappeared. Even though you read about write downs, there are still lots of jobs. And there's this whole idea of a battery belt in the US largely driven by these plants in the southeast. So I think to the extent that we continue to see this bipartisan rhetoric of, hey, American manufacturing is a good thing. I don't think that's a right or left thing to say. And obviously, at least from a rhetoric perspective, the Trump administration has been very open to that. Now, you can argue about how they've implemented it. And I have many thoughts on that. But that is part of the rhetoric. And so it's not, doesn't seem like to your point, anathema to say, hey, we'd be four EVs. Unfortunately, my point is basically to end the rambling here at the national level. We just haven't seen from Republican politicians get on board yet. Maybe that's because they need permission from the chief executive. Maybe it's because of the cultural issue still. It's warming. And you're right at the individual level, folks who have owned a lightning, folks, just normal people.
I think understand this, the more experienced I have with the EVs, unfortunately politicians, particularly non-local ones still don't. Governors, it's a different story, I think they're more on board, mayors totally on board. But again, it's very specific, right? If people have an economic benefit and they can realize that they'll see it, if they can drive the vehicle for themselves, they'll absolutely see it. Yeah, and I mean, at the national level, it's also easier to campaign off of a boogeyman, whether it's the right or the left. Somebody's going to be the boogeyman, so if you're making the boogeyman EVs, voting for it, maybe it's not in your best interest personally. With that, what are some of the things that EVs for all America is doing in terms of changing hearts and minds through policy and just conversations? Just information. We do a lot of polling and I'll give a link to you to share with your listeners for this episode to the work we do on our website. We release lots of basically what are like focus groups and market studies that we get using polling methods that my boss used back in his days in the purely political sense. Now we use it from a market perspective of figuring out who's buying EVs, who isn't, why are they buying EVs, why are they not? What we find is really interesting. Beyond the partisan angle, we've actually seen that healing a bit in the sense of particularly with Elon's whole adventures and stuff that actually has made Tesla owners in particular much more 50/50 Republican Democrat. Even though a lot of left wing people were really turned off by Tesla now, very anti-Elon, because of Doge and all of that stuff, what we actually saw and we confirmed this with a recent guest in our podcast, he was a separate consulting firm out of Pacific. Their data also showed this, Tesla has moved more right in the sense of their customers. We actually view that as a good thing, because guess what? The people who had Teslas before and don't want to buy Teslas, now they're buying EVs from Ford or General Motors or they're still very much on board with EVs. The people who never thought they would have an EV, maybe they want a Cybertruck now because that's become the thing in their red County. We actually see that as a good thing in the sense of, hey, not every vehicle is going to be for everyone, but there is some interesting brand opening up there. Also in terms of OEM and brand influence, we find that, guess what? People really like Toyota, and they really want a Toyota EV. Even though up until this point, that company has not made many compelling EVs, that's changing pretty quickly, but it shows you brand loyalty still has a huge effect. And then when people think of what the most American make is, they still say things like Ford. And so I think there's absolutely an appetite for people who want to buy a Ford EV. Now, we'll nuance that and say, when we look at younger demographics, people are less brand sensitive or they're more price sensitive. And that's where we find people are not only open, we do find younger people, as you might expect, are more open to EVs and powertrains. They're also more open to the idea of Chinese brands. They don't necessarily have as much affiliation or nostalgia for a Ford or a Toyota. They'll say, hey, you know, I'm going to buy a house eventually. I want to save money if BYD can come in here and I can get a $15,000 cheaper car that charges in 10 minutes, sign me up. You know, that's my crude summation of it, but that's effectively what we've seen is the younger the demographic, both the more open to EVs, but also I think the American auto makers should pay attention to this. The more open people are to foreign brands and new brands like Chinese entrants. I think that all of those things you're speaking my heart right now, all of those things I agree with, like one of the things that I found interesting this quarter is and we're talking on April 10th, I'll release this a little bit in a week or two, but on April 10th, in the first quarter, Toyota with one brand, one mediocre in my opinion, EV. They sold more or one model. They sold more EVs than Ford did with two and the lightning was still in those sales numbers. So brand loyalty means a heck of a lot, especially for Toyota folks and with the Highlander coming out and some of the other things that Toyota is doing, I think Toyota might be the sleeper. I think they might be the apple of the EV space for right now, like they waited and waited and now they are making their moves when everybody else is pulling back. That might be a huge mistake, but Toyota for all of it. I have friends who own Toyota's and they're insufferable. I don't have it from a Toyota the brand, but my friends are just awful. Their cars are fine. They're not the cars that they're claiming them to be, they're great cars, but they're not amazing cars. But anyway, my thing is, I think Toyota might end up at least maybe for the second half of the 2020s winning the EV war because they are really good at engineering. They're really good at building a good car that 90% of the people love, but it's not something that is a spaceship. It's just a really good car. Yeah, and that shows you, right, it's the lived experience matters so much to people in the sense of what do their neighbors drive? What have they had good experiences with? And if people have realized, hey, everyone in my neighborhood has a route for they're able to drive 200,000 miles or more with it with normal schedule maintenance. That's great. And they also associate Toyota heavily with hybrids. That explains, I think, a lot of why people are so receptive to Toyota EVs, even though you're right. I agree with you, particularly their early EV efforts were very half baked. They've been improving quickly. They're coming out with new EV product, building a lot of it in America, which is great, but it's been, you know, yeah, they haven't been the most cutting edge. They haven't been space ships. At the same time, people like what they know and they see a Toyota, they can understand that. They look at certain other EVs. You get into, of course, you know, not even excluding factors like cost, but you look at something like a Rivian or a Tesla. And these vehicles are full of screens. They're full of what we call software defined features. That's very exciting, especially maybe for those younger customers. But when you look at the average demographic of the new car buyer currently today, many of them are in their late 40s or their 50s. They have some money, right, to be able to buy a new car. And it turns out that they want something that is a little bit more familiar to them and they'll have more confidence in. And we find that to be a pretty high factor in what people buy. 100% 100%. So with that, what do you see when it comes to polling, Elon is a symbol on the right now? Are you seeing other folks people on the right giving other EVs the chance as well? Yeah, sometimes it's hard to look at the causation that specifically. We do the polling quarterly. And so what we notice is a trend and it's probably a bit of a lagging indicator. I think your your intuition is right that as people warm to Tesla, as particularly Republicans, we have noticed overall Republican resistance to EVs is lower. Now that's not necessarily when we when we give our respondent answers, they're not answers like, Oh, I'm going to buy an EV tomorrow. But it's like we have this responsive. EVs are not for someone like me. And that used to be much higher for Republicans. We noticed that dropped 20 points. And so Republicans now, at least broadly speaking, who are polling are in the position of, okay, maybe I'm not buying an EV tomorrow. However, there's less of this kind of like immune response to like, I'm never buying an EV. That's gone down a little bit. Now that might also be from comfort level. If you look at the polarized times and we're still in polarized times. But if you look at the Biden administration, right? Obviously, very public messaging that EVs are the future. They're here to stay. Get them or get out, right? And you know, back in time to I think some of these political matters, I think I think people felt really threatened by that and the idea of consumer choice going away. And of course that awakened all of these partisan instincts of people saying, Oh, I don't I disagree with the government in charge. They're pushing EVs on me. It's a scam. I don't want it. Now you go into the market where in now where frankly the US has lacks to know environmental regulations of emissions. There's no immediate threat. Now if you look globally, our market probably can exist like that forever. But we are in this stasis point right now where there is much less federal scrutiny of regulations. People don't feel the burden as much. And you know, topically now, we don't have the pulling data on this yet because this is obviously much newer. But you look at the headlines and the state of the world being what it is gas prices being much higher turns out people do warm to EVs on those economic points. And I wouldn't be surprised when we do this pulling again to see people being even more receptive once they realize what they're paying at the pump. We've noticed a similar trend where despite your stereotype and what you may think about government stimulus, when the tax credit existed, Republicans like that too because it turns out everyone likes money. Everyone likes, say, getting a deal. And so Republicans were more likely back then to buy EVs just on the basis of a tax credit or an affordability measure what they didn't like was the messaging. And so that's a lot of the work also to your earlier question of what we do at EVs for America. We take this pulling and we try to advise out of
makers, their focus groups, and in our conversations with them, hey, you need to change your marketing or consider programs that focus on affordability metrics for customers because red or blue, everyone wants a good deal, and we've really noticed that trend. Yeah, and they want to keep as much money in their pocket as possible. In the fire, I'm a firefighter, I don't know if I tell that to everybody, but in the fire services, there's a lot of folks who are conservative. There are a lot of folks who are like, we should be, why are we buying money or why are we buying oil from foreign countries and all this other stuff? Why do we have so much reliance outside of ourselves, right? And my argument to that is why don't you drop by in EV because your power is low, unless you live in like one of the bordering states, but in most cases, your power is local. You can power directly from your solar panels, which many folks that I know have because this is Arizona and its sun is out here all the time. It kind of drives, it drives me nutty because then you're just not relying on that at all. And it's not like oil job. I came, we talked about this earlier, I was born in Alaska. All of my family made their money in somewhere, former and other from the oil industry. Like I don't think the oil industry is going to go away just because you know, we increased the number of EVs we have. Well, you still need plastic in those interiors, yeah. 100%. And there's other things that oils used to or it's not just powering cars. What's one of the things that kind of, when you do the polling, what's one of the things that has surprised you when it comes to just kind of looking at the, what this sentiment around EVs, when that can come from either party side? I would say the thing that, I mean, the partisan gap is surprising, I think the generational divide is also illuminating. Another thing I'll say is also the knowledge, and it's the sense of, and this is some of the other work we do, a lot of this is based off, you know, I think there's the now an industry term for this, it used to be range anxiety, now it's the charging anxiety. I think folks are well aware now that many EVs on the market can reach 300 miles of range or more, right, using EPA data. And on a highway, it's close to that high, if not even higher, with some vehicles. The issue is with charging, many people can't charge at home. And so, but I think it was surprising in particular, realizing how many people weren't really quite aware of the convenience. For many people, the EV thing felt like sacrifice because it's this idea of an extra burden, an extra thing you have to do to go and fill up. When you tell people how home charging works, they love EVs. And maybe that feels intuitive, but I feel like the industry hasn't reckoned with this enough. And I do want to give another shout out to Ford, who I think a year or two ago started the program of giving people EVs, or you know, charging equipment for their EV when they bought a Machee or a Lightning, RIP discontinued for the moment, right? But when they buy a Mustang Machee to this day, still, you can get a charging equipment from Ford, free of charge, not just the equipment itself, but they'll cover reasonable electrician install costs, you know, barring if you live on a ranch with like 10 miles of conduit, right? But like up to some reasonable limit, they will pay for your charging install. That is a huge adoption barrier. And it's something I think the industry still needs to do a better job of. We've done a great job. I think of selling people on like, oh, this truck is fast or has lots of range. And the new affordable stuff is exciting. We can't wait to see the next generation of products, but guess what? You can put someone into a last generation, lesser technology EV and they'll actually I think be happier. This is my opinion. If they have home charging versus giving them a state of their RV and but they have to go to electrify America every week or twice a week, depending on how much they drive. The convenience factor of home charging is huge. And some of the work we've done specifically in California has been looking at policy measures to actually break that down because when you think of folks who live in what's called multi-family units or like condos and apartments, many of those people cannot do the overnight charging thing because their landlord doesn't know what to do. It's hard to get it permitted. There's all these barriers to installing that when frankly, particularly what we call level two charging in the nerd sphere or like that kind of overnight EV charging. That is not that expensive to install compared to DC fast charging. And we're the opinion we need much more of it. And I think some of the polling data bears that out that the convenience of home charging is a huge barrier. And once you get over that hump, people are way more willing to go into EV. I agree. I've had a couple of folks on that are trying to find what the ultimate solution is for EV charging and apartments. And one of the things that I think is one of the things that kind of out of the gate, like if you have an established apartment complex and you want to have this space on the property that is this is reserved for EVs, but it's really far away from the panel. And then you want more space than what your panel can handle. You'll get some company out there that will give you this astronomical bill. Like it won't be as much as a DC fast charger, you're right. But it's going to be a high tens if not the low hundreds depending on how far away it is and how much they have to transfer all that stuff. But there are other options available like Orange Chargers, a company for instance that will just install a regular outlet at a normal charging spot and you can, you know, slowly charge off that outlet. They have a whole system that charges you the money so that the apartment complex is an out, is there a kind of a better way to get the information to property owners or property managers that yes, you can do it the way that this company who wants to charge you $90,000 to install five chargers. You can do it that way or you could actually work with some of these other companies that have found a more reasonable and more affordable way of doing kind of the same thing. Maybe you don't have one area for charging, maybe you have multiple areas for charging and maybe they don't charge at 48 amps, maybe they charge at 20 amps. Yeah. I think it's important to be technology agnostic to your point. There's companies like Orange and I think there's also Pandewildic Trek. There's plenty of folks who are doing really innovative things in making installs cheaper by not over building or by challenging assumptions of what people used to have about level to sharing power point, allegedly. You know, grid distribution is a big bottleneck with our aging grid and lots of areas of the country, including urban parts of California where you think lots of people will be ready to adopt EVs but they can't yet because of this multifamily bind. And so I think being open-minded in the technology is important and to that extent, what we want to do is when the state helps, let's say, subsidize an install or make it easier with permitting, there should also be some guidance or some flexibility that allows for different kinds of technologies. It doesn't say, "Oh, you must install this 48 amp charge point unit. That'll be $6,000. Thank you very much." You know, this industry, yeah, a lot of people will pad their pockets for sure. And we're not against pocket padding. It's capitalism. And so I think there's, to the extent that you can have policy levers that work, incentivize the electricians to want to do this because let me tell you, if you get that, you have the electricians and the installers who are unionized or whatever your state priorities are. But if you get them on board and you incentivize them heavily to do this, they're going to do the sales pitch themselves. And suddenly, the landlord doesn't need to worry about it because he's going to have people knocking on his door saying, "Hey, I can do this for this bid, XYZ." And we want to make it easier for the tenants too. And one more thing I'll say in the polling data is we found it's people aren't against, they don't expect free charging. They're willing to pay for it. Many of these apartment folks already pay like $100 a month for parking. We found in general people are willing to pay about $35 a month for a flat rate for charging, not including the energy, just for the convenience of having a charger in their spot. Then you tack on the energy cost and charge something reasonable, let's say, in California, energy is more expensive. The neighborhood of 20 to 30 cents a kilowatt hour with maybe some off-peak accommodations. People aren't fine with that. That's still a lot cheaper than fast charging. You can imagine Arizona or Colorado or elsewhere in the US where we're blessed with cheaper electricity, it's an even better deal. People can save a lot of money. I think innovative solutions are great, but from a point of policy leverage, you want to get on board with getting the installers and getting the labor to want this because that's the big bottleneck. Right now, they have to deal with so much permitting and the way the regulations are written in certain states, a lot of the incentives are really only equity driven, which is fine like it's based on income. But when you think of, let's say, a pragmatic environmental standpoint, if you're a state and you want more people driving EVs to track on emissions, does it really matter how much income they have or does it matter that they can get a charger if they live in their luxury condo or if they live in a rent subsidized condo? It doesn't really matter. You should all have charging. That's our take on it. Oh, I think that's great. I think that's great. One, it's funny that you say get the electricians on board because every single person I've had on to talk about charging infrastructure, they say, well, we're making money.
but it's really the electricians that make all the money. And I don't know if they're really pushing that off onto the electricians. My dad was an electrician. I know that electricians make good money. But on the other side, it's just every single company that comes on to talk about what they're doing. They're like, oh, the electricians, they make all their money. So I mean, for sure, incentivize those folks and make it a more streamlined. I don't think that we need to throw more roadblocks up to charging infrastructure. But we definitely need to make sure that whoever's putting that infrastructure in is doing it in the way that they should. But more so, just not haphazardly, they're just not just throwing stuff into the ground without thought or care. But I do think maybe easing up on some things. I know just installing the charger my garage, the installer was like, oh, we don't need to tell the city that they're doing this. And I said, no, no, no, no, I'm going to sell this house one day. I need the city to make sure that this is cool because I'm not going to go back and pay for something later. So we're going to make sure we're going to do this right. But I think the city of Tempe, which is where I live, I think they did a decent job of making it easy. But I know not all cities do that. - Yeah, and I mean, you look at the way many condos and many unit, many of these for rent apartments are done particularly in California. The ownership model is pretty private. In the sense of a lot of it is based off complicated property agreements that go back generations. And that makes the logistics of getting this paperwork to install a charger is really difficult. That's where we think the power of government is actually best used. Let's try to streamline this as much as possible. Remove as many obviously still prioritizing safety installs and you can advance policy priorities of keeping journey men and electricians employed and making sure they're certified ones. But at the same time, remove the excessive red tape and considerations that we think have been slowing things down. And that'll vary a lot, locality to locality. But there are a lot of those considerations and that little bit of friction makes it much, much harder for anyone living in an apartment right now to live happily within the EV. - Agreed. Max, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Where would people go to find out more about EVs for all America and then your podcast directly current? - Yeah, well, thanks for the shout out. Happy to be on. People can go to EVsforallamerica.org. That's our site where we have all our info. The podcast is directly current. And so that's in YouTube and all the podcast apps. And like I said, we try to have monthly guests on there. We're not as regular as you guys. We're not in the newsy business. But when we do have conversations, we focus on these kinds of policy issues and what kind of roadblocks that are happening. So, love to talk EVs. Been a pleasure being on. Thanks for the invite. - Yeah, thank you so much. And I don't know if you can hear my cat in the background, but he's up side for some reason. So, I should probably go make sure that the other one's not stuck somewhere. - Maybe she's a Toyota owner. (laughs) (upbeat music) - Thank you so much for that, Bodie. That was a fantastic interview. I love your interview shows. You do such a great job on 'em. By the way, he has a couple more for us. I've been kind of hoarding them, waiting for the right time for them to fit into the show. And I even just love his music. I'm always dancing to it as the show opens up and when it closes. (upbeat music) Well, it's your favorite time of the show. It's time for me to panaddle for money. Turns out, it's not free to create the shows and do all the work we do here. If you could spare a little bit of change once a month to help support the show, that would be awesome. Did you know you can support the show at podfee.com/patreon for just a buck a month? You could do that. Heck, you could do five bucks a month. Whatever it is that you think you can afford to choose the value you think you get out of the show. You must have learned something in the last 21 years that makes it worth supporting, right? Thanks for whatever you can do to support the show. (upbeat music) Hi folks, Bart here with a solo security bits because I have a whole bunch of stuff going on and you don't really want to know about it, but basically as much as I prefer to talk to Alison, I just don't see it working out this week, but I do want to catch up on the latest cybersecurity news. I am recording this on Tuesday, the 14th of July, little after a midday Irish time. So it's gonna be a while till you hear it. Goodness only knows what's happened in the meantime, but I will catch you up next time around. Starting with some feedback and follow ups, well, not really feedback. Follow ups on stories we have covered before. Test Texas had a controversial age verification law go into effect at the start of the year that covered all mobile app stores, including obviously iOS, basically requiring everyone who has an app store presence in Texas to prove they are an adult. And that case is being appealed, but unfortunately, while it was being appealed, it was a request to stay while the appeal was ongoing, and that request for a stay has been denied. This means that while the case against the law continues, the law also continues. Meanwhile, in the European Union, we have taken another twisty-tony development in the scanning for CSAM. So this takes a little bit of context to understand. Before April, the European Union had a sort of a temporary situation in place, and it was intentionally temporary because everyone knows it's not a permanent solution. Basically, EU privacy law makes it illegal for people to scan everything you do, but the EU also wants to scan for each other's material and those two literally can't work together. So the temporary solution was a temporary derogation from the privacy law for any companies who voluntarily wanted to scan for CSAM. So this is called check control 1.0. And that expired because of the temporary measure that expired in April. Initially, the parliament wouldn't reinstate us while the parliament have now reinstated it after all. But it's still a temporary measure for voluntary scanning. So it's not great, but it's not the catastrophe that would have been possible. And what is currently still being negotiated called check control 2.0, which would be mandatory scanning, i.e. the end of end-to-end encryption in Europe, then it's still in a completely not-relegal quadmock quagmire showing no signs of a breakthrough, which is grace from my point of view. So you may have heard on the news that the EU has reversed course or something. That's the nuance of what's going on. It's a lot more complicated than your typical American or frankly, your typical European, your typical any human being would expect it to be. And just another little reminder that we are selling the dangerous Wild West era of AI agents and that it is very important that you do not grant your agent permission to do things behind your back that are dangerous. A new technique has been found to hide prompt injection into that AI agents accidentally get prompt injected anyway. And that has been demonstrated to be able to be successfully used to steal secrets from the device that is running the agent. So this is called ghost commit, and the clever idea is to hide the prompts inside images. And then when the agent scans the image, they execute the prompt. Yeah, look, as long as these agents don't have a clear way of knowing the difference between their prompts and what they're doing and given the way modern AI works, that's literally a feature of how it works. This is going to continue to be a gigantic big problem. It is still the Wild West continue to exercise all the possible caution. We have no listener questions. So just a reminder that you can submit listener questions to myself or Allison or whatever over on the Podfeet Slack at podfeet.com/slack. You will find a channel in there for security bits and it's a fun place to post off to lots of cool people in there I do my best to pop in when I get a chance. So that's where you can submit your questions. And just where you can chat with us all about cybersecurity. So podfeet.com/slack. Moving us on to Action Alerts. If you own a ubiquity router last time, I told you to remember to apply the previous patches. Now I'm going to tell you to apply the new patches. So a new maximum severity vulnerability has just been patched. So patchy, patchy, patchy, patch all over again. If you're a Linux user, particularly a Linux desktop user, and you're getting awful deja vu here, here we go again, whole new vulnerability in the Linux kernel. This one is called Ghost Lock. It has 15 years old. So of course, it's just been excavated by AI. This is another local privilege escalation vulnerability allowing local users who are not rotating.
gain root access. So normally, I yada yada pasties a little bit by saying, if you already have malware on your system, then the malware can dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, we're obviously the, if you already have malware on your system is the first part of the problem. This one has a little sting in the tail. That means I need to raise the flag a little bit higher this time. So yes, it is local privilege escalation, but it can be triggered from inside a container or a virtual machine. And I know we've had no select has to raise discourse in the slack. And in, I think even on air in segments of the show, but using virtualization or containerization, so docker that kind of thing to run browsers and things in a safer way, isolated away from the main device. Well, that isolation is broken by this book. So the bug is patched in the kernel itself, but no, no operating system ships, the barrel Linux kernel straight from source, they all do their own tweaks and whatever. So you need to wait for your Linux distribution to provide a patch. Those are rolling out at the moment. And then as soon as you can patch, do patch. And in the meantime, if you're relying on virtual machines or containers as a layer of safety, well, layer is a little bit litigier than it should be. So just bear that in mind. Those are our two action alerts. We now have some worthy warnings. So we have talked a lot in recent weeks and months about residential proxies. This is where you install a piece of malware. And it basically sells your internet access to the bodies for a price. So the cyber criminals are making money. And then the baddies root their malicious traffic through your device, through your IP address. And this is done to avoid being detected by scanners and things which are always looking for traffic coming from known malicious IP addresses. But if you mix it in with normal browsing from a genuine normal family, way harder to detect. This of course means you have all sorts of malicious stuff coming out of your home network. Could also be malicious stuff doing stuff in your home network. So you really don't want these residential proxies anywhere near any of your devices and a lot of them tend to sneak in with pirated stuff. And also with fake installers. The most recent example is a warning from the hacker news that there are fake seven zip installers that turn people's devices into residential proxies. And then we also have one from cyber insider warning that a popular free VPN app for Android called the wire VPN, which has millions of downloads turns everyone who installs it into a residential proxy. This is probably a good reminder that a VPN is such a privileged piece of software. You absolutely cannot afford to cut corners here. You absolutely cannot afford to install VPNs that you don't pay for where you're not the customer. Because if you're not the customer, then you're being somehow monetized. And this is a somehow turning you into a residential proxy. That is a way to monetize you. So be very careful, which VPN you choose. I have to earn your trust. That is a very privileged position. Speaking of privileged positions and earning trust, your router is your connection to the internet. Literally everything you do online runs through your router and your router is also your protection from the internet back into you. So it's very important. It'd be secure and that'd be maintained by trustworthy people. There is a Chinese brand, which is becoming popular outside of China. It's generally sold as a value brand for consumer and enterprise called Tinder. Well, as the hacker news warns, hidden admin backdoor in Tinder router firmware. So there is no patch. The only real workaround is to hide access to the web portal, which just minimizes the who can attack you. But the problem is still there. And really, they didn't even bother replying to the various organizations reporting into them. So this is not a company that, in my opinion, is worthy of the trust of being the privileged device that's between you and the internet. So if you have one of these tender routers, I would strongly urge you to upgrade it. If you notice a tender router in your friend or family's house, I would urge you to urge them to move along and get themselves a newer, more reputable router. We'll use then. We have an interesting development from Cloudflare. So last time we talked about a positive development from Cloudflare giving more control to site owners about how bots should be treated when browsing, you know, when accessing your site that's protected by Cloudflare. And now Cloudflare are creating a new paid for tool that will be available to, you'll have to pay for this tool, but this is like capture only more so. So the idea is that instead of the capture being a one-off gate, you pass through the capture and then you're allowed to access the website. That means that the only chance the Cloudflare have of verifying you are a human and not some sort of an AI bot is that one interaction during the capture. And then the fact that the AI bots are better at solving the captures than the humans, obviously there's a problem to be solved here. And the way that Cloudflare have solved it, and I don't actually know if there's any other way to solve this other than just, I don't know what the answer is really, but either way, their solution is to inject JavaScript into every page served through Cloudflare for customers paying for this feature. And that JavaScript will sit on the person's browser as long as they are on the website, and it will monitor their keystrokes in the mouse actions and other JavaScript events like stuff coming in and out of focus and things like that. And it will distill that down into an anonymous report and send that up to Cloudflare for analysis where they can then use AI to figure out whether or not the person surfing the site is a human or a bot, and then they can basically slam the door at the moment they say, "Oh, no, no, not a human." But that means that you have a piece of JavaScript running in the website all the time watching everything you do when reporting by the Cloudflare servers. Now, Cloudflare have made it very clear that this script doesn't log your actual keystrokes. What it's doing is keep an eye on the timings of things. And it's also not a cross-site thing. So you get a session with this protection for the current web page you are visiting. And if you go to a different web page, you get a whole different session protecting you again or protecting the site from you or then protecting you really has to be honest. So it is per-site not a cross-site thing so that doesn't open us up to cross-site tracking and all these kind of things. It's not a finger-printing thing. But it does still raise privacy concerns for the obvious reason that you have someone else's JavaScript running watching what you're doing. Now, this is something which is happening all the time. Anyway, if you've ever gone to a website to buy something, type something into the search box, not bother buying it, and then been surprised to find an email where they are telling you what you were searching for and offering you suggestions. That's because I'll know full off a lot of websites monitoring your keystrokes and they're not monitoring the timings every keystrokes. They're monitoring the keystrokes every keystrokes. They are literally reporting back every single thing you type to the website owner so that they can advertise at you. So you are kind of already being monitored like this and at least Cloudflare are doing it for not nefarious reasons. The only other silver lining I can find is that JavaScript running in the client side is by definition auditable. So if Cloudflare roll this out and it starts to do things contrary to what Cloudflare say it does, they will be caught and that will be very, very bound for a company like Cloudflare who will depend on the reputation. So we do have some safeguards here. This makes me feel icky. But the more I think about it, the more I understand it and the less I think this is a catastrophe. But it still makes me feel pretty icky if I'm completely honest. Speaking of feeling completely icky, our friends admit that thought they could get away with another one of their let's up to everyone in by default into a controversial feature. Check, there's a trick they have pulled many times before. This time they were going to just say that well if you've posted something to Instagram and it's public, well then we will allow anyone else on Instagram to use your photo as the input to their generous of AI prompts and they can then manipulate your photo and make it hilarious with AI and send it around. That caused more than a little bit of pushback to put it mildly and even better realize the writing was on the wall on this one and decided to say never mind and have decided not to do that. The fact that they were going to opt people in by default is just that extra little bit of mana special. Now, matter really should have been on better behavior because they got a strong slap on the wrist from the European Union.
or at least the start of a strong slap on the wrist from the European Union. As the Mac Observer very expertly summarized it, and I do, I just, if you're wondering, why is the Mac Observer talking about legal stories in the EU? Their legal reporting is simply superb, and they have a very broad definition of Mac news, because if Apple users use Facebook and Instagram, then that is Mac news, and the Mac Observer is point of view, and there, as I said, the legal coverage is excellent. So I do very often end up relying on them here in security bits. And this is a good example. So EU warns meta over Facebook and Instagram addictive design. So I will quote from the Mac Observer, "The findings focus on features such as infinite scroll, auto play, push notification, and highly personalized recommendation systems that keep users engaged for long periods without meaningful limits." So this is a finding on the Digital Services Act, the DSA, which places responsibilities on very loud online platforms to protect children and vulnerable users. And so this finding is basically that they are failing in their legal obligation to protect children and vulnerable users. The way this works is that the European Commission issue a preliminary finding. It's basically like an indictment in the American system. So this is a preliminary finding. This is not a final ruling. So this is the Commission going, "We think this is addictive for this, this, this, this, and this reason." Scraping report, meta now have the right to reply. The European Commission will consider meta's reply and then they will make their final ruling. If meta disagree with the final ruling, then it's off to the courts. So that is what is ahead of us here. None of this is going to go quickly, but it is a pretty clear marker to meta here. Hey, this kind of addictive stuff is a breach of the Digital Services Act. If they are found guilty, then they will owe the European Commission a fine of 6% of global revenue. Global revenue. That is substantial. Keeping with the European Commission, there is another proposal brewing. Unsurprisingly, given everything else going on in the world, the European Commission are also proposing social media ban. But theirs is a lot more nuanced. So what they are proposing is a ban for kids under 13 with phased access thereafter. And I was expecting to hate every single line in this article and I found myself rather surprised reading a report of something that the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said. And I found myself going, oh, that's actually interesting. So I will quote from the Mike Observer describing the president's words. European Commission, President Ursula von der Leyen recently shared that the focus should be on when social media can access children rather than the other way around. In some related context, the EU is testing a privacy protecting digital ID, which can be used for age verification without giving away any identity information within Europe. So that is certainly context for anything that's going on here. I'm interested by the concept that this is about making the platforms earn the right to support children, as opposed to making children sort of criminalized as the platforms not the children. It seems like the way I would phrase it. And that seems like a much better approach. And this concept of a phased introduction rather than a big bang, that also seems like a very good approach. Like 13-year-olds are not infinitely more maturity than 12-year-olds. Then growing up is a thing that happens slowly over time. And so being allowed onto social media but under rules where there can't be addictive features like infinite scroll and so forth, that's perhaps not a bad way to face kids into these things. And then as they approach 18, more and more of the guardrails come off and they become full-fledged adults. It's an interesting idea. This is all a long way from happening. Like I said, I was expecting to hate every single thing about this, and I thought it was going to be another privacy-invading mess. But there is some things here that make it stand out in a good way. So that is a thing that will develop slowly over time. Something that is happening quite quickly, this is the only piece of good news I was able to find. It's obviously only really been a week of news since I'm recording this on a Tuesday instead of a Saturday. But anyway, Google Chrome extensions must meet new privacy standards by August 1st. That is not very far in the future. Today is the 14th of July. So I will quote from Cyber Insider here, "The most significant change for users concerns how Chrome extensions collect personal data. Under the revised limited use policy, developers may collect user data only to the extent strictly necessary for an extension's disclosed single purpose." In other words, an extension is supposed to do a thing. And the only information the extension is allowed together is the information it needs to do the thing it says it does. Continuing from Cyber Insider, gathering additional information for unrelated uses such as analytics, advertising, or future features that are not essential to the extensions core functionality is no longer permitted. That is, I have to say, a truly excellent lockdown. I don't know how well that's going to be enforced, but goodness me, that is certainly an interesting and clever approach here. Her assert clever may not be quite the word for, but certainly a positive development here from Google. So if they manage to implement these rules, that definitely will make things better for Chrome users. Okay, I am sorry to say, I do not have a pilot cleanser for you. Allison has submitted a pilot cleanser, but she should be here to tell you herself. So I'm going to keep that one in the bank until the next normal security bits, hopefully myself and Allison get back to normal soon enough. And until then, remember everyone, stay punched, so you stay secure. Well, thanks so much for that, Bart. I sure miss doing it with you too. It's just not the same. That's going to wind us all up for this week. Did you know you can email me at allocentapodfee.com anytime you like. Have a dumb question, maybe a suggestion, maybe something I messed up you want to tell me about. Just send it on over. Remember everything good starts with podfeet.com. You can follow me on
[email protected]/mastodon. If you want to actually see Steven, my podcast work on YouTube, you can go to podfeet.com/youtube. That's where he's going to be posting the thing I did at max.about spreadsheets. If you want to join the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeet.com/slack, where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely nosilla cast ways, including Eddie Tonkoi. You could support the show at podfeet.com/patreon, or maybe you just want to make a one-time donation. Go to podfeet.com/donate. You can use Apple Pay or any credit card. It's super easy. If you have the PayPal persuasion, we've got that too, podfeet.com/papel. And if you want to join in the front of the live show, you will have to wait until July 26th to head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time, and join the friendly and enthusiastic nosilla cast ways. I missed you guys these last couple of weeks. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed. (upbeat music)
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