Facebook vs Meta on face recognition and other intrusive tech. Biden's broadband plan. Bitcoin tax. NSO Group. Ransomware. Google gets into trading. Apple looking at Crypto.
Facebook vs Meta on face recognition and other intrusive tech. Biden's broadband plan. Bitcoin tax. NSO Group. Ransomware. Google gets into trading. Apple looking at Crypto.
It's The Next Wave podcast. Well settle in. Grab a cup of coffee. Sit down by the fire. Yeah. Wait, that's the Christmas episode. That's right. Good old Yule to Yuletide log. Whatever that's
Brad Kirby:Settling by the old yule log. Wait for a stranger to come down or chip.
James Thomason:There you go. Yes, baby. It's cold outside. And that song has been banned as well. Unfortunately, right, everything's cancel culture. Yeah, everything's fackin canceled. All right. We'll get a hot mic. We ready? We feeling good. And we got a drink? I believe so. Got some. Okay, we got some bits flowing. That's good. So I'm gonna say it's the next week podcast episode 52. Hey, hey. That means that it's been 52 episodes. 52 weeks worth of episodes, we slowed down slightly because it COVID In the middle, we get the news cycle kind of slow. The business cycle got kind of slow, but it marks the anniversary of the next week podcast. 1000s of you tune in every week to enjoy our super
Dean Nelson:Our banter. Yeah, and, really appreciate it. We do we do.
James Thomason:Thank you for being listeners. And it's been a great year. I've really enjoyed doing this podcast. We've had so many great guests on the show. It's been really wonderful. I'm glad we decided to do this while sitting in a cafe. Actually, it was a taco bar. It was a Mexican place. Yep. Place. Houston. Houston. That's right. Yeah. Oh,
Dean Nelson:yeah. are crazy. Travel. Such schedules intersect that somehow we ended up in Houston. We're like, you know, we're gonna talking to each other. We should We should make other people listen to us talk.
James Thomason:Because hey, they may well, we never
Dean Nelson:mind. And they do. Yeah, strangely they do. And it's gonna be our last episode before Thanksgiving. That way. We probably have another one.
James Thomason:Thanksgiving, right? Oh, that's okay. So much better. The turkeys gonna be repeating guests on the show
Brad Kirby:knows what I sound like. Pretty much. Voice radio bronchitis. Right.
James Thomason:Um, you've had bronchitis three weeks,
Brad Kirby:right? It's three and a half weeks now. Yeah. Wow.
James Thomason:You certainly be Arthur.
Brad Kirby:This is the best girls. Oh, thank you.
Dean Nelson:I guess that's a compliment. I'll take it.
James Thomason:If you're too young to watch The Golden Girls where you really should. It's on Hulu.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, I was a little upset that I missed the quantum computing discussion last week.
James Thomason:With it. That was such a good show. Yeah. As we're recording the show, no one else has even heard that show. Yeah, but it was such a good show. Yeah. And the I think we're really gonna do that. Yeah, coming up. Interesting. By the time this episode airs, I guess it'll have already be out. So if you haven't heard that show, go back and listen to it. That's gonna be a good one. That's gonna be good work, take the quantum leap and do it. So we haven't talked about the news a little while. And then there's a lot of news. And I guess the biggest news has been for some reason, Facebook's rebranding. And I sort of feel like big rebranding is like this happen when a company is completely out of ideas or like voted to change the logo change. It's a Don Draper moment if you don't like the conversation. No, change it right. So now it's now it's meta. And there's nothing more meta I think than watching Mark Zuckerberg pretend to be Steve Jobs as he introduces this dystopian hellscape in which everyone is permanent plugged into his surveillance apparatus being discreetly programmed by algorithms and other other bubble effects to be good little consumers and to buy whatever Facebook advertisers want. Yes, folks. It's the metaverse.
Dean Nelson:I was just letting you go on there because that was that was flowing. That was that was very interesting. We all have a different opinion on different things here. But
James Thomason:it's big tech, but bigger. It's bigger than big tech. It's metadata.
Dean Nelson:It's Omni tech. That's what's coming next. The Omniverse
James Thomason:isn't that's really meta. The Omni versus so meta.
Brad Kirby:Okay, we should have seen it coming with Oculus, right with I mean, yeah, sure.
James Thomason:No pun intended.
Dean Nelson:We should add a 360 degree view of it.
Brad Kirby:Yes. Have you guys dabbled in the metaverse yet?
Dean Nelson:No to
James Thomason:the No,
Brad Kirby:no, never.
Dean Nelson:Never did I hear I never had James Thomason never never had to go in the metaverse.
Brad Kirby:I know at some point just to do it. Oh, okay. I'm gonna
James Thomason:delete this book. I committed to deleting Facebook. deleted it. I will not be installing meta myself onto myself or otherwise.
Brad Kirby:Okay. All right. They're not other meta verses or is it just Facebook?
Dean Nelson:Yeah, it's called Second Life didn't that exist?
James Thomason:I remember when second life was going to be the new thing. People were buying virtual real estate Yeah. To put their virtual cows on in Second Life.
Dean Nelson:Actually, that actually worked people did make a good chunk of money. I don't know where it is today. I haven't logged in in 510 years, probably. But when I was at Sun Microsystems, we had Greg papadopolis. Yeah, he was the CTO. And so we created the a second life, entire island area. That was all data centers, and infrastructure. And I had avatar that they created for me. And then they got me an Armani suit. And all that was, I look like a dork. But Greg was in there. And I was in there. And we did a an actual live session in Second Life as son with a whole bunch of customers that came in. And I remember doing that that the month before. We're working with developers in there. So I would go log into what is now the metaverse, I would log into Second Life and I would fly over to this island and then in there, I would be instructing them. Right on what it is like, oh actually know that electrical distribution is wrong, this kind of thing that they were creating the full 3d replicas of data centers inside a second life. So this isn't a new concept, right? I think it's just that technology has come a long way. Have you seen the Microsoft release? That came out? I forget what it's called. But they're pulling on this too.
James Thomason:That's a classic. Oh, yeah. Microsoft's doing something I can't remember what it's called though.
Dean Nelson:Actually, so Saatchi was on there presenting it and showing it and all this right. And then they they they add it and it was like Second Life, but it is fully immersive with your avatar in conference rooms, but there's no second.
Brad Kirby:That's with HoloLens. Right? Yeah. So it's in the Microsoft Teams,
Dean Nelson:but there's no bottom half of your body. It's just floating torsos. Which I thought was a little strange. That was the thing that got me like
James Thomason:this. Yeah. Disembodied, ghastly figures drifting through cyberspace. You know, there's nothing. There's nothing. So meta as listening to Zuckerberg say, connecting people like an alien might say human intercourse with clinical precision and a hint of revulsion. Connecting people.
Dean Nelson:You're not a fan, James.
James Thomason:Oh, my God, I hate it. I hate it so much. I can't like it gets worse every day. I hate it so much. Well, that being said, and I have to say there wasn't like an overwhelming positive feedback loop from the series of press announcements, but it was it was pressed at all. And he said even bad press is good press. There's plenty of press around it. I don't know. I think the most interesting piece of it for me was the bit that leak did like Facebook, I'm sorry, meta wants to see itself in the center of everything, including business. So this idea that like while you're performing your debt slavery job, you will also have to be plugged into the metaverse to communicate with the rest of your company. Because we hate workers. I'm sorry, I'll stop being so negative about it. It's gonna be great. You're gonna be injected with with heroin while plugged into the metaverse and working a job that you used to hate but now that you don't care, it's gonna be right.
Dean Nelson:Okay, so, so James, are we plugged in and just totally different ways today. Think about I mean,
James Thomason:Dr. Slag my daughter definitely as Brendan, I can't if I couldn't slap the hand out the phone out of her hand, if I tried. She's got a vise grip on that thing.
Dean Nelson:truth, truth, but so do we, don't we?
James Thomason:It so much better. I get so much better.
Dean Nelson:All right, you are you're achieving a higher level than Brad and I are I assume, is that correct, Brad? Or have you achieved the metaverse as well?
Brad Kirby:I actually have a VR headset on a PlayStation. So that's on the metaverse, though.
Dean Nelson:Are you actually are you connected to your devices, though? You're not? Okay. Let me ask you a question. When you go to sleep. Where's your phone?
Brad Kirby:Beside me?
Dean Nelson:And the is your phone your alarm clock? Yes. Do you take your phone into the restroom? Yes. Wonder you're not with your phone.
Brad Kirby:Actually don't always take the phone to the restroom. But yes, it's connected.
Dean Nelson:So this is think about that. Right. So that's what I mean, James. So So by the way for me, Brad, I'm right, right there with you. Right. It's like an extension of my arm. Right. I can't not have that. So I'm fully addicted as is the rest of the world. Not just your daughter, James. I will but that's only one thing. We'll
Brad Kirby:look at it in the restaurant. If I made dinner. I genuinely will not do that. I don't like doing that. Unless it's like,
Dean Nelson:there are social aspects. Sure. Sure. Sure, sure. But in the end of it, it still pops back up, right? Yep. We're sorry.
James Thomason:The time of day five. So during during business hours I have it because essentially my functioning running a startup really requires me to have it. And then at a certain time of day, take it out of my pocket, set it down, forget about it for the next 12 hours. And that's that's kind of my new approach. Because if I don't do that, then there's always the temptation to read, research, whatever question happens to pop spring into my mind, and then you know, get on the whole dopamine flywheel, and then pretty soon, I'm watching Zuckerberg say, connecting people.
Brad Kirby:I have my digital well being.
Dean Nelson:Oh, look at the dashboard. Okay, now. This is scary.
Brad Kirby:Friday, 15 hours and three minutes. Screen time. What? I just think it's, I think it just sitting around at the time.
James Thomason:You're on your phone 15 hours Friday?
Dean Nelson:No, for Friday? No, it says a week,
Brad Kirby:or is it the whole week? as well? Yes, that's total apps. Well, it's Friday.
Dean Nelson:So where's this dashboard? Oh, my God that is on an iPhone. I have an Android. You're on your phone as
James Thomason:much as my daughter
Brad Kirby:now. Now, I think that's total app usage. So I think when they're running in the background, like WhatsApp, I have WhatsApp for six hours and seven minutes. I'm pretty sure. I wasn't texting people for six hours and seven minutes.
James Thomason:You got another metaverse. That's what happened.
Brad Kirby:Maybe that's how that's how Facebook's getting me through WhatsApp. All right.
James Thomason:So I'm sure when people are plugged into the metaverse people, we just find people randomly standing around staring at a wall and interested in a bowl of gelatin salad in their hand.
Brad Kirby:I will explore the metaverse but not through meta.
James Thomason:God, okay.
Dean Nelson:So I don't know where yours is. But like a Mayan. I'm getting about an average of three hours a day this lightweight last week. That seems wrong. I feel like I'm on that a lot more.
James Thomason:And you're on your computer, right? I mean, that's Yeah,
Brad Kirby:yeah.
Dean Nelson:Anyways, I did want to say that these names are actually pretty good. So think about what Google did. They spun off and created a parent company called Alphabet. Okay, that's kind of all letters in the alphabet. Then you think about what what Facebook just did? You get two minutes of screen time. James is two hours, two hours, two hours, okay. All right. But think about what Facebook did, they spun off and created this parent company called meta. Okay, so what's Apple going to do? What's Microsoft gonna do? They creating parent companies, are they just gonna stick with with their parents they have today?
James Thomason:Yeah, I kinda, you know, I can kind of understand it like Facebook is such a specifically web to Dotto social brand, you know, and it's such a specific user experience. And now there's a bunch of really specific, like, negative things tied to the brand and I you know, meta is a new thing. It's, it's bigger than Facebook, I get it, you know, I get the rebrand. But
Brad Kirby:Apple did finally come out today and say that they're interested in cryptocurrency. Yeah, that came out for the first time. Although there was no clear plans. So
James Thomason:yeah, it was on. I think, CNBC this morning. Yeah. But the market opened. I got a couple blurbs of him talking this morning. So he was on something he was CNN, CNBC. Yeah, we'll see John, as well. Yeah, chatting it up. He said he was getting a really positive response to all the privacy changes Apple has been making. I'm like, I'm not sure you're paying attention to the full gamut of feedback on the privacy changes that you've been making. I mean, I know we, he honed in specifically and talked about the ability for you to opt out of tracking. But he said nothing about Apple scanning all of your personal photos and other information to look for nefarious activities.
Dean Nelson:But I think he was he was basically getting the kudos because they're, they're sticking to their guns on allowing you to opt out of apps on the App Store. Right tracking. That's actually really good. Right? It's in the back into the users hands.
James Thomason:Yeah, he did say in his interview that privacy is a human right. That's the stance of Apple privacy is a human right. And they behave strangely for a company that would say something like that, because they are you know, they're equally invading privacy as they are protecting. And that's why I found the whole photo scanning thing so strange because they were historically you know, preventing the FBI from cracking into your phones, like if you won't cooperate with the FBI, but you'll internally write some kind of weird algorithmic scanner to look for pedo porn on everyone's handheld devices in their iCloud account. It's a strange What the hell is actually going on? Is anyone in control? Does the company even know what it's doing? I don't know. But yeah, he was on this morning. He said some other things too. He moved off the privacy topic. He talks about got ahead a clip here. What's gonna play what have lost it? Just like Sean Connery. I found the show for the plague of the 20th century and I've watched it Yeah, medicine man. That was a fantastic movie if you haven't seen medicine.
Dean Nelson:So I'm cannery missing again.
James Thomason:Once again. Haven't seen medicine man from the 1990s
Dean Nelson:I've not seen motion man. No, yes. Maybe not came
James Thomason:on late night cable TV quite a bit just before Xena Warrior Princess
Dean Nelson:Sina. I remember that. What's that a
James Thomason:lot. I still watch the you know, my baby being really honest. Xena comes on I'm watching. Well, we'll have to see well to see how this turns out. But I'm not plugging it you guys tell me how the metaverse is that will be really meta like me. Yeah. Understanding through you.
Brad Kirby:I think it'd be interesting to bring someone on that knows something about it. Maybe, because always is fun to bring on. Because we're always skeptical about certain, you know, new tech in the future of it. But see if we can bring someone on that.
Dean Nelson:I don't know if we're all skeptical about new tech. I'm not sure about that. One, some tech,
Brad Kirby:some, some of us are. Generally James, but
James Thomason:just likes the numbers.
Brad Kirby:He does. I tried to I tried to create an NFT for the first time last week, and the gas price of Aetherium was $390. A cola. So posted 390 bucks, or$90. equivalent of Yep. So I don't really blows my mind at times. But I want to accept it but
James Thomason:tech and into politics, big politics, big tech, big politics. Six, six, Biden's historic $65 billion broadband plan was approved by Congress. One rad what does this mean?
Brad Kirby:Well, I think we've talked about it before in terms of what's in there. But one of the bigger things that the crypto world was up in arms about was there's a specific piece of an amendment to the IRS code that effectively writes in digital assets as reporting requirements. So exchanges, wallet providers, will now have to report in the same way that you know, like a bank would in terms of transactions, so not just Coinbase, but some of these smaller intermediaries that are dealing and not just cryptocurrency, any digital asset. So it's pretty broad. People were pretty upset about it. There was a little bit of scale back on it. I personally don't think it was meant to capture as much as it appeared. But other there was a lot of pushback on that. So we'll see where that lands, but it's a dump of what the regulator's are doing around stable coins and now taxation is really any crypto quite higher. So
James Thomason:oh, wait, there's there's what's the meat of this? There's $65 billion broadband plan, but only 42. Point 5 billion is for broadband right? First off, I'm not sure what the other 14 billion goes to an affordable connectivity fund that is essentially a longer term version of the emergency broadband Benefit Program, which sounds a whole lot to me like cronies collecting falling coins from the sky. But let's go with the the meat of it the 42 point 5 billion in broadband equity access and deployment program. We give subsidies to ISPs that build in underserved areas. And so I have a question mark around the underserved areas. Yeah. And where those are? Exactly. I mean, it seems like most people who live in a city of significant size have broadband some form of Brian might be crappy. It might be DSL.
Brad Kirby:Pens. Oh, you just find his broadband. Yeah, well, I
James Thomason:see that I think it's no misquote me Don't quote me on this. I think it's like there's a specific definition like 20 down into up, the Feds consider that broad matches was not. Yeah, which, you know, the South Koreans would laugh at that, like 20. Down and two up. That's like, that's like what I had in 1995. Yeah, maybe three, maybe three, maybe three up here.
Dean Nelson:I was driving in LA on 5g And I got 120 megabits driving. Download on my How the hell while I'm driving down Highway four or five this weekend, and I thought I still get less than 40 of my house.
James Thomason:And I'm wired Well, right. Speaking of rural connectivity to underserved areas, I think we should try to lobby to get Dean Nelson sounds put very near the top.
Dean Nelson:I agree with that one. Yes. I should get some subsidies for that. Because just i I'm bound in the mountains. But okay, let's go back to this for a sec, the underserved areas. The reason I had a question about this, is, if we're subsidizing ISPs, the reason that we don't have broadband, right in these connections is because the ISPs had prioritized where network was going to go. And when they did that, they did that for all of the wealthier, higher concentration of money areas. I don't want to beat up on the ISPs. But what they did is follow the money. And the issue here is that we didn't have build outs in all the other places that were not as wealthy and to me That's the issue that we're trying to solve right now, the question is, is it truly going to be defined and prioritized in underserved areas? Because the majority of places that don't have it are the ones that are struggling the most in the pandemic, the ones with a kid sitting in the Taco Bell parking lot, listen, you know, connected to the Wi Fi.
James Thomason:Yeah, that's a real thing. By the way, we we've got multiple data points on that working in our edge computing projects and rural communities, there are kids with no internet at home who are going to like set a McDonald's and do their homework. That really should not be the case. I mean, absolutely. I did find it in the bill. The bill defines underserved unserved locations as those without access to speeds of at least 25 megabits downstream and three Meg, upstream. And without access to latency, sufficient support real time interactive applications, that's kind of a new, that is interesting, this funded projects will have to provide speeds of at least 100 megabits downstream and 20 megabits upstream with good latency, and I'm not sure what they mean by what's the fingers. Good latency is
Brad Kirby:how many seconds? Yeah,
Dean Nelson:less than 500.
James Thomason:milliseconds moonlights, probably
Brad Kirby:like it's probably 250 or 300.
Dean Nelson:That would not be good. Yeah.
James Thomason:Yeah. So this is interesting. I mean, I would love it if like, we saw a surge of fixed wireless providers and others to compete with sort of the local telcos that currently dominate this space. You we had that surge in the 90s, when there was deregulation, right? And you can then get into these pops and compete. Should I say deregulation? Or I should say, regulation in that case, right? Because what really happened was that there was legislation passed requiring the carriers to share space with celiacs and to serve these this last mile access, right. So it's probably regulation,
Brad Kirby:at&t was very opposed to this plan, because they think that Americans should be happy with a maximum of 10 megabits. Watch. Is that real? Yeah, that's in the Ars Technica article,
Dean Nelson:that is nuts that i Whoa, talk about disconnected from the world. 10 megabit
James Thomason:megabits. I mean, you can even upload your turkey videos.
Dean Nelson:That was covered right on, right on. We gobble that up. Okay. So on the connectivity part, there's, there's a company out there called Three, red eight. And they're doing a really cool project, a lot of its public now. And I think I think you guys are aware of this too. But that is building the new Internet backbone, right trenching fiber connecting from from the actual landing stations, etc. And that's going to be you know, traversing the country here in the US, and one of their primary objectives. And this was to be able to connect tribal lands as well as rural areas, and not just for people, but for all the machines and agriculture, and all of those things that allow us bandwidth to be in the right place. So that things can happen. But they're one of their biggest pushes was equity, and the ability to have access to broadband. And there's so many places around the country, at least here in the US, it's just not equitable at all. And that includes in cities, right, you get high concentrations of places, and you just don't have connectivity for a lot of the different areas. And those areas are usually in the under served markets and with the with less wealth. And that's that's the stuff that I hope this is really going to address. So that's why I was questioned about the how is that being calculate what is how are they defining an underserved area? So that should theoretically based on what you just said, If it's less than 35 megabits?
Brad Kirby:Down fine, right?
James Thomason:2525? Some of them,
Dean Nelson:right. Okay, so that's gonna that's going to address the worst acrosser Like you said, the DSL is the ones with dial up. So hopefully, I got my fingers crossed, that'll be that'll roll up the right way.
James Thomason:Not only did at&t lobby against fiber optic, and say 10 megabits good for everyone. They also lobbied against Elon launching satellites to cover the earth with internet. And it wasn't just them that lobby, it was the entire wireless communications industry and all the fiber providers everyone. No one liked the idea of Elon simply being able to launch satellites and cover the same area that they took them billions of dollars to do with a handful of rockets and satellites. And they propose all kinds of wild stuff. I remember reading some of the comments to the FCC, you know, there were being read in by professionals like Elon satellites, were gonna fall to the side and crash into houses and there was a huge public safety risk. And that's like, wow, they they really do know that they're screwed, right? What? They're really concerned about low latency internet from the sky.
Brad Kirby:Amazon just failed to launch 4500 satellites yesterday. Another piece of news
James Thomason:4500 4500.
Brad Kirby:Yes. Which Elon was opposed to?
Dean Nelson:I've already got that space. That's my meta space. What are you doing? If I
James Thomason:was watching the Pixar cartoon while they set in the future when the earth is completely encased in, like junk satellites and space garbage, that's it. happening fast.
Brad Kirby:Speaking of satellites, good, good show Netflix called billion dollar code. But these German developers who created the first version of Google Earth, and their patent was infringed upon. Or so they made it seem
James Thomason:to be a pretty good idea. It's a forerunner to VCs told them now there's no demand for global geospatial data that'll never work. Look at satellite imagery
Brad Kirby:to Deutsche Telekom, funded them as a art project initially. They really, yeah, that's interesting, though. 10 years before Google Earth launched.
James Thomason:Even the US government and forestry services have been taking satellite and aerial photos going back in the last century actually had to rely on it in a land dispute case for one of my properties where government agency insisted that the land was in a certain way. And I insisted that it wasn't and when we went back and looked at aerial photos from like, the 1940s Indeed, it was not that way. So that became really material. So thank you, aerial photographers, and thank you geospatial infantry guys with their patents infringed on in the new Netflix series. What was the name Brad?
Brad Kirby:It's called the billion dollar code,
James Thomason:the billion dollar code.
Brad Kirby:It's in German, like they have the dub version on Netflix, but I watch it with original subtitles
James Thomason:that Netflix has decided I'm Scandinavian I've watched so much weird stuff and I keep getting like the weirdest shows now and some of them are really good. Yeah.
Brad Kirby:I really like the show lives as well.
James Thomason:Even though they're you know, subtitles slash dubbed postmortem, no one dies and squareness is a great series.
Dean Nelson:I really liked Ragnarok Ragnarok. Yes, that's a great really good and it was very,
James Thomason:that's a really good series. And maths if you haven't seen that night maths that is such a good series. Really? Yeah, it's it's not it's that's a US or Canadian series. But it is such a good series is so well done. The cinematography, Doctor script character. It's just a great, it's a great little series. Really, really beautifully.
Dean Nelson:It was talking about squid games, and I haven't I haven't gone
Brad Kirby:through two or three episodes left of that. Okay, it's,
James Thomason:yeah. It's basically just Metaverse but like, you know, squid versus Battle Royale. slivers? Yeah.
Brad Kirby:Japanese version, that movie. Okay, Battle Royale. Alright.
James Thomason:Alright. So you mentioned this, Brad, there's a controversial Bitcoin tax provision, not a Bitcoin tax provision, but a Bitcoin tax provision in the Congress infrastructure bill, and did this pass, this is a problem now. Is it one version of the bill? Is it law?
Brad Kirby:It is it is not a law. I think when I went through the Senate, they leave, they kind of lighten the language a little bit. But not to the not enough that that satisfied I think, anybody in the space. I read it as a chartered accountant. I didn't think it was insane. And I had a few arguments with people that wanted to pretty much kill me when I when I when I challenged them on it, but
James Thomason:other super receptive to taxation, I'm sure you get a lot of comments and feedback.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, it was a little open ended. But they did, they did tighten up a little bit. But it will ruffle feathers because they need to put the systems in a place to do things like withholding and reporting their OS and everything that that you would see a broker dealer do.
James Thomason:Wait, so what so what is the requirement? It's a reporting requirement for individuals or for institutions, institutions? Okay.
Dean Nelson:So it says here, crypto currency tax reporting is important, but it must be done correctly. And this is a letter back in August from the lawmakers. They said when the infrastructure investment and jobs act comes to the house, we must prioritize amending this language to clearly exempt a noncustodial, Blockchain intermediaries and ensure that civil liberties are protected. do you explain that, Brad?
Brad Kirby:Yes. So there's a lot of intermediaries in the capital market supply chain. And you think of things like transfer agents, custodians, these entities typically with securities don't have this reporting requirement, compared to a broker dealer. Okay. And the argument was that it was a little bit vague and whether or not they were meant to be captured. There were a number of congressmen that came out and said, that wasn't the intention. That's not the intention. I don't think it will be the intention. I don't think anybody will be required to that's a transfer agent to be reporting these things. Let alone I mean, cryptocurrency is meant to disintermediate these parties anyways, so Right, right, like shut up and get over yourself. That's that's, that's my No offense, but that's my two cents. But it was a bit of a loose reading. And that's not the intention. It's meant to capture The exchanges like Coinbase that are really broker dealers that are like your eyes that your Robin Hood's that, that needs to be doing these recordings for, for tax collection purposes.
Dean Nelson:And they're saying is too broad and vague, because it could also include the miners, wallet developers and that kind of thing instead of just the brokers, or what would you say, as a broker like Coinbase?
Brad Kirby:The brokers should be included? I mean,
Dean Nelson:yeah, yeah, it seems like it.
Brad Kirby:And thank you could also because they use the term digital asset, you could start extending that to things like NF Ts, right. So if you have an exchange where you're trading or like Sotheby's, for example, using NF T's. That is I have to start reporting. There's some of that, that I, I can understand as an SI around, because somebody doesn't have to.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, right now that the guy that bought that art for 69 million digital ardor and ft for that art we talked about in another episode. Yeah. So would the creator of that be taxed in that manner? Or is that not taxed right now?
Brad Kirby:All it would always be taxed, whether or not it was a non fungible token or not, was still the still sale taxable? Assets are still taxable. Right? Right. So personal property, whether it's digitized or not, is irrelevant. But the fact that it is on an exchange or it is a marketplace, it does leave it a little open ended. So and I mean, why not try to click on if you're, if you're the IRS, why not? That's all
Dean Nelson:they collect, from
Brad Kirby:his opinion on that, but I believe that,
James Thomason:oh, no, I'm a very compliant tax filer.
Brad Kirby:So you know, if someone bought that for 10 million and sold it for 69 million, I should be paying their their taxes on those gains.
James Thomason:Besides money, you know, money is, so last century, everything is, we're living in a virtual world. Now, people make money out of nothing. I don't know if you follow the story of the group that took and bought an original Andy Warhol drawing for $20,000 and then destroy the provenance and made 999 copies, and then sold the entirety of the 1004, tutor and 50. Folks, that's a$200,000 profit for everyone paying attention. So the idea is that, you know, one lucky person got an original Warhol 999 People got a copy, but no one knows who it is. It's almost like a lottery to win, you know, with a guaranteed winner to win the original Warhol. But no one knows who's is what. And the provenance is destroyed. So there's no way to prove it anyway. I guess, you know, it's probably too young for radiocarbon dating. Or maybe there's DNA testing or something else I could do to try to restore the provenance. But how gangster is that? Right is danger. That's just pretty great art provenance to make a 10x Unicorn like return in a few days, like instantaneously. So we're gonna take the Mona Lisa down, make 999 copies of it, destroy the original provenance and you know, sell the copies for 20,000 each.
Dean Nelson:There you go. Just make one of her smile. That's all.
James Thomason:It's so meta. It's just so bad. That is my new catchphrase, by the way. Yeah, it's so meta. Okay, well, another Senate bill, that seems to have bipartisan support. I don't know if this passed yet would limit big tech mergers. Was that the case? Brad? So I think this is a situation, there's a heightened awareness around the idea that big tech might be turning into a monopoly that we want to limit the size and number of companies that they can legitimately acquire under the same entity.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, so I think it's just been introduced, but it says this bipartisan legislation will put an end to those anti competitive acquisitions, and making it more difficult for dominant digital platforms to eliminate their competitors. More difficult, maybe.
James Thomason:But to an entrepreneur, it sounds like they're making it harder for them to buy my company, which is part of like, why we start companies to sell them to other companies. I mean, as you guys will know, I'd be thrilled with the breakup of any of these companies. And we broke up Standard Oil at 90%. These companies have 95% plus market share in their respective domains. So I would be ecstatic if they broke up Google and YouTube and Facebook and Instagram. The world would be a better place that day with the emerging new shiny boards of those, those baby big Tex. And there'll be a flurry of acquisitions that would result from that. Think about all the things that Instagram would have to buy that it didn't have because it got a divorce from Facebook and vice versa. It would really oxygenate the water. So I'm, I'm all for it. I feel like everyone's dancing around the issue like oh, let's put some nice restrictions on big tech. To the audience who threatening and dangerous and it's more of a case of like no let's let's break them the mother f up because they're gigantic destructive monopolies how would that How about everyone gains some kind of scruples and deploys them to break up giant monopolies? I don't know. Maybe it's just me. Everyone loves your big tech so much. We're all going to be getting Metaverse from the satellites anyway. So maybe maybe it doesn't matter so much anyway. These are basically becoming divisions of government anyway, right? So it's kind of like meta versus government service, right? I think that's what's next, right? Everyone? Everyone? Metaverse is a human right?
Brad Kirby:I think Facebook is the government of the metaverse.
James Thomason:It has its own currency.
Brad Kirby:Oh, they they got their currency coming out of its
James Thomason:border job to
Brad Kirby:their only is pursuing the wallet with the drop the currency. What do you know, they only want the transaction data.
James Thomason:They're like, yeah, you're having all transactions Earth is good enough. We'll take that.
Dean Nelson:Well, what was that called? Is we were talking about David, what was his name? He went over it. He went over to Facebook, and he was doing all the crypto. Yeah. David. David Marcus. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So you're saying that that that change, then there's what's called
Brad Kirby:Libra and then they change that they changed it to something else, just like Facebook is doing. And collibra was the wallet service called Libra. Okay, my understanding is that there was too much regulatory pushback from without trying to do and it has been put on hold, and they just want to be a wallet service so that they can see everybody's transaction data, which was really probably their ultimate goal. The beginning anyways.
Dean Nelson:Interesting. collibra ca meta. Meta. So meta, is meta.
James Thomason:Well, the Biden administration has blacklisted the NSO group maker of Pegasus spyware, we've talked about several times in this podcast. Brad, I know you've spent a lot of time researching this group and had some theories conspiracy, that you were a victim of this spyware. How do you feel about this blacklisting. And what does it mean?
Brad Kirby:Yeah, I think it's the right, the right move. They've always maintained that they're independent. And they sell the technology to government organizations, that they have the ability to shut it off at any given point. There's been a number of stories and specifically the Darknet diaries by Jack Crusader, Episode 100. They covered it last month. That's a it's a really fascinating episode. They kind of build into how bad NSO group has become, to the point where they're actually operating their own spyware, to spy on people to spy on the children of journalists to feed information.
James Thomason:Wasn't No, wasn't Jeffy Jeff BIG JEFFY Jeff Bezos phone hacked by Pegasus was the genesis moment where people take it seriously like, oh, yeah, maybe maybe this is yeah, maybe
Brad Kirby:that that working group that Biden have added the White House and a chat about that. And that was what came of it. But yeah, Phasellus was hacked, I think in 2017, I believe, from Pegasus specifically. And there's been a number of major politically exposed people, journalists, activists, but there has been good uses. They they claim to have caught El Chapo from Pegasus. So there's a lot of interesting utilization about this. They used to click spyware. You said the click it. But now it's zero click, and now it's been able to infiltrate iOS, and it's just gotten too far. So I think it's, but it doesn't stop with the US is around the world.
James Thomason:So the net the net of is that it bans all trade with this entity, right? They're on a, they're on a super special list of entities, which any US person or US company cannot do business with. Is that how that works?
Brad Kirby:Yes, it's correct. Yeah.
Dean Nelson:That's a death was curious.
Brad Kirby:to other companies with this announcement.
James Thomason:It's quite the sanction. Yeah.
Brad Kirby:But I think it's a move.
Dean Nelson:I heard the other day Huawei started exiting hardware, compute hardware, primarily because of the blacklist blacklisting that's going on. Right? There's just no way that they could compete. So yeah, these are these are pretty serious decisions that come in. So I'm gonna I'm not endorsing Huawei. I'm just saying that the interesting, interesting results of this, it's like sanctions against countries, right. They're really, really, really hard to get around.
Brad Kirby:This is a result of a group in Toronto here, actually, citizen Citizen Lab. They do a lot of research around it and they've they've been on NSL for like, the last four years now. And they've really done a good job of reporting around them. And that's how I know that I was also compromised by the same spyware whether it was I'm sure it wasn't them, but somehow it got into my ecosystem.
Dean Nelson:Somewhere, I believe, I remember when you did that, I'm like, okay, my download software, do I? Am I infected?
Brad Kirby:I'm not gonna talk about it publicly.
Dean Nelson:It told me i COVID, but it didn't tell me at Pegasus. So it was okay.
James Thomason:Yeah. So the US also lead charges against the Ukrainian and Russian set of Ukrainian and Russian nationals over a sweeping amount of ransomware attacks that we've touched on quite a bit this year. I guess they've collected over 200 million from ransomware attacks. So you know, today on the NASDAQ shares in the hacking group, Rose $234 billion through NFT. Sales, and I'm just kidding. Just gonna say what? You know, Twitter billion is a lot of revenue. I mean, that's a pretty serious business we collect ransomware. Right. That's, that's not a insignificant amount of money at all. So did you hear about this team?
Dean Nelson:Yeah, I heard about this, that the group was called a reveal. If you think about the way it's it's pronounced, so it's Ari VI. L.
James Thomason:I read it as our evil.
Dean Nelson:I know. So that's what I mean. Like, it's
Brad Kirby:like it's it's Evil Corp. Evil Corp is the corporation. Mr. Robot. Goes back to that.
Dean Nelson:Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So like you're saying $200 million of ransomware. This is the stuff with the meat supplier right out of Brazil, the JBS one. And then MSP the the occasion that forced the Swedish grocer Co Op, to close nearly 800 of its stores. I mean, it's these really serious hacks that have been going on.
James Thomason:Yeah. And I mean, that's pretty real, right? I mean, there are angry hacker photos put out by the FBI, for a number of these guys, like on the website now. So they seem pretty serious. I mean, I'm doubting that. I mean, in particular, the case of the Russian nationals, they're probably working for the government. Right. So probably not going to get arrested anytime soon. And then handed over to the feds, I'm thinking. Yeah,
Dean Nelson:yeah, this is a cool, I really focused effort to go do something. But at that, that's a lot of coordination.
Brad Kirby:They also charged another one with 3000 attacks at$13 million. on us.
James Thomason:They also put out a bounty right, but it was for a different group. Right. There was a different ransomware. Gang.
Brad Kirby:That was for the Colonial Pipeline back, I believe. Right. So
James Thomason:there's a there's a $10 million State Department bounty for anyone who has information that will lead them to identify or locate the leadership of the Group Dark Side. That's a pretty significant federal bounty 10 million bucks. which I guess means they have no clue who did this.
Brad Kirby:Like none. Yeah.
James Thomason:Which, again, is probably likely to be like a state actor in that case, right. The level of sophistication of that talk was pretty. Yeah, pretty
Dean Nelson:high. Dark sign affiliates.
Brad Kirby:Well, if you saw Russia did Ukraine back in? Was it 2016 or 2017? Was pretty much shut the whole country down. Tear electrical grid. Oh, yeah. Something that people don't talk about so much. That's another interesting story. So that was, I feel like there might have been some some overlap with that group. Talented, talented people, that's for sure.
James Thomason:Or rapid fire we've got, we're wrapping up the show, we got 15 minutes or so we got a bunch of other stuff going on, though. Google invested a billion dollars in CME Group, the futures exchange, is that the case they actually put money in? Yep. And I guess the quid pro quo is that CME Group is moving a good bit of its infrastructure to Google's cloud. So they're sort of like taking Google money to buy Google stuff. That sounds shady to me. But hey, you know, I'm sure it's all aboveboard Chicago, talk about all these new monitoring systems and tracking everyone's bank account and deals like this. You know, what I want? I want the government to pass a law that connects my trading accounts to Nancy Pelosi, these stock trades. So then, you know, I can we can all benefit. When Nancy makes an insider trade, and then it's all automated. We don't have to do anything. They just we buy shares and, and Google or whatever happens to be trading that day. That's going to propose this. I have some contacts in Washington, I think, Okay, this time. I think we get this done. You're just out there. So there we go. I was just out there. Meeting with everyone. You know, that was giving us some very, yeah, this came up. We'll make sure it comes weeks on the agenda next time for sure. Okay, so what else do we know about this deal? Brad anything
Brad Kirby:is a 10 year partnership. So it's a billion dollars over 10 years, and they're moving their futures exchange to the cloud, like Amazon last year, also partnered with two exchanges, one in Singapore, and another one in London, to do a pilot program to move their infrastructure from on prem to to the cloud. So you're seeing this as a trend. You're seeing it with financial institutions to
Dean Nelson:Yeah, it's just it's that industry, I think what they're doing is trying to break in. So, you know, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, I was out there when I was with eBay. And we were collaborating on metrics and measurement and the infrastructure, I was able to go see what they what they did. But if you think about the steel, it's a billion a billion dollars over 10 years, that means it's basically $100 million and commit in cloud contracts, which they're going to be doing pretty easily. So they can migrate a certain percentage of their infrastructure over to over to Google Cloud, and basically get this but the billion dollars, this is a big deal, I think for Google, because they can break into the financial sector, and they have CME as a anchor. Yep, we're making CME work. So why can't you move over? So it's a good tactic?
James Thomason:I see it as that. But I mean, I also see this as a potentially Google Making a direct move into the financial sector. And that may mean, meaning Google may run and own the exchange in the future. Right. So they may there may be
Brad Kirby:non voting though. That's perfect there. pref shares?
James Thomason:That's not voting, but it's a billion dollars. And yeah, you know, once once they're wedded to Google's infrastructure, you know, an acquisition isn't out of the question, right? I mean, they they could they could definitely own it, right. I mean, they could definitely own CME Group. So I view this as like, maybe a toehold into something much bigger, like a longer term strategic play, where Google moves, begins offering product in the financial services sector, not just Cloud Hosting, but maybe something else, like a new type of exchange. I mean, exchange is a very lucrative business models very stable. And the kind of like the same DNA, right, like, in a way, like the the infrastructure systems and stuff that the exchanges are made of. I mean, they're, they're very cloud infrastructure like, right, so with rich network connectivity, so I think they could, I don't know, I don't know anything. This is pure speculation. Like, I think they could begin to offer data feed products, trading products, you know, clearance and exchange products, like from their basically points of presence from their Edge locations, trying to compete and then tying in at the API level starts to tie in, basically every other financial services company into this ecosystem. So it could be like a, it could be the first toehold in like a much bigger platform play is what I'm trying to get out.
Brad Kirby:Okay, analytics.
James Thomason:Yeah, like it could be. Yeah, think of think of Google is like Bloomberg, like most
Brad Kirby:direct competitor to Uber. That's Google Berg. Googler. Michael Gerber.
James Thomason:Yeah, that's, that's really interesting news embedded with so yeah, it was it was a billion dollar equity investment, non voting, convertible preferred shares. The back channel is there. They're getting the revenue over 10 years. Back into the club. Yeah, I think there's something bigger at play. And we'll we'll mark down this episode in our notes, when Google burgers announced. But it has all my spider senses
Brad Kirby:tingling. It has me too. That's right.
James Thomason:Yeah, yeah. And put this together with Google's massive investment in machine learning. Right? True, also highly complementary to that whole business unit. Right. So Cloud Plus ai plus, could be could become the world's dominant financial services platform. That's Huh. Huh. Let me call my real quick. The markets still open. I got no damn it is closed. Okay, 10 cents for a two chips. The three chips, Tencent unveiled on Wednesday are all custom built, one for AI inference, one for video transcoding and another for network interface. So this seems pretty far from video games right? After seeing that they're getting to this this business.
Brad Kirby:Interesting move Fisher.
Dean Nelson:But it's very, very similar to what Amazon, right, they make their own silicone. And they've been doing that for a decade. So because they just got to the size where it made sense. They bought their own fab. I forgot where it was, but they bought that to start building. And so if you think Tencent their their big company, and they spent a lot of money on infrastructure, but I think this really goes back to control, right, their chipset, their ability to actually get this into a lot of different places and lock it in.
James Thomason:Yeah, since getting into chips while he's getting out of hardware.
Brad Kirby:References The Smart NIC comes concept as well, which is something that you know, one of our listeners actually The worst one of the one of the top smart NIC companies. That's the network interface card. And for gaming, that's actually quite important. Right? So I'm just general video computing. It's as it stands alone. So maybe what they're seeing is that the chips on the market that are being offered by Nvidia, maybe are, maybe they think they can do a better job.
Dean Nelson:Well, it really just comes down to there's so much more data coming through the network. They need to offload these into those types of processors, offload processors. Yeah, I think that we had the infrastructure Mason's end user summit just last month. And this came up in those conversations, that there's a lot of these offload processors that have been created, especially on the Knicks, and they're just not utilized. Much, you know, that could just be that people don't really have the software that optimizes that yet, or they just don't know how to optimize it. But yeah, there's a lot of a lot of investment in this. And you think it's just like GPUs when they came out, you know, you didn't want the CPU to be a bottleneck. So they, you know, they have Nvidia, Nvidia link or endlink, whatever that is, and B link in between the GPU so that you can have the speed between those units, same kind of thing where you're offloading, you know, another trend, a trend that came up in that session, I thought that was interesting that ties to this is composable infrastructure. So that is where we are still bound by a box, that box has a certain so think of a server that has a specific amount of CPU and memory and buses and channels and PCI lanes and all the other aspects of it. They're starting to say they break this up to say, I've got pools of CPUs, I've got pools of memory pools of storage, and I start composing all these parts together into that, well, that was called a mainframe before. Just happens to be this new, cool composable infrastructure. Yeah, no, but, but it's, it's really just just trying to break things up to increase and improve performance. So these offloads are, I think, are going to be leverage pretty heavily. But to go back to Tencent, if you think about it, they are investing in AI ml and offloads right, and that. So I mean, James, you you know quite a bit about this. When you think about the CDN aspects of what's going to happen at the edge.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, 10 cent video is like there's that flexible Akula. China as well. Right. So you got to think about that from a CDN perspective.
Dean Nelson:Encoding to Yeah, just, again, the resolution is going up, the volume is going up, the experiences going up the game game aspects of it. So yeah, I can see the huge amount of need for this on the network or at the edge in different steps in the network.
James Thomason:Yeah, we've been talking about moving things like parts of the game engine down into smart NICs for like, literally for decades. And all the attempts of doing that. So far, I've been kind of stymied by the fact that things change so fast. By the time you get the silicon done, you have a new game engine, it's not supported. So it starts over again. It's just like a constant push and pull there. I mean, conceptually, we've always thought that was the right thing to do, right? Get get code closer to the network, as close as it can be like literally writing packets out the interface. And that's a good thing for game performance. It's a good thing for your computer's performance overall, I don't know, you know, all these, the video game company making the chips for the video games, it's just so meta, isn't it? I mean, I'm not gonna stop. Okay, we're gonna keep this up for a little while. Now, I think it's interesting. Everyone is building some kind of AI inference thing, chip, or some kind of like, feature extraction, Edge inference, special purpose async, to do a really specific thing, I think this is going to reverse. I think what's going to happen is you're going to get more general purpose computing closer to the things that needs to be close to, because it's just too it's too expensive to build these ASICs and then the long tail on their marketability is they don't have one, it's really short, right? So you have to get this thing to market. It's kind of like the, I mean, look what's happening even like in crypto, right, you have an ASIC miner. It's good for like six months, and then it's garbage. And that's just that's just the basic business. Right? So I, I think you're gonna get more general purpose processing down there. I mean, that's what Intel was working on. For a really long time was like getting general purpose processors like on the network. That's, I mean, there's smart NIC initiatives. Right. Yeah. And so I
Brad Kirby:think, I think there might be an interesting, that's where you see the potential.
James Thomason:Yeah, there's this general trend of like, right now, everything an edge, people are trying to cram processors and special purpose ASICs onto the devices themselves. And that drives up the cost of the device, and kind of our thesis on it. And we were admittedly, like, way ahead on this particular trend. And by that, I mean futuristic not to say that we're, you know, correct necessarily in our prediction, but our belief is that what you want is more clusters of high powered edge computing, that you can leverage over the network in close proximity to you so think about you know, taking taken for granted, wherever you are that you can sort of plug into an electrical outlet and electricity, you should be able to take for granted that wherever you are, there's some really expensive computer near you that can do a lot of stuff on your behalf at high speed over the network. And that's going to be way more economical in the end than trying to build all this custom stuff. And, you know, cram it onto the device in question, if you look at like these cameras that are doing inference, or they're doing feature extraction, and they're cramming processing on them. I mean, they're, they're huge, right? I mean, they're like 40 pounds, huge heat sinks. And they're expensive, you know,$300 $1,000 $3,000, in some cases, and I think that the IoT demands the opposite, really cheap stuff, that's really well connected, and that you can harness that in, you know, with some nearby computing capacity. So we're, I'm totally at odds with that trends. Like, I think like, it's gonna go the other way back towards consolidation, or centralization. But the centralization will be at the edge, it won't be like in cloud, necessarily, it'll be the new cloud and the, the far edge of the network and close proximity to things. And so I believe in it so much, I'm running a company to do exactly that. There you go, putting in your money.
Brad Kirby:I just can't you guys an article from from Charlie Ashton Apotek. He is an avid listener. So he's always he's always sending great articles about what we talked about. This is specifically about this, to agree to that. That's awesome. Thank
Dean Nelson:you. You know, I had a I had a conversation this morning, by the way, about this very topic. And with some people that, you know, you guys both know, and I agree with you, James, I think that there's there's not a one size fits all, I think this is going to be a combination of many, many things that create a mesh of different types of compute, and there's going to need be a need for concentrated AI, concentrated machine learning, but that's gonna be percentage of the larger compute. And the general compute needs to be distributed all over the place, as well as the storage. And so this whole, we just talked about the composable infrastructure, right? If you think about it, this is distributed computing, we're basically moving everything is close to the the consumption that it can be. And they're gonna have software that orchestrates between all those those units to be able to make that a large system. So serving metros and any of the other consumption, whether it's smart city initiatives and the other things we've talked about. So I, I know, we're all preaching to the choir here. We agree with this, this statement of this approach. But I think that to get to scale, and do this the right way, there has to be standardization on a lot of this, whether it's packaging, or units, or plug ability, or that kind of thing. standard ways in which these units can go off at any blue collar worker can walk in and swap something out. Because we're gonna have so many locations, and so many of these commodities all over the place, that it needs to be right it needs to be just like swapping a tire on a car, you just have another car tire and pop another one on, right. There's just got to be standardization across it. But I do believe that this is the Wild West and no one really has the definition yet. Everyone's got a different definition. And there's billions and billions of dollars being sunk into this. Billions and billions right now without full definitions. And we'll see who emerges. But overall, if you can orchestrate all those elements, Mr. Thomason you might win. You might win the grand
James Thomason:prize that might work for you. It would, Tommy pretty good,
Brad Kirby:right? Let's be honest, I sense from the inside.
Dean Nelson:Mr. Kirby, I agree with you.
James Thomason:Alright, so if this doesn't give you pucker factor, ladies and gentlemen, nothing will the United States Treasury has been buying private app data to target and investigate people in an effort to circumvent Fourth Amendment restrictions on improper search and seizure. Quotes from Wyden co sponsor of the Fourth Amendment is not for sale act, proposed legislation that would force law enforcement intelligence agent to obtain a court order before using this sort of app data. It's clear that multiple federal agencies have turned to purchasing Americans data to buy their way around Americans Fourth Amendment rights. The limited spending that's been done on this so far has been seems to be targeted at foreign interests, or United States being interested in in the activities of foreign interests. But this is pretty scary, right? Because it is a backdoor. I mean, advertising companies are completely unscrupulous, and they'll hoover up whatever data they can on consumer devices, and there's nothing to prevent them from turning around and selling that data. They've done it. Notably, during the election cycle a few years ago, we see the use of that kind of data, right? So this is this is pretty scary. Brad, do you know the status of this act? Is it is it is it moving
Brad Kirby:yet? I don't know if it's moving yet. I'm not sure where it's at right now. But it's like it's go through OFAC right, like if the FBI, the IRS, the DOD. We've all done this before but you know, rather than kind of backing off of If this kind of invasive processes, they continue to, to use this type of ad tech for location jacking for economic sanctions and skirting the the law or or, you know, poorly breaking it really to kind of achieve their their surveillance in Texas. So
James Thomason:according to the intercept to contracts obtained via Freedom of Information Act request, and shared with the intercept by tech on Korea research and advocacy group show that over the past four months, the Treasury acquired two powerful new data feeds from Babel Street, one for its sanctions enforcement branch and one for the Internal Revenue Service. Hmm. Well, that makes it makes Bucher tighter than a diamond, the middle. Last bit of legislation, House Republicans introduced a strategy to establish a national privacy standard. This is pretty interesting, right, Brad? Dean, did you see this?
Dean Nelson:I haven't seen this one yet. So what what exactly is being suggested in this privacy, it makes me a little nervous.
James Thomason:It gives it gives, again, the pucker factor, right? So it says this national standard will provide clear rules of the road and give Americans the same data protections wherever they go. Privacy has not ended state lines and Americans deserve better, blah, blah, blah. It kind of feels like maybe an Americanized version of some of the privacy protections that exist in the EU. But I haven't waited through this whole thing.
Dean Nelson:Let's they've got four principles in this. Yeah, the internet does not stop at state lines. So why should one state set the standard for the rest of the country? It's like create, right, creating arbitrary barriers to the internet may result in different options, opportunities experiences online. So okay, a lack of transparency has led to where we are today. This is principle two, and any federal bill must ensure people understand how their information is collected, used and shared. Okay. Third is any federal bill must ensure companies are implementing reasonable measures to protect people's personal information? Okay. With those those are for principle four is must also protect small business innovation. We know that in Europe, investing investments, and startups are down more than 40% Since our data protection and privacy law GDPR when it went into effect, we must guard against a similar situation here.
James Thomason:Yeah. Yeah. So this is a discussion draft bill, I got to the bottom of that. So that's that's the, you know, reason for the rather nonspecific and high level description of what, what we're talking about. So it's just a discussion draft, no legislation to look at yet. It doesn't appear to be. So I think this is going to be part of the Republican cloud hammer against big tech, that is definitely going to come to a head probably around the next end of the next election cycle, depending on how Congress turns up, right. And if you believe that projections, then, you know, I think I think they are getting ready for an assumption of power event in the next election cycle. And that point of time, they're going to have the big tech clown hammer. Ready. That's that's what this looks like. To me. You read between the lines? I read between the lines read between the lines? Interesting. We'll keep track that for everyone on the show. And for ourselves, of course. And hey, you know, it's almost turkey day. Yeah.
Dean Nelson:I think we should get the turkey a round of applause, don't you? I didn't really think we should. Yes.
James Thomason:Thank you for the grades. Okay.
Dean Nelson:All right. I am right there with you. Yep. You guys.
James Thomason:Unto us. We're having 52 episodes in the bag, as they say, you know, we put a lot of time into this podcast, a lot of planning a lot of a lot of preparation work. And gosh, you know, we enjoy doing it. And just want to thank everyone for for being listener over the year, it's been longer than a year 52 episodes, we're trying to keep to 52 episodes a year now with, with hopefully COVID The worst of it being passed us. And there you go. So thanks very much, everyone. And if you do enjoy the show, and you love staying on top of the latest news in tech and business and the really just I mean, Dawson guests, be real with the folks we bring awesome guests on the show CEOs of companies that are doing innovative things, technology leadership, forward thinking futurists just the best and brightest right and that's that's our aim. So if you do enjoy that please do give us a five star review at your leisure it does help us game the algorithms and grow the audience and bigger is better as they say Right? I think we need we need more friends. Everyone needs more friends. I need more friends. Speaking person so subscribe.
Brad Kirby:Make sure you subscribe on Spotify or subscribe know
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