Chapter 1: What is the Defiance Act and why was it passed?
your nightly rebellion against predictable radio and podcasts the last show It is time for Technology Time. We are joined by tech analyst, tech expert, and friend of mine, Carmi Levy. Some people call him Random Access Carmi.
Does anyone call you that, Carmi? No, because that shortens to Ram Carmi, which quite frankly has some implications I really don't want to get into or have to explain to my wife. So maybe Random Access Carmi would work on its own.
All right. Rack, I think. Random access. Never mind. Let's talk about this act that has been passed by the U.S. Senate. It's not signed to law yet, but it's basically trying to protect people with whom deep fakes create fake images of them, fake videos of them that are awful. We're talking like dark stuff, like pornographic, things like this, which I would want myself...
protected from that even though i don't really care if anyone sees me naked i don't want anyone to generate images of me and then i don't know blackmail my employer with them or if i'm a young person send them to all my college peers or just people can do really awful stuff with this tech and i do think there needs to be some protection
Yeah, I mean, it's an ultimate nightmare scenario, and certainly we've seen it over the past couple of weeks, specifically with Grok, where regular unsuspecting people are posting images of themselves, as people often do, to their ex-account, and then complete strangers are grabbing those images, running them through Grok, nudifying them, sexualizing them, putting them in bikinis, or taking off their clothes, and then distributing them to
their followers, at which point they go viral. So imagine that level of digital victimization. I mean, it's a form of virtual sexual assault, and you have no control over it as a victim. And so it's called the Defiance Act, and it's probably the best acronym ever coined. It stands for disrupt explicit forged images and non-consensual edits for defiance.
And it was sponsored by a Democratic senator and the Senate has now passed it unanimously. So everybody agreed this is necessary. It ensures that anybody who's been victimized by non-consensual, sexually explicit deepfakes of themselves, that they can take civil action against the people who have done so.
So it at least gives victims an opportunity to level the playing field to seek some kind of justice against these cretins who are doing this online, using AI image generators like Grok to persecute this kind of crime.
It's weird. They're being kind of technical about it.
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Chapter 2: How is Grok AI being integrated into U.S. military networks?
They're not saying the very generation of it is the problem. It's like the hosting of it. Could I use this act? Suppose someone did something awful like this to me. Could I use some mechanism on X or Twitter? I'm still calling it Twitter. I don't care. Twitter forever. To like cause them to then immediately take down the post? Like what would the mechanism be for me? Can I just sue?
Because that seems really difficult. The average person doesn't have access to a lawyer and a lawsuit. Is it sort of like a digital millennium copyright act takedown?
Which for those who have no idea what I'm talking about, that's like if a pirated video gets posted to the internet or some copyrighted content gets stolen, I can just submit to YouTube and say, hey, that song that someone added to their video is mine. Please take it down. I don't have to go to the courts to do it necessarily. Is it more like that?
It's kind of like it. And what it does is it works in concert with legislation that was already on the book. So that piece of legislation was known as the Take It Down Act, and that was passed earlier last year. And that requires the platforms to remove the content when asked to do so. So it doesn't stop the content from showing up in the first place. And I think that's the it'll still occur.
Tools like GROK can continue to exist. They will have no guardrails preventing this kind of thing.
The law doesn't compel them to put those guardrails in place, but it at least gives options both to victims to have it to go after perpetrators with civil action, and it also, in concert with the Take It Down Act, requires the platforms like X, like GROK, like OpenAI, like anyone, to remove the content once they become aware that it's there. So
Little bit more protection now than we've had previously.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of breaking up Apple's App Store?
Still doesn't address the root cause of the problem because those image generators are still there. And there's still no law that requires image generators to explicitly stop these kinds of assets from being created in the first place.
So if Elon Musk decides to remove the guardrails, they've said that they're going to prevent Grok from doing so in future in response to this latest controversy if they decide at some future point in time to remove it. There's nothing in law that sanctions them accordingly. And that's a bit of a problem. It means we still have a ways to go in terms of putting laws in place.
And of course, this is only in the U.S. You know, north of the border in Canada, there's really nothing equivalent. And so if you really want to continue to perpetrate this kind of crime, you just move to Canada and keep on keep on keeping on.
Ooh, I do have a Canadian passport, but this sort of crime is not interesting to me.
No, but now you said it on air, so now they're watching.
Now, on the one hand, we've got the Senate passing a law that seeks to maybe curb Grok or Elon Musk's ex's AI thing. It's probably the most off-the-rails, widely available AI product offered by a large company. So on the one hand, they're potentially curbing some of the behavior of this AI bot or at least what happens to content generated by it.
But then on the other hand, in the US government, we go to the Secretary of Defense or Secretary of War or whatever. They're announcing they want to use Grok AI into military software. So like, which one is it? Are they going against Musk? It's like they don't know what the left hand and the right hand are doing.
They don't seem to know how to read the room. I mean, on the one hand, you have Grok going off the rails and being rightfully spanked for it. And countries around the world are, for example, Indonesia and Malaysia, they are banning Grok now because of this controversy. And in the U.S.,
essentially saying, OK, we know that Grok is problematic, but we're going to put it on all of our systems at the Pentagon by the end of the month. So defense secretary. What could go wrong? Exactly. What a great idea. So Pete Hegseth has said he wants to integrate Grok into the Pentagon's networks by the end of the month. And that includes every unclassified network and more troublingly,
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Chapter 4: How are big streamers responding to new financial disclosure rules?
every classified network throughout the Defense Department. He says it's part of their AI acceleration strategy, which is basically use AI to remove barriers, unleash experimentation, focus on investment, blah, blah, blah.
I don't want that in military software.
That's the scary thing is that, you know, architecturally, Grok we know is problematic. And now you're going to combine that without a whole lot of due process here. It's not like they studied this for years to make sure that it was safe or that it would ensure that classified military American data wouldn't end up in the wrong hands or
wouldn't be shared in some way with, you know, let's call them bad actors. So the checks and balances, the protections for this, what is essentially the most sensitive of all data, just simply aren't there. And the fact that it's Pete Hegseth? Oh, my God. Like, just no. I mean, this is the headlines for this are already being written now.
And it's only a matter of time before we see the first scandal blare again. because of this. This is just one of those bad ideas that, quite frankly, smarter people in the room should have stopped, but for whatever reason, they didn't.
I'm just thinking classified information and the most notorious AI model for not having guardrails. You mix those together. I don't see it getting good results, I got to say.
I find it amusing that before the U.S. went into Venezuela, they specifically did not inform anyone in Congress. So on the You know, the congressional committees that oversee the military, they were not advised. And what was the excuse was because they were worried that there were leakers there.
Never mind that all these people on these committees, all these elected officials have national security clearance and it's been done in the past. There have never been leaks associated with them in the past. And now they're willing to. So they're so worried about leaks, but now they're just going to layer over Grok on top of very sensitive Pentagon technology infrastructure.
And they think that there are no leaks at all. That to me is just unreal.
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Chapter 5: What is the current situation regarding Iran's internet shutdown?
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Apple's App Store. If you want to install software on your phone or on your iPad, you have to use it. You may not think much about that, but what that means is Apple has to approve everything you install on their platform. A platform that does that is not an open one. And there are people that would like this platform to be open.
There are app developers who don't want to have to pay Apple a cut to put their software in their app store. And that's what we're going to discuss here with Carmi Levy. There's a group in Canada that seeks to break up the app store. Carmi, welcome back to the show.
Good to be back. Yeah, this is a story that's been festering for a very long time, almost as long as app stores have existed.
There's always been this push by developers, smaller organizations, smaller companies, possibly competitors, who essentially say that they bristle at Apple's imposing of those rules that they say prevents competition, prevents consumer choice, lowers quality, increases prices.
And now they're called the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, and they filed an application with Canada's Competition Tribunal basically saying Apple's dominance is harming the market.
It's harming developers, it's harming consumers, it renders them with less choice, and it also puts up barriers to anyone else who would want to get into the market because Apple's rules are so stringent that they essentially form a block. to anyone else who wants to come in. And they are saying they would love for Apple's App Store to be broken up completely.
Kind of a bold move because, you know, this is Apple. But at the same time, I think they're sending a message.
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Chapter 6: How does the Iranian government manage telecommunications during protests?
And so it's sort of the best of both worlds. Google gets to have their walled garden. They get to approve everything, blah, blah, blah, just like Apple. But if I, an owner of a phone, really want to install something that doesn't do that, I can still do it. With Apple, you can't do that. I know I just asked you what it would look like and then described what it would look like.
But tell me what a world would look like where Apple wasn't so locked down.
So, I mean, I think the reason Apple has given for its approach to this relative to Google's is that it wants more control over the user experience. Over the money, Carmi, over the money. Of course it is. That's the quiet part. And we're saying that out loud. But the quiet part is, or the not so quiet part, is that Apple says it's concerned about security.
It's concerned about bad actors getting malicious code into Apple's ecosystem, which would ruin kind of the integrity of the iPhone, the iOS, the iPadOS platforms. And so that's been Apple's excuse. But of course, if you're a developer, you got to pay your 30% cut to Apple. And there are very specific rules about what you can and cannot do.
For the longest time, you couldn't put links in your app store entry. And so you couldn't direct customers to your website, for example. You couldn't set up your own payment system. You couldn't do in-app payments. And if you did, Apple could very well ban you from the platform. And it did so many times. Remember what happened with Fortnite when Apple and Epic were engaged in this battle.
Epic set up a paid, a separate payment system. Apple banned them from the app store. Next thing you know, they were spending years in court. So that's really sort of, that's what's at issue here is that Apple makes rules that it says are required for the integrity of their environment.
Whereas competitors say, no, it just blocks us and it hinders competition, hinders innovation, and it essentially kills our business and doesn't allow anyone else to get a leg up. And so it's the existential question.
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Chapter 7: What technological advancements are being used for internet censorship?
Do you believe Apple? Do you believe the outsiders who say that those rules should be loosened in a more Google-like way? And so, you know, as the competition tribunal looks at this, it's going to be asking those questions and bringing those stakeholders in to, you know, share their piece.
And obviously, 180 degrees apart, you know, hard to tell who's going to win, but it's an important conversation to have because this is how the digital economy works, at least today. Might change tomorrow, but at least for now. This is how we get stuff done on our phones. And this is how the money flows.
Well, if you think about desktop or laptop operating systems like Mac OS or Windows, if I want to install some software and pay a software distributor on my by doing so, let's think like Photoshop or any app where you have to pay money for it. Microsoft and Apple get zero percent. They get no cut. This is an open system.
I can install whatever software I want and they get 100 percent of whatever I pay. If I do it on the phone, Apple's taking a 30% cut. What, just for the pleasure of listing it on the App Store? That's insane. And there's nothing stopping them from next year turning it up to 35%, 40%, 90%. It's just made up and it's totally monopolistic.
And I get Apple saying, okay, we want to have consistency on our platform. We want to guarantee safety, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that cut seems so arbitrarily high. And for what, Carmi?
Because Apple says that it's like it built the playground, so it gets to make the rules. It crafts the infrastructure. It pays for it. Therefore, it takes what it says is a reasonable cut of the proceeds. Of course, if you're on the other side of that equation, you have a very different opinion.
I think it's a reasonable argument to be made that the world has changed since the App Store was first set up and that all the cards now sit in Apple's hands, and maybe that's not necessarily the most fair way to go about it. The problem that I see here is that, you know, who is the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic?
And does Canada's competition tribunal have the power to impose this change on arguably the world's most powerful technology company? using an app store that quite frankly has become the standard for how we get apps onto our smartphones and tablets.
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Chapter 8: How can individuals prepare for potential internet outages?
That's a pretty big lift for just the competition tribunal to have. And I kind of wonder where this is going to go. Makes for a great headline, but legally, economically, would this stick globally? I just don't see it happening.
I don't unless the U.S. regulators come down on Apple for their monopolistic practices with the App Store. I don't see it happening.
And exactly. And given politically sort of the change that we've seen in the relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley over the last year or so, I just don't see that happening anytime soon, I think. the interest is in maintaining the status quo, at least until technology renders this entire argument obsolete.
When AI takes over a lot of those workflows, instead of downloading apps onto our phones to get stuff done, we'll simply, as you can do in chat GPT today, we'll simply tag their partners to get things done. And at that point, the notion of downloading an app becomes very quaint indeed.
We've got a couple of minutes, but I want to stay in Canada here to like the, you know, internet regulators. They're the same organization that prevents me from swearing on the radio, the CRTC. Darn. Sort of. Darn. Sort of the CRTC. There's another thing called the Canadian Broadcast Standards. You know what? I'm not going to get into it. Okay. CVSC.
There's a new rule saying that streamers, you know, like Netflix, Amazon, this sort of thing, they have to disclose certain financial things in Canada. And streamers are really upset about this. Walk me through it.
So this is part of the Online Streaming Act, which, of course, is now law in Canada. And so the CRTC is trying to figure out, well, how do we determine when Netflix and Amazon show a movie or a TV show on their services in Canada? How do we figure out if it qualifies as Canadian content? Radio's been dealing with this for decades, of course.
They're taking that CanCon regulation and they're carrying it forward, trying to modernize it for the streaming era. And one of the things they want streaming companies to do is share some information on everything that they produce. So like if you produce a TV show or a movie, you have to share details on what makes it Canadian, right? So where's the director from? Where are the actors from?
Where was it filmed? And just as importantly, What are the financial statements attached to these projects? And that's where the streamers are pushing back and they sued the federal government. They're in the federal court of appeal. And they're essentially saying, we do not want to share our financial information with you. That would affect our competitive position. Why would we want to do that?
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