Katherine Druckman (0s): Hey everyone. Welcome back to reality. 2.0, I am Katherine Druckman and I am talking to Dr. Charles today. We have a couple of things on the agenda. We're just going to have a, kind of a casual chat about Tesla's Starlink that we're really intrigued by and Mozilla just announced a new Firefox feature state partitioning, and we think that's kind of an interesting direction for browsers to go in the, is it privacy war? Can I say privacy war? Let's call it privacy war. Katherine Druckman (43s): It is a bit of a war at this point. So, so we think that that's, that's interesting for a few reasons. So, yeah, so we'll get into that. But before we start talking about any of those things, I wanted to remind everyone that you can visit our website at reality2cast.com. That is the number two. Please sign up for our newsletter. We share sort of a brain dump every week. Sometimes there are some extra little tidbits in there that we were finding interesting. And this, this past week we had a whole lot of links and notes and there's bound to be something interesting in there. So we encourage you to subscribe. And the other thing I was going to mention is, Hey, we put up a swag store on the website. Katherine Druckman (1m 26s): So if you, if you ever needed a bound journal to remind everyone of the importance of privacy, you could get that there. Now I'm really kind of obsessed with this. Heaven's above things is really cool. Doc Searls (1m 39s): It is heaven's above. It changed my life. It's old. It's been since the mid nineties and as a kid, a guy who was a kid named Chris, Pete, I think, and he's in Germany, who does it and he did it and he does it. He's on a, it's a dot ASP site. So he's doing it on Microsoft something, but it's been around a long time and it is amazing. I mean, if you live anywhere where you can see the sky, it'll be, and you're farther South. So you're even than I am like the, the, the space station, the Hubbard telescope, these things are visible and, and the space station and actually goes kind of overhead. Doc Searls (2m 24s): But the cool thing about these satellites, I don't know how it works is like, there are only 10 or 15 of them in a row. And I, I, I do not know how they get low latency. I don't know how they're relaying back to earth, but it is really interesting. And, and I think it changes everything. I really do. I think it's possibly, I think almost everything Elon Musk does is important. Katherine Druckman (2m 49s): Oh, Starlink. Yes. Yes. I mean, yes, he, he can disrupt everything. He disrupt the stock market, telecommunications, crypto currency. Doc Searls (3m 7s): I don't sense that he does it out of malice, not grueling with it. He's I mean, he's, I mean, Katherine Druckman (3m 14s): No, he's a very sincere, serious, enthusiastic innovator for that stuff. So, Doc Searls (3m 21s): I mean, he kind of looked at the car business and it wasn't like I'm going to do a better Ford, you know? No, I, he, there were already electric cars and he just did not just the better electric car. He did the best car on the road. I know in like a one go, I think there was an earlier version. It wasn't great. I'm not sure, but, but it was pretty amazing. Katherine Druckman (3m 46s): There's no, there first there, he, he came out of the gate pretty, pretty strongly. I think. I don't know. I think, yeah. I mean, obviously they've improved, but I remember even the very first Tesla model S is being considered. Doc Searls (4m 1s): Maybe I'm wrong about that. I want to be wrong about it actually. Katherine Druckman (4m 5s): I mean, or I could be wrong. That's equally possible. Yeah, Doc Searls (4m 8s): No, I think you're right. I thought for somehow, but maybe I'm thinking of what are the other electric car makers and, and it's not, there's nothing to take away from anybody else. You know, my wife just got, I'm not going to name her cause she's more private than I am, but the, you know, her, but she just got the first new car that within married 30 years in different, bought a new car and, and it's a Toyota hybrid and I'm astonished by how good it is in, in as a, as a vehicle. I mean, it's, it, it gets like 50 miles to the gallon and it's hot. Doc Searls (4m 50s): I mean it performs. Katherine Druckman (4m 52s): Is it a Prius or one or the other? Doc Searls (4m 53s): No, no. It's a Camry of all things. And let me get a camera is, is a rental car. It's an Uber vehicle in New York city. And I had one too. I had an 85 Camry that finally, I think, I don't know if it ever died. My daughter gave it away when it had about 300,000 miles on it. Nothing ever went wrong with it. I got it because nothing ever went wrong. Everything I bought before that was like a $250 Chevy because I could fix it on weekends. So that was my theory of cars, which is if I could fit, I wouldn't be able to fix my car. And I totally knew two 87, two 83 and three 27, V8 Chevy's and GM cars. Doc Searls (5m 35s): I had a, a Pontiac, we call it big white. I had another one I think called big blue. They all have big things wrong with them, but I can fix them, you know, with a six pack and buddies on a weekend. And then I, I had a serious job and you know, my part business partner said, you know, you kind of want to show up in a nice car. Why don't you get a nice, and I, I looked at what had the lowest frequency of repair and it was this Toyota Camry. And I bought it because of that. And it was a great car. Katherine Druckman (6m 6s): Mine was, my camera was a fantastic car, but it looked like Alexis at the time. It was, it was one of those w that was back when Lexus just came out and they basically looked like Toyotas, but then there was a period. Yeah. But there was a period in there where Alexis get, you know, kind of started to get a spruce, their models up a bit. And then, and then that kind of bled into Toyota. It was the, it was a late nineties model. And I love all of the most reliable things. Doc Searls (6m 32s): The, the law actually, we looked at Lexuses too. And the thing I didn't like about Lexuses is that they have what I call the manta Ray grill. They, it looks like this giant mouth in the front. Katherine Druckman (6m 43s): They all do. They all build they're ugly. They're hideous Doc Searls (6m 47s): Toyota has it too, but the, it has no ground clearance. I mean, you go over a, it's a problem, but it's got, it's got the normal eco and sport buttons and it even changes the steering ratio. So in sport, it steers more like a bike. And when it's on eco it's a little bit more, the steering ratio is a logger when, or at least it seems that way. And, but even if you don't put it in sport, if you hit the gas, the thing tears out, it's amazing. Katherine Druckman (7m 21s): No idea that non Prius hybrids today got that kind of gas mileage. I'm so out of it, like my, my intent when I bought my last car, I actually, I, I said at the time I said, this is the last gasoline powered car I'm going to get. It's a 2013. It was, you know, I got it. And I got it new. So it was it's, I've had it a long time and I have no plans to, you know, I keep cars a long time, so I have no plans to replace it. But at that time I remember thinking, okay, the next one by then electric cars will be, will be, you know, a solid enough option that, you know, and I, in my mind, I mean, I meant fully electric now, you know, a hybrid is probably, you know, a pretty good compromise, but, but yeah, I'm so out of it that I had, I just had no idea that it was getting that kind of mileage, which is fantastic. Katherine Druckman (8m 9s): I thought that was only a Prius that would get that kind of money. Doc Searls (8m 12s): Yeah. It it's, I'm just looking it up right now. It's I mean, it has like a, I think the tank holds, Oh, it says 15.8 gallons. I thought it was like 12, but, and it says the total range is 442 miles. It, I mean, we've gone almost 700 miles on a tank. I mean, it's amazing how, how far the damn thing goes, you know, anyway, Katherine Druckman (8m 40s): Would you consider getting a Tesla at any time during this? We never even Doc Searls (8m 44s): Just discussion about it. I mean, we went looking for an old, we actually lit, literally went looking for an old Prius, went to a dealer, drove a couple of them, totally felt like a rental car, basically. And, and I mean, we liked them, but it was not, it didn't have any personality. And then Joyce asked, do you have any nicer hybrids? And I didn't even know they had a hybrid other than a Prius. And, and he said, actually, that we're getting rid of the 2020s. We've just knocked six grand off of this one. And actually there were two of them, but we, she got the, kind of the better of the two that are the top of the line one. Doc Searls (9m 27s): And, and I was amazed, you know, we went home, didn't even talk about it, went back the next day and we're just talking with him about it. And Joyce said, I'll get it. And I just gave her a name and it's all right. Anyway. Yeah. But it's, this is about the Tesla. I've been in a few Teslas and there, I don't like a car that knows more about me than I do as a driver. Maybe doesn't know about my life, but it knows about me as a driver, a friend of mine who drove, went down here, had to stop for several hours and get a charged, you know, in, in San Louis Obispo, but rode around with it. Doc Searls (10m 10s): He says, no, you totally have a sense that this is a, a software thing. This is a software car and it does it, you know, it's updated on a constant basis, but he completely, they completely rethought it. And if you, and if you go to any of the, if you do like I do, when you're a bit of a space freak and you go watch launches, like right over that way, for those of us in video, which is only two of us beyond the walls of our house, right outside our house, I can walk out on my little deck there and I can look West and I can see rockets taking off from Vandenberg air force base. And, and you can also watch live coverage on your phone. Doc Searls (10m 53s): And, you know, when things took off from Cape Canaveral, there were all these guys with flat top crew cuts that have been, you know, in civil service or science or aviation or the rest of it for 35 years. And, and we're always guys, right? And now they're all these earnest young women running space for space X, right? I mean, and they're, you're on camera and, and they're probably there, and obviously not just women, but that's what I noticed because I'm a guy, but, but also because it seems anomalous and, but it's not, not the way the world works now. And, and you know, and Natalie here, do you watch these rockets take off and we saw Starlink rockets launched from here. Doc Searls (11m 40s): You see this thing go up into the sky. And then the first stage comes back down to earth and you could barely see it except in a far the retro rockets, but, and then they land on like a 40 foot square thing floating in the ocean and recycled the first stage of the rocket. And it lands on its ass perfectly. It's like, Holy shit, that's, that's cool. And the way they're doing, you know, the way they're provisioning internet for the whole world, I think is remarkable. It's going to put the rest of the world on the internet. And if it goes well, and I can't believe these guys have not thought it through. Doc Searls (12m 21s): So I'm, I'm very, very optimistic about that. And I, and I think it's going to be hard for, for example, China or Russia to say, no, you can't have it. Or if you do have it, they're going to try to make Ilan or his friends sphincter the internet so they can spy on everybody. And I think that's a kind of Wheaton chef thing. Cause if they're behind on that too bad, you know, we need freedom. So say that as, as a human being, not just as an American anyway, we were going to talk about stuff. Katherine Druckman (12m 59s): What about, about school, about Starlink is, is one of the big ones I, you know, I think what's interesting to me is, you know, I, I heard, you know, I'd been following a little bit, you know, I I'm aware that they are launching these satellites and, and have this roadmap so to speak. But what's interesting to me is just last week, you don't just how many people jumped on ordering pre-ordering the Starlink. And, and that was interesting to me because it wasn't just, you know, my geeky early adopter friends, you know, posting, you know, obviously there were those, but I saw a lot of people who have already ordered. Katherine Druckman (13m 43s): And I thought that was interesting because I, it was somewhat unexpected, I guess, you know, I don't know. I think, and some of it is because, you know, I know people who live in less densely populated areas, and so that's an obvious use case. Right. But you know, other people too, and I, you know, I think it's, it'll be interesting to see how it, it, it, it changes especially right now because we're, you know, we're, we're, we're talking a lot about, you know, how a post COVID workforce is going to is going to work because are we ever going to go back to offices? I mean, I'm sure some people are, but I think a lot of people are just not. Katherine Druckman (14m 25s): And so you can live anywhere. So, you know, why not live on a goat, farm out in the middle of nowhere and get your Starlink. And, and there's just, it just, it, it removes a barrier to really living your life kind of any way you want, you know, which I think is kinda cool. Doc Searls (14m 43s): It's I think it will. This is the thought. So one of the things I spent a lot of time in the UK, and it seems, of course, I'm dealing with mostly people in the UK, but a remarkable number of them live in the country, right. They live out there. I'm kind of amazed at how many people live in the country in the UK, and that there is room still lift in the country for people. Katherine Druckman (15m 8s): I've often wondered that too. Doc Searls (15m 10s): A lot of people live in the city, you know, the, the, that live in, you know, in, in Manchester or South Hampton or London will have another place. They have another place that's off there in the country and, and they spend a lot of, and they spend some time there. I think this moves more people out there, you know, that, that want to live there, you know, that want to live full time out there and don't want to pay city rates or whatever it might be. I just think it, I think I, I think it changes. I mean, to the degree that we, we have to be on the internet. I mean, it's just, you have to be there if you're operating in the world. If you're in school, now, this is the new thing. Doc Searls (15m 50s): If you're in school, you have to be on the internet. Right. And again, this is a very middle-class thing, but I, I wonder, you know, what, how this changes economically in the less developed world to have that kind of connection and, and whether, whether it's affordable. I don't even know if it's affordable. Maybe if a whole village gets one connection that might be doable. We were also at the mercy of your, of your receiving equipment or your receiving tread spending equipment. Cause you're going both ways. I've seen the, I've seen little videos and descriptions of how it works. You get this dish, you know, when you fix it out there somewhere and it, it looks around the sky and it does a whole bunch of learning things. Doc Searls (16m 38s): And then it's busy and then you're connected, you know, when you're getting like, you know, 300 megs down and a hundred up or something like that, Katherine Druckman (16m 51s): Constantly improving for one. Yeah. Doc Searls (16m 53s): I mean that, that's, that's amazing. And, and it's, you know, the progress is the process by which the miraculous becomes mundane. And this, I think is going to prove that because in four or five years, everybody, yo, you have to start like no big deal. You know? Katherine Druckman (17m 14s): So we mentioned this heaven's above site then, and you gave a little background on it. You know, I would like, I would like if you, if you could, you know, if you have additional information to share about that, because I haven't really followed this at all. And you know, what's interesting to me in particular talking about Starlink is I guess I just didn't realize how many of these satellites, Doc Searls (17m 38s): Oh my God, the sky is full. I mean, it's, Katherine Druckman (17m 41s): I, I mean, I knew there were a lot, but it's a little bit different when you visualize it like this. And here's how, Doc Searls (17m 49s): If you're in even like where we are, there's a lot of light pollution here. For example, most nights, you're not seeing the Milky way, but you know, the ranking stars, you know, first and second magnitude stars, the North star is like a second magnitude star, roughly they're visible, you know, at the big dipper that's there, there are a lot of satellites that are that bright. And a lot of them are, you know, Russian rockets, the, that, you know, in the early days when they'd launch a satellite, the rocket that launched, it continues to float around behind the satellite itself. Right. And they're big enough to reflect light. Doc Searls (18m 30s): And sometimes they get brighter and dimmer because they are tumbling around in space. Most of them are white, so they reflect a lot of light, but there's just a ridiculous number of satellites up there. So I think on the average night, if you just go outside and look at the sky for a few minutes, you'll notice this is after sunset, when it has become fully dark and preferably if the moon is an out and right now it's full tonight, it's a full moon. There was a full moon. You'd be looking at, wait a minute. That star is moving and that wrong. That was wrong. None of them are stars here. Yeah. Because a couple of them hours after sunset, the sun is still hitting things that are a hundred miles, 200 miles above the earth. Doc Searls (19m 13s): So, you know, the sun has not yet set up there and they are not in earth shadow. You won't see them in the middle of the night, but you will see them, you know, you know, after it gets dark and before the sun comes up and within a couple hours of that in any way about heavens above, I'm looking on the page right now for anything that's Biograph Oh, there it is. Chris Pete. Chris is his name and yeah. And he's got his email address, you know, Chris dot pete@heavens-above.com. It's, it's an, I just close the window, but it's heaven's dash above.com. Doc Searls (19m 54s): It has been around 25 years, some enormous amount of time. I here's how it changed my life. When my younger son who is now 24, but when he was a little boy, I mean like, you know, three, four, five years old, and we were living in the Bay area, we would actually all the way up until he was a teenager. And we lived here in Santa Barbara. We would go out every night and look at the stars. And I would have a, a green laser pointer. The green laser pointers are, they totally rock. And you get them for about five bucks on Amazon or whatever. And the, with the green color, you can actually point them at the stars. Doc Searls (20m 35s): You can say, look at this one, this one, this one, and it doesn't hurt your eyes unless you shine them into your eyes. None are horrible, but it, but if you're just shining them into the, into the air, the little beam goes, you know, a few hundred feet, something like that, but you can see the beam and, and point to stars. And I would have a laptop open to heavens above. And, and it would tell you exactly what star, what satellites are passing overhead now. And it would give a little map and it would show the path on the map and you could find them, you know, there's, you know, there's the Russian, this one, there's that one it's, it was just incredibly cool. And it still is. It's still there. And, and it's more complete than ever. Doc Searls (21m 16s): And he's got new visualizations. It looks like I haven't looked at it a long time because I haven't had a kid to go outside and look at the stars with. So, and that was just so much a part of my life that it almost hurts me to go out, you know, without a kid with me, you know, but, but what you do is you put in, you know, cha you know, you put in your observing location and I think any phone now will tell you what your latitude and longitude are, but you could also do it by town. You can put in Houston or wherever. And, and it'll tell you exactly, you know, where the, where the satellites are, you know, what their paths are and when they're going to disappear, it, it shows their rising and setting time. Doc Searls (21m 57s): You can look through a whole table of them and see, well, which ones are first, second, and third magnitude at their peak. It's pretty, it's, it's really cool. You know, and he's got lots and lots more in there than the last time I looked live. Sky view. That's a new one star link, dynamic, 3d orbit display, which among other things shows you that I didn't know this, that the, the strings of satellites that you see in some of those pictures are, that's just part of, like, most of the satellites apparently are float hundreds of miles from other ones in the sky. Whereas the ones in a row, they must have some other role. Doc Searls (22m 39s): I don't know what the role is, but it's pretty damn cool. Katherine Druckman (22m 43s): Very cool. Definitely cool. Doc Searls (22m 45s): Oh, and you can roll the earth around and look at it. Katherine Druckman (22m 47s): Yeah. Yeah. That's the one I was looking at where I was sort of overwhelmed by the number of so many. Doc Searls (22m 54s): Yeah. And they definitely do not have them concentrated at the polls. So, and I have a F a F well, you know, the guy we talked to him the other day in Alaska, or I talked to him, Starlink, apparently doesn't go that far North, which is too bad. They could really use it in Alaska. Or maybe he's just not showing it. That is a possibility too. I don't know, in any case it's, it does cover most of the earth. So I see say Barea, the Arctic and the Antarctic, except for some of the strings of satellites, don't seem to be served except now. Doc Searls (23m 35s): And then, but I don't know. I might be wrong. I'll have to look into that. Katherine Druckman (23m 41s): Another thing that I just learned that I didn't know before was that Starlink will also be able to provide you with emergency telephone service, which I, which is interesting. I mean, I, I, I don't know why it wouldn't, but I that's part of the deal. I don't know. It's so apparently according to an article that I, I just pulled up, it sounds like it's, it's ruffling the feathers of a lot of internet service providers, which I think is Doc Searls (24m 13s): Yeah. Yeah. Well, it, I, I can, I can, it should, Oh, it should totally, totally should. Because you know, all those things need competition. I think especially the, the phone and cable companies, which, you know, for the most part, they put the original eyes peas out of business, you know, the, the brand X decision and their market have basically replaced all the small ISP is that, and that we depended on in the early days. And then there's lawmaking like the, there are Republicans in a lot of States right now are trying to, and I think there's even a national proposed law that would basically outlaw municipal broadband. Doc Searls (25m 1s): It would out, it would forbid. And this is pretty much the case in North Carolina already. It's a state I used to live in. I think it might be the case in Texas where they don't want, the whole thing is about, we don't want government competition with private business. We, and it's basically, we don't want government opening the market to competition for the, for our mom monopolies that, you know, pay us to stay in office. This is what's wrong with, you know, the free market, the way that the way free market advocacy tends to work in this country, which is it's all about favoring, giant companies, bigger, the better, you know, and rather than how do we open up markets? Doc Searls (25m 45s): How do we have laws that open up markets, all kinds of competition and all kinds of service. And that's what we really should have and be able to do that just like cities have their own water systems and other things. Anyway, Katherine Druckman (25m 60s): Anyway, so yeah, I think in summary, Starlink cool. Doc Searls (26m 4s): Yeah, I know, I know all my friends that live in places we'd call nowhere are just can't wait, you know, Katherine Druckman (26m 13s): I, I'm kind of interested in the idea of, of being in nowhere with a Starlink. I think that sounds pretty great, especially now. Doc Searls (26m 24s): And how long before, you know, that your Airstream comes with one, you know, just as a matter of course Katherine Druckman (26m 31s): Dreamy. So the other thing that, that we talked about earlier, and we haven't gotten into yet is this Missoula state partitioning that they, Oh, I dunno a couple of days ago this week. Yeah. Which is cool. It's yeah. A further step in protecting Firefox users, isolating tracking cookies, isolating the ability of certain third-parties to track you while at the same time, also offering up a, an API and ways for let's call them legitimate reasons to, you know, for multiple, for somebody it's single sign on and that kind of thing for websites to track you across other sites for, for actual, real useful purposes. Katherine Druckman (27m 30s): But yeah, so this is, it's interesting. I think, you know, Mozilla has been really active in the last couple of years in this privacy arena and yeah. Encouraging Doc Searls (27m 42s): What I like. Here's, here's what I like about it. And it's worth it. Your listeners, if you just look up state partitioning and Mozilla, you'll find it. And I guess we'll put on the website a, a link to it. There's a piece there by Johann Hoffman and Tim Wong about, and they call it, you know, total cookie protection. But basically what I like about it is it looks like, you know, what, if this is the best way to do it, then it should be in every browser. In other words, you know, Chrome and brave and edge and Safari and the rest can pick it up and they can do it too. Doc Searls (28m 22s): I mean, in other words, it can become, because what we have right now is that it makes it almost impossible to follow how it's done. I mean, there you can, in a more or less typical way, dig down into your settings and turn off what's variously called cross site tracking and equivalent things, or, or third-party tracking and stuff like that. And, but it's all done differently. It's not, it's not a standard thing. It's not like, you know, the way, you know, the, the symbols on a dashboard of your car makes sense. And no matter what car you get into it's or similarly like any of the normal symbols you see on a browser and how those look. Doc Searls (29m 10s): But I, I would hope that if it's a better way to do this, that it would, would, would work. I know what they were doing before. It was this thing called enhanced ETP and has tracking, Katherine Druckman (29m 21s): Which required them to, to keep a list, right. It's not sustainable. Yeah. There will be ways around it, inevitably. And inevitably. Yeah. Doc Searls (29m 30s): And on top of that, it's, it's basically, you know, the disconnect list and all hail disconnect for staying alive all these years and doing a good job of, of staying on the privacy case. But there, it's basically a catalog of every, at every violator basically, and that that's not sustainable at all. And, and, and then Apple, I don't even know what Apple does. I think they have some kind of machine learning thing that, that, you know, that, that does some magic in the background that limits what you, what you can see, but there's no common experience here. Doc Searls (30m 14s): Augustine fou, who we've had on this before on, on the, on the podcast before he was asking people on Twitter a couple of days ago, you know, if you're seeing this, if you go to this particular page and it was a big, big ass Katherine Druckman (30m 32s): I saw, I saw the, I saw the post you're talking about it was a huge, huge Facebook ad on the top of, was it New York times or the New York times? Yeah. Massive. It was the whole, it would have been your whole window if you're on a laptop. Doc Searls (30m 44s): Right. And well, the fact that it is a Facebook ad on every single one means it's probably not based on tracking you. They just bought what in, in the TV business, they used to call a roadblock, which meant, let's say, if you like in the old days, and you wanted to, you were Coca-Cola and you wanted everybody to see your ad. You bought a roadblock, you bought the same ad on the CBS, NBC and ABC evening news. And, and you couldn't get away from it. Right. That was a roadblock. They bought her, they kind of bought a roadblock, but it was definitely blocked by the browsers that I had set or were set automatically to block tracking. Doc Searls (31m 27s): So tracking was involved in some way, but how, I don't know this kind of thing where you maybe can trust that you're not going to either, you're not going to see anything that got there by way of tracking, or if it does show up, all you're going to do is see it. And it's not going to track you to some other site or follow you around the net because you haven't acquired an unwanted cookie. That's going to live, you know, like a tick on, on your skin as you go from site to site. Katherine Druckman (32m 1s): Yeah, no, I was just, I'm thinking of, what's interesting to me about their approach is it's interrupting the ability of API APIs that were not, as they say, we're not designed for tracking, but it had been used to, you know, track people anyway, because there are, they are sharing this information that, that allows that. And, and so it's taking a different approach because previously, you know, if you're just focusing on things like cookies, you know, you know, how many, I don't know how many ad-ons you have, how many, how many, how many, how many ways we go about trying to block tracking from, from, you know, all these various entities that want our information and it just becomes, it is frustrating. Katherine Druckman (32m 49s): It seems like it's a lot of work, you know, and, and it doesn't seem sustainable. So I like the fact that Firefox or that, that Firefox is taking an approach of just trying to build a wall around some of these at the API level so that you, these technologies that weren't even for tracking, can't use them in that way anymore. And I think that's that appeals to me. Doc Searls (33m 13s): I mean, I'm looking here and this is just on, on Chrome. I mean, it's unreal. Most of these, I actually have turned off at the moment, but I, I used to experiment with them, but I don't much anymore because it's too complicated. You know, like you block, there's the vanilla cookie manager, the red morph privacy monitor, privacy Badger, you know, mask me kind of track. I mean, I'm only halfway up this thing, you know, that here's a VPN proxy on blocker, whatever. I have to think again about whatever that was. I don't have it turned on Ghostery. Doc Searls (33m 54s): I mean, here's a Google analytics. Opt-out, ad-on, you know, and back in our Linux journal days, I mean, we spent a lot of energy discovering the Google analytics. Doesn't see a lot in part because the kind of readers we had had, you know, the kind of tools that I have here and you have to, I'm sure there's so many of them there's. Katherine Druckman (34m 15s): Yeah. Our, our ad impressions did not match our traffic by a long shot. So yeah, we, at some point just gave up and said to hell with it, but yeah, I don't know. So, so what, what you said earlier, you already, so you were already basically covered it. The other browsers need to do the same thing. Doc Searls (34m 33s): Well, yeah. It, to me at this point, it's a watch this space, right? So a, let's say this is a prototype of something that should be normalized across all websites and Microsoft or Google or Apple, or somebody says, Oh, wait a minute. You know, we could, we could do it this way, and this is a better way to do it. And okay, we're going to, we're going to, you know, open source this and it's on get hub and we'll dump it. We've got into there and then we'll see what happens. I don't know. I, it, it's going to be, it's going to be interesting to see, because what often happens with this kind of thing too, is that the other Rosie, you know, we have a better way of doing it. Doc Searls (35m 14s): There's going to be our exclusive way and screw the screw everybody else. So if it comes typical, that's another thing. Katherine Druckman (35m 22s): Well, and just from an ideological perspective, yeah. The idea that they're sort of retroactively going and shutting doors that were left open is sort of how I would put it, I guess, because again, when you, when, when entities are technology, that was never even designed to be, let's say abused, I'm going to just say abused in that way. Yeah. It, it puts, it puts the rest of us in a position where we have to go back through and close all of those technical doors that were left open. So, so I, I kind of see it that way rather than, rather than standing at the door with a bouncer, like a little bit of, a lot of our ad-ons are doing this is just saying shut the damn door nobody's coming in or out. Doc Searls (36m 9s): Yeah. And it's another possible outcome is okay. You've got, you know, 10 different ways of locking the door. You know, I mean, bill from house to house and they're going to be different ways. Doorknobs will all look different. Some will have a deadbolt, some will have, you know, a twist lock. Some of them will have a combination lock. So we'll have some, we'll have, you know, some kind of YubiKey thing who knows, I'm just making these up, but there are a lot of ways to lock a door. But if all the doors are locked, does the business that, that tried to get past the locks dry up and go away or get marginalized? I think that's going to happen. I think one way or another. Doc Searls (36m 49s): Yeah. I don't think anything that people hate as much as they do being tracked and, and anything is unwelcomed as advertising of that, of the tracking based store can live with one exception. And this is, is a tough one, has had a long talk with somebody last night about this. Somebody we should have on as a guest, but I would say what is yet, because he may not want to, just to be public, but as somebody who knows just a buttload about how Facebook works and that if you're, if you're serious about doing direct marketing of any kind, and that includes a lot, all local advertising, you know, I, you know, I want, you know, I, I want a tackle shop that specializes in, you know, lures for striped bass in Galveston, you know, and I want males that own trucks that are 25 to 34, you know, and you just have a bunch of cross hairs and you buy across those cross hairs on Facebook and you're going to succeed. Doc Searls (37m 59s): You're going to get a lie. It'll be. And that, that is a many, many multi-billion dollar business for, for Facebook. And, and it's probably not going away, you know, there's no, the, I mean with this guy said was, there's no overstating in the advertising world, the size of Facebook at that. And, and, and Google is, you know, that Google is not as privileged as either Facebook or Amazon at that, because Facebook has all kinds of information about your just by watching you on Facebook, Amazon has your entire buying and your searching history and they can, they can use that to advertise at you with a lot more precision than Google can. Doc Searls (38m 42s): And the one that's sort of in third place in this is Google, especially since Google is the routing mechanism for lots of the tracking based ads. So they're much bigger in that business than anybody else there's kind of the backend. So they're kind of the, the advertising service provider for the world are much more infrastructural than Facebook is, or so I'm told, but I don't think that's wrong. So that's sort of an interesting thing. I, but for getting around on the web, on the ordinary web and looking at things on the web, we should be able to operate there without no. Well, knowing that we're not being followed by anybody, including Facebook. Doc Searls (39m 26s): So some days yeah. I'm optimistic. Katherine Druckman (39m 30s): Yeah. No, I think so too. I, you know, I think that this is a, this is a space that's, that's moving rapidly. You know, I think there's a lot happening. A lot of people are more and more interested and, and more concerned. So, so that is what, you know, drives action, I guess. So, yeah. I think we're, we're going in the right direction collectively. So listeners, we would love to hear some feedback from you where, where on the lookout for ideas, for what you would like us to talk about for any other feedback. We love some newsletter feedback. If you haven't signed up for it, please do. Katherine Druckman (40m 11s): And we'd like to hear what parts are useful and what parts are less useful. Do you want more links as we've got them? Doc Searls (40m 21s): Yeah, yeah, yeah, Katherine Druckman (40m 23s): Yeah. But reach out to us, please. There are many, many ways to get in touch. You can reach us on Twitter. You can reach us on Mastodon on Facebook. You can, you can go to the website at reality, to cast.com and contact us through the contact page there. And you can just email us at info at reality, to cast.com and we will read it with great enthusiasm. So if you've made it this long, thank you. Yeah, we really do. Please, please. Don't we're very, we're quite serious about it. We really do Doc Searls (40m 58s): And we're like what you're doing and yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. Katherine Druckman (41m 4s): So yeah. Thank you for continuing to listen and thank you for reading our newsletter and thank you for participating and we will see you next time.