How Apple is Locking Out Cops

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I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are 404 Media co-founders, Sam Cole.

Howdy.

Emmanuel Mayberg.

Hello.

And Jason Kebler.

Hello.

All right.

This is going to be a slightly different episode.

We're going to, usually we talk about free stories each week, right?

We're going to open with one and then we're going to talk about something that maybe Jason is still going to write about but hasn't yet.

It's about the big migration to Blue Sky.

So I guess are you writing about that, Jason?

Yeah, probably.

It might be even be out by the time this is

published.

Who knows?

Okay, I guess we'll see.

And I'll see.

We'll see.

As for the first story,

this is one I wrote.

Apple quietly introduced iPhone reboot code, which is locking out cops.

I guess I'll start with what Apple has done, and then maybe Jason has some questions for me.

But as the headline suggests, Apple has introduced this feature.

an undocumented feature I'll say like there isn't like

a blog post about it there isn't anything really on Apple's website, but it appears to be called

inactivity reboot or something like that.

And in essence, what happens is if an iPhone has not been unlocked for around three or four days, it will reboot itself.

And now you may be thinking,

okay,

why the hell would I care about that?

Also, I don't know.

Maybe I have an alarm to go to the airport and it's going to ruin my alarm or something like that.

The point is, it seems, to make the phone more secure against forensic equipment, stuff like Greykey, stuff like Celebrate.

So

I want to talk about how cops get into phones.

Like Celebrate and Grey key are two of them, but there's two different modes.

There's before first unlock and then after first unlock.

Maybe that is like a good place to start here yeah that's fair yeah so

after first unlock afu

is as the name implies imagine a user has taken their iphone they've powered it on as they would normally and they've unlocked it at some point during the day that puts the phone into an AFU

state.

And obviously, it's on a case-by-case basis.

The operating system, the phone also applies to Google, Android handsets as well.

But broadly speaking, that makes it a bit easier for tools like Grey Key or Celebrate to get access to user data.

You then have BFU before first unlock, which is basically when the user has not unlocked their phone.

And you can imagine it's sort of the state a phone is in.

As soon as somebody turns it on, you know, if I turn on my iPad, for example, I can't use Touch ID or anything like that to get into it.

It always asks for the passcode.

I haven't unencrypted that data or decrypted that data at any point.

So that is a BFU state.

And if you're a forensic investigator, you don't want a phone to be in a BFU state because it's going to be generally harder for you to actually get data out of there.

Does that answer your question?

It does.

I think you've also reported recently on a few like leaked,

I guess they're spreadsheets, but they're basically like what types of iPhones and what iOS can be unlocked before first unlock and after first unlock.

And it's like some of these tools are able to

are like not able to get into newer phones

before first unlock.

if they're updated or it takes longer or or it's just like more difficult, right?

Yeah.

And I mean, you're referring to some Celebrite documents that we got a while ago.

We published a few months ago, yeah.

Yeah, this was back in July.

And I think the documents were from a few months before that.

I think they were dated to April.

And there it says stuff like, oh, unlocking iOS 17.4 at the time was in research.

And then actually.

Shortly after we published that piece, some people leaked some other more updated Celebrite documents and they showed that Celebrite had caught up and it was able to unlock IOS 17.4 in an AFU state specifically.

Like you look at the spreadsheet and it says, yes, we can do it, but only an after-first unlock, which goes back to the point I said earlier about if you're a cop or forensic expert, you want in an AFU state because it seems, you know, at least with these leaked Celebrate documents that we reported on a while back and have seen the newer ones, it's easier, basically, yeah, for them to do.

Do you want to talk a little bit about how you first

like started reporting on this specific story?

Because there's actually two articles,

one based on a specific leaked cop document that you got, and then

where they were sort of like theorizing what had happened.

And then you figured it out and published a second story explaining the whole situation.

Yeah.

So I'll put this one in the show notes as well.

I just didn't want to lead with it because it's not that we were wrong.

It's that the cops were wrong.

I was just reporting what they were saying.

But the headline was, police freak out at iPhones mysteriously rebooting themselves, locking cops out.

Okay, sounds kind of straightforward.

I got sent a document which is written by, it seems, law enforcement in Detroit.

And they said that.

They had a bunch of iPhones ready to be forensically examined in their, you know, forensic laboratory or whatever.

And they go in to do that.

And a bunch of them have like magically or mysteriously rebooted.

And they're like, what the hell?

The phones weren't like this,

which is both

very interesting to us and very, very concerning to them.

They theorized that

Apple had pushed an update.

to IOS 18 that was telling IOS 18 phones, like sending them a message to nearby phones saying, oh, reboot yourself, almost like it was infecting or like poisoning other phones in the lab.

That is a very

interesting theory.

Multiple people I spoke to said

they didn't really put much weight into that.

theory.

And then another leak I actually got later from somebody who works with Greykey said they doubt it as well.

So it basically the cops were like half right.

They were right, obviously, the phones are rebooting because they can see it right in front of them.

They were just wrong about

how and why exactly, because it wasn't some sort of poisoning IOS 18 code that was infecting other devices.

It was more, there's basically a timer counting down

when a phone is on the most recent Apple operating system.

And I should say that I published that first piece, and then researchers very diligently start digging through

what updates may have happened.

And one found the inactivity reboot.

I then spoke to a couple of others and then got a leak as well.

And that's how we got to

the ultimate answer.

There's this undocumented feature.

And I'll just clarify that Apple hasn't given a statement on this.

Obviously, I'm talking to Apple and I'm trying to get a statement out of them,

but they haven't confirmed it.

Instead, I've spoken to to you know three or four people about it who independently verified it

do you think

that we could like can you safely say that this feature was added for the express purpose of preventing tools like gray key and celebrite from breaking into phones or is it a broader security mechanism?

Like, obviously, we probably can't say for sure, but I think like, does this seem like something that is targeted targeted at the cops or is it more of a broad security feature for its customers that has like other implications like anti-theft and things like that

yeah again apple isn't commenting but i feel pretty confident in saying at least in my own opinion that it's the latter i think that apple takes a much more general approach to security

and where they could they can introduce features that will impact lots of different parts or threats or that sort of thing.

I mean, you can think about it sort of when they did that lockdown mode and that sort of restricts a lot of features on the phone.

Some people will say that came in response to NSO malware being spread on iPhones and that sort of thing.

I don't think so.

I think it's broadened that there's many more malware vendors and contractors.

And I think it's sort of here in that

having a phone reboot after a certain period of time will also potentially stop data being extracted from phones that have been stolen, for example, just by normal thieves on the street.

I don't think they're necessarily specifically going out and being like, we're going to screw over Greykey or we're going to screw over Celebrate.

I mean, the consequences, they definitely are, but I don't think, at least in my opinion, that they're doing that

specifically for that.

You know, and I think you can look back at some earlier features where

they've introduced new stuff.

Like there was USB

restricted mode quite a few years ago at this point.

And that made it so

after a certain period of time, you couldn't sort of make the phone interact with a computer.

It basically became like a dumb charging cable.

So you couldn't plug it into these devices and that sort of thing.

I see it sort of that in that context, you know.

Yeah, I mean, the cat and mouse game between

Apple and I guess Google as well, but

and other phone manufacturers, but especially Apple and Google and

law enforcement and the government and hackers more broadly is super interesting.

And it's something that you've been covering for a really long time.

It's also something that, I mean, the big sort of flashpoint was the San Bernardino shooting a long time ago.

I mean, it wasn't that long ago, but that was sort of a moment where there was a ton of pressure on Apple to to put a back door into,

you know, the suspected shooters' phones.

Well, they were the actual shooters' phones.

And I feel

like this is just my opinion, but I think that there's some truth to it.

There was an ongoing court case between the Department of Justice and Apple, and it was headed toward this like very important

or what would have probably been a pretty important like court decision.

And what happened instead is the Department of Justice and the FBI found another way to get into that phone.

And I believe we still don't know, at least like on the record, who did it.

Well, the FBI never confirmed it, but it's Azimuth Security, which is,

I had one source.

I could never,

I covered about azimuth security with our former colleague Lorenzo years ago.

And they're a super important, very, very small hacking shop that works with Five Eyes intelligence agencies and law enforcement.

And then the Washington Post reported later that it was them that basically broke the San Bernardino phone.

Yeah.

I guess I bring it up because Apple is actually

like there's kind of a symbiotic relationship between Apple and companies like Azimuth and Celebrite and Grayshift, where Apple will update iOS to not be as hackable.

Then they update their hacking tools to break into them.

And in some ways, this keeps some of the pressure off of Apple to have a formal back door into iOS or into the iPhone, where

Apple probably doesn't like the existence of these companies, but the fact that they do exist has taken a lot of pressure off of them, in my opinion.

Like, can you talk a little bit about that?

I mean, I think that's a really, really good way of pulling it.

It's similar to, I gave a talk recently at DEF CON, and like, there's the free options when you get data from companies, right?

There's the front door, and you send a search warrant or a court order to Discord and it gives the user messages or something like that.

At least when it comes to encrypted messaging services like Signal, you don't really want them doing that, right?

That would kind of suck.

The other one is a back door, which you also don't really want for Signal.

And to your point, you don't really want a back door in the iPhone.

because there's going to be all sorts of unintended consequences.

Can that backdoor be protected?

Would it be abused?

Is it going to be available to non-Western law enforcement?

All of that sort of thing.

And the third option is basically what we have, which is hacking goes on, Apple and others try to stop it.

The hacking companies get better and get workarounds and the cycle continues.

And it's expensive and it's labor intensive, but that's better than having a back door.

you know and i think the way you put it jason was really interesting in that the taking pressure off apple i haven't really thought about it that way before that's uh that's really really really interesting.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's just like if these tools didn't exist, we would probably be having the encryption debate constantly in the United States.

And it hasn't gone away entirely, but I think the fact that law enforcement can get into these, into most phones, has made it so that there's not as much political pressure on Apple to

introduce a full backdoor into the iPhone.

Because that was something they were obsessed with for a while.

There's like a huge, you know, history of going dark dark and just

like this tension between law enforcement and technology creators and encryption providers.

And

you still have some of that, especially worldwide.

Like there's been some

attempts to force Apple and other companies to put a back door in, but it feels like the US government has at least kind of pulled off of that for a while.

Anyways, what do you think happens next?

Like, what is the ultimate impact of this new feature that you found?

Yeah,

usually I would say, well, they'll just continue.

And the cycle of life carries on, and people find exploits and they hack into iPhones and that sort of thing.

And I do think that's the case.

And I do think that will continue.

That being said, having a four-day timer in the iPhone to reboot to go into a state where the cops can't get in, that

is

dramatic, for sure, you know?

And I think what will happen practically is that,

I mean, of course, maybe the Grey Keys and the Celebrites of the World will try to find more technical solutions to get around that.

I think it will probably change policy at, I don't know, local, state, federal forensic laboratories where they say like, we have three or four days to get into this phone and and we need it to be stored correctly.

We need to get it, we need to get it into a

AFU state, we need to unlock it, something like that.

Technically, again, you're going to need the tools to do that potentially.

Maybe there will be, then be more pressure

on the individual suspects.

Like, you have a time, you have a deadline to unlock this phone for us.

And if you don't, there's going to be a problem, you know, because it even got to the point where they started introducing face ID and touch ID, right?

You then have in the search warrants new, boilerplate, not new now, but at the time, boilerplate language saying we can force you to put your finger on here, like legally, you know.

And I don't know, maybe they introduced more language that could

do something about the timeline, you know?

I think before we end this section, do we have a sense of how long it takes to break into a phone with a strong password that is updated?

Like, this isn't necessarily like a 10-second process.

Like,

as we understand.

That's a fair point, actually.

I don't have like modern or recent

data on like how long it would take, but it's interesting in that if that four-day timer is counting down since it was unlocked before,

If your brute forcing attempt or your unlocking attempt is going to take more than four days, are you just like also screwed there as well?

It's not like, oh, we can just keep the phone alive.

It's like, no, you have to basically get in there.

I don't know.

Yeah, it really depends on the passcode, you know, that sort of thing.

Yeah, it's just because you can alter, not alter, but there's an option on the iPhone to instead of using a four or six number passcode, you can have an alphanumeric password.

And if it's a really long one, that is by definition going to take longer to brute force.

If that is how these tools are currently working, which you know, it's kind of hard to say, but that's an interesting, that's like a question I have essentially.

Yeah,

for sure.

I mean, hopefully, we get some clarity on that as well.

All right, we'll leave that there.

And then, when we come back after the break, we're going to talk about Blue Sky.

We'll be right back after this

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All right, and we are back.

We're going to call this section the big blue sky migration.

So, what happened?

What happened to Blue Sky over the weekend?

Did everybody get more followers?

Is that what happened?

Did anything happen in the last week?

Like

anything big that would make something happen with social media?

I don't know.

I mean, you could lay out if you want.

I mean, do you want to lay out the timeline?

It's a very short timeline, but

I think I'll let Jason do it because I think he maybe has a different perspective.

I mean, obviously, Trump won and Elon Owens Twitter is kind of the very short version.

So, but yeah, the interesting thing to me is I haven't seen like a specific

call to action in the way that I have seen in the past when people have migrated off of Twitter to other platforms.

I mean, I feel like it was kind of just like a

some sort of like shared holy shit moment after Trump was elected as sort of like with the help of Elon Musk.

But I don't know.

Like, I don't,

I didn't see

some like amazing blog post that said, like, everyone needs to move to Blue Sky now.

It just seemed like people started doing it.

And like, now everyone is talking about it.

But over the weekend, I was trying to figure out why people were moving to Blue Sky.

And I mean, the reason is

Trump's election, Elon Musk's like dominance over Twitter.

I think also people are starting to get annoyed with threads for reasons we can possibly talk about.

But it seemed like people were just moving over very quickly over the weekend.

And

I got like 6,000 followers in two days.

Over the weekend, two and a half days, something like that.

I was getting like hundreds of followers an hour.

and I wasn't even doing anything.

Like, I don't know, I just like was refreshing Blue Sky.

And,

you know, I don't say that to brag, although I do like my serotonin.

My serotonin go way, like, way up, uh, dopamine, et cetera.

Cause I was like, wow, people following me.

But it was more like

there, it feels like there's a critical mass on this social media network for like maybe the first time.

But I don't know.

Did anyone else, was anyone else even excited about this?

Or is everyone just very mad at me for talking about it endlessly?

I'm like begrudgingly

back posting again on Blue Sky.

I just, I'm so tired of

thinking about like which social network is the right one to be on.

And I don't want to add another one to my list of things to check.

Like I have to stay on Twitter because we're journalists.

We kind of need to be there.

But now I guess everybody's on Blue Sky.

Like it just feels like another thing to check.

So, like, that's, that's why I have an attitude about it that people may be picking up on, um, that Jason has definitely picked up on because I've told him upfront, fuck blue sky.

But, you know, it's like, it's not anything against the people moving there.

It's just like, God, here we go again.

And it's happened.

It happened in, you know, every time there's like a major thing that pisses people off on Twitter, people are like, I'm goodbye to the hell site.

And it's like, okay, see you in three days.

Like, I don't know.

This feels different.

It definitely feels different in that the last time there was the, well, there was an attempt at a big migration was, at least as I can remember, was when Musk originally bought Twitter, right?

And then, and then there were the blog posts and there were the articles about it's time to leave.

We're going to leave it.

And, you know, nothing wrong with writing those.

And I agree broadly, broadly with all of their points.

It's just that.

Sort of what you were getting at, Jason, this one felt more organic in that people weren't like talking about doing it.

They just did it.

And that's interesting.

You know, Emmanuel, did you notice any uptick?

And sort of, were you already there or not?

I am there and I definitely noticed the uptick.

I think

one reason that this wave seems to hold more than other ones.

And definitely the reason I'm noticing it is

the lists that people use now to kind of get up to speed are very useful, right?

Like, I mean, the most annoying thing for me about migrating to a new social network is reconstructing your feed and getting all the follows you want.

And somebody, many people have just created like lists of people you should follow, and you can follow all of them with one click.

And I think the starter packs, yeah, yeah, the starter packs.

And I think the reason we're seeing like so many, like I've gotten a few thousand follows as well, and that's probably because I'm on like a couple of lists.

And I think that's probably true for all of us.

So that makes it, that makes it easy to get up to speed and it makes it very useful.

Just personally,

I think

maybe,

I don't know, two years ago or around when Elon bought Twitter, there were a lot of takes.

And I think there was maybe one on Motherboard about how it's the end of the social media age.

And just from like the perspective of an individual user, that's where I'm at.

I'm on all the networks and I look at all of them looking for stories.

And that's something we were talking about this week.

Like, okay, how do I get an interesting feed so I can find cool stories on Blue Sky?

But I am not,

I think, ever

going to,

again, be a person who is just like tweeting or skeeting my thoughts and feelings of what I'm doing throughout the day.

Like, I think that I'm done with that forever.

I share my stories, which I know is a very boring feed.

So I don't begrudge anyone for not following me.

And I go and I read as much as I can always.

I'm on there all day looking for stuff, but

I'm not interested in interacting that way.

And I thought like we as a society were kind of moving away from that.

And if anything, I mean, whatever, people should go wherever they're happy and like do whatever they want.

I don't judge you for

tweeting or skeeting, but

I thought we were moving towards like group chats and Discord channels and

comments on subscription websites like 44 Media.

Like I'm I love interacting there.

If you email me, I'll email you back.

If you comment on a story, I will respond to the comment.

We love reading

emails and comments you send us here on the podcast, but just like tweeting into the void.

No, thank you.

I don't care where you're doing it.

So there was in the aftermath of the election, there was like this really widespread take that the left needs a version of Joe Rogan,

which I won't get into here, but it feels to me like this is that, but for social media where people are saying like the left

needs a version of Twitter now that Twitter is expressly owned by someone who may work work in the Trump administration, who actively

campaigned for Trump, you have also things like Truth Social and Parlor and Rumble and Gab, which are these specific right-wing social media networks that, to be honest, I have more or less discounted over the last few years.

There was this whole

time when people were saying,

like,

you know, don't amplify Nazis or don't amplify the far right, blah, blah, blah.

And like, the effect of that was they formed their own social media networks.

And there's something called like Donald.win, which was like a Reddit replacement that happened after Reddit banned the Donald.

And I think it's really hard to say what the impact of those specifically like right-wing social media platforms are.

But I did read or hear a take that I kind of agreed with where

you have places like Gab and Truth Social where like absolutely batshit things happen.

And then you have like a right-wing media ecosystem that picks and chooses things that like resonate there and then like brings them into something that's like more mainstream.

And then it's sort of like filtered through

into like the public consciousness.

And I'm not saying that blue sky is like, is going to be that.

I have no idea, But I do think

something very interesting and extremely cringy happened, which is

AOC

was like, hey, I'm back on Blue Sky.

And she tweeted something.

And then CNN was like, here's what AOC said on Blue Sky.

And it like filtered out of this specific like smaller social media network into like a larger context.

And I don't know if that matters at all, but I think that the idea that I've seen where it's like social media is fractured in a big way.

And if you're just posting on these smaller platforms, it doesn't matter and you're just like talking to yourselves.

I don't know if that's actually going to be true.

Uh, I think that it does have the ability to like

form larger talking points because that's, that's what conservatives have done for a long time.

And they've done it very successfully.

Uh, I'm curious what you think about that.

I mean, I think that makes sense.

Yeah, I think that it's probably going to branch out, you know, and you said that it's all fractured and decentralized.

And I guess Blue Sky is the one of one at the moment.

You, Jason specifically, previously thought that Mastodon was the one of the moment.

What was the article you wrote a while back?

And were you wrong?

Yeah, it was over a year ago.

The title was Mastodon is the good one.

And I have a whole like spiel about it, which is I still post on Mastodon.

I think Mastodon is good.

I think the Fediverse is like interesting, and

like we are on it.

And I think that it's good to have decentralized social media that's portable.

It obviously uses like you know, the Fediverse platform, whereas Blue Sky uses something called the AT protocol, and for a while they were not interoperable in any way.

And

now they are kind of interoperable, which I think is notable.

But I guess I'll say is that

the thing that should not win is threads.

It's just like, it's owned by Mark Zuckerberg.

It is like a disastrous, like, like Meta is a disastrous company for many of the same reasons that Twitter is a disastrous company, in my opinion.

It like spreads disinformation in the same way.

It, you know, it deprioritizes links.

It like doesn't want politics or news.

And yet, there's many, many people sort of

defending threads as an alternative to Twitter.

And I think that's like so stupid.

I think it's like one of the stupidest things.

I just, I've no reason for it.

Is it

Fred's super aggressive moderation where we post one of our articles and it has a nipple in it and people get scared and it gets removed from Fred's and they like go home crying?

Or is it like that its user base numbers are entirely inflated because there's just ports all over from Instagram and they say, Look how many hundreds of millions of users we got.

Yeah, because you copied and pasted them.

What is it?

Exactly, dude.

It's all of those things.

It's that.

It's, I mean, it's the fact that it's like many of the people are like brain poison Silicon Valley, like rank and file defenders of like meta's practices and stuff.

It's like the algorithm is super broken.

It's not real time in any way, shape, or form.

I don't use as well.

It's like Sam has the most interesting threads feeds that I've ever heard about.

And it's like, maybe, Sam, you can talk about like what you get on threads.

Yeah, I mean,

yeah, there's got to be a middle ground because threads is because threads is like

you're kind of on threads if you're on Instagram in a way.

It's like, I think it's.

They're kind of like almost because it's meta, but on Instagram, I can see threads posts on my feed.

So that's how I consume my threads intake.

But the threads algorithm is so

aggressively

for what it thinks my demographic is, which is middle-aged white women who may or may not have children, who are dealing with some kind of like serious mental or physical illness.

And that's just all I see on my timeline.

Emmanuel's laughing really hard.

It's like, that's, I mean, that's definitely like

an algorithmic niche that is very valuable to these social networks um so that's what i get all the times like people who are like having like real serious crises with their children involved

and i'm like go to the hospital or the police get off threads and then you get to the end of the the story that the story time they're doing and it's like it was kind of like the whole time it was like a really boring story and I'm like my heart rate's up reading it.

So threads has an algorithm that's like very much attacking me.

And then Blue Sky has like no algorithm, right?

So the chronological timeline

and just like not having it feed me anything that's like

specifically relevant to me.

It's just like, here's everyone you follow in a row, what they've said is also very chaotic to me and not

not a useful way for me to look at like what's going on because people are just posting about like what they had for breakfast or like whatever thought, whatever Margaret Atwood quote comes into their mind.

It's like, okay, that's not really like something I want to use either.

I kind of want to know what's like popular right now.

Or I guess there is a popular tab, but I want to know what's like kind of popping above the feed and like getting attention as it's getting attention and not just like happening in the moment.

I don't know.

It's like, maybe I just need to spend more time in blue sky and like unplug my mind from the algorithm.

Maybe I'm just like.

getting out of the matrix.

I don't know.

Well, so what I was, I wrote my behind the blog last week saying like I had no way of following the election because I like could not find a good like real-time-ish feed.

It's like threads was useless.

There wasn't that much happening on Blue Sky.

And that was probably my fault because I wasn't following enough people on Blue Sky.

But I guess like what I would say is in the last few days, Blue Sky feels very usable to me as like a feed of news because I've added all these things and because people are like actively posting there.

in a way that Twitter did used to feel like for me a long time ago.

And I think Emmanuel is right that like the social media age is kind of coming to an end.

And I also think that something Joseph said is very smart, where you said,

it's like Threads is adding a million people a day, nominally.

It's the number one app in the App Store.

But it is like not clear to me that Threads has anything happening there.

And what I mean by that is

you're like forced to look at it on Instagram.

It'll like, it will inject threads posts.

And then if you want to look at them, you have to download the app.

And so like how many people are actually using that app?

How many people are actually posting?

How many are like

international in nature, but like not posting?

Like I think,

I don't, I think that threads' popularity or quote-unquote popularity is fake.

And like Katie Natopoulos has written about this a few times.

Like Max Reed has written about this a few times.

They have

both articles that you should check out.

But like what's happening on Blue Sky right now feels like more real to me than what I have seen from threads, which feels like forced Facebook engagement in the same way that

if you go on Facebook right now, there are tons and tons and tons of

like Facebook stories, people like nominally like using the stories function or the reels function because it will just like automatically cross-post from Instagram or something.

It's like the Facebook ecosystem automatically shares your posts across like all of the apps that they have.

And that is not like real, in my opinion.

Yeah.

Also, Threads was like originally like so many brands.

You remember this?

It was all brands talking to each other.

At the start.

Yeah.

At the start.

Yeah.

And Blue Sky has like, I haven't really seen any like brands.

Well, we're trying.

Blue sky.

Well, we're trying.

Yeah.

Well, we don't care.

We're not

brands.

No, that's that's true.

But for those who haven't noticed, we are doing more social media posting from our main accounts.

Like, we have some help on that.

So you may notice some change there.

And it's just funny that, you know, we're doing that on Twitter and Blue Sky and Fred's, and they all have their own idiosyncrasies.

And I don't think

the particular news outlet idiosyncrasies of Blue Sky have really been established yet because nobody's done it yet, right?

Because we're now doing the big migration and we're going to figure out how news fits in there beyond you know individual reporters and that sort of thing um i want to say one more thing i know i feel i feel like you're about to be like and that's our show uh to go back it's like blue sky is part of a broader decentralization thing it is not owned by billionaires it is like a portable platform And so when I wrote like Mastodon is a good one, it's like, I now Blue Sky can also be the good one.

It's like, it's the same vibe in terms of like portability and being part of like a broader Fediverse and like owning your audience and stuff like that.

So I don't regret it.

Was correct the whole time.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

But it's it like embodies the sorts of things that I think that we have like largely championed.

And so

like if if Blue Sky ends up being some sort of winner and like if it has some staying power, then I think that that's a good thing.

That's just the point that I wanted to make that it's not owned by a billionaire.

Jack Dorsey is no longer involved, was like bullied off of the platform, as far as I know.

There's a lot of good bullying.

I'll give it that.

You know, if someone turns up and they don't like it, they get them the fuck off there.

That's that's refreshing.

Uh, super briefly, just because I do think it is relevant, Sam, you've been using RSS more, right?

Can you just talk about why you because is that in response to all of this decentralization of social platforms?

Or

yeah, I mean,

I don't know.

It's like I used Feedly for a long time and like Feedly, I don't know if I'm using it wrong or it's not like what I needed, but

I saw someone posting like RSS,

like a, what is it, like OML, like one of those files where you can just kind of like populate your whole entire RSS in one go with somebody else's followings.

So I did that

and I was like, yeah, maybe this is like how I can like consume information without having to deal with like everyone's opinions and like

their every thought that crosses their mind.

Cause that's, I mean, I just like, I'm trying to find a way out of the noise and into like what's actually going on.

It's just so much

chaos right now in particular that I was just like, I need to like get off of these social media apps that I'm looking at all day long, one way or the other.

So yeah, that was kind of, that's where that came from.

I don't know.

I mean, I just, I just started using Inno

like three days ago, and it's been okay.

I don't know.

I kind of missed the opinions.

I've tried that.

I should get back into it.

And that's just a reminder that if you are a paying for a full media subscriber, you actually get a full text RSS feed of our site.

So you could read our articles without even our opinions as well.

You know, if you want to entirely get rid of all of that.

We will leave that there.

If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I will now play us out.

But if you are a paying 404 Media subscriber, we're going to talk about this article we published in the wake of the election about what we're doing, what we did in 2016, why we're staying.

I guess I'll leave it at that.

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