217: Surveil and Chill

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How about a little follow-up? Brian, we have talked about AI on the show several times and your disdain for use of the word artificial intelligence. It's just bandied about a bit haphazardly, wouldn't you say? I would agree. I would agree. Now, I found this link this week, which I thought was pretty interesting.

It's from the EFF and it is the AI progress measurement page. It's from EMF? It's unbelievable. Not EMF, EFF. Oh, damn. Okay. And it is a pilot project collecting problems, metrics, and data sets from AI research, from the AI research literature.

And it's tracking the progress, which is, you know, minimal. It's a very long page. It has a lot of things that I can't really understand. I was about to say, I spent an hour on this page. It's got a very web 2.0 top. And then as soon as you scroll past the banner at the top, it is very much 1984 web.

And if you want to just stare at a lot of charts that tell you that in some ways AI is getting as good as people, and in most ways it's not, and really burn your brain out for about an hour and a half, by all means, this is a fantastic page.

I'm just saying they could have made it a bit more user-friendly. This could have been the if-you-want-to-go-deep page, and then there should have been just a quick page with, hey, here's where we're at. Yeah. A summary. A Reader's Digest version. Yes. And I love all the code that they have in here, because it's not really AI code.

It's just a bunch of function calls. Yes. And I'm like, okay, the function calls with arguments. That doesn't really tell me a whole lot. It tells me how maybe you use it, but it doesn't tell me really what it's doing. No. No. It's a start. It's a start, I guess.

It's a start, yeah. Keep an eye on it, and maybe someday we'll get a good AI that can come back and fix up the page for us. That's right. I can't wait for these self-programming pages. Oh, God. Oh, the future we have to look forward to. Now, we've also talked a lot about not being able to get jobs in programming, because we're owed.

Well, to be fair, we also don't want jobs in programming anymore. Yeah, that's true. I mean, part of that is because we couldn't get jobs. I'm like, ah, screw this. Because having to take crappy contract jobs for a third of what we used to get paid, it's like, ah, it's too much work.

You're working three times as hard to make the same money as you did 10 years ago, and it's like, we are too old. Well, a South Korean company, a new startup called EverYoung, is only hiring people over the age of 55, which means we still can't get a job there.

Right. We're screwed. Yeah, we're in the Goldie-fucked zone. That's pretty much it. But now, the thing about this company, they're only working four-hour shifts, and they have to take 10-minute breaks every hour. I'm like, okay, that's a pretty sweetheart deal right there.

I like that, yeah. I don't know how much money they make. Now, here's the real problem with what the company does and why I wouldn't want to work there. Okay. They're a content monitoring company. Oh. Yeah, these are the people that have to look at the Dickies all day.

Right. I mean, I feel bad for the 85-year-old guy at the grocery store down the street that has to bag my groceries, even though they've been kicking him out and bringing in developmentally disabled people to do that job. I can't believe you're so PC right there. I was like, I don't have a mute button, but my phantom finger was over my phantom mute button.

Well, you know, I mean, but even the old guy at the grocery store can't keep his job. And, you know, I feel bad for that guy when he did have a job. But it's like, to get to that stage in life, it's like, oh, I've made it. I'm not dead yet. And then have to go take a job looking at, you know, withered old schlongs all day and hitting deny, deny, deny.

I really would just put a plastic bag over my head and call it quits. Yeah. I mean, I'll take Walmart Greedo over that. But what are you going to do? Speaking of that, that job may not be around too much longer. I'm going to skip ahead one story because that's a good segue.

Sears and Kmart are closing more than 43 more stores as the retail crisis continues. We've been talking about this, the epic collapse of the retail infrastructure in this country. Sears Holdings continued its steady drip of store closures as of this week or this last week, because this comes out on Monday, with the announcement that it would close 35 more Kmart locations and eight more Sears stores.

There's no, unfortunately, there's no estimate as to exactly how many people are now out of a job. But you've got to figure, those are big stores, quite a few. Now, the interesting thing about that is employment went up this month in the U.S. So where are those jobs coming from? Yeah, I don't entirely understand that.

Well, these people haven't been laid off yet. This would be next month's. Okay. So we shall see. Someday where that goes, yes. Yes, exactly. Well, JCPenney has said it will shut another 138 locations. So that's coming soon as well, which is roughly 14% of its stores and give buyouts to 6,000 of its employees, which is a nice touch.

Well done there. Macy's plans to shut down an additional 68 stores. Radio Shack, which has been seeking bankruptcy protection twice in the last two years, has closed more than 1,000 locations since Memorial Day weekend. And one-time ball favorites Beeb, The Limited, and Wet Seal are all closing or in the process of closing forever all of their storefronts.

Wow. Well, that's a lot. That's not that. I mean, we're talking the entire universe that you and I grew up in, Jason. Yeah. It is roughly gone. Everywhere our parents took us to shop to get clothes. Everywhere. Well, we didn't. We're dudes. We didn't shop at Beeb or The Limited.

But I mean, all these stores that we walked around the malls when we were teenagers are gone. Yeah. Gone. So, it's a different world. It's the Bezos apocalypse. It pretty much is. So, that is continuing. And a quick follow-up on drones. We have been discussing the various things that the FAA is trying to do with drones, including the registration site that they had set up that required all people to go and register their drones, which we both approved of.

I think it makes sense. You want a drone, it's going to fly in the air. It could potentially fall or anything or whatever. You have to have a license. You have to have a license for a motorcycle. You have to have a license for a car. You have to register these things. So, register a drone. Makes sense. Only costs five bucks. Well, never mind.

They've decided that you can now deregister and get your money back. Because if you are flying your drone purely for recreation, not for a profit, you no longer have to register with the FAA. They are hoping that you will do so anyways. But due to a federal court ruling, they will now refund you your money and remove you from the list.

Yeah. Too bad. Too bad. Because this makes sense. Yeah. About four episodes ago, we talked about it. And all the industry insiders are, you know, they're for registration. And like, no, we don't want you to not have this. We will get to that later because we have a story about that.

Yes, we do. Oh, well. If I had a drone, I could get my five bucks back. But I don't. In the news. We have talked about the Internet Day of Action that's coming up around net neutrality this coming July 12th.

Can't wait to leap into action. Yes. What are we going to do? Here I come to save the day. What are we doing this time? Are we are we putting some sort of ribbon up on our pages? Are we turning backgrounds black? Okay. I don't know. I am. Yes, I am actioned out.

I guess I'll find out on July 12th and see what everybody else does. Because I don't. I mean, we don't really have a website that anybody goes to or cares about anymore. So, and if you're interested, go to GOG.show. Get show notes and old episodes if you like. But nobody does. Well, we said it wasn't really going to matter until Facebook and Google joined up.

Well, they have. Okay. We don't know what they're going to do. But apparently they're going to do something. There's about 170 companies now that have, you know, jumped on the bandwagon. So, we'll see. And they're pretty big names. But even Etsy's in there who have just laid off, what, 25% of their workforce?

Oh, yeah. What are you going to do there? I don't know. Yeah. So, what we asked for is happening. But we'll see what comes of it. I'm guessing nothing. Yeah. Me too. Damn. The internet. Well, you know what? We have been pessimistic on this front before.

And we were wrong before, you know. Except for the fact that we're sitting here talking about it again. Right. But the fact that we're talking about it again means that it hasn't happened yet because of the things that happened before. Okay. All of this has happened before, Jason. I know. So, yeah.

Just keep the ball in the air is pretty much what we're trying to get through here. And we've also talked about the Internet of Things. Yep. The Pew Internet Study. Pew, pew, pew, pew. We love the Pew Internet Studies. They come out all the time. Apparently, the Internet of Things is not slowing down.

Yes. And it's going to keep going and going and going until everything that you have can be hacked. I'm sure. Are we surprised by this? Jason, you are an enabler of this. How so? I don't have the smart light bulbs. Let me read the little quote that is right here that you put in the show.

Despite wide concern about cyber attacks, outages, and privacy violations, most experts believe the Internet of Things will continue to expand successfully the next few years because people like Jason DeFillippo hook up their crazy Chinese cameras. That's right there. That's exactly what you posted in there. The whole sentence.

Yeah, but I didn't write it. For fuck's sake, I didn't write it. Hey, don't you have Internet-enabled lights in your house? You know what? They never actually worked quite well. They kept dropping, and it kept, like, disconnecting from my Wi-Fi, even though everything, it wasn't that far away from the base station.

So I eventually just unplugged the damn thing. Yes, but technically, you have a more Internet-enabled house than I do, so. Well, no, because none of it's plugged in. Well, you tried. Anymore. You attempted. Just because you failed doesn't really, that doesn't factor into it. I will say it was kind of cool to say, I can't change my words here, that turned on the Millennium Falcon.

That was awesome for a while. I'm sure it was. It just turned on a damn light. So anyways, not so much fun. Let's talk about people losing more jobs, shall we? Oh, sure. What do we got now? Well, Google is now funding a new software project that will automate writing local news.

This isn't new, though. They've been trying to do this forever. I don't think Google's... No, they've been trying to do this forever. Now, if you read the story that I put in here, it talks about how the Associated Press has been doing this for a while. It's been using automation software to generate stories about corporate financial quarterly earnings, which is basically just regurgitation of numbers.

What this is, is Google is basically funding an initiative to actually do real stories, not just regurgitation of fact, but like, let's go ahead and let's have some natural language processing going on here. Let's scan police splotters and let's generate actual stories.

Interesting. Yeah, so more local reporters being put out of business, in theory. I love this. You know what the software project is called? What's it called? Radar. Reporters and data and robots. Oh, my. I don't know if you've checked out your local paper recently with your local reporting.

I actually do. It's quite funny. I mean, OK, robots might do a better job. Yeah, this really might be a step up. There's some pretty incoherent stuff in the local suburban newspaper out here. That is fair. So let's continue on with layoffs.

That was potential layoffs. Now let's do real layoffs. And what should shock nobody? SoundCloud is laying off 40% of its staff to stay afloat. The only thing I find shocking about this is it's not 100%. Yeah, definitely. Because they were really teetering on the edge not too long ago.

Nobody thought that they were going to make it out of the month. And they did. But it's still not going to work. It's just crazy. People keep throwing money at SoundCloud, even though everybody knows it's not going to happen. They're waiting for somebody to buy them, but nobody wants it.

But nobody's buying. Spotify was looking at it. That fell through. Twitter was considering it. Instead, they didn't buy them, but then invested $70 million, which you'd think would have paid for it. If $70 million isn't getting you the kit and caboodle of SoundCloud, I don't know what would. Yeah.

Seriously, what do they have? A bunch of other people's music. They have other people's music. They get a bunch of hard drives and a player and a bunch of other people's music. There's really no... There's nothing there. And it's an already outdated back end. Yeah. So, what the hell? No.

Anyways. So, that's happening. Microsoft is actually laying off 3,000 people. What? But this is more of a radical reorganization of its sales business. So, they will cut up to 3,000 jobs, mainly in the sales department, which is less than 10% of their actual total sales force.

And roughly 75% of those cuts will be outside of the United States. The reorganization effort is basically being done to focus up on building up Azure, which is their cloud platform, which is not really competing very well at the moment with Amazon and Google. It's actually not doing that bad, though.

I know a lot of companies are on there. Me, too. I know a ton. It's actually... Somebody was saying to me that, you know, you should look into that and come get up to speed on it. And I was like, I don't want to do that sort of stuff anymore. But it looks nice. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean... I did get up to speed on it for a bit, and it's actually really nice.

And I know a lot of companies and a lot of friends, what they're doing is they're running stuff on AWS and Azure to... Now, you got me saying it's Azure, not Azure. I know. Azure makes it sound so much nicer, though, doesn't it? Azure. Azure, baby. And, yeah, what they're doing is just double duty.

So, if one goes down, like, you know, when the lightning struck the AWS factory in Virginia and everybody had lost their Netflix for a day, they're doing just dual, basically dual systems. So, if one goes down, they can fail over to the other one. Yeah.

It's a smart redundancy play. I got to give them that. I mean, by all accounts, it's a better product. But, you know, beta, VHS, we've seen this before. Yeah. I mean, it's just compute, you know? It's a computer that you don't own. That's really what it is. That's what it always comes down to.

But that battle's lost, Jason. Yeah. Yeah. I miss racking my own servers. Said no one ever. Yeah. Well, another company that has basically disintegrated, Jawbone, which is one of Fitbit's competitors, a fitness tracking company, once worth $3 billion.

Hear that, Snapchat? It's shutting down and liquidating its assets. So, it is come and gone. They made fitness trackers and Bluetooth speakers. The founder and CEO, Hossein Rabin, has started a new company called Jawbone Health Hub. He is married to this Jawbone.

He really likes that Jawbone thing. Yeah. Yeah. So, which is smartly going into the medical software and hardware business. That is a huge growth area. So, good luck with that. Hopefully, his hardware and software for the medical business is better than his Jawbone software and hardware. Because I know a lot of people that got the Jawbone and they just said it was shit.

It would fall apart. Didn't track properly. That's why, I mean, Jawbone failed because they sucked. To be fair, not tracking properly is kind of endemic throughout the entire industry. Well, my Fitbit tracks pretty damn well. My Apple Watch tracks pretty damn well.

So, you know, I don't wear the Fitbit anymore because the Apple Watch actually does track so well. After I did that 14-mile test and they were off by like, you know, 0.001%. I'm like, okay, now I only have to charge one thing. Oh, by the way, I meant to ask, have you gotten your AirPods yet?

Not yet. Okay. After you get them, we're going to have a chit-chat about it because I think you're going to have to buy an Apple Watch after that. Because they really kind of go well together. I'm just telling you. All right. Moving back on. Sorry, Jawbone. You won't be missed.

Nobody used you anyway. I think I'm done with firings at this point. Now I'll just talk about jobs that aren't coming to the U.S. and are going to Canada instead. Wonder why? Google's newest AI team is setting up in Canada. And there are two reasons for this. Canada has a long history of AI research, believe it or not.

There's a broader AI research community in Canada than in the U.S. Most of the AI researchers in Silicon Valley are actually from Canada, where they plugged away at deep learning, complex automated processes of data analysis at universities there. So it's very popular in the universities in Canada.

Secondly, the Canadian government is friendlier to AI research than the U.S., and one would argue research in general if you've even read the news. Oh, okay. Interesting. So there you go. So, yes, Google has decided to set that up. And I think even though this article over at Ricoh does not discuss it, you and I have talked about the whole visa issue that we're running into in the U.S.

So it makes sense for a lot of these companies to set up somewhere where they can bring in people without having to go to fucking court. Yeah. Yeah. And Canada's close enough, you know, just to hop, skip, and jump across the border that they can just load up up in Canada. Yep.

So I'm surprised nobody's going to Mexico. Maybe that's next. They're just going to surround us on both sides with great, you know, great tech minds, and then we'll just be here in the middle picking our nose going, where'd all the tech people go? Yeah. Speaking of that, guess where Tesla is building the world's largest backup battery?

I know, but why don't you tell me, Brian? In Australia, not here. But this is actually part of a bet. I know. This is actually kind of, this is why I like Elon Musk, and this is why it must be fantastic to have a 20 gazillion dollars to just be able to do whatever the hell you want.

So, blackouts left 1.7 million residents without electricity in Australia, and Elon Musk basically just made a bet that Tesla could supply 100 megawatts of battery storage in 100 days, and if he couldn't do it, it would be free to Australia. Yep.

So, we'll see if he makes it. We'll see. He's got to get his, he's got, he's spread a bit thin right now. He's got the boring company trying to finish a hole to a parking lot. He's got a Tesla trying to launch a whole music service right now, as well as an additional car.

Yeah, the Model 3, yeah. And now he's got a 100-day bet going on in Australia to build the largest battery pack in the world. Oh, there's that little side project about sending shit to space every month. Oh, yeah, he's still doing that. Yeah. Yeah. Busy guy. He must get up very early in the morning. I would hate to see his calendar.

Me too. Going back to drones for a minute, an Arizona man, 54-year-old Gene Allen Carpenter, has been arrested and charged with 14 counts of felony endangerment and one misdemeanor of unlawful operation of an undemanded aircraft.

This comes back from a couple months ago when he was flying his little drone a little too close to the aircraft that were trying to put out a forest fire. Good. Go to jail. Lock this guy up. Lock him up. Lock him up. But his drone mails. Anyway, I'm glad to see that they finally caught this guy because what a tard.

Yep. Well, it could be a lot easier to catch these guys. If only we would pass some sort of actual legislation regarding registration and identification of drones, as we discussed in the follow-up. It is going on and on and on, and we are not getting anywhere. So what they are talking about now is there's this group called the Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

It's an industry group for drones, which has put out a call for proposals for remote identification systems for drones. Now, this is even better than just the registration, because if you registered your drone, theoretically, then somewhere there's a social security number. That, well, you know, that would make sense.

There's some sort of identifying number on the drone. So if it were to crash somewhere and you were to find it, you would be able to match the number to something. But that does not help if the drone is in flight and if you do not physically get a hold of it. What they are talking about doing now, which this makes even more sense, and this was brought forth by DGI, which is a consumer drone maker.

They submitted a proposal that requires drones to transmit their location and registration number via radio equipment, which is already aboard most drones, just like everything else that fucking flies. Yep, yep, everything should have a transponder. So it makes sense. Yes, there you go. I don't know why this is not being adopted immediately.

It seems like a no-brainer to me, but hey, we can't have nice things. Well, they're going to try and just get all of the other companies that make drones on board, which, you know, makes sense. But for DJI, because, you know, the privacy people are going to, you know, boycott DJI, which would be terrible for them.

So they're not going to, they want everybody to go in at once. And hopefully they'll get it done because it does need to happen. It's like, yeah, it just makes sense. And that way, you know, if there's a drone that's flying that doesn't have its transponder on, then they can send out the eagles to take it down. Yep. Release the eagles. Oh, Ticketmaster is in the news.

I saw this. I love the story. The story is cool. Yes, yes. So what they're trying to do, instead of going, standing in line with your phone, holding up the QR code and swiping 17 times, if you got 17 people with you. We had to do this at Hamilton when we went and saw it. And it was just such a pain to get like, you know, we had six people to get six people in the door.

You had to sit there. They scan the QR code. You swipe it. They scan it again, scan it again, scan it again. And if not, all the people are there trying to coordinate that in even bigger problem. Again, it's like every time I'm at a checkout at any store ever, I'm like, how have computers sped any of this up?

Why is everything so much slower? Yeah. Those damn chips in the cards. Oh, chip and pen. Evil. So anyway, what they're trying to do now is they've got a new system where you just swipe your phone. It's like going to the airport, you know, and when you're getting on the plane with your e-ticket, you just stick your phone on it and go.

They're trying to do that with their new app and it uses audio signals. So it generates like a custom tone. And for them, there's a couple of reasons that this is good. A, it helps cut down on fraudulent tickets. And it also lets them track you even more granularly so they can offer you more things.

Yes. Because now they have direct access to your phone, your email, probably your cell phone numbers so they can, and they know what shows you're going to specifically so they can market to you. Now, what I am waiting to see, because Ticketmaster has a wonderful long history of doing this to you, is how much they're going to charge you for this convenience to you, which is actually more of a convenience to them.

So I'm sure there's going to be now a $5 extra fee if you want to be able to use this awesome e-ticketing system, which actually makes things much easier for them. Yep. I still stand by paper tickets. You know, it's just so sad now because these kids, kids these days, you know, it was just, it was what, a year ago.

It was right before my kid was born. I was going through a box of old stuff and I found a huge trove of like 400 ticket, of the old style ticket stubs. Not even just paper printed out by yourself, the old style ticket stubs of all the shows I went to when I was a kid. It was amazing. Those were great. Yeah, you should put them all in like a photo book just so you have it and stick it on a shelf somewhere.

Yep, I really should. Some of them are even starting to fade, which is kind of a bummer, but what are you going to do? You can always scan them and make a photo library. Who's got that kind of time? Seriously. But yeah, I love paper tickets. So yeah, when we had the problems at Hamilton, I got tickets for Billy Joel for my dad on Wrigley Field soon.

So I got, I printed out paper tickets for everybody. I'm like, we're not going through this again. Nice. Well, in other news, Virgin Galactic is back following the crash that they had back in 2014. The first flight that they have done, they've resumed powered test flights for the first time since then, ending a series of glide only tests that they started back in December.

So the company will fly in the atmosphere every three weeks and plans to return to space or at least as close to as possible by November or December of this year. So good on you. Go, Branson, go. Nice. I can't wait for them to get back on back up in the air and go on. Yes. Get those engines fired up and hopefully somebody won't pull the wrong handle this time.

Yeah, that'd be nice. Yes. Volvo. Is going big on electric cars. I saw this. Very big. They want to end the solely combustion engine powered car. Good. Yeah. They think it'll take till like, you know, 2025 to do it.

But yeah, they're going whole hog on making sure that it's either fully electric or electric hybrid. Yep. Good on them. Congratulations. That's a great, brave move to make. I think it's going to be, I think the whole industry is going to be going there soon. No, definitely.

They're ahead of the game on this one. I mean, I'm still not going to buy a Volvo, but congratulations. Yeah. There's your rub. Nobody wants a Volvo. We've got the greatest. Yeah, it's a Volvo. Yeah. I don't live in the woods. Ups and doodads.

Brian, I know you're not much of a gamer. I think somebody got something this week because there's this whole series of links in the show notes that I don't even understand. Yes. There is a huge set of links in here because I, in an attempt to do things that get me away from the computer, bought another computer.

Buy another computer? Yes. It's more of the mind space. I bought a, I finally went out and bought an X book, X book, Xbox one S the new one, not the, so this is coming, but this is coming off the heels of you attempting to buy a new Mac being denied by your credit card.

But I'm assuming this was cheaper. Oh, this was ridiculously cheaper. Yes. Okay. No, this is cheaper than the Ram that was going to go into the new Mac. Gotcha. But yeah, I got, I got the new Xbox one S with the Gears of war four edition. I got some turtle beach headsets so I can be like, you know, one of those nerd gamers.

Hey, get them, you know, top left and a bunch of other crap. And I got it just to, you know, kind of try and decompress at the end of the day. Turns out Gears of war is stressful though. I was about to say, how's that going? It's fun. It's fun. It's hard.

I'm not a first person shooter guy with the controller. So I got to figure out what kind of games that I really liked with the controller. But I tell you what, on a 4k TV, it's amazing how far these things have come. I really do sound like an old man right now, but it really is unbelievable what they can do with these boxes.

And the new Xbox that's coming out in November looks like it's going to be even more insane. But it's beautiful. And I got to get rid of my Blu-ray player that's been taking up space and now I can just use that. I still have a Blu-ray player that basically just sits there until Christmas that has Love Actually still just sitting in it from last Christmas.

So then I just press power on around Christmas time and spin up Love Actually. You know you can just digitize that and play it through your Apple TV, right? I think it's on Netflix, but I just find it funny that the Blu-ray just sits there with the disc in it waiting for Christmas.

Yeah. I kept mine plugged in even because I used it for Amazon Video. And I kept it there just because, you know, I have four Blu-ray discs that I'm probably never going to watch again. And then I used it for Amazon Video. And even though six months earlier I got a TV with Amazon Video built in, I couldn't be bothered to, you know, pack it up and put it away.

Right. Until the Xbox came and I had to move it because I needed the plug. But, yeah. By pack it up and put it away, you mean throw it in the trash? It's in the garage waiting for somebody to have a garage sale so I can give it to them so they can make a dollar off of it. Right. It is a nice Blu-ray player.

I got one of the Sony ones. It's actually a really nice Blu-ray player. I'm sure somebody in Latvia would love to get a hold of it. Yeah. I'm sure there are really nice Betamax players still floating around out there, too. One thing that I got this week that is not very nice, though, I got the Amazon Dash Wand with Alexa.

Why would you do that? It's free. Oh, okay. It cost me $20, but as soon as you buy it and you turn it on, you get $20 in credit. So I'm like, oh, a free gadget to try out for the show. I'll try. I'll take that. Okay. So what it's supposed to be able to do is you're supposed to be able to scan it, scan something, and then it adds it to your cart.

Right. In theory. Right. Okay, in theory. And you can also ask it questions like Alexa. And it comes with a little card with a bunch of different things you can ask it. It's also magnetic. You can stick it under your fridge. Yes, it's actually where it's at.

It gave me another magnet to put, you know, cartoons and stuff on the fridge that I never do. I actually used it to hold up the paper tickets for the B-52s that I went to go see last week, which is handy. So back to the card.

And it's a bunch of different things. Well, 50% of the things on that card don't actually work. Which is, I'm like, okay. Now, you know, they always say in software, if you, you know, if you're not embarrassed by your first release, you release too late.

Well, apparently Amazon Dash wand released right on time because they should be really embarrassed by this thing. It doesn't do anything. So I went on a scan fest trying to scan as many things as I could around my house to see what it would recognize and add to the cart.

After about 25, 30 things, one, one thing was on Amazon that I could scan and that was a four pack of deodorant. Right. But it was a good price, so I ordered it. You know, but I mean, okay, 20 bucks, plus you get 20 bucks off immediately.

It's got the microphone in it, so it's basically a dumbed down Alexa device. Who cares if it scans or not? You can just walk around the house talking to it. But it doesn't work as well as Alexa does. That's the problem. Yeah. Or why would you need this even if you already had an Alexa at all?

So that's what I'm saying. Like, you know, I talk to my Echo and it works fine, but. But it's free. So you get a free magnet for your fridge. That's true. Yes. You get a free magnet with a laser pointer that you can play with the cat with if you have a cat. There you go. Yeah. I mean, talk about throwaway technology. We are there.

Yeah. It literally is worth throwing away. But I'll keep it for the big fridge magnet access. And I did talk about starting the Hackintosh project. Yeah. How's that going? Man, there are some really good resources out there.

I found a ton of them. The problem is I was pricing it out. It's not that much cheaper. It really. Yes. You can build a super powered machine. But at the end of the day, you're still building a pretty high end PC, which means it's going to cost a lot of money. So the cost benefit analysis that I ran on it was like, hmm, maybe a couple hundred bucks saved over getting a top of the line iMac or waiting for the Pro.

I mean, yes, over a Pro, you're going to save a lot, I'm sure. But the new iMac 5Ks that they have are just as powerful as the CPUs you're going to get in this thing. You can bust up the RAM. You're probably going to save like 600 bucks, I think. But you still have to buy a monitor and the iMac comes with a monitor, a 5K monitor.

So in the grand scheme of things, I'm not sure if it's worth the hassle because there's no place where you can just go buy a Hackintosh. It's like, OK, hey, look, we've put all the parts together. Pay us for labor. Here, we'll send you one, which is what I would do in a heartbeat. But there's nobody that's selling them.

Nobody's marketed like a full put it together yourself kit. Here's everything. There are places out there where you can get shopping lists, where you can buy them all and then put them all together. But ain't nobody got time for that. I got an Xbox now. I got to say I'm a little disappointed because I was looking forward to the social media meltdowns that were going to be involved with this.

I was having them when I was reading it in my head. I'm like, wait, I got to get thermal paste and like put the CPU fan on myself. What kind of shittery is this? I'm not 15 again. I did this shit 30 years ago.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking when you were first telling me about this. I was like, you got it. You're never going to do this. I tell you what, what really I mean, what got me over the edge was my friend was telling me, just get an Xbox. If you need something to distract you, don't make a computer. Just go play some video games.

And I'm like, you know what? You're probably right. And then you hounding on me, just waiting for me to explode when I started, like put the, it put the, that kernel of doubt in the back of my head saying, um, you know, Brian's probably right about this one. And it's just going to be an expensive pain in the ass.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to get three quarters of the parts, get so pissed off at it, put them in a box right next to the, uh, all of the other crap that I bought for the show that never really went anywhere. Like my Arduino kit, all of that stuff, the closet of dead tech, very expensive dead tech that we never used.

And then just, uh, go have a beer. Just go have a beer and watch TV. I'd like to take this moment to apologize to our listeners. I apparently overplayed my hand with Jason too soon on this one. So no fun, no fun for any of us now. No, seriously.

That was, uh, you, you, you were just so giddy that I'm like, Oh no. Cause then I'm on the hook. If I start this project and I don't finish it, I'm going to be eating crow for like two more years. And I'm like, I don't know if I want to do this show two more years.

If you go, how's that Hackintosh going? How's that Hackintosh going? Every, every, every episode title is going to be Jason's Hackintosh. That's it. Day five. Hack and fail. On Lonely Island. Oh God. How are them dip switches, Jason?

No. So yeah, I think, I think that project is going to go by the wayside. Unless I can find something that's going to have an easy prebuilt one that I can just buy for cheaper than it would cost to go get a really high end Mac. Right. And right now I don't need it. I have six Macs in my house.

Uh, I would like one just because I'm, I'm reaching the end of what I can do with what I've got. But, um, yeah, so that one's on the, on the back burner, but you know, it is going to snow here soon. So who knows? I do go a little snow crazy, but that's true.

So we talked about win amp and how much we miss it so much. You remember, remember old win amp? I vaguely remember it now. It was a beautiful little MP3 player back in the more innocent days. Yeah. And it just worked. It really just worked.

It did what it was supposed to do. Uh, ours technica put up a post with a couple, uh, articles put together about the, you know, the 15 year history of win amp and, uh, how it fell apart and died. Now going through this, I, I, normally I would say, ah, it's cute article, but halfway down here, it jogged my memory.

Um, and I think we both worked with this guy. Do you remember Rob Lord? I do. There he is. Yep. Nullsoft's first hire. I, I've worked with a lot of douchebags in the business. Top five was Rob Lord.

I mean, I mean, he's, he's, he's actually vying for two, number two and three. Number one, I'm not going to name names on, but this guy was a dick and almost got me fired several times for no reason. So fuck you, Rob Lord. Um, I just had to get that out.

It's been, it's been, it's been under my skin for a long time. If you can't tell, God, I, I love using this show for vengeance. Well, to be, I mean, if you really want to feel better about it, Rob, Rob Lord has just moved on to more and well, let me guess. He's got a podcast.

There's two ways to look at this. First off, all he does is go from, from project to project, all of which fail on the other way of looking at it. He keeps getting funded and is obviously living a pretty good life. Yeah. No, he actually brokered the sale of the company I worked at to another company.

Right. Thus ending my job at the company. All right. Let's, uh, let's, let's pound those sour grapes into the ground here and move on. Yes, they're pounded. I, I, I just had to get the Hackintosh out of my, I feel better now. I feel better now. I did find a cool app this week called Yoink.

Uh huh. Uh, you know, sometimes when you're dragging and dropping stuff on your Mac and you just like, ah, you, you hold it and you try and move it around and all that stuff and get it from app to app. And sometimes it can be a little frustrating if you let go at the wrong point. I will say UI on that, uh, PC blows away a Mac.

It is so much easier to drag and drop on PCs. Mac gets weird. Uh, so what this app does, it gives you a little tray. So you select a bunch of stuff and you can put it in a little tray and then go to where you're going to go and then go back to the tray, grab it and put it back to where you want it to go. It's nice.

I, I found this on, uh, or, or Apple could actually just make it work better. Nah. You know, okay. So they're charging 699 for this. This will be in the next version of iOS or not iOS.

This will be in the next Mac OS. No, because I mean, this, this is based on an old app called drag and drop. Okay. And so the, this functionality has been around forever and they've never adopted it. So we'll see. They might take it for iOS, but yeah, I was listening to the accidental tech podcast and they were talking about this.

So I tried it out and it's pretty cool. I got to say it's one of the only things I get from that show. Uh, but what are you going to do? All right. You got some apps. Well, muzzle app, muzzle app, uh, across my, my social feed this week. It's not anything I need. Uh, I don't think it's anything anybody needs anymore at this point.

Right? So the whole point of muzzle is it's a simple Mac app to silence embarrassing notifications while screen sharing. It theoretically works with, uh, any program that you can now screen share, uh, within and it automatically turns on do not disturb when you launch your screen share so that you don't that.

Now, the only reason I put this in here at all is go to the site and start reading their examples. Aunt Arlene, please don't leave your butt plugs on the bathroom. Dot, dot, dot. Jesse, Vinny is looking for you. Seems pissed. Uncle Dwayne. Woohoo. Make America great again.

These are just fantastic that they put some good time into coming up with very, very funny notification messages. So are you sure your wife won't find out? We are so overcharging this moron. I'm going to quit. Fuck this place. What's a milf?

Your friends keep calling me that from mom. Yeah. Good stuff. So you don't need, you don't need the app, but you do need to go look at the website. Um, and here's, here's a follow on for that. I noticed at the bottom, it says, uh, build websites, check out code kit. So I went to the code kit website.

Have you checked this one out? That actually looks really cool. I don't really think I need it anymore, but if I were to build a website from scratch these days, I think I would try that out. All right. But here's what you missed on this one. You have to scroll down to the reviews. Okay. Uh, Phil Schiller, senior vice president in Apple.

Our Mac updates are now scheduled, scheduled around major code kit releases. This app is that good. Craig Federici. Is he high? It just keeps going. Johnny Ive. Code kit three is the most deliberate evolution of our founding design. Each button's nine step anodized process brings absolute unity and efficiency.

To a singular vision. This is truly a product that only Apple could create. And then underneath Tim cook, stop quoting my employees. Very funny. There's a ton of them on here. This guy is this. I like this guy a lot. Yeah. All right. I think I'm actually, I don't need muzzle, but code kit looks super interesting.

So, and it's only 34 bucks. I'm going to support him for his clever comments and, and fakeness that he did for the muzzle app and buy code kit and give it a go. Okay. Let me know how it goes. Cause it does look pretty cool. Yeah, it does. So, all right. Uh, something else I found that was super fun, uh, this week, uh, Facebook ads.

Now you can use an ad blocker and that gets rid of some, but not all of Facebook ads, but rather than that, why not just replace them? Okay. So this is awesome. This is called social ads, comma, vintage edition. It's a group Google Chrome extension that replaces Facebook stable of ads with nostalgia inducing photos of everything you love.

That's now retro. So it brings in all these great eighties ads instead that they've scanned and brought in teenage mutant Ninja turtles, Casio synthesizers, all these great old arcade cabinets. This is awesome. I don't use Chrome anymore, but I ran it for just a couple of days with this audit and I was snickering left, right, and center.

If it's a Chrome extension, you can still run it in opera. Oh, that's right. Opera has that, uh, that wraparound thing that lets you do the Chrome one. So I'm going to install that now and I'm going to turn off, uh, ad blocking on Facebook because this is fun. If you are, if you are of our age, you will enjoy this and they have a pretty good stable of scanned ads in there because I've only seen it repeats once or twice.

Nice. Very cool. And then finally, I was actually going to put this in more on of the week, but it just cracked me up too much. Rick's daily tips. Did you go to look at those websites? I have not yet. No. So tell me all about Rick and his daily tip. Please do just quickly click on that and, and take a look at the awesome design.

Hello blogger. Yes. Nicely done here. This is a great, I just like this. We've known at least for Facebook pages and for businesses for a long time, you need to go ahead and like your own stupid posts because it actually gives you a little bump up in the algorithm and theoretically makes it appear more places, which we all know probably doesn't do it anymore, especially now that there are people out there posting this as the secret.

That means obviously that Facebook no longer does that. But I just like this because he goes into it as if you've been using Facebook for a while, you've probably noticed that many people like their own posts just as soon as they post them. While this could be viewed as a form of vanity, I mean, really, is it cool to like your own posts?

In most cases, it isn't vanity at work at all. He then goes to explain that if you like your own posts, that means that'll force more people to see it, which is the very fucking definition of vanity. But it can be marketing as well. But he's talking about for his own personal pages, like not even marketing.

Like, I had a turkey sandwich today. Like, I want to make sure that more people get the opportunity to see my post. Yeah. Good old Rick here. It's a great picture, too. He looks like, what's his name from? He looks like Stapler guy. Yeah. Yeah. From Office Space.

Office Space. Yeah. Sorry, we should make fun of him. I'm sure he's a lovely man. Yes, he's an A-plus certified computer tech and blogger with more than three decades of experience in the tech world. He should be doing a podcast. He could call it Grumpy. Wait, that one's taken. Yeah, taken.

Sorry.

Media Candy. Radiohead's OK Computer is probably top five albums of all time for me, for sure. I should listen to it someday, then. It's great. And for me, it's the high watermark of Radiohead.

And I know I'm committing hair assay, especially with our particular demographic of listeners who will now inform me that Radiohead can do no wrong and send endless links of songs that I don't like that came after OK Computer and tell me how wonderful that they are. They aren't. OK Computer was definitely, I mean, this is one of the best albums of all time.

Tom York has always insisted that OK Computer was inspired by the dislocation and paranoia of nonstop travel coming off, you know, endless touring of the Benz. Everybody else in the world has kind of told him, no, it's about unchecked consumerism and over-reliance on technology and how it can lead to automation and eventually alienation from ourselves and from another, which is what I think it's about.

And the New Yorker, of all places, goes into a very long article about how everything that they talked about in OK Computer and we were worried about and the dystopia that they were telling us was coming. Well, it's all here now. Yay!

So, yay. It is 20 years old. I think it was the 20th anniversary. So they've just released a, you know, super box set with outtakes, things like that. We've talked about it on the show before. I just thought this was a great article from the New Yorker that really, I mean, it's not every day that you get the New Yorker writing about an album and going super in-depth on it.

So, fascinating read if you're a Radiohead fan. And if you haven't listened to OK Computer yet, Jason, put the Xbox away for an evening and toss on OK Computer and give it a go. It is a phenomenal album. Okay. I will give that a shot. So, Daniel Dae Kim from Lost, Grace Park, Boomer, and Cylon No. 8 from Battlestar Galactica.

Quickly got new jobs when those shows ended. They both ended up becoming stars on Hawaii Five-0. I can't believe that that show has been running for like seven years now or something. I know. I can't believe it either. I always meant to go watch it. I never did. Don't, dude, don't, don't. I watched half an episode and was just like, my brain fell out.

I'm like, this is dumb. Grace Park in a bikini. I don't think you understand how much I love Boomer. Yeah, I mean, that's few and far between, though. It's a lot of bros and guns. Okay. Well, they're not on the show anymore anyways. They are leaving because they were not getting as much money as their white co-stars, according to Variety.

They were seeking salaries equal to those of stars Alex O'Loughlin and Scott Kahn, who neither of whom I've even heard of. Scott Kahn was in Entourage for like two seasons. He was pretty funny. Never watched that show. I know. So CBS's final offer to the two actors was reportedly 10 to 15 percent lower than the salaries of their co-stars.

That seems a little fucked up. Yep. So there you go. I'm glad you're leaving. You guys are both great. I mean, fantastic actors. So get the fuck out of there and fuck CBS. Yep. Go start up a new Battlestar Galactica thing. No. Bring back Boomer. Oh, well, I'm kind of beyond that.

That's fine. You have dipped your toe into Yahoo's probably the only company not doing this at the moment. YouTube TV, one of the five companies in search of the mythical $35 price point for basically getting over the Intertubes TV.

Yes. Yes, I did. And it lasted for a month and a half. A lot enough to get a Chrome. That's it. Yes. Another company is now in. This time it's Hulu. They are offering for approximately 50 channels, including live TV and four major broadcast networks for $40 a month.

As mentioned, this is the fifth major company to enter this market over the last few years. Sling, Sony, DirecTV, YouTube, and now Hulu. None of them are any fucking good. None of them are able to get all the channels that anybody would want. Local channels still continue to be the biggest problem.

That's what YouTube TV was good for. YouTube TV was good for local. But I didn't get a bunch of other channels that I needed. So I still had to, you know, hop on over to Sweden. But here's the thing. It's almost as if they forget that the reason that we were all upset about cable or satellite TV in the first place is bundling.

And what all five of these companies are doing is creating bundles. It's the only way they can get the channels, though. That's the problem. Yes. Well, that's the thing. Then don't even fucking bother doing this. Don't bother because it's the exact same thing. You're charging a little bit less and giving us less.

So fuck it. Yeah, that's it. You know, honestly, it's like I just stopped watching that much TV. That's after I can always do that. Yeah. Once I get rid of YouTube TV, I found that, oh, you know what? I don't really miss it. I don't really need to watch Big Brother.

No, nobody actually needs to watch Big Brother. Nobody needs to watch. The one channel that I always want is Comedy Central and nobody has it. Once Hulu dropped Comedy Central, then I dropped Hulu. Right. You know? And you can always just go and get the app themselves. I mean, you can watch that. I don't think Comedy Central charges for their app and you can watch old shows, although I do think that they do the check to see who your cable provider is.

Yeah, and all my friends have tapped out on all of their accounts for their cable companies, so I can't get a free login. Damn it. Well, and things are getting even more fractured in the media landscape. Facebook has now added to their original TV lineup, which thus far has not really made any waves, but they got Mike Rowe on board.

So, returning the favor, featuring Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe. He'll highlight people across the country who do exceptional work in their communities. The second show is named yet, but it is a reality series starring LeVar Ball and his family, which is a bunch of basketball player type people with massive egos, from what I've heard.

So, that should be not interesting. Now, if it was LeVar Burton, I'd be into it, but not LeVar Ball. I know. When I first copied and pasted the story, I was like, LeVar Burton and Mike Rowe, that's great. And then I was a little more disappointed. So, I'm assuming that this is all just free, Lost Leaders for Facebook. Yeah, Facebook just couldn't.

They should just buy all the TV companies anyway and just give it away for free, so you'll spend more time on Facebook. Spotify is also rolling out their own original content. They've actually been doing it since 2016, but they're getting into it more traditionally now.

So, there's a documentary about the young days of legendary rock band Metallica, a video series on Green Day, because, of course, Green Day has to take over everything at the moment. K-Rock. Now, the streaming service is getting ready to launch something called I'm with the Band, an in-house initiative that will feature music, videos, and a documentary inspired by issues like immigration and LBGTQ.

Sorry, I was just getting used to the four-letter version, and then he rolled out another letter. Equality, the original series brings together artists such as Designer, Pusha, T, the aforementioned K-Flay, who I love, and ex-ambassadors on six new pieces of music, all created with help from singers, songwriters, and producers who are affected by Trump's controversial travel ban.

So, content coming from Spotify and not afraid to look like snowflakes. Where do you get to watch? Do you have to use, like, the Spotify app to watch the videos? I've never seen, because I don't use Spotify, the app, for anything. So, you have to use the app to get it. I see. Yes, you do. So, if you're in-app, you can watch videos and all that sort of stuff, and all this stuff is in there.

And it's pretty, I watched the K-Flay bit. It was good. Okay. If it doesn't cost you any more from your standard Spotify, then it's fine. It does not. It does not. Although, one would assume if they start to roll out a significant amount of content, there will be some sort of premium, premium. Premium, premium.

Super, duper, premium. Super, premium. Yes. And Vulture has a nice long-form article called The Streaming Problem, How Spammers, Superstars, and Tech Giants Game the Music Industry. We have talked about a number of these things when Spotify first came out. People putting out completely silent albums or, you know, two-second, three-second songs and having their fans just play them repeatedly.

Yep. This is a whole list of how Spotify gets gamed. Yeah. Including any time that there's a hit song, people immediately releasing cover versions. The happy birthday insert name here. Oh, yeah. That seems to be working very, very well. That's a good idea. It's a fantastic idea.

And as we go more and more to people using basically voice searches rather than using a keyboard or anything like that. And, you know, we all know how well they actually work. There's always a little bit of error going on. And plus, you know, it's just going to grab something that's close.

So that's what, you know, Lamar, Kendrick Lamar had a song called Humble, which is like very huge right now. And there are already like 35 different cover, what they call cover bots and rip-off artists who are, one song alone has been streamed more than 30,000 or 300,000 times, which is, you know, you're going to make a couple bucks there.

So a lot of people are out there gaming the system. It's quite funny. And this is a great read. So go take a look at it if you want to chuckle. Oh, man. That's just, it's kind of sad because those, you know, yeah, the spammers do like swing the numbers. So regular plays from regular artists get shafted even more.

Well, and the weird thing about it is if you do, especially if you've hooked up Spotify with Alexa and you just ask them to play an artist, what they'll do is they'll play the top songs, right? Yeah. So that can get game two, where instead of hearing like the songs that you want to hear, you're starting to hear these weird cover versions that pop up that are just tagged.

It's just strange. Oh, there are switches that you can turn off. I had to do this this week. Like there are switches in the Spotify control panel or the settings panel that you can turn off, like play artists like and follow on like when the albums are done. So, yeah, I turned all that crap off because I like I was playing Rise Against and then it went into some Blink 182 shit.

And I'm like, get this off of my damn machine. I don't ever want to hear Blink. Blink 182 is not welcome in my home. So, yeah. Okay, well, I'll check that out. Yeah. And Spotify, what you also need to add is a never play option. I want a ban. I want to be able to click on Red Hot Chili Peppers and never have anything that ever has any of those artists ever, ever played.

Oh, God, that would be so nice. It should. Why wouldn't you have that? It makes sense. I do not want Peter Cetera ever to be played in my house. I will take Peter Cetera way before the Chili Peppers. It's a toss up. Security?

Ha! We're joined again this week by Dave DDoS Bittner from the Cyber Wire. He's here to lull you into a false sense of security with his very own dulcet tones. Hello, gentlemen. It's nice to be back. Well, good to be back. Everything going well since I was gone last week?

You kind of came off a little bit halish there. Opened the pod bay door, Jason. Yeah, it was. Actually, I was kind of going for Roman Mars from 99% Invisible. But, all right. Anyway, good to be back, gentlemen. Good to hear you. Yeah. Well, you know, it's been a busy week as it always is.

It seems like, like so many things, the rate of change is accelerating when it comes to cybersecurity and threats and so forth. Last week, we spoke about the malware known as many names. Some people are calling it Petya. Some people are calling it not Petya.

Some people are calling it Nyetja, which is my favorite, although it doesn't seem like that one's going to stick. Well, we're going to try and change that because Nyetja is my favorite as well. Yeah, it is. GoldenEye is another one that's been going by. Hated that movie. It seems like not Petya is the one that has stuck the most.

And I'm okay with that one. What troubles me is that there are many people still referring to it as Petya, which is actually the correct name of a previous bit of ransomware. So I think for the sake of not having confusion. And the fact that this is not, it literally is not Petya.

It is. Exactly. So we can't, I don't know how we could be more clear than to call it not Petya, but that certainly differentiates the two, you'd think. So the fallout continues from not Petya. There's a really great article that we link to here from the Talos team that really lays it all out.

It's from beginning to end of how this works, how it took hold. This week has really been about the fallout and the financial fallout. Some of the companies like Maersk, the big shipping company, you know, they've gotten hit pretty hard by it.

They've had people cancel orders because ports have been shut down while they've been trying to deal with this. That's insane. When it gets to the point where companies are advising their investors that there may be real effects on earnings, that certainly takes it to another level of attention.

What do you always say, Dave? Now we're, as soon as we'll be talking about real money? Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, you know, they were hit pretty big. There was a division of FedEx. They have a division called TNT, I believe. Dynamite.

Yeah. Oh, boy. They were hit hard as well. So, substantial fallout. As we said last week, this initially was perceived to be ransomware. Turns out it's not. It's just a wiper. It's destructive. Once again, targeting Ukraine.

And, of course, everybody's looking at. Who are we looking at, gentlemen? Russia. The Russians, absolutely. But, you know, Trump just got out of his meeting with Putin, and Putin says they didn't do nothing. So, it can't be Russia. So, we have to move on. That's settled. That's settled. It was probably just some Russian patriots like some of the other ones, and the government had nothing to do with it.

We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. How could you know? Wasn't there a big raid this week, though, with the company that owns the Medoc software that was actually used as the launching point for not to pet you?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. It is. I believe it's referred to as Medoc is the correct way to say it. Not that I'm being pedantic or anything. But you're being pedantic, so. Yes. But I am. But so, yeah. The company who did Medoc got raided this week by Ukrainian authorities.

Now, they were very cooperative with Cisco. The Cisco report that we've laid out here. They were raided by the Cisco police? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They were raided. No, Cisco volunteered to help them. And they were open to that. They said, yes, please come on over and basically, you know, opened up the kimono and said, please have a look at everything you want to look at.

We want to get to the bottom of this. And according to this report by Cisco, they did just that and dug in and and help them out. So they they weren't really trying to hide anything by all accounts. But at the same time, the Ukrainian authorities went in and are looking at Medoc as ground zero for this.

And so I don't know if it's too well. They've said that they could be held responsible and liable for not not having a high enough standard of security to allow this to go out to as many people as it did.

According to the reports, they were backdoored three times before this went out. So do you think if that is set as a precedent, that's that's going to really change things? The idea that you are you are if you didn't you don't take care of your own house and somebody gets in and affects your computers and those go out and get everybody else out, you are responsible.

Yes, but I mean, let's look back at something like the Target breach. Certainly, there was a huge financial impact on them and that made everybody take a closer look at all this stuff that made a lot of people buy a lot of insurance. So, you know, there are different ways to approach the the liability reality.

You can you can you can you can improve your protection. You can buy more insurance. You probably end up doing both. So, yes. But I do agree. I think the more of these that we have where people are held liable and and, you know, if people actually end up doing jail time.

Yeah. You can bet everybody who's on a board of directors who's going to be possibly exposed to this sort of thing, they're going to be taking a real good look at how they're protecting themselves. And the interesting thing, like, you know, Brian, you brought up the Target hack, which is a very interesting topic when you want to get into it, because if you look at the ME doc issue, that was probably computer on computer issues.

Right. But the Target hack was perpetrated by, you know, guys that were dressing up as HVAC contractors that broke in. So there, you know, they're totally different attack vectors on those, even though the result was similar. You know, they got into the systems for the Target.

But you're looking at two separate types of, you know, attacks. And where do where do we draw the line where where liability comes in? Yeah, I don't think you do anymore. I don't I mean, I know, you know, you're talking human vector versus computer on computer crime.

But at this point, is there a difference? At least as far as as repercussions or the law would be concerned, and I'm not sure that there is, we have to start getting licenses for computers and treating them like handguns, putting them in the vault at night. I'm not I'm actually not doing that in your beloved movie hackers.

I'm I'm actually not joking. It's like you got to lock up the computers. The the cleaning staff should not have willy nilly access take away that you have to check in your keyboard at the end of the day. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea. Yeah. Virtually or otherwise. You know, I mean, it's an interesting idea.

I mean, there are plenty of organizations who make a point of telling people, you know, shut the damn things off at night just to reduce your attack surface. Don't leave your passwords on a post-it note next year on your monitor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But these are all just like caveman approaches to the problem.

You know, when you really look at it, it's there. There are much more elegant solutions. But this is a thought experiment for another day. Let's let's keep going. All right. All right. So story about hacker last week. Again, we talked about the nuclear facilities being targeted.

And yeah, the interesting thing that you and I talked about, Dave, last week is, you know, somebody got into an administrative system, but we were we were both on the same page. We're like they could just be probing the network. And there's a new joint statement out from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security saying that, yeah, there is no indication of a threat to public safety in any potential impact appears to be limited to administrative and business networks.

But also in the article, they say that they are trying to map those networks. Right. So, yeah, we were ahead of the time. Hey, breaking news. Lateral movement. It's such a weird thing to to say that, you know, there is no threat to public safety. That is in the statement itself.

But the statement carried an urgent amber warning, the second highest rating for the sensitivity of the threat. So which is it, guys? Well, let me fall back here. And say, you know, I when faced with these sorts of critical infrastructure situations, I always look to Robert M. Lee, who we've talked about before from Dragos, who, Jason, I think you said has the coolest company name there is when it comes to these sorts of things.

And he even tweeted a thank you for that. So thank you. Yeah. He's he's he is my voice of reason because he is usually calm and measured and sort of he doesn't hesitate to cut through the crap and tell you the way things really are. And right before we went on the air today, I was checking out his Twitter feed and he was basically saying, look, you know, this is no don't panic.

This is there's no need to panic if there's any group of people who understand, you know, keeping their systems under controls. It's the folks in the nuclear power business. Such a great track record. Well, they have a great they do actually have a great track record.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in this country. Yeah. So I think we were right last week in that our suspicion sort of from last week got confirmed this week. It's there's no reason to panic yet. But really, the types of things that we were talking about are pretty much the types of things that they're talking about this week.

So is it surprising that that bad guys are trying to map out these systems? No, not at all. No, not at all. Well, you know, here's the thing. If this podcast thing doesn't work out for us, you know where we have a job. Uh, psychics, uh, nuclear facility analyst.

That's us. We could go or that or that. Yeah. We have the credentials. We talked about it on an episode before that, you know, the FBI and Homeland Security came out with a report. So we broke the story. So we that's our that's our new gig, man. All right. I'm start start polishing up our resumes just in case a couple of people that don't have to polish their resumes are a couple of Russians who got busted for running a hacking service.

Basically, you know, hacking as a service or evil as a service as, uh, was it two episodes ago? We, we named our show. Yeah. Uh, well, let's be, let's be clear here. They are actually Latvians. No, uh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They were actually, they're actually Russians living.

One of them is at least a Russian. One of them is Russian. Living in Latvia. One of them is Latvian. Yes. Yes. Mm hmm. Yes. All right. Mr. Pedantic is back again. But they also got a co-conspirator in Virginia. Yeah. Ah. Yeah. So I think the, the take home, so just to sort of give an overview of the story here, these are two men, uh, like you said, in Latvia who for a long time, it says this, their network has been operational since 2006.

We, we, we hack you a long time. So they've been at this a while. Yeah. They've been running basically these sort of, um, you know, bad guys as a service sorts of things. Um, all things, virus, um, Trojans and, uh, remote access Trojans, key loggers, all the, all the usual suspects.

And they've been running these as a service, providing customer service and all these things that we talk about. Um, these are some of the folks who've been doing it. And according to this report, they've been doing it for quite a while. They have thousands of customers and good for the FBI. They tracked them down and, uh, and they've been arrested.

Uh, one of the things that I noted in the, this article from the Washington post was that, uh, assistant us attorney, uh, Kellen Dwyer noted that when Bondar's, that's one of the guys. And by the way, Bondar is a great bad guy name. Yeah. Um, when Bondar was arrested, he was carrying $30,000 in U.S. cash as you do, right?

Yeah. And, uh, and he had bank accounts in various countries. So I, I suppose if you're not using Bitcoin, uh, this sort of thing, I guess could be a cash business. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, $30,000 U.S. in Latvia. That's like what, a Snickers bar. He was just going to go, he was going to Starbucks. That's all.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Dollars don't go as far as they used to. Yeah. Everybody in Latvia is a millionaire from all the cybercrimes. So, you know, inflation. Yeah. Well, but it covers a topic that we talked about last week where, you know, it's like, is being software as a service in the evil area as bad as, as actually perpetrating the crimes?

Well, it turns out you can still go to jail and get arrested for it. So it does happen. And, you know, yay for the FBI. This is, I think so many of these things we think about day to day and we don't really think about people being brought to justice because I think usually the way it goes is that people get away with these things for a long time.

And I think there are a lot of people who just get away with these things, particularly if they keep it at the low level kind of, I don't know, side business kind of thing, hacks and skids. But these guys, I suspect they've been on the FBI's target list for a long time.

And it's nice to see them being brought to justice. And hopefully that helps put the word out to the other folks out there that they might want to think twice before doing this kind of thing and that the law has a long arm. Yeah, I mean, 11 year investigation probably into these guys finally bore some fruit.

I mean, they didn't do the whole Ross Ulbricht, I'm a megalomaniac, I can, you know, have people killed type of thing. They're just like, ah, you want some malware? Here you go. Give me rubles. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So speaking of exchanging money, according to Bleeping Computer, the fourth largest cryptocurrency exchange was hacked and users lost some of that money.

They lost some Ethereum and Bitcoin. We don't know how much yet. They haven't confirmed the exact amount, but it seems like it's a lot because there are a lot of users on this exchange. What surprised me was, so 31,800 BitThumb users were, had their, basically their stuff stolen, which is 3% of the platform's user base.

Yeah. Wow. That's a lot of people. But I guess if you're the fourth largest exchange, you know, that would, it says there's a lot of people into Bitcoin and Ethereum nowadays. Yeah, I, that's more than I would have thought. I can't really say that I have any reason to have a good beat on this.

I don't personally dabble in these sorts of things yet, but I suppose it's only a matter of time as they become more popular, they'll just probably become easier to use them. I mean, the thing is, look at, look back at Mount, what is it, Mount Gox and all of the other exchanges.

That's the one thing about cryptocurrency exchanges is the only time you hear them in the news is when they get hacked. And that's like every other week. It's like, okay, it's really easy to set up a cryptocurrency exchange. It's really hard to secure one. Yeah. Yeah. But I, I wonder if we're going to see a sliding scale of, of, of, as we're in, as, as these exchanges lose their newness and the bugs get worked out and, and everyone goes, oh, that bug, oh.

And the professionals step in. We need the professionals to step in because you know that these things are run by a bunch of amateurs. Hmm. I don't know about that. Look at Mount Gox. Those guys were right in pH. They, they, okay. A, they wrote their exchange in PHP.

Number one. And these guys are, they're literally figuring it out on the fly. Well, I mean, to, to be honest, that's part of the appeal for people that are trying, that are investing in, in these, in these cryptocurrencies right now, because it is volatile, which means there's a chance to make big money and it's a gamble.

Yeah. So the thing, the thing about these things is as they get codified, as they become more and more professional, competent, standardized, the chance of making big money goes away as well. And it kind of loses some of its appeal. We need an FDIC for cryptocurrency is what we need.

Well, then, then nobody's going to bother with it anymore. I mean, it's insurance. Somebody can come in and insure it. It doesn't have to be the actual federal government. Or the, or the company itself, apparently, because the thing that you guys left out about the story so far is that the, the exchange is basically going to reimburse all the users.

So they're right now they're, they're insuring it themselves, apparently. Yeah. Yeah. Which is interesting how, how, you know, where are they going to get the money to do that? It struck me that, you know, something I've thought about in terms of just plain old money, you know, the money that you, we all have that's in our banks. Um, it's sort of, you don't think about your money as being your money.

In other words, if you're, well, I have so little of it. I definitely think of it as my money. His chase is on a first name basis with every dollar. Right. It's all, it's all under, uh, it's under Hamilton. Hey, Phil, I'm going to change you in for a taco. Yep. Yeah. It's all stuffed under Bam Bam's mattress.

That's right. But, um, if your bank gets robbed, right? The, the, you know, the bank at the top of the street where you keep your money, your first thought is not, oh, I hope they didn't get my money. Yes. Because it's not your money. It's, you know, the, the, it's, it's just money and it's, it's just a ledger.

You know, it's, it's, it's, it's a bizarre social contract that nobody can really wrap their head around because the financial crash happened. We're all like, what, what happens if we wake up in the morning and money doesn't work? You know, separation between a physical object and as money has just deteriorated massively within the last 20 years.

There's, there's no doubt about it. We don't consider it. We don't think about it. It is, you know, bits and dots and it's credit card statements. It's, we don't, we make no connection anymore. Unless you're a libertarian and you got a box of gold under your bed. That's true. I've seen them commercials on CNN. That's right.

Well, moving on. Have you guys ever heard of a zip bomb? Not until today. Nope. You know, I hadn't either. So yeah, the thing about a zip file, which I, I, I, you know, I knew that compression was really efficient, right? Yeah. But I didn't know how efficient it could be because you can have a 42 K zip file that will expand into a 4.5 petabyte file.

If you're just encrypting zeros. Nice. This is the coolest thing I've ever heard. And I found this on bleeping computer because they're, they're one of my new favorite sites for just weird hacking news. And people are taking these 42 K files and they're hosting them on ports on their web server that hackers will usually port scan to try and find vulnerabilities in their web server.

So if I'm just like doing a port scan and trying to find this stuff and I'm like, okay, I noticed that this user agent comes from a port scanning tool. I'm going to serve them up this zip file that they will then, when they get it, they will decompress because you can do G zip and things like that on, you know, over, over HTTP.

It's one of the standard compression algorithms that you use, you G zip stuff and pass it around. And so when they get it, boom, their computer is trying to extract a 4.5 petabyte file onto their server, which will basically will crash it. Obviously.

Yeah. I think this is just so damn clever. It made my day. I'm like, that's really cool. You know, I used to, I used to serve pictures of gay porn up when people would try and steal my images, but this is way more clever. It is. I was really waiting to see how that sentence was going to end.

Oh, no. Look, man, we used to, when, when, when Brian and I started with our web servers back in the early nineties, you had to pay for bandwidth for your web server. And when people would hot link your images and they would get popular, you had to pay for that. So our revenge, or at least my revenge was, uh, let's not say our, okay, but I know you did it too.

Don't, don't front. Don't front. I know you did it too. So I did not use male pornographic images, but I did replace the images. Yes. Yeah. So yeah, sometimes you replace them. It depends on the client. Sometimes it'd be like, please do not link to this image.

You know, you could do something clever if it, if it was, you know, like for a company that you were doing. But for me personally, yes. And Goatsea was popular for a while and things like that. But yeah, you could, you could replace whatever they were stealing if the refer didn't match coming from your website.

And, uh, this I think is just an, an evolution of that, which makes me very happy. It's quite clever. Um, I ran across the story, which kind of shocked me. This is one of those things that you never think about. Cause I guess, well, you're not, I'm not in the military. I know we have a couple of military listeners who have sent in some interesting questions that we've been unable to answer because we don't really know policies going on in the military with tech, but this one was more than a little surprising.

Uh, the U S military is finally going to start encrypting soldiers emails. Believe it or not, they are not encrypted at the moment. So to some degree they're, they'd have been better off using Gmail. Uh, but okay. Uh, they don't even use start TLS, which is a 15 year old encryption technology.

Uh, the reason that they say that they can't use that is they cannot scan through for malware phishing attempts and other exploits. Uh, that's what the DISA is saying. So, but, uh, never worry. They are coming up with a system to finally encrypt our soldiers emails, uh, and it will be ready in next July.

Hmm. Okay. Hopefully you can't rush these things of importance will happen in the next year. Yeah. I, I, you know, I kind of understand where they're coming from though. They're trying to, they're trying to prevent the military and computers that these soldiers are actually checking their email on from getting phishing attempts or malware sent to them.

So they can scan everything in the email links and things like that and flag those. So being able to do that, I agree. I, it makes sense. The reasoning why, but I, it's just one of those things that it's like a mental bomb that goes off in your mind going, this is not in place already.

Yeah. And I think the way that they're going to have to do this is basically do their own man in the middle attack as it were. So they're like mid flight. They'll, they'll decrypt it, scan it, then re-encrypt it and send it on. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I think the only way that they can do it. And that will take some time to do to build that system for the entire military.

Right. It reminds me of that joke from, from airplane, which I'm, I can just paraphrase where the, the pilot says, you know, we're, we're coming in low from the North. Uh, we'll be protected by fog so they can't see us. And, uh, we'll be dropping all of our 500 pound bombs. And she says, when will you be back?

He says, I can't tell you that it's classified. I figured you were going to go with, have you ever seen a grown man naked? Yeah. That's the previous story. That's just you, Jason. Yeah. See, it's always grown men naked with you, Jason. Look, I'm just, you know. Always grown men naked with you.

It's a callback. I'm just saying it's a callback. I got it. We got it. We're, we're with you, man. We're with you. Okay. Okay. Moving on. Moving on. So, um, in the civil liberties, uh, department from the civil liberties desk here at Grumpy Old Geeks, uh, Facebook is fighting a gag that prohibits it from alerting users to search warrants.

This is from Suffos. Must not make joke. Okay. I, I've been chastised enough. Moving on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think this is interesting. You know, um, quite often when the government asks a company, a, a, a provider to provide information on users, they do so.

And with that request comes a gag order where the company cannot tell the person that they're providing the information about that, that information is being provided. Mm-hmm. And of course there are people who there, there, there are legitimate good reasons for that sometimes. But on the other hand, sometimes the companies push back.

And in this case, Facebook is pushing back and saying that, uh, it joined with the EFF, uh, saying that, no, um, you, you can't just do this, you know, you, you have to have a good reason. And, and, uh, we think it violates the first amendment rights of our subscribers for us to turn over their information without them knowing about it.

And, uh, I, we, we don't have time to go into a lot of the details, but it's an interesting article worth reading. Um, and I, you know, I think it's good for there to be attention here. I think it's good for these companies to, to push back and to have this play out, let the courts decide, um, where this needs to land.

What this reminds me of is, go ahead. I just think it's a great story because it's such a unicorn. It's Facebook doing something right. Oh, come on, Mark. Don't hide it. Provide it. Right. Right. The other thing it reminded me of is something we talk about a lot here.

Uh, the cyber wire is when it comes to military things and, and state secrets, there's this tendency to over classify because why not? Right. So you have all these things that people just stamp a classified statement. Stamp on because that way, you know, we don't have to share it.

It's classified. And, uh, you know, there's not a lot of oversight to, to that. Um, and so a lot of people say that there are too many things being classified. This reminded me of that. Yeah. Right. Well, go, go Facebook. Never.

Exactly. Something that we ever say on this show. It's, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite rare. Yeah. Give them credit where credit's due. Exactly. Yep. Now we started off this segment by unintentionally going off onto a thought piece tangent. And I actually had one ready for the end of the segment anyway. So we'll start with the thought piece and end with one.

Uh, this is a very good long form article by John Penny, who is a research fellow at the citizen lab at the university of Toronto and teaches law as well. He's a research affiliate for Princeton center for information technology policy as of fall 2017. And he has done a very long study and a very long article about what exactly he sees happening when speech is chilled by surveillance.

So this is the thought that a little backstory earlier this month, the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats backtracked on a promise to disclose how many of Americans communications are being swept up in warrantless mass surveillance of foreign targets. And he has admitted that even Herculean efforts by the NSA would be unable to determine the number of people and Reuters has reported that could be in the millions.

This is not only an American concern. Uh, what this guy, John Penny is doing is he's been studying this stuff and finding, you know, different occasions of surveillance spyware being used by different governments, including Mexican governments to monitor journalism, human rights activists, uh, lawyers, et cetera, not just cyber bullying and harassment.

And as he goes through all of this, what he's discovering is basically that people, when they feel they are being monitored, uh, or there is surveillance going on, whether it actually is or not, uh, just the, the thought of there actually being surveillance going on, tend to change their behaviors online.

Um, and how exactly is this affecting us and how we behave online is a really interesting topic that he gets really deeply into. And he also points out that, uh, through his research, he's discovered that this stuff actually, uh, affects different people more so than others, particularly women and young people who will basically curtail activities that they would have engaged it online because they just feel like they're being watched.

It's quite interesting. It is. It is. I, I, I, I'm not sure how I feel about this. I, I, it's, it, it is fascinating. On the one hand, I had the reaction of thinking, well, duh. I mean, you know, you're being watched, then your chances are you're going to, um, I, my first thing thought is to say, be better behaved, although that might not be the best way to

describe it because is good behavior always the best behavior for a society? Right, right. I'm not, I'm not sure it is, but, um, certainly, you know, if you know, I don't know if you're a teenager and you know, your mom's standing in the hallway outside your room, are you less likely to, um, I don't know, be fooling around with your girlfriend or boyfriend on the other side of the door even, you know, probably not.

So, um. You've never been to my house. Yeah, well, um, but on the other hand, it's how fascinating that women and young people are affected more so. I guess also on the one hand, surprising on the other hand, maybe not because if those are groups who are, might be more accustomed to being told, you know, Hey, pipe down or something

like that, maybe disempowered conditioned. Yeah, that's the perfect way to say it, Brian. Yeah, exactly. Maybe they're conditioned to be more circumspect when they think someone's watching them. It does make me wonder, is this the last nail in one of the last in the coffin of what the internet was supposed to be, which was the great leveler, um, you know, where the disenfranchised and disempowered were given the same degree.

And what we're finding is not really, it's, it's still the people that feel the power in, in the real world that are maintaining it even now into our virtual worlds. Yeah. And, and what an amplifying effect it has that, you know, the ability for people to be shouted down, piled up upon and, and, uh, and harassed is, is greater, maybe perhaps greater than their ability to get their voice out there.

Yeah, you're, you're right. It's an interesting article and, uh, certainly worth the read. Uh, one of those articles that you, you end up spending some time thinking about for a while after you've read it. And one of those articles where there's, there's a lot of stuff that he links out to, and, you know, I never go and read all the various links in an article, but this one, I've been working my way through it and reading all the sub articles that he's pulling from.

It's just fascinating to see what he sees and, and how things, again, you know, we're three middle-aged white men sitting here having a discussion about things, things that aren't really affecting us too much. Obviously we're on this podcast and we're spewing shit all the time.

We are not changing what we're saying, but it's really interesting to see what other people and other people's experiences in this venue in which we are every day we're spending time. And so I would just like to say there are only two white guys talking about this. You guys have, uh, have been taking this one over, but I would just like to point out that Jeremy Bentham is the late 18th century thinker and philosopher who came up with the idea of the panopticon.

And we've talked about this on the show previously, and there is a lot of writing about this, which is the same chilling effect that you're talking about in this article. So definitely if you want to go deeper into this stuff, we're going to have the Wikipedia article linked in the show. And there are a lot of outbound links as well as the, um, the article that Brian linked to about this topic.

And it, it's, it's, yeah, it's kind of scary. And it's quite funny that you picked Wikipedia because in the article itself that I was talking about, he was talking about the Edward Snowden effect, where after that came out, people were terrified to use Wikipedia because they knew it was being monitored. There you go.

And one of my colleagues that I work with is very careful about anything he puts in our Slack channel because he believes that it's, it is inevitable that someday it's going to be hacked and made public. Right? I mean, he might not be wrong.

He might not be wrong. I mean, we have to realize that everything that we've done digitally at some point could come back out to be out there. It just is. But now we're getting into total tinfoil hat territory. Well, no, here's the deal with Slack. Slack is a private company, so they can be subpoenaed. So anything you do say on Slack is available to the government.

Right. Right. Right. Okay. Enough of this. Well, that was cheery. Okay. Well, gentlemen, have a good one. Enjoy a chilly weekend, everyone. That's right. Exactly. And on that note. In 20 years too late news, but still kind of cool.

The Beastie Boys sabotage video has been remade with Sesame Street puppets. This is, of course, not authorized. This is by somebody. Let's see. What's his name here? Adam Schlecklehorn. Schlecklehorn. Schlecklehorn. Schlecklehorn. Okay. A Milo the cat. He previously created videos of Sesame Street characters.

So apparently his genre is illegally reappropriating Sesame Street characters and lip sync in Bone Thugs and Harmonies, The Crossroads and a previous Beastie Boys song. So what you want. These videos have racked up millions of views on YouTube, thus getting him money for stealing other people's copyright.

Having said all that, it is kind of a clever video. So worth a watch. It's quite funny. And speaking of funny, the Chinese now have a sense of humor, which I think is fantastic, which, you know, we've lost our sense of humor in this country. Yeah, thank you. For the past six months or so, or maybe a couple of years.

But anyway, they have built a giant solar plant. It's like 250 acre solar farm. But they shaped it like a giant panda. It is awesome. I almost want to just, I want to go to China just to fly over this thing.

You could bring your drone and fly over and take some drone pictures. That's right. But yeah. Elon, get on this. Why can't we have nice things like this? Feedback loop. We've got some new Patreon subscribers.

So thank you so much for that. I'd like to thank Marcus Naylor, Ilya Krasnov, and Eric, who wrote Jason a little comment. Hackintosh veteran here. It's okay. You'll be fine, Jason. LOL. Make sure to check out TonyMacX86.com. Jason will not be fine because he's not doing it.

But thank you, Eric. Thank you, Eric. I did find that resource, which is one of the ones that made me go, oh, Jesus. And the whole point and the fun, Eric, would have been Jason not being fine. Yeah, okay. And we got some PayPal donations, some one-timers from Rafael Butch and Scott Itterman.

Thank you guys very, very much. Yes, Scott sent a little comment as well. Special instructions. Hey, nah, I'll be nice. Just a huge thanks for the hundreds of hours of entertainment during long drives in Canada. And even bigger thanks for all the hard work you guys put to the show. Cheers, Scott. Nope.

Cheers to you, Scott. Cheers to you. Thank you so much. Yes, and we will get some maple cookies. With that money. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe that'll happen. We got some people writing into us at GOG.show. The first comes from Chris. Just wanted to mention, Opera is owned by the Chinese. Dun, dun, dun.

Dun, dun. Dun, dun. Hey, they just came up with Panda Farms, so I'm kind of okay with that. You guys discuss it a lot on the show, but fail to mention that from a security perspective. I'm not sure I can trust it. But what can you trust these days? Bingo. You just answered your own question, buddy. Yes, and he also follows on with, I've been using the Brave browser based on the Chromium base.

So far, so good. Works well on my iPhone, too. Much faster than everything else I've tried. Company is led by the original developer of Firefox, which I don't know if that's a good thing or not. Yeah, me either. And he says, not sure how the micropayments will work out, but I've started contributing to sites I like. Maybe GOG.show can earn a few Bitcoin via Brave.

Now, what he's talking about there is, what Brave has done is they've turned their whole system into kind of a flatter system. So they're building that into the browser. And I checked it out, and I checked out some of the YouTube reviews about it, and it looks pretty cool, but it doesn't have all the functionality that a real browser needs, like Google Doc support, which is important.

I can't use a browser that does not have Google Doc support. Yep, I agree. And on the Opera side of things, I went and I did some research on it. Yes, they are owned by a Chinese investment firm now, but all of the original people are still there, and they're still based out of somewhere in Scandinavia.

It's all the same people, because they've been around forever. So the core people didn't change, just the people who get the checks sent to them have changed. All right, gotcha. All right, we got another comment from Andy, a better password manager. Andy Sink sends us a link from Bleeping Computer.

With your regular discussion about password managers, I thought you might dig Horcrux. Andy, I cannot use this because I'm not a millennial, and I refuse to use anything that's named after Harry Potter. Even though you've read all the books and love them. Yeah, I did, but still, I cannot worship at the altar of Harry Potter.

I cannot do it. Although, I have to say clever name, so well done. Now, the point behind this one is they say it's dangerous behavior that password managers insert user credentials inside a page's DOM, which exposes them to malicious JavaScript scripts that can read those credentials while inside the forums before submission.

So they get around that by putting in dummy credentials inside the login fields and then hacking the post request and replacing the dummy credentials with the real ones there. Now, they've admitted that this idea is not new. Other researchers proposed the same solution in the past. That solution was not adopted by the developers of other password managers due to usability and compatibility concerns, which is fair enough.

Yeah, and usability and compatibility concerns are kind of what I want when I want a password manager to work. So, yeah. Yep. I'm going to stick with the one that we used to recommend quite a bit because it still works. I agree. So I'm not switching, but it is cool.

I mean, good on them. And like I said, the naming is quite clever. Friend of the show, Patrick, wrote in regarding the Pyro Mini, which has now made two appearances on our show. I did go and verify that we had talked about that in the past. That was very funny. He says, call me when the Tim Mini is done and then you'll have a buyer and a clever link to YouTube where there's the Monty Python skit, which is very funny.

All right. And Ken writes in, absolutely loving you guys. Only recently found your podcast thanks to CyberWire. How about that? Awesome. Have you guys ever looked into publishing your podcasts on Deezer? Also, I've never heard of Deezer. I have. Is it worth publishing too?

I, okay. Here's the deal. We openly publish an RSS feed that anybody can get our MP3s. So if Deezer wants to come get them, they can get them as long as we get the credit for them and they don't fuck with our show. I'm a little surprised that Deezer is actually still in business.

I don't expect them to be around too much longer. If SoundCloud's still in business, you never know. You never know. Could be around forever. And Ilya Krasnov wrote in and said, thank you guys for an awesome show. Have been listening for about two years now. GOG is the only podcast I'm waiting for every week. When my wife sees me laughing with headphones over my ears, she knows I'm listening to GOG.

You played a big role in my tech slash security slash privacy maturing process. And thanks for weekly lessons on persistence and quality work. Well, thank you. Now we got a big one here from Matt Nixon. Matt wrote in a couple of weeks ago and we took a bit to write back because we actually had to go find the answer for this.

Right. I'm 39 years old and a current student. I'm looking to do a career change and get out of trucking and into cybersecurity. Good move because trucking is going away and possibly into the self-driving maintenance of future cars or the internet of things that the cyber wire talks about. I'm enrolled in my local college for network server admin.

Oh, bam, bam. Quiet, girl. I know. Go ahead. I guess you didn't get that. I guess you didn't get that dog size. Yeah, I don't have the dog size mouse pad to roll her in. Okay. Must be Don's delivery.

Okay. Okay. He goes on to talk about his schooling, but he says, my question is, where do I look for entry-level jobs? I live in a tourist area where everything is outsourced from the next largest city over. Would it be beneficial for me to start at our geek squad or hold out to be a ticket taker and answer phones for the lowest level IT for a year?

Looking for some insight. Thanks. So I reached out to friend of the show, Monkey13, who is in the cybersecurity business. And he says, I always like to get new people into our security teams when they come from the service desk or NOC type jobs and network operations center jobs. Even better if they moved from that into systems or network operations.

The more experience you get in those other support roles, the better mindset they will have in a security role. I worked with people who got hired the same month. One was on the service desk for a year or two and one that just finished their security degree and was starting their master's in security. One was amazing right out of the gate and became a critical member of our team.

The others struggled day to day just to try to figure out the basics. I will let you guess which is which. I would say definitely try to get into a helper service desk type role when you study security. Also let your manager or the powers that be know that you are very interested in the security side of the house, that they may have you focus a bit more on that side, even on the service desk.

Good luck and have fun with that. This IT focus is very challenging, always changing, and frankly, can be a lot of fun. Also look to see if there are any local security meetups. They are a great place to meet people with the same mindset and a great way to network. In our local meetups, we have found many people jobs in the industry, veteran security people, as well as people totally new to security.

So thank you for that, Monkey13. And good luck, Matt. Yep. Good luck. Thanks for listening. Over at iTunes, we have a five-star rating from Master Weenus. Love that name. My inner dialogue in podcast form. Love the snark. These guys are the voice of every workforce nerd in the best of ways.

May all the snowflakes melt in hell. Nice. Thank you for that five-star rating. Appreciate it. Next comes from Chris Mann from Slovenia. Weekly dose of tech. Great pod. Delivering tech news with healthy dose of humor. Be warned, though. May make you want to buy Chinese webcam. Yes, it might.

Yes, it might. And that was another five-star rating. Now we have a three-star rating. Oh, okay. From Capitan Stubisa. Okay. As far as I can tell. He's from Australia. And he says, I think the technology side of this podcast is okay, but as another reviewer has pointed out, they are just too ultra-progressive.

I was but disappointed that they called PewDiePie a racist a-hole without even doing so much research into the entire incident. Well, he got fired by everybody, so I don't think that we were wrong about that one. And we're apologists to Charlie Hebdo Massacre. Hmm. Okay.

I don't think. Okay. Anyways, they come off as a typical duo who would agree that milk is racist if NPR wrote an article about it. Well, I don't know if you read the story two weeks ago, but half of Americans think that chocolate milk comes from, dare I say, dark-skinned cows. Yeah. So milk is fucking racist.

And fuck NPR. Sorry. Look, obviously, we have very different opinions about how the world is and how it should be, Captain Stubisa. So, you know, no harm, no foul. Go listen to somebody else's show. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and a snarky review. Closing shout-outs! My shout-out goes out to the new zombie gunship survival. I finally hit level 30. I'm done.

I deleted it from my devices. So, thank you for the fun times and you're welcome for the money. I actually paid. I did exactly what I said I was going to do. I spent $25 on the game and it lasted me three weeks. So, I thought that that was a fair price to pay and it is a fun game.

All right. I'd like to give a shout-out to America. Had a nice 4th of July and a wonderful half-week, which was fantastic. I also want to say that we're recording this on Saturday, July 8th. On this day in 2014, Germany played Brazil in the last World Cup.

Germany, powerhouse. Brazil, probably the biggest powerhouse in soccer ever. They've won five World Cups. Germany had only won three at that point. The final scoreline for the game, probably my finest and most enjoyable soccer game I've ever watched.

Seven to one, Germany. Absolutely destroyed Brazil. Ah, the memories. I remember you talking about this, yes. I was in a pub in Toronto. They had handed me a bell to ring every time Germany won, assuming, you know, it'd be like a two-to-one game at best, probably with Germany losing.

I ring that motherfucker every 10 minutes. It was awesome. So, until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors, and stuff we like.

If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to GOG.show.com, where you'll find all the ways you can support the show and help keep us on the air. To learn more about all of the people who make the show possible, head over to GOG.show slash about. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash 217.

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