247: Thoughts and Prayers

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I'm calling you today from my living room. Oh good. Why's that? Not my wonderful studio that I've spent so much time setting up, because last week I told you that I, you know, got a PC to run the studio. Yes. So I turn it on, and you know, there's usually Windows updates that come out of those things, usually immediately.

Yeah. Could take quite some time if it's a machine that's been sitting in a back room somewhere for a while before you bought it. Sixteen hours. Yep, that sounds about right. Sixteen hours. Multiple, multiple reboots and downloads and start all over again.

It's like, Jiminy Crispy. I don't think this machine is that old. And man, you know, the picture just doesn't do it justice on Amazon. It is so much uglier in person. Oh, is it really? Oh, it's hideous. Yeah, that was a fantastically bad looking machine. So send me a photo of that.

We'll put that up on our Grumpy Old Geeks Instagram this week. You don't really get the majesty of it until you see all the rainbow lights on the front. Yeah. It has rainbow lights on the front. It's an ugly machine. It's a very ugly machine. It's a Gamer's Republic machine.

It's meant for gaming. But unfortunately for that, I've had to use my downstairs iMac to actually talk to you today. So if I sound a little echoey, I apologize. And if you hear cars and everybody else outside, that's the reason. There you go. And a little follow-up on my Twitter followers.

Yes. Every day, coming in the morning, there'll be like, say, 3,700. By the evening, there's 2,400. By the time I go to bed, there's maybe 3,000. Right. And then I come back today, and it's like 2,300. And then it's just, it's schizophrenic.

It's what it is. It's a battle, right? At least we know Twitter's doing something, because it's the battle of the bot followers versus let's delete those accounts. But I'm only getting like five new followers a day, so why is it fluctuating so much? Who knows? Twitter is whatever.

I know. But I mean, I've had to use it pretty heavily with the new Jordan Harbinger show, at least getting the word out as best I can. Right. Which brings me to something else. When I ask you for a retweet, and I say, please, can you give us a retweet? Don't like it instead. Yes. That's just, it makes me want to slam my head against a wall.

I'm like, either do nothing, or do what I asked. I mean, that's all I really care about. And I need a retweet, help, on this issue to get the word out. And if you don't want to retweet it, don't like it, because that does nothing. That's true. It does nothing. Literally does. It does one thing.

Pisses me off. So, I guess it does have some value. If you give it a heart, I do not heart it. And don't give Jason any hearts. No hearts for me. I was listening to NPR, because there was sports on my one station, and they were playing like Kid Rock on another station.

I was just like, ah, okay, let's listen to some NPR, because I was stuck in the car. Now, you know, we ask for your dollar a month Patreon subscription. Yes, we do. A lot, because we need it, you know? Yes. I am barely employed, have no insurance, and have a family to support.

So, and Brian has, you know, an actual family. A child, an actual family. Hey, kiss my ass. Hey, both of our kids shit on the floor, so you're no better than I am. That is true. I was doing some wiping up yesterday. Now, on this NPR thing, they ask NPR listeners, literally, if you're going to die soon, why don't you think about adding NPR to your will, and give us the last gift you can give us to help keep us on the air.

You gotta say, at least they're aware of their target demo. That's true, but I mean, I almost drove off the road when I heard that. I'm like, I'm going to be dead. Fuck your radio station. I don't care. Did they really ask that? I can't believe that. I 1,000% guarantee it. That's amazing. All right. Yeah.

No, trust me, it would be much funnier if I made it up, but that is an actual thing that I heard on WBEZ here in Chicago. Well, unlike NPR, we would like your money now, and we'd like you to stick around and keep on living and listening. Yep. And since I did use some of that money that you have given us to send off the DNA sample for little Dino.

Money well spent, right, Jason? Man, I thought 23andMe was bad. If only there had been some podcast that had talked about how horrible these things are and how useless they are. If only you had listened to your own show, Jason.

Well, why would I do that? Too busy talking. Yep. I don't know what he is, but he's got the coloring and temperament of a Rottweiler-Doberman mix. And according to the people, I think it's Wonder Panel or whatever it's called, I'll figure it out, there'll be a link in the show notes, but they came back as 25% Cocker Spaniel, 12.5% Beagle, 12.5% Labrador Retriever, and 50% 5-0 Mixed Breed Groups.

So you're saying that's not right? No, not even close. So I called them. I actually called them, and they're like, well, you know, Cocker Spaniels do sometimes have that brown and black coloring, so that could be it. And I was just, I mean, I was cracking up on the phone because it's such a, you know, a bullshit script that they're reading from.

Oh, yeah. Duh. To just not give me my money back. And they've, you know, finally, they offered a partial refund, not a full refund, only a partial refund. They didn't say how much, but they said if I would send them two pictures of the dog, they will send it to their scientific team for a re-evaluation.

But I give them credit because when I hung up the phone, I was just like, okay, I'm not getting anything. And then they followed up with email immediately saying that, you know, we got the feeling you weren't very satisfied with our customer support at the end of this. I'm like, what tipped you off? So I sent in the two pictures, and they immediately wrote back and said, oh, what a cute dog, blah, blah, blah.

But now they have a picture of them, right? Right. Can't really do a blind trial when you can look at him and see that he basically is a Rottweiler or a Doberman. Right. What they're going to do is they're going to tweak the randomization algorithm, I'm sure, or go and find somebody who actually has a, you know, a Rottweiler or Doberman and come back.

Because, yeah, now they can cheat, which I really don't like that they do that. But for 75 bucks, it's pretty funny because I got to tell everybody around town that he's a Cocker Spaniel now. I'm like, it's a pretty handsome Cocker Spaniel, don't you think? Right. And it turns out a lot of people do the doggy DNA.

A lot of people. Of course they do. And no one has gotten a result that even comes close to matching their dog. Right. So, Brian. Yes. What do you say we go into the doggy DNA business? Because I bet we can write a better randomizer. Yeah. You don't actually.

Why even bother with that? We'll just have five different things and we'll send them out randomly to people. We don't need a randomizer. That's true. This is complete and utter crap, right? Like, it's just totally wrong. It's amazing. Absolutely wrong. And under the mixed breed groups, you can dive in and click on the different breeds.

And under Rottweiler and Doberman, it says 0% chance that he has any of that in him. Right. 0%. 0%. 0%. 0%. And I'm like, maybe you guys, you know, swap the samples with maybe, I don't know, a Cocker Spaniel Beagle Labrador mix.

And not my dog. They're like, no, no. The samples were, you know, they were handled correctly. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? They're all a load of crap. I've got some follow-up on Bird. Bird is the scooter system that is currently only operating in the city of Santa Monica, where I live.

But sure to come somewhere near you soon, I'm sure, because they got an awful lot of funding recently. It's app-based. It's basically the Uber for scooters. Unfortunately, it also, you know, they basically just flout laws left, right, and center, and don't take any responsibility for that, because it is a motor vehicle.

You do have to follow a number of laws, such as wearing a helmet and all these other, and having a license and being old enough and, you know. Not drinking and driving. Not drinking and driving, and you're supposed to park them responsibly, not just dump them off in front of people's doors or businesses or in the middle of the damn sidewalk, so I have to push it out of the way so I can get my stroller through with my kid, all that sort of stuff.

And they were also operating without a business license here in Santa Monica, even though they said that they did. They have made a plea deal because the city was suing them, so they're paying $300,000 to the city, plus another $6,000 in administrative citation fines.

They have to run a week-long public safety education campaign here. They have pled no contest to an infraction and paid an additional criminal fines of up to $200, plus statutory penalty assessments for all these various other things. And basically, they've kind of done a mea culpa, sort of, because they were forced to.

And it will change absolutely nothing, because the city of Santa Monica will still continue to ticket everyone, because people will still continue to use them illegally. In fact, just this morning, as I was taking my bike ride, two of them ran Kitty Corner across a busy intersection, making two cars stop. It's just insane.

So, it is... I don't know why Bird pisses me off so much. Probably because it's a microcosm. It is Uber in embryonic form right in my hometown. And I'm just watching people not give a shit, flout laws, and get away with it. And not only just get away with it, get away with it and become, like, a million-dollar company.

Soon to be a billion-dollar company. And it is so frustrating watching it happen. Yeah. You know Mr. Vendor Zanden, the CEO, actually used to work at Uber and Lyft. So... Yeah, of course he did. So... That's where he's got his playbook from. Yep. Can you just buy a lot of marbles and start throwing them in the street?

I don't... Well, you know, it's... I don't... I understand why people use them. I get it. It's convenient. It's quick. It's easy. It's dirt cheap. It's kind of fun. So, I don't blame the people. I blame the company.

Because the company has just kind of said, well, you know, we're not going to hold any responsibility for this. You're on your own. You should follow the laws. That's not really how it works. It's not how it's supposed to work, anyways. Anyways, I'm just... I'm pissed. We all know why. You're pissed.

I'm pissed. Everybody's pissed. It all happened again. It's really hard for me to give a shit about any tech bro news. I just... I'm pissed. The shootings, it's enough. We're going to talk about it a little bit, but not too much. All I have to say is, I remember when I was a kid, I did duck and cover drills because nuclear annihilation seemed rather plausible.

And I'd give anything for my kid to have to deal with that instead of active shooter drills, which is what kids are doing in schools now. Fuck it. Let's go to the news. In the news. Now, we're going to start off the shooting with a bit of tech news because, turns out, the Florida gunman took an Uber to his mass shooting.

Yes, you heard that right. He took a fucking Uber to his mass shooting. Now, everybody's talking about, if you see something, say something. Now, you think a kid with an AR-15 in the back of your Uber getting dropped off at a school might be a red flag.

Just a little one. That's all I'm saying. I mean, I know it's Florida. Strange things happen in Florida all the damn time, but that seems like a little red flag. Uber has confirmed this, that the kid did take an Uber and they are working with law enforcement now.

I want to hear what this driver has to say at some point. They're withholding his name or her name. Right. Hopefully, they're withholding it while that person leaves the country because that's where they should be headed to the Philippines now. Vox had an article out titled, After Sandy Hook, we said never again, and then we let 1,607 mass shootings happen.

I put this in here because they've made a map from the Gun Violence Archive, which is a database that tracks events since 2013. And it's an interesting look at what's going on because everybody's talking about this now and everybody should be talking about this now.

Yeah. Yeah. Not waiting. It's like they always do. Yeah. So angry. Yep. Yep. Yep. And it is a rerun, unfortunately. Every time there's a mass shooting, let's pull out the onion. No way to prevent this, says Only Nation, where this regularly happens.

Yep. Yep. Yep. That's got to be one of the most reposted onion articles of all time, and that's kind of sad, isn't it? They've got a couple of them, like, you know, seriously, again, I think is one of them. They've got pretty much every day after a shooting, they come out with one of these, but I think this is a pretty good older one.

Anyway, and there have been a lot of things been said in the news about 18 school shootings so far in 2018, which is completely wrong because it turns out every town, which is a gun safety non-profit, likes to kind of stretch the truth about what is a school shooting.

You know, some guy trying to blow his head off in the parking lot of a closed school, like had been closed for months, is not a mass shooting, and it is not a school shooting. Thank you. Thank you for the Washington Post for this one. Yeah, yeah, and I fell victim to this as well. Well, victim. I mean, I posted the same stat when it first came out because it seemed, you know, it seemed to be backed up and it seemed to be, you know, vetted and it's not.

And we don't need this. We don't need fake news on either side. We don't need the muddies, the muddies, the water getting muddied with this kind of stuff. Let's just go with the straight facts. They're bad enough. We don't need to exaggerate them at all. It's horrible the way it is, and when you come out with this, you're giving ammunition to the people who want to fight against this and say, you know, we don't really have a problem.

We do. We very much do. Let's see. I've got some stats that are right. We've had 150,000 U.S. students have experienced a school shooting, meaning, you know, there were that many people in these schools that have had them. The U.S. has by far the highest number of guns in the world, according to a 2007 estimate.

The number of civilian-owned firearms in the U.S. was 88.8 guns per 100 people, meaning there was almost one privately owned gun per American and more than one per American adult. The world's second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there are only 54.8 guns per 100 people.

So we have a gun problem. America has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times that of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to United Nations data compiled by The Guardian. So to everybody that says, if we get rid of the guns, they'll just drive cars into schools.

No, we have too many guns. It's okay. And we can have a multi-pronged approach. Nobody is saying that we can't. I'm just saying we should do something. I'm coming down more and more on the side of just get rid of all of them, but that's a lot of guns to get rid of.

That's the problem. It is. And the argument is that's nearly impossible, and I understand that, but that doesn't mean do nothing. We have a specific gun that has been used in almost every single one of these school shootings. Sure. If we ban that, then they may go and use a different type of gun, but let's go ahead and try it.

How about that? How about we go ahead and ban it, and then if another gun comes along and starts being used in a bunch of school shootings, then we ban that one too. I don't understand doing nothing. You and I were programmers by trade before we became non-paid podcasters.

We made a living programming. When something that we were building broke, we didn't just stare at it until the huge fix came into our mind. We made incremental fixes as we went along.

That's how you do things. That's how you get to a destination. That's how you build something. You don't sit there and wait for the perfect solution. You tinker, and you try this. You try that, and you fix this one little bit, and then you see how that happens, and then you fix another bit. Why aren't we doing that?

Why is the argument always, if we do this, it's not going to solve the entire problem? Well, let's start. Let's start. Let's start with little things and see what happens. Let's do something. I hear you. I hear you, but when the people who are in charge of doing the things are not motivated to do the things, it's kind of hard.

I wonder why they're not motivated. If you have a programming problem, and then you ask the designer to do it, it really is never going to get done. Yeah, I know. David Jay from Love and Rockets was feeling motivated, and he wrote a song. And I do miss when music was about protest and upset about the world, and it's pretty decent.

I liked it. So, Thoughts and Prayers by David Jay is up on SoundCloud. You'll find the link in our show notes. It's worth a listen. He was, like I said, bass player from Bauhaus and Love and Rockets. It's a nice little song. This is a really interesting article called, Why We're Underestimating American Collapse. I'm not even going to attempt to say this guy's name.

I'm sure I'll get it wrong. So, I'll attempt it now. Anyways, Umair Hake. It's a six-minute read. It is The Strange New Pathologies of the World's First Rich Failed State. I tried really hard to disagree with any point he made in here, and I was unable to.

No, you can't. You actually can't. You can't. And it's something that I've noticed, and something we've kind of talked about and edged around. We're not built for all this information. I think this is really starting to screw with us. I also think hyper-consumerism, basically the capitalist experiment, has kind of failed on a lot of fronts.

But I think what it's doing, and this is, you know, we have mentioned this before, but I think that, at least with a lot of my friends and a lot of people I see, they're just turning into nihilists. They just don't care. No, okay. First, let me backtrack really quickly and just talk a bit about the article. He lays out five examples of what he sees going wrong in the United States and how they're massively different from anything that's ever happened before in history, as far as we know.

The first being these school shootings that doesn't happen in any other society. Anywhere. It's just, it's a purely American phenomena. The second, the opioid epidemic. We're number one. Yes. The second being the opioid epidemic, the fact that Americans are numbing themselves and killing themselves with the hardest of hard drugs.

Again, purely American phenomena in many countries in the world, Asia, Africa. You can buy opioids over the counter without a prescription, and they are not abusing them the way that we are here in America. And he's postulating that the reason that we do this is because existence here is traumatic and desperate, and we don't have healthcare, and we're self-medicating.

There's a second side to that. There's a second side to that, though, because when I had my ankle broken and surgery and all the pins and that stuff, I was so over-prescribed pain medication. Like, I was only supposed to be on it for a little bit. Do you know how many pills he, like, in total prescribed me for my broken ankle?

Probably a ton. 500. Whoa. That's a lot. 500. Yeah. All the refills and everything. Total to 500 painkillers for my leg. And that's just ridiculous. It's utterly ridiculous.

And it was so hard to get off of it when it was done. I mean, it really sucked. I fortunately, you know, did it, but I can see how a lot of people wouldn't be able to do that, and it was just really hard. So I think it's not just we're trying to, you know, numb ourselves to the daily grind, but sometimes there is an over-prescription problem, for sure, and they're trying to work on that.

Yep, and that's definitely a broken healthcare system, which we have here. Then he talks about the elderly being cheated of dignity, about the support systems that used to exist that no longer exist, and about how family and social bonds have collapsed here in America. And then he talks about the final bit being the fact that we just don't seem to care about these problems.

We pay some lip service to them, but we don't do anything to fix them. And I think you're right. I think technology is a big part of this. I think, you know, what we've done with our cell phones and with Facebook and with the social networks and the ability to create your own bubbles put us in this place where we just create the world that we want to be, and we reject reality, and we make our own.

And we've created this entire system where we're just wandering around in our own little bubble, in our own little haze, and as long as something isn't affecting us directly, we don't care. And that seems to be where we're at, and he talks about that in this article. He talks about how America is a predatory society now, where we take care of ourselves and to hell with everyone else, and there's no social bonding anymore.

And it's hard to argue with this article. I really suggest everybody read it. And I know English is not this guy's first language, and I know a lot of people, when I've passed this around, have been like, it's hard to read a little bit. He doesn't, you know, there's misspellings, and he uses some words wrong.

Well, screw you. He knows a couple languages. You probably know one. F you. Read it. Yeah, yeah. His point, though, is well taken. So, okay, enough of this shit. Let's cheer up a little bit. Okay, and this is, okay, my favorite thing of the day. Talking about people being in their own bubbles and not knowing what the hell's going on.

Apparently, Apple has a problem with their new employees at the spaceship, because as people are getting used to a new office layout and figuring out where they're going, but probably looking at their phone all the damn time. The problem of distracted Apple employees is they're running into the walls because the walls are made of glass.

All of Johnny Ives' beautiful grand vision turns out to be kind of, it's like a bunch of pratfalls with people walking into the walls. I wish there was video of this somewhere. Me too. You know what they need, and I remember this from when I was a kid, because we had big, long glass sliding doors that led out to our backyard, and my parents, to stop us as little kids from basically running straight into the glass doors, got these little bird stickers and put bird stickers all over them.

So I think that we need to send these to Apple. They need little stickers, little emoji stickers maybe, all over these glass panes will help. Well, they tried to do it, but then the management said, no, you have to take that down because it's messing with the aesthetic of the building.

It's not the aesthetic that we're going for. We're going for head trauma. Exactly. Johnny Ives was probably somewhere having a conniption fit going, what are these people doing to my beautiful glass doors? Yeah. Oh, it's killing me. No more Post-its. No more Post-its.

But I just, I needed to lighten things up. And the vision of a lot of people around Apple with their little iPhones walking into the walls is just, I think that really is the sign of the times and where we've come. Kind of is.

Yeah. We've talked a lot about the coming robot revolution, or at least what it might mean for us in terms of jobs. And we've hashed out the idea that, okay, well, somebody's going to have to take care of the robots until the robots start figuring out how to fix themselves. So maybe there'll be more work, but I've always been on the side that we're going to, there may not be any work.

And this is a good article over at Mother Jones called The Robots Really Are Coming, But In The Meantime, Let's Not Go Crazy. I enjoyed this. It made me feel a little bit better about our future. There's one paragraph in particular. It won't happen for at least a decade, but eventually artificial intelligence will get to the point where it will, in fact, produce enormous productivity growth, and no deficits will no longer matter.

We won't quite be in the mythical post-scarcity society of Star Trek fame, but we'll be close. The main problem of economics will no longer be business cycles or inflation or trade deficits or even unemployment per se. It will be strictly about how to distribute the fruits of a society in which both human labor and capital stock are no longer of any value.

I agree. That is the key question. Will we get to the point where all the money is not going to go into Elon Musk's company and it will be distributed fairly and equitably, or will it all just go into the coffers of the people that own the robots? That's the big question, right?

No, the big question is when are they going to finish with these decent sex bots that will do my laundry and the dishes? That's my question about the robots, but if you want to go Star Trek-y and go for it. Wow. You want a sex bot that does laundry and dishes? That sounds like a wife bot.

Well, yeah, you know, one that you can turn off at night. Or a husband bot. Let's not be sexist. Let's not be sexist, yes. Whatever it is, it's creepy, but... Yes, it is. But I thought it was a well-written article. It's pretty interesting, so it's worth a read.

You well know that two of my favorite sites, at least used to be, for going to news was Slate and Salon. Slate took a little bit of a swipe at Salon this week, which is kind of funny. Because Salon has come out and basically done the, will you let us take over some of your CPU power to mine cryptocurrency if you don't want to see ads?

They are doing it themselves, and as far as I know, this is the first at least major publication that is going this route. So they're trying to co-op visitors' computers to mine Monero, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency. Aren't all cryptocurrencies privacy-focused? Isn't that the point?

It depends. It depends on the technology behind it. Well, yeah, okay. Well, Salon is hoping that it can encourage users who want to avoid seeing ads to instead subsidize the site's work with their personal computer's spare processing power. There's a lot of assumptions there, obviously, but the CEO says, Ad blocking is here, and it isn't going to get any better.

Right now, there are a couple models out there to deal with it, and we wanted to see if there was another, so they're giving it a go. Interesting, but not something I'm going to let them do, because I want to be able to inspect that damn code. Yeah, yeah. How about, you know, why don't you just put up a paywall like everybody else? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. That seems to be what people are doing now, but they're trying something different. And another side effect of the cryptocurrency mining craze, it's hampering the search for alien life. That's right. SETI, the search for extraterrestrial life, researchers want to build out their operations at two facilities so they can increase the search themselves.

And they can't find any GPUs because they're all being bought out by people mining bitcoins. Yep. Not only is SETI pissed off at it, gamers are pissed off at it because they can't get the graphics cards that they want for their games because everybody is going crazy mining cryptocurrency. So that's awesome.

Yeah, I actually saw a posting the other day of some miner who just gave up. He's like, ah, screw this, I'm not doing it anymore. And he was selling like 450 GPUs that he had. Yeah, a friend of mine was at Fry's and he said that he saw somebody walk by with just a shopping cart full of GPUs and they were completely sold out.

Like, they took all of them. It's ridiculous. It's crazy. Yeah. Berlin, we love the Germans, don't we? They tend to take things and get the ball rolling. And Berlin has stopped Airbnb from renting full apartments to tourists to protect affordable housing in the city.

Rents were going up and because everybody that owned a property was basically moving, buying another place and putting up their place on Airbnb. So they're now doing large fines and they're hoping to protect property supply and keep rents as low as possible.

They're still you're still able to rent out a room. You're just not able to rent out your entire place anymore, which I think is a good move, especially in urban cities like that. I mean, that sort of stuff is what's driving rents and property prices up here. I mean, that's happening here as well. So you got to protect that stuff.

Yep. Good to go, Berliners. Yes. And Snapchat is finally giving their celebrity influencers access to some of their data rights. Oh, God. I mean, I don't even understand how this has been going on. Like, how are these people been able to get so much money when nobody knew how many people were actually looking at their stuff?

But now they're actually sharing this this information with the influencers. So that's a that's a step in the right direction, I suppose. I guess. I mean, since I'm not a Snapchat influencer, I'll never get access to my data. So what else? No.

And yes, Magic Leap. There was some news this week about Magic Leap. How many conferences does Recode have in a year? Because I swear, it's like every week they have a new conference. I know. Every week it's some sort of conference. It's unbelievable. So, yeah, I guess there was news.

News being Shaq is wearing a headset. Yeah. So the big news is it's well, here's the first thing. They're not calling it augmented reality because apparently they want their own term. So they've come up with spatial computing.

That's what Magic Leap is doing. Okay. Yeah. Multiple sized headsets. And you can see Shaq in the headset and he looks like a twat. This is not a good looking headset. And they said, it will cost some amount of money that is maybe affordable to some people.

It will cost some amount of money. Yes. No shit. Which is the best line of the article. It will cost some amount of money that is maybe affordable to some people. That is the best line of all time.

I know. Oh, I wish I could make that our title. Yeah, I know. And they still say it's still coming out sometime this year. But we'll see. Okay. All right. We'll see. And hopefully I'll have the amount of money that is affordable to me because I'd like to see it. That's for sure.

We'll see. Maybe we'll pool our resources and share one. Please donate some amount of money to our Patreon. Yes. Oh, my God. Speaking of people that don't have some amount of money, Amazon is making layoffs. Oh, no.

Shocking. Several hundred corporate jobs are being cut. And it's the only reason that this is news is because Amazon generally isn't in the business of firing people. But they did what most businesses do at the beginning of the year and had their yearly meetings with the employees.

And some employees suck. So they fired them and they saw which divisions were had too many people. So they cut a few. Right. It's no big deal. Every company does this. And they're still hiring. You know, like I think it was in the article. They say there was like twelve thousand five hundred job listings up for Amazon already.

So the people who got fired could probably go get another gig in Amazon if they want to. Probably. Yeah. Well, that's interesting. Yeah. But I mean, not surprising. And it does make news just because Amazon is Amazon. But every company kind of does that. So. Yeah. And they've got so many little tiny companies that they keep buying up that just aren't are underperforming.

So, you know, they just got a few people from them. That's. But it was. This was making the rounds like it's like, oh, my God, Amazon Armageddon, you know, but not really. This is just pretty much what every big company does. And they're still the second highest employer in the country. So there you go.

Yep. And just to continue to prove that the world is not black and white, as many shades of gray, as much as we hate the FCC and agit pie in particular, because of net neutrality, they can't do things right. And they have. So they have basically signed off on Elon Musk's SpaceX and backed a satellite internet plan that that he wants to do.

And the FCC is kind of giving them the go ahead, which is great. Good on them. All right. Congratulations. Yeah. Good move. Now, you know, let's fix that net neutrality thing. Yeah. And this goes right into the next article from BGR. And I'm just going to read the first line of this because it just made me very, very happy.

In a shocking twist that absolutely no one could have seen coming, former industry lobbyist part-time manchild and full-time FCC chairman, Agit Pai, is reportedly under investigation by the FCC's internal watchdog. The investigation is focused on Pai's push-to-change broadcast ownership rules, which have cleared the way for Sinclair Broadcast Group to acquire Tribune Media for $3.9 billion.

And we covered this on the show when that went through. It's going to let big places not have basically a presence in a local market. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Maybe other people at the FCC are still doing good things as well.

Maybe. Good. Good. Investigate them. Yay. And in fun news, well, fun for us because we weren't the ones being sued. Boing Boing was sued by Playboy magazine because they linked to something. Okay. Fortunately, fortunately, there's a judge out there somewhere that is smart enough to say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You can't, no, no, you can't do that. And threw it out and came back and said that, okay, Playboy, no, this is dismissed. You have the option of doing an amended draft to send back to me. But I'm going to tell you, you might not want to do that because you're going to lose.

So, get on the judge. Get this out of there because, yeah. You can't sue somebody for linking to something. You can sue the people. I guess they were hosted at Imgur. Okay. You sue Imgur. They're the ones hosting it. You can't sue boy-boing for going, hey, this thing, it's right here. Click.

Right. But in the United States, you can sue anyone for anything. Well, yes, you can, can't you? Yes. It doesn't mean you're going to win. Nope. But you can sue everyone for anything. Ups and doodads. So, I'd like to start off our segment today with a little update from Clash Royale.

What's going on over there? We've been having a great time. As a clan, we're doing pretty well. But I have had to kick out a bunch of people for non-compliance, meaning they're not playing. They're just hogging spots. So, if you got kicked out this week, sorry, but you've got to play and participate.

That's basically the main thing. Look, you kicked me out, people. Yeah. Yeah. No one's safe in Clash Royale. And based on your recommendation, Brian, I have signed up for the Data Ethics class. It starts next week. Yeah, it starts on the 19th. All right. That's awesome.

I think you'll really enjoy it. It's, you know, it's a couple hours out of your week for a few weeks. But it was really interesting. Certainly right up the alley of everything that we talk about. In fact, I've pulled two articles out of news and put them right here because they'll both be in your class.

So, I thought you might be interested in them. The first is this just came up from Engadget. AI facial analysis demonstrates both racial and gender bias. Researchers from MIT and Stanford found that three different facial analysis programs demonstrate both gender and skin color biases. The team looked at the accuracy rates of facial recognition as broken down by gender and race and basically 97% for a face recognition system they designed.

But the data set used to assess its performance was more than 77% male and more than 83% white. This narrow test space results in a higher error rate for anybody who isn't white or male. It's because white male people tend to be the ones that build these things and don't think about it. And this gets discussed in the course.

In fact, there's a clip from some show. I think it was The Good Wife. It's some sort of legal procedural show. And a woman sued a company, a made-up company that was Facebook-esque because her photo was tagged as being a gorilla rather than if she was just a black female.

So, she sued them. And they sent the lawyers in. And, of course, all the white brosifs that were working at the company said, Well, we scanned everybody that works here. And then the lawyers look around and it's just all young white guys. Yeah. They're like, well, it'll get better in time. I mean, didn't that actually happen to Google?

Yeah, it did. You know, this is one of those shows that's ripped from the headlines. Oh, that means they don't have any. You know what they use? They used AI to write the script from the headlines. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much so. And then the second story that I saw this week that was right out of the class as well.

German court, again, the Germans, rules Facebook use of personal data. Illegal. A German consumer's rights group said on Monday that a court had found Facebook's use of personal data to be illegal because the U.S. social media platform did not adequately secure the informed consent of its users. Informed consent will be a big part of your class, Jason.

Okay. Yeah, this is straight out of it again. They're saying Facebook hides default settings that are not privacy-friendly in its privacy center and does not provide sufficient information, i.e. a fucking manual, about it when users register. And they're saying, again, that's not ethical because you are burying this information.

You're not telling people what you're going to use their information for. And therefore, anybody that signs up is not giving their informed consent. So right out of your class. That'll help you out. All right. It'll help you out for your peer-reviewed final essay. Well, thanks for the cheat sheet there, buddy. No problem, man.

And since I'm taking the data ethics class, I've also got a note in the mail this week that masterclass.com has a new one, and it's Bob Woodward teaches investigative journalism. We can all look into the current version of Watergate that's going on right now.

Yeah. It'll be fun. But I have the all-you-can-eat plan, so I'll be able to check it out. I guess it's pre-order right now, but it'll be out soon. Yeah. And I really do dig. For the price, you know, if you do one class, it's like $99, but if you do the all-you-can-eat, it's like $180 for the year.

It's like buying two classes, you get all of them, and they're fun. They're nice to be able to pop into. I've been meaning to take one of these, just because they look so interesting, and I want to see how they work, so I'll get around to that. Maybe this one. It does seem interesting. Mm-hmm. And I do recommend the Gordon Ramsay one, because, man, that guy can cook.

Media candy. Star Trek Discovery has come to an end. The first season finale aired last Sunday. Did you get a chance to see it, Jason? Are you caught up? I am. I saw it. Have you seen all of Utrecht? All right. Yeah. Yeah. What the fuck was that?

Well, Vulture has an article that is spot-on to how I feel about the show. It's called Why Star Trek Discovery Needs to Evolve. It gets into an awful lot of points. If you watch this and you are Trekkie, like both of us are, and we really love the entire thing, this is a good read.

You're going to probably agree with it, just like Jason and I did. The show was okay. Every single criticism in this article is valid. But I will say I need to apply my three-season rule, except for the fact that I'm actually watching it right now. Yeah. Let's see what they do next season. They really do seem to have painted themselves into a corner, but I shall hold out hope that perhaps this will get better.

And just as a tangent, I've got to say this, Spock's mom has always been hot. Every single actress that has played Spock's mom I have either crushed on at the time or when they were younger as an actress. Jane Wyatt, the original one, Magil Barrett, Cynthia Blaze, Winona Ryder, and Mia Kirshner in this version.

Man, they're just, Spock's mom has got it going on. That's all I've got to say. No doubt. No doubt. What did you think about the show? It was so, that ending was so weird. It was so weird. Yeah. I don't know what they were thinking. It just didn't jive for me at all.

I mean, I know they wrote it before they got picked up for a second. No, they knew they were doing a second season before that filmed, right? Yeah. So, because this kind of felt like a wrap up that they could just stop and then they ended with running into the Enterprise with that.

Yeah. No. There are a lot of problems with this. The technology, the spore drive, how the hell. I mean, now there's speculation that this is in a third universe. This isn't the original universe that all the previous shows were in. This isn't in the rebooted J.J. Abrams universe.

This might be a completely different universe, which seems to be the only way they're going to get themselves out of some of the things that they've created. Yeah. I don't know what they're doing, but like I said, I guess we'll see. I really hope that we get more anthology next season. I hope it's not one through storyline the whole way through.

I miss that. I really do miss it. I miss the morality plays. It looks good. I don't know. It looks good, but they've sported themselves into a corner. Yes, they really have. The spore drive thing was just, I mean, they didn't need to do that. Yeah.

So, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. But, I mean, there was shakeups with, you know, the showrunners before it even aired, so, and writers and all that stuff. So, who knows? Maybe they'll at least get their heads screwed on straight for season two. Right. But, yeah, it was really a weird finale. One of the weirdest I've ever seen.

Yeah, definitely. So, I don't know where they're going to go with it. I tried to watch The End of the Fucking World. I guess we'll just call it that because that's the title. Yeah. That pretty much is the title. One doesn't know how to pronounce that. Okay. On your recommendation. And much like how I can't watch Black Mirror right now because the world is already too bleak.

And I need delightful things in my life. Like Phil Rosenthal. I don't need this. I tried to watch two episodes. The wife was, like, walking around taking care of stuff. And every time she'd come back in the room, she's like, what the fuck are you watching? Why are you? This is so bleak.

This is, go put Star Trek back on because I don't need you in a mood. So, yeah, it was just unrelentingly bleak. I mean, it looks like it's very well acted. I mean, there's some humor, very dark humor in it. I chuckled a few times, but it just made me feel bad.

So, I got to put that on the shelf for now. We'll see. It's a wise idea. Timing is everything in these things. Yes. Yes, it is. Now, I put this one in here for you because you just finished watching Voyager. And it's a fake research paper based on Star Trek Voyager's worst episode was published by a scientific journal.

Yeah, I read through it. It's very funny. You'd probably need to go back and watch the episode to enjoy this article. And I wouldn't suggest going back and watching this episode because it was horrible. Terrible. This is a terrible episode. So, I would pass on that. I just, if you want to read it, go for it.

It'll be in the show notes at gog.show slash 247. But this one was just for you. Yeah, thank you very much. It was very funny. I've been trying to catch up on the grand tour. I'm hoping for some of that delightful. Not really getting it yet, but it is getting better. I'll give it that.

Every successive episode is a bit more enjoyable. I just need some reality back. They've got to get rid of all this scripting. They've got to. Because it's horrible. Because the jokes fall flat. They're funny when, they're funny by accident, not by design. Okay.

I don't know which one you're specifically talking about. Did you already, but did you watch the episode where they talked about not being scripted? Yes. Yes, where they got all meta and they pretended to not be scripted even though they were still scripted. Yeah. That one went on, that joke went on a little too long.

Yeah, it did. Way too long. Anyways. They get, I mean, I love it all the way through, but. Yeah, I mean, I'm still watching. I still enjoy it, but it's no, it's no Top Gear. And I don't think they're ever going to get quite there again. But we'll see. You never know.

As you've talked about, it is Oscar season. So I finally got to see an Oscar nominated movie. I watched Get Out. It is available on Amazon. It's also available for free on HBO right now, so you don't even need a fancy screener like we have. And you can go to the theater and see it for free. Oh, that's true.

They're doing something for that, right? By the time this comes out, it'll be too late. But yeah, they're playing it for one day for free in the theaters. Yes. A highly entertaining movie. I don't know if it's Oscar caliber. And I don't understand the, this is such a huge social movement point of it, but it's very good.

I chuckled and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it greatly. So yeah, I thought it was a, I thought it was a good movie. I don't, I also didn't know if it's Oscar worthy, but I thought it was, I thought it was decent. Yeah. Highly enjoyable. What are you gonna do? Now, this is interesting and I still get the hustle newsletter, even though it's written, written by and for millennials.

Right. Some days, some days it's harder than ever to, to get through. Yeah. To stomach. Yeah. So they did a thing on torrenting, which, you know, is how we go to Sweden. Over a decade ago, peer to peer file sharing ruled the roost, accounting for nearly 70% of all internet traffic in 2006.

But ever since, torrenting traffic has been on a steady decline. In 2015, it accounted for just 3% of web traffic in North America, which is a pretty steady decline. But, you know, Netflix came out, Amazon video. Everybody now has a way, yeah, on demand.

Yeah, streaming music, every single song ever available for $9.95 a month or free if you want to listen to some ads. Of course, torrenting has gone down. Yeah. You and I only torrent things that we can't get anywhere else. Mm-hmm. Pretty much. Yeah. So that's kind of a no shit Sherlock article.

Yeah. I just like the numbers though. That's a pretty steady decline. But yeah, it's not going away and there's no way it's never going to go away. But it's nice to, when there is an alternative where we can give you a credit card and get what we want, we'll do it. That's what people do. Yeah, I think I've said from day one about us going to Sweden, it's if you made it easy for us to get something and relatively cheap, then we will do it that way.

If you will not, then we will torrent it. And I'm certainly not going to pay 70 bucks for Star Trek Ooptrekt. No, that's ridiculous. That's the idea that they're, here, pay all this money for one show. No, no, not going to do that. I'll pay, if you made it a small amount of money, if it was like a buck or two bucks a month, I'll give you that, Pat.

I'll happily give you that for Star Trek, but not what you want. Yeah, because there's nothing else on that network besides what the Big Bang Theory, which I cannot stand, so. Yeah, that shit is horrible now. Yeah, what are you going to do? Speaking of things that are horrible, Billy Corgan is in the news again. Now, you have held me back in the past from crapping all over good old Billy.

Because I was working with him at the time. So, once he showed his true colors and shit all over my friends who he was working with, then gloves are off, man. Take it away. Yes. But yeah, there's a new Smooshy Pumpkins reunion tour without one of the original members.

And I think you can take it from here, Brian. Well, yes, they are doing a money-grabbing tour that they've announced, and there's an awful lot of mudslinging going on.

Yeah, Darcy Retsky, the original bassist for the Smashing Pumpkins and bassist for the Smashing Pumpkins through all the good albums, has not been invited. Billy Corgan, of course, says that she was invited. She wasn't invited, and she held her, she did her first interview in over 20 years with Alternative Nation, and she did not hold back at all.

If you want to know what kind of a, what a crazy industry the music industry is in general, or what crazy Billy Corgan, well-known in the music industry, is the most insane of all the insane people, is actually like, read her interview. I will not be attending this tour as much as I'd like to. I'd love the first couple albums by the Smashing Pumpkins.

They were formative albums for me. But Jane's Addiction is not Jane's Addiction without Eric Avery. I don't know what that horrible version is that's been touring for the past 15 years. It's not Jane's Addiction. I won't go see Jane's Addiction either. It's not the Smashing Pumpkins without Darcy.

It's just not. So, not going to see it. There you go. And I just got an email that just came in. Apparently, Flogging Molly, one of my favorite Irish bands, is doing a cruise this year. Now, but they're doing it with The Offspring. Hey, man, the cruises are big money now.

If we could get enough people on a boat, it'd be the Grumpy Old Geeks cruise. Everybody's doing it. Corolla does it. Everybody's doing cruises now. I think the Goose just did one. I don't know. It's big money for these acts. You got to make money somehow. Nobody's buying albums. Yeah, Jonathan Colton does the Joko cruise, and lots of people go on that one.

And I used to go on Irish music cruises all the time. I went to one in Hawaii and one in Mexico. They're fun. They're actually a ton of fun, if you can stand being on a boat for seven days, which I can, because I love the sea. But yeah, let's do a Grumpy Old Geeks dinghy cruise, because that's about as many people as we'd get.

That's true. Grumps at sea would be marooned. Oh, man. Okay. Sorry about that. We've got spam and spam and spam. The Verge has an article about YouTube's Karate Kid reboot, and it says, It's just like the original, except everyone's way too old to be doing this, and I didn't even bother to read the article, because there's one line, which is the subtitle.

It's been three decades. Move on already. I'm like, okay. That's all you had to tell me. I'm done. I'm out. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I don't care. Sweep the leg. I, whatever. I did get some text messages yesterday from a friend of the show, Dr. David Teeter, because he was in my old neighborhood out in Woodland Hills, and he was on his way to Langer's Deli, which is from the, was that the first season or the second season of Phil's show?

I believe the first. Yeah, it was the first season, and he was on his way to get a number 19 pastrami sandwich, which looked so good. I know. It looked delicious. Oh, my God. I just, my big meal of the day yesterday was a big fish from Burger King, so that pastrami looked really good.

But if you still haven't followed up and seen those episodes of Phil's eating shows that we talked about the last two weeks, I highly recommend it. If you want something just fun, check them out. Yeah, I agree. And just don't send me any more pictures if you do go to the places that they do in the show, because that makes me extremely jealous and hungry.

Well, interesting that you say that, because in theory, assuming our nanny will work on Monday since it's a holiday, we're hoping that she does, we're going to go off to Grand Central Market, which is another place that Phil went in his L.A. episode, so I'll be certain to send you photos. Cool. Yeah, that looked like a cool place.

I've never been there. Me either, so I'm looking forward to it. All right. We're back with Dave Bittner and the gang's all here this time, and yeah, leave you guys alone for one week, and y'all can't even remember where teledildonics came from.

Stunningly, not top of mind. Yeah, I don't, I mean, who knows, I mean, maybe it's just a matter of discretion and not memory, right? Well, I will say that as we uttered that, I knew, I knew that this would appear in the show notes this week from Jason. Of all things that we discussed, teledildonics would make an appearance, and when it popped into the show notes, I chuckled to myself.

It's a great time to be alive, isn't it? Go ahead, Jason, please inform us. This is not the kind of thing that you saw in the old encyclopedias that we used to, you know, have on the shelf. I gotta say, Wikipedia, hats off to you. But the interesting thing is, the term was coined in 1975 by Ted Nelson in his Computer Lib Dream Machines book.

Yeah, that was surprising. I wouldn't have thought it went back that far, but there you go. It's also known as cyberdildonics, which I like teledildonics better. Yes, me too. There, and the history lesson, but otherwise, great job. Well, thank you. What did I say, Brian?

I said we would start the show with some sort of correction. Yes. And so maybe, I don't know if we'd label that a correction, perhaps. We're just filling out some details. Yeah. Well, shockingly, though, we did get praise rather than you guys did a horrible job.

So it's a banner day. There you go. There you go. Shut up and talk about some security already. Although, I will say that cutting out so much of Dave's swearing was the highlight of my day. You know what was funny?

I didn't realize how much I had sworn until I listened to the very end of the show. And I was like, wow, I really let loose there, didn't I? Oh, that was just a small portion of it. I was going to leave it in, but you put- I have to go back. Yeah, you gave me permission for that one.

I have to go back. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. I just, you know, the filters come off, I guess, in a moment of frustration. And that's fine. I'm only human. That morality clause leads to a lot of editing around these parts. I know. God. I tell you, if anybody ever gets the behind-the-scenes recordings here at the Cyber Wire, I'm in deep, deep trouble.

This is why I can't have an assistant, because they have too much on me, you know? Right. I will say, in our Clash Royale clan, somebody said that, just listen to the new show, Dave Bittner swearing, question mark, is nothing sacred anymore? Yeah, that's right.

That's right. Yeah, I just asked my wife about that. I never swear at home. Never, never, never, never, never, never. All right, let's get to some real serious news here. And today we have some real serious news. This is breaking as we record this. Robert Mueller has, uh, indicted a bunch of Russians for interference in the 2016 election.

Whoa. Nothing to see here. I was too busy talking about teledildonics. This is all news to me. Breaking. No collision. Uh, 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities accusing them of defrauding the U.S. government by interfering with the political process.

Uh, I highly recommend, uh, everyone go read the actual indictment. It's, uh, you know, well, skim through the boring parts and read through the juicy parts. It really lays it all out. Um, the people who came over, how they got their money, uh, the campaigns they used, specific types of influence they attempted, uh, everything from social media stuff to organizing demonstrations, um, using fake bank accounts.

It's, it's, it's all pretty much laid out there. So, uh, it's an interesting read. Wow. Yeah. It's, uh, things are speeding up. Yeah. Uh, I included another article from, uh, our friends at Endgame. Uh, Andrea Little-Limbago is the author there. She's, uh, sort of their global policy expert.

I've spoken to her a few times on the Cyber Wire. And, uh, this story, while an older one, this is from November of last year, it really lays out kind of the background of these types of indictments, why we do them, because it's unlikely that any of these people are ever going to be actually brought to justice here in the United States.

But it really lays out the political background. What's the, the, uh, the benefits of these sorts of indictments? Why do we do them? What can they lead to? What, what are the, what's the message they send globally to do this sort of naming and shaming kind of thing? So if you're interested in the global policy implications of it, I've included a link to that article as well.

Nice. Yeah. I read through that. It was fascinating. Yeah. So the Mueller thing is, uh, you know, breaking quickly. Like I said, as we record, it just came out about less than an hour ago. So not a whole lot of details there, but I imagine as we head into the next week, we're going to learn a lot more about it. We're learning.

Somebody is having a really very bad, no good week. I've got to say there's, there's a lot of, uh, reports coming out now about networks, uh, to pay off people. From affairs and oh boy, it's, it's a mess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, this next story, uh, that broke, uh, Oh, the earlier this week about, uh, a bunch of government websites that were hijacked by crypto mining plugins.

Mm hmm. Um, over 4,000 websites are thought to have been hit. It got caught pretty quickly. It only ran for, I believe, about six hours. Um, and reports are that the bad guys netted a grand total of around $24. So, but, um, what's interesting about it is this sort of shit.

Well, a couple of things are interesting about this. First of all, the shift from ransomware to crypto mining. Mm hmm. That's definitely something we're seeing. Um, and I think the idea there being that crypto mining can fly under the radar for longer because it's not really, it's, it's more of a nuisance than, you know, locking up your files and ransoming them.

And for many people, they didn't even know it's going on. Um, and then the other thing that this points out is this idea of third party vulnerability. How these websites got hacked is that they were using a third party plugin, something to allow, um, people who have, um, disabilities, I believe it's visually impaired people.

It would allow them to basically have the website read to them. So what these folks did is they infected that plugin. So any website that used that plugin would start crypto mining. Right. So a clever way to get, uh, your code out there into a bunch of places at once.

And this is something we, we talk about all the time, uh, over on the cyber wire about this vulnerability to third party attacks where you're trusting someone else with a, you know, a piece of your website, a piece of your software, something like that. If the bad guys can get to that, um, you know, there's not a whole lot you can do about it.

And, uh, this, this showed that being the case. Nice. Yeah. It's pretty interesting. Um, I had an article that I thought was very interesting. Cause as you know, we are almost, we're not paying anybody, but we are actively questioning whether any Mac has ever been hit by a virus.

We're still waiting for anyone to tell us that this has actually happened. Any, any actual proof anybody to say, I got that coming up. Good. Well, I'm glad, glad to hear that. But in regards to this article, cause this annoyed me so much, uh, it's the actual title is how Mac apps can spy on your computer.

And it goes into detail about how apps don't have to necessarily say that they're going to do this or that and, and things that can happen. However, the text that was promoted on both Facebook and Twitter for this article was your Mac is just as vulnerable to viruses as any windows PC.

Here's what you can do about it. Are they though? Because what they're describing in this article is a, not a virus. B doesn't discuss anything about PCs. I got so angry about this. These are not viruses. These are software. These are programs that you have willingly installed on your computer.

That is not by definition, a virus. Yeah. What, what this article mainly is, is bad writing. Yes. Yes, it is. We have a lot of that around. But I, you know, my, I'm, I'm just instantly always looking for anything. Anytime I see the word Mac and virus together, I'm checking it out because we're continuing this, this, this hunt.

But go ahead, Jason. You apparently have been affected. I have not been affected in the way that you think. But what I do have is I have a Synology, right? Right. And since a Synology is basically just a little Linux computer, I have a backup of basically everything in there from the past 20 some odd years of being online and all the stuff that I've done.

I read that as porn. Surprising to me. I was going to say stuff that fell off the truck from Sweden. Yeah. No, these are, these are projects that I've worked on, surprisingly enough. And so I, I, like we said, porn and projects that fell off the truck from Sweden. The funny part is the main project is called I'm Right, You're Wrong.

So there you go. Shocker. Yeah, definitely. Now here's, here's, here's the interesting ones. I, so I ran an antivirus against it and it quarantined 181 items. A lot of them are old.

So here we've got html.phishing.auction66, win.trojanu28, html.phishingauction, blah, blah, blah, html.exploitcve2017. There's a bunch of really interesting ones in here. There's a ton of different ones. There's also a lot of ones that I never even caught that were in WordPress installs that I had archived.

So the plugins have malware in them, in their name, but there's another one here, osxmalware.proton6377366-1. So that is, that sounds to me like an actual Mac piece of malware.

Did you look it up? I haven't been able to yet, but I just ran out of time, but I've got different html exploits. A lot of these are Windows exploits that people sent me, of course. But there was a specific one that says osx. So I'm going to keep digging through these, and next week hopefully we'll have a list of the different ones that are on here that are Mac specific.

But they are somewhere here on my Synology, but fortunately they've been quarantined, which is interesting. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, it'll be interesting to see if that, like that one you call out, what does it require to run? As we've said, it seems like so many of these Mac things require some sort of error on the user's part to run something they shouldn't be running.

So it'll be interesting to see how exactly does that one work. And we'll look forward to that. Yep. I will have a full analysis next week, but I just, I thought you guys might be interested in that one. That is interesting. Yeah, that is interesting. Yeah. Definitely, definitely cool. And I have one more story.

Now, this is one of those words or titles or, you know, whatever that I always see written and I've never heard anybody say in real life because nobody I know has one. So I'm going to, let's see how I pronounce this. U.S. intelligence agencies warned buyers to avoid Huawei smartphones.

Well, I will tell you that I have been told by our Asia desk here at the CyberWire that it is Huawei. Ah, Huawei. Okay. See, I don't know anybody that has one. So six top U.S. intelligence chiefs, including the heads of the FBI, CIA, and NSA, have told Americans that they would not recommend buying products or services from them.

They're deeply concerned about the risks of allowing any company or entity that is beholden to foreign governments to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications network. FBI Director Chris Wray testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee, thus kind of ignoring what's going on in the FCC right now. But that's okay.

Yeah. The U.S. government has tried to block them from any U.S. government contracts and also advise private carriers and ISPs against using its telecom equipment. So I guess if you're looking for a cheap Android phone, that's not the way to go. Yeah. I have a related story to this. In fact, just this week, I interviewed a gentleman who is the CEO of a company called Refirm Labs, and their specialty is going in and reverse engineering firmware.

And so if you have a product, they'll go in and audit it and make sure there's nothing funky in the firmware. And they were given a cable TV box by a major cable provider and asked to go in and see if there was anything bad in there.

And they went in and they found, sure enough, a hard-coded back door. And this was made by Huawei, you know, Chinese company. And so they went back to the cable company and said, we found this hard-coded back door. You know, tell Huawei to take it out of there.

So the cable company did, came back with the next version of the cable box, and they found, sure enough, another hard-coded back door. It was still there. It had just been moved. So this, I think, speaks to this notion that the distinction between Huawei and the Chinese government is often considered to be one without a difference.

Right. Right. And they're known for, you know, trying to hide stuff, trying to get information. And, you know, the Chinese, of course, are known for wanting to get intellectual property, that sort of stuff. And they've got a track record. So, yeah. Lots of tomfoolery and shenanigans go on over there.

Yeah. And I guess the point is that this isn't just a political thing. There's plenty of evidence that Huawei is up to shenanigans when it comes to trying to hide things and devices. Yeah. That was kind of my question after my article, because it did kind of come off as mostly political, but obviously there is a rich and storied history here.

Yeah. Seems to be. Yeah. Well, while you guys were talking about that, instead of waiting until next week, I did a little bit of research on OSX Proton. You are fast. Again, I think I know where it came from. Brian, do you remember a while ago when you were talking about how you were trying to get something to play and you recommended the El Media Player?

Yes. Yeah. When I downloaded it, I got the version that had the malware in it. Oh, that's right. I forgot. There was a brief period of time where they set out an alert saying that their installer had somehow been hacked. That's right. And you downloaded it right during that period of time.

That's what I was going to say. Right. That was known as the JSON period. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently so. Pretty much never buy a Mac when I do or download software when I do is the way it goes. Yeah. All right. Well, there you go. I mean, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You win. Yeah.

But now I got to figure out if it's on any of my computers still instead of just in a backup somewhere. Because the backup is a time machine backup and it's the antivirus is going through all the time machine backups and finding it in the files in there, which I think is pretty cool. Right. So, another plus for Synology.

What does this say about Proton? What does Proton do here? I'm looking through the article right now. It exfiltrates keychains and 1Password vaults containing user passwords and other sensitive information as well as browser information, including login credentials for those who use browser functionality to remember their passwords.

So, all in all, that's not good for me because I do all of that. You do all those things. Not good. Yes. Not good. It says, I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh, but you will need to begin the far harder process of remediating the effects of the breach.

You should assume that every password to every online account has been compromised and you should change them all. Awesome. Well, how long ago did this happen? I mean, you... This is a long time ago and I haven't seen any... I think if anything happened and it tried to exfiltrate, it probably would have been caught by Little Snitch.

Right. You know, and that was actually a question I had about... I'm glad you brought that up. I was wondering if this is... I meant to say, is this the kind of thing that Little Snitch would flag? I would imagine it would be. Right. Because when El Media Player installed itself, I said, you know, no to anything that they wanted to call out for.

So, hopefully that would, you know, cover it. Because I don't let anything do automatic software updates on their own. I have to... I manually do that myself. Because I don't want everything calling in the background. And I especially don't let them do registration and things like that. So... Right. Hopefully Little Snitch saved my bacon.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I don't... It doesn't really say here how to remove it, though. That's interesting. Well, Jason's got some homework to do. We'll check in next week. Let's see. Just how bad is the infection? Nice. Yeah. You know what? You know what I'm thinking that I want to make is an account that is just a Honeypot account to see if anybody would log in with at some point.

So then I know if somebody ever gets my credentials that I get an alert if something's logged into that's not just a regular thing that would, like, kind of trigger. It's like, uh-oh, there's a canary in the coal mine that my stuff has been compromised. I think that might be something else to work on. Yeah. Just be...

And just keep it in, you know, playing with all the other stuff. Maybe that would be a fun tool to write. Maybe I'll do that in 2020 when I have some free time. Yeah. Right. Luckily, before we run, I saw in some of the comments in the show notes that someone was recommending Privacy.com, which is the virtual burner debit card service.

Have you guys... Did you guys talk about that already? Have you... What are your thoughts on that? Is this a good one? It's a new one to me. We'll be talking about it shortly after this, but I reviewed it on the show a couple months ago and actually used it a couple times, and I recommend it. It actually works really... It does exactly what's on the tin. It is a burner for credit cards.

Yeah. It seems like a really good idea, and I kept... I guess the reason I ask is that as I was looking through their website, I kept saying to myself, what's the catch? What's the catch? What's the catch? Because it doesn't cost you anything to do. They're making their money on the, you know, with the transaction fees. It just sort of seemed too good to be true.

Right. But you've had success with it. It worked great for me. Yeah. Yeah, of course, you had success with the L Media Player app, so, you know. Well, that one was a Brian suggestion. I recommended privacy.com. Of course, of course. We'll blame Brian, of course. Well, the L Media Player, to be fair, worked great for me, so...

Right, right. I did not get the... I got the SANS malware, so... Right. Yeah. And on next week's security, we'll find out that Brian has been writing malware and promoting it on the show. There you go. Back after, everybody goes and downloads it. There you go.

To be fair, I've moved to a cryptocurrency mining, because it's a much better model for these sorts of things. As you do. As you do. Yep. All right, gentlemen. As always, talk to you soon. All right. Talk to you soon. Be safe. Bye. Bye. We've got a bunch of new Patreon subscribers this week, which makes me very happy.

Thank you. Me too. Hillary M. John S. Sheriff T. Ray Z. And my favorite, Mattintosh. Which is a great name. And Mattintosh gave us a little note. Says, you guys are the quintessence of modern... Is that quintessence or quintessence? Of modern tech podcasts.

Keep up the great work. Well, thank you. Thank you. And Dobby Wineglass wrote us over there as well. Hey, guys. I just upped my pledge to $10 a month, which I was thinking about doing. But the thing that got to me enthusiastically to do so is the print-to-PDF thing that Brian mentioned. Holy crap. That's worth this year's support right there.

Thank you. The funny thing is, I tried to do that trick on a PC. Doesn't work. Really? Works great on a Mac. Does not work very well on... Well, at least in the Edge browser, it didn't work. I didn't try to cross the spectrum, but... Ah. Yeah, and I don't know if you ever knew this.

In Opera, there's a built-in screenshot functionality. I did not? Yeah. So you can take little annotations on the screen and send them right out. I used it a couple times. I just found it this week when I was trying to do a screen cap on a PC. Nice. Anyway, back on track here.

And we got two from PayPal. Was it Breed J and Tony W? Yes. Thank you so much. We appreciate that. And over at GOG.show, we had a few people write in. First off, Sheriff T, who spent a large time complaining about Patreon's UI and trying to give us money and it not working out, and then trying PayPal and then not wanting to give them a percentage.

But you should just suck that up anyways, everybody, because everybody's going to take a percentage. There's no free lunch, people. Just do it. We're okay with it. It comes out of us, not you. Anyway, so don't worry about it. We'll take your money. We'll take a percentage of your money. Anyways, he says, this last week, all I listened to is your podcast.

You guys are incredibly smart. Your analysis is spot on and eerily prescient. And yours is the only show that doesn't make me want to rage quit the world. I can just shut off my brain, relax, and listen to you guys and be grumpy. Super grumpy, even. Thank you for saving my sanity during my daily commute. And while I'm trying to program this blasted prototype using jQuery and handlebars.js.

Damn you, handlebars. Cheers. See, the problem is you're too smart. If you thought like a moron, you would have breezed through all those issues. You would have had no problems with the UI and got less money, lickety sweat. So, dumb yourself down a bit. Yeah, yeah. Stop using jQuery, for God's sake. It's not easy.

It's actually easier than writing yourself. But I don't know handlebars.js. Me either. I got out of there before that. We're not in that game anymore. Yeah. I think we quit just in time. Anything with JavaScript is miserable. Yeah, I never enjoyed it. And Ivor D writes in, Hi, guys.

I recently saw this YouTube video of an interview with the famous historian Niall Ferguson on his new book, The Square and the Tower. This is a book that takes an historical perspective on the networks and hierarchies that make up our society. I will definitely be reading the book as soon as I have time.

But I thought the theme of the book was relevant to your podcast because it deals with societal impacts of social media in very relevant historical perspective. I'm sure you and most of your listeners would be interested in this topic and, indeed, your own views on the themes and ideas discussed in this interview and the book itself.

Cheers, Ivor. I'm definitely going to check this out. Yeah, me too. I need a new book, so this might be next up on the list so we can actually get one and have a library segment again. Oh, I've got 17 books in my queue to get through. I keep moving them to their holding bin every week.

Yeah, I know. Let's see, JC, not Jay-Z, wrote in. I'm a bit late to the party, but I have a bit of a hack for your SodaStream. If you find that you use it a lot and want to get an edge, if you go get a 2.6-kilogram CO2 bottle from most home brew stores in an adapter lead, you can remove your dependency on costly SodaStream CO2 refills.

It's clearly part of their business model to be able to leverage the price as much as they want on the gas and goes on about some of the finances on that. So, yeah, I've heard that you can also hack it to use paintball cartridges. Oh, really? Yep, yep. So, all of that.

The only thing is I'm tired. I'm overworked. I'm underpaid. I'm exhausted all the time. I don't have time for this. And I'm kind of okay with their business model. They sell the SodaStream machines themselves pretty cheap, and they make their money on the cartridges. I'm just going to use the Bed Bath & Beyond trick to save that amount of money.

Plus, I don't want to hack something that involves compressed air with my kid around my house. Yeah, you really don't want to do, like, you know, a high compression system where the kid who can just, you know, knock it over and blow himself up. I'm sure it's not that easy. But, yeah, the problem was the adapter lead.

You lost me at the adapter lead because at that point, yeah. I don't want my house to blow up because I read the Reddit instructions incorrectly or somebody left something out. That's all I'm saying. You know, because we were software. We weren't hardware. Yeah. I just, you know, put a little caveat on what our skill set is.

And, yeah, hacking hardware is definitely not in our wheelhouse. No, but I do love the SodaStream. I still use it all the time. And, yeah, one of the first things I saw when I Googled SodaStream hacks, I was more looking for, like, drinks to make. But the first thing that came up is here's how to make it work with, you know, different CO2 cartridges because the SodaStream ones are so pricey in comparison.

So, thank you for that. And Barrett Reese writes in over on Twitter, nearly got T-boned by an Uber autonomous car that drove through a stop sign tonight on my way home from work. And my reply to this was, well, get hit next time. It'd be a better story. True. Yes. And photos. That'd be great.

Definitely. Jay Lester wrote 100% on Altered Carbon. Solid sci-fi right there. Yes, it is. I'll have to watch that one. You haven't watched it yet. Yeah. No, I have not. Oh, I love that one. Is it depressing? No. Is it Black Mirror? No. Okay, good. I love that. All right. All right.

I'll watch it then. 6502 Chip writes in, thanks for the shout out. I'm touched and incredibly thankful. It's been five months, so we are out of the news cycle and mentions like yours really super help. And he also follows up with, the fun never ends. Water service went out yesterday at noon.

Still no water. Fortunately, we have a cistern and a stash of water bottles. I suspect a power outage at water processing plant, but of course, no official word. And that's our friend, Gabriel Pagan, who is living down in Puerto Rico. Sorry about all this, man. Hang in there, man.

Hang in there. Yep. Blitzkrieg basically writes to Bittner, Dave, you're very funny this week on GOG podcast. And he was. He was quite enjoyable. I enjoy your security segment on the show and the cyber wire as well. Cheers. Well, thank you. Brian Doherty writes, looking for a clinometer for my off-roading vehicle and saw this gem.

I think this one wins the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast award for longest Amazon title. I mean, just read the description. Big success. And I've got it right here. Let's see. I've got to blow this up so I can actually read it. Too bad road running the whole distance is a two-barreled inclimator, cry-mo-meter, floodlight, cigar-powered, 12-volt front, rear left and right, plus minus 40 degrees, corresponding four-wheel drive vehicle camper.

And it's only got two and a half stars, so I don't know if you want to buy this one. Yeah, I would skip that. But it is a great title. Yeah. Definitely. And the Tim Woodruff writes in, regarding cancel your card to cancel your subscriptions, privacy.com lets you generate a new credit card number as a burner or with a limit for monthly, quarterly, or annual.

Just pause or kill the card to ensure no more charges. Love these guys. And we covered them ages ago. And I set up a couple cards with them. And I forget why I stopped using them. I think it was just inconvenient at the time where I wasn't setting up new stuff. But I think when I reset up things in the future, I'm definitely going to go back and use them again because it was super easy to make a burner and just, you know, tie it to a real card.

Yeah. And Life Is Not For Sale writes us and says, thanks for the BBC Radio 4 Boring Talks recommendation, a fine addition to my podcast listening. Have also subscribed to your podcast after finally checking it out after all the Fan Mail Friday shout outs. I do see those on Friday. Thank you.

So I'm glad people are finding us that way. Tell a friend. Well, tell your friend about the Jordan Harbinger Show because Fan Mail Friday is the other show that we're not doing anymore. But now we have Feedback Friday. So just letting you know. And we've got some iTunes reviews now.

This first one comes in from Cabaret. Five stars. Tell it like it is. Being a lot older than Jason and Brian, I put myself in the grumpy old fart category. Still, I look forward to their podcasts. I like the irreverent take on things as well as the smart and informative. The banter and rhythm keep the show moving forward and I get caught up on current technology and the evils that lurk out there on the internet.

Good stuff. Well, thank you, sir. Thank you. Yes. I've got another five star rating from Chicken Andrewster. Interesting. Get it? Yes, I do. We all need a little more skepticism in tech. As a grad student, closet geek, and wannabe tech nerd, I find myself coming back every episode to get the grumpy take on all the tech news that pops up in my RSS feeds and various other podcasts.

GOG provides some much needed perspective on all the early days, disruptive and revolutionary tech continually delivered by the brofits of Silicon Valley. Brofits? Brofits? Brofit? Profit? Profit? Profit? Eh, whatever. Meh, whatever. Let's call the whole thing off.

That's it. Well, thank you, Chicken Andrewster. Got you there. OC Adam writes in, Salty old geeks, Mondays can't come fast enough. Has that ever been said in the history of man? I think it. These guys say it. If you're bitter about the direction of the interwebs and where it's gone, you'll feel right at home with Jason and Brian.

You'll find yourself nodding in agreement about the terrible state of the app du jour, stupid UIs, and how many TV shows just aren't worth the effort. If you ever ask WTF, were they thinking about anything in tech? You'll be in good company. So thank you there, OC Adams. Thank you.

And we have a final five star rating this week from Aussie 365. Mucho bueno. Thanks, guys. Great show. Hello from Sydney, Australia. Well, hello, Sydney. Thank you very much. Thank you. If you want your question or comment read 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. And as always, pretty pleased with sugar on top. Tell your friends. Closing shout outs. Quick shout out for every town for gun safety, even though they occasionally stretch the truth.

They're doing some good work. And if you care about this stuff, take a look at them. Toss them some ducats. And it is Chinese New Year. So happy New Year. It's the year of the dog. Gong Hei Fat Choi. Jason, may our wallets overfloweth with cash from the podcast this year. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently, the year of the dog doesn't have dogs because my dogs take all the money out of my wallet, but anyway, and thanks to everybody who wrote in and chatted with me over the past two weeks about the Jordan Harbinger show, not the other one.

We actually hit the top 200 in iTunes yesterday after two weeks. So thank you for your support and keep listening. Support this show more. I want to beat them. I want Grumpy Old Geeks to be ahead of the charts. Damn it. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo.

Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give us a one-time or recurring donation, you can also go to gog.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 247.

From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy, and we'll see you next week. Walk on the road. Walk right side, safe. Walk left side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later.

Get the squish, just like grip. Here, karate, same thing. Either you karate do yes, or karate do no. You karate do guess so. Just like grip.

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