252: Cluster Zuck

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Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Dave Bittner. Dave Bittner. That's right, people. Dave Bittner is here. You know why? Because Brian, Brian, you know, I just got kind of tired of it. Every week he's hounding on me, making fun of me, and I'm just over it.

And last week he said, the great Santini Schulmeister has predicted my move back to L.A. And obviously, he never saw the great Santini because in the end, the great Santini dies. Spoiler alert. Or has he? Yeah. No, I'm just joshing. No, Brian unfortunately has some family issues. His dad's really sick, so he's taking the week off to spend time with the family and the dad.

So hopefully he will be back next week. So Dave Bittner has decided to sit in with us. So we thank Dave very much. Hello, Papa B. Hello. Happy to be here. I wish Brian the best, of course, and look forward to having him back next week. So I have one bit of follow-up before we jump into the news because we got some news this week.

And we talked recently about how the South Korean government is starting to force people to not work so hard because they're not porking. And so there won't be any little South Koreans coming out soon if they don't get back to shagging. Right. Now the government has decided that they're going to take the measure of shutting down people's computers at night to make them go home.

Oh. But it's only Fridays. Now, if this is the problem, how about instead of shutting them down, they switch them over to porn? Yeah, but then they're going to be banging their office mates and then, you know, divorce rates going to go up. Yeah. I guess if you want, I mean, if you just want babies, it's one thing. If you want babies within wedlock, I guess that's another thing.

That's true. I don't know. Maybe they're progressive and they really just don't care. Yeah. I think there's something to this, though, because I mean, I think this is a problem we have here in the States as well with people. This this what I think is a misplaced notion of that time at the office equals progress and loyalty and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah. You know, we just we work too many hours. I think some of those European countries have a have a better idea. Yeah. I mean, and studies show time and time again, the longer you work, the less productive you are. Right. Right. Yeah. It's not worth it. Yeah. Yeah. You need to sleep, especially if you want to be creative.

If you want to be productive, you need to sleep. If you want to be safe, you need to sleep. And so this notion of working your your butt off as a show of loyalty to a company that, you know, will replace you the week after you leave. Yeah. Yeah. I just say it's a cultural thing. I hope we we overcome, but I have little faith that we will.

In the news. David, finally turns out Uber has a body count. It has been all over the news. Yeah. An Uber autonomous vehicle has finally killed somebody. Yeah. It's tragic.

It is, but it's inevitable. It was going to happen with one of these companies. And I'm not surprised it's Uber first, honestly, because their program seems to be farther behind than everybody else's. Really? My intuition is that just looking at all the news, seeing all the people that they've had come and go.

And especially the stuff with the Waymo side of things. Right. And learning that their LIDAR is, you know, like a two lens LIDAR and Waymo is using a four lens or all that. It just seems like they're scrambling to catch up because they hired the entire Carnegie Mellon robotics team away a long time ago.

Mm hmm. But that was after Waymo had already been going for years. And you've also got GE and those guys coming up after them with, I wouldn't say bigger pockets, but definitely bigger institutional knowledge on how cars work. Yeah. Yeah. GM.

Yeah. Did you watch the video of this occurrence? Yes, I did. What did you make of it? Now, it's funny because the first time I'm watching it, I'm thinking, oh my God, what's this guy doing eating a burrito while he's driving? Mm hmm. Because he keeps looking down and not really paying attention to the road.

Right. And then I'm thinking, okay, maybe he's looking at the readouts on all the displays because when you see those self-driving cars, it's like, you know, mission control in there. Right. And I'm thinking maybe he's paying attention to that. But for the most part, what I found is that, no, they're actually not supposed to be looking at that.

When they have somebody to look at the readouts, they have a second passenger with them whose only job is to look at the computers. The person behind the wheel is supposed to have their hands right next to the wheel so they can intercede and also be looking at the road for threats the entire time.

And this guy definitely wasn't. I saw this and a couple things came to mind. First of all, it appeared to me that this person was looking down at a phone. And the reason I say that is when the video starts, you can see their gaze looking down kind of at their lap.

And then it looks like they respond to something. Like they make a little chuckle as if, you know, a text came in or something like that. And then they look up again at the road and then they look down again and then they look up and are shocked because, you know, that's the moment before they hit something.

So, on the one hand, I can kind of understand if your job was to sit in this car that drives itself for hours and hours and hours at a time and you do that and nothing bad ever happens, I could see someone, I guess I have a certain amount of empathy for someone slipping into looking at their phone even though that's not what they're supposed to be doing.

Exactly. And I think that informs a lot of other things, right? I mean, you look at the current state of driver-assisted cars, I guess. And one of the things I wanted to point out was that I know Cadillac's system, for example, actually has sensors in the steering wheel.

At the top of the steering wheel, there's a row of little cameras that do face monitoring and they watch your eyes to make sure that you're looking at the road. And if you spend too much time not looking at the road, the first thing, the system beeps at you and then it shakes the wheel and then it goes and, you know, pulls off to the side of the road and shuts down.

We need that on regular cars, let alone, you know, self-driving cars, honestly. But, I mean, so that's in a system that is deployed, a driver assistance system that's already out there that's working and by all accounts is getting, you know, rave reviews from the people who use it. But isn't that an interesting way to keep track of things?

And then the other thing is you were saying earlier about the number of sensors that Uber has and that sort of thing. When you look at the video of the person crossing the road right before they get hit, there's an empty lane to the left of the car. This person is crossing the road from left to right.

So they cross that empty lane into the path of the car and that's when they get hit. So you see them come into the range of the headlights, right, the visible range of the headlights moments before they get hit.

My question is, shouldn't the sensors be able to see farther away than the visible spectrum? Yeah, some of the stories I've heard is that the LiDAR should be able to pick up objects in the road between at least 150 feet to 300 feet before it gets there.

And it's interesting that we're seeing visible light footage from the car, not any kind of night vision footage or infrared or anything from the LiDAR. Right, right, the interpretation from the LiDAR, how it was tracking all the objects around, because you can bet they're looking at that. Yeah, and I'm surprised they didn't release that.

And breaking news here, I almost called you Brian. So used to Brian here. I get that a lot. ABC7 from Tempe, Arizona, is saying the safety driver behind the wheel when a self-driving Uber car struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, served time in prison for two felony convictions, but met the company's requirements for hiring, according to officials in public records.

And it is a guy. His name is Rafael Vasquez, and he's 44 years old. All right, all right. Well, I'll bet that hiring decision isn't going to come back and bite them in the butt. Two felonies. When you're driving for Uber, it doesn't really matter. The best people. The best people.

Yeah. Like, we're supposed to do background checks? Come on. What do you mean? Yeah. No, it's tragic. And I think Uber did the right thing here by putting their tests on hold until they have time to evaluate it. They have to do that, and that's the right thing to do. Ultimately, I think we're going to find ourselves in a situation where, yes, people are going to be killed by these cars, but it's going to be a lot fewer people than get killed by us humans driving.

The interesting thing, I think, is, you know, I want to hear if there's any toxicology from the person who was crossing the road because maybe she was a little bit tipsy and going too slow because there was no reason that she should have been at that particular point when that car came because that road was empty, you know? Right, right.

There was nobody else on the road. It was empty. It's like, what's the deal there? But the other interesting thing is that I saw in the video is that she was walking in front of the bike, which made a very interesting outline for the LiDAR. But the LiDAR still should have picked up that there was an obstruction in the road no matter what.

Yeah, that's interesting because when I first heard this story, I imagined someone, you know, stepping out from in between two parked cars, you know, obstructed and suddenly appearing in the road. But that's not what happened. This person, like we said earlier, was crossing an empty lane to the left.

So there was plenty of motion and really nothing in the way of this person. So, I don't know. Yeah, she was just outside of the cone of the floodlights or the streetlights. Right. Which is odd. Why would you cross the street in the dark when there's a streetlight right there? Yeah. You know, I don't know. There's just, there's a lot to be answered for this.

And, you know, everybody's wringing their hands and everybody's saying, who's responsible when a self-driving car kills a pedestrian? Well, the company that made the self-driving car is where I come from, but everybody's got an opinion on this. What's your opinion, Dave? Well, also, what's the priority of the self-driving car?

How does it decide who's more important, the passengers in the car? Oh, God. It's a rally problem. Again. Yeah. I mean, but that's, but that, but there's logic in the, like, I don't know about you, but like, I, I, when I learned to drive, one of the things they taught me, you know, here on the East Coast, we have so many freaking deer.

And one of the things that I was told was hit the deer. Yeah. You know, don't swerve to try to miss the deer. Hit the deer. Right. Yeah. And so the cars are going to have to be making those decisions. What do I do? Do I obviously slam on the brakes, try to minimize whatever's going to happen, but do I go off the road?

Do I, do I hit a pole? Do I hit the, the other person? I guess, uh, humans are cheaper than, or, uh, softer than poles. Right. I've seen no one, uh, profess what the answer to that question is. So we're just speculating, but someone has to make that programming decision.

That's the issue. We covered this, I think two or three years ago, maybe even four years ago when the, when they were first starting to talk about the trolley problem and self-driving cars. Yep. And I'm, I'm like, this decision is going to be in the hands of a 15 year old programmer at some point. But, and you know, they were trying to figure out what the decision should be, what should be prioritized?

Cause you can't scan fast enough and do facial recognition and see who's worthy of living. If you're going to hit three people or one person or a tree or the, so the people in the car, and I just said, randomize it that way, hand of God, you know, so just, just throw out a random number.

And if it's in the range, then you'd go right, left or center. Oh, that's interesting. If there's no, if there's no exact answer, then to get rid of the blame, yeah, exactly. It is a roll of the dice. Just like most traffic accidents with humans are. That was my solution.

Yeah. But one that nobody will ever take, I'm sure. Yeah. Because what'll happen is you'll get dragged into court and you'll say, so you, you want us to understand that instead of having the chance of saving this young boy scout's life, you decided instead to roll the dice and then off you go.

I know they say God doesn't play dice, but I don't believe in God. So I play dice. Right. But programmers do. But then how do you guarantee you're generating real random numbers? That's true. The old pseudo random number problem. Oh, man. It's turtles all the way down.

It is. So let's move on to the elephant in the room. Oh, the Cambridge Analytica Facebook buster cluck of the week. Yeah. I like to, I like to call it a cluster zuck because this whole thing is just, it's gotten out of hand in my, my humble opinion, but let's, let's talk about the facts for a little bit here.

Okay. A long time ago in a, in a Facebook far, far away, somebody got a lot of data out. Right. And that data ended up getting used to get Trump elected is the long and short of it. Because that's, if you look at the timeline on it, researcher gets data, data goes into pool, pool turns into company, company makes software, software gets Trump.

We get Trump and somebody feels bad about it because now the alt right is a thing. So the dude with pink hair comes out and says, Hey, we did some bad stuff back then. You should know about it. Now, the only reason we're hearing about Cambridge Analytica, in my humble opinion, is because they got caught and now we know who they are.

And because yes, Trump, but you know that everything that has happened in this case with all of the data being taken, companies being built upon it and profiling our every move. These guys are just one out of a thousand companies that are out there that are doing the exact same thing.

We just never heard of them. Now, when you say got caught, what do you, what specifically do you mean by that? That the whistleblower came forward and said, this is what we did. And now we're going to talk about it. Okay. Yeah. Because if there's no whistleblower, we never would have really, the story wouldn't have been a thing if this guy hadn't have come forward to BBC four and said, Hey, look, this is what we did.

Let's talk about it. And I'm going to hand you these guys on a platter. Do you really think that this story would have ever come to light? I don't know. I don't know. And I don't know. I don't know if there is a way to know. I don't know if this is something that, for example, Mueller would have gotten to in his investigation.

I don't know, you know, how many people knew what was going on and through the regular, the questioning that's going on all around this last election round. How often would this have come up as being something that was a bit of an aberration compared to elections past?

So whether or not it would have come up, would it have come up in this way, to this degree, this public way? I'm not sure. But, you know, part of this is this whole thing that we're shocked, shocked that our Facebook data is being shared or was shared.

You know, some of us weren't shocked. Some of us who use the platform. Well, that's my point. We're not shocked at all. This is not news. I think what's news is the degree to which it happened and the sort of exponential way that it happened, where, you know, a couple hundred thousand people took a survey and through that 50 million people's data, complete sets of data got shared because that's the way it worked back then.

Right. And they shut it down in 2015, but you know they didn't do it for altruistic reasons. You know that there was something else that happened. That was going to get them in trouble. They're like, oh crap, everybody's got this data. Now maybe we should turn off the hose and pay some people to go away so this doesn't come out. Because I guarantee they didn't turn it off because they were being nice about it.

We pointed out on the Cyber Wire that Wired Magazine noted that Zuckerberg waited either five days or two years to make a public statement on the matter, depending on how you look at it. Right. Exactly. Exactly. I'm going with two years.

Yeah. Two years and five days. Yeah. And what did you think of his statement and his quote unquote apology? I think it's too little too late. Okay. Horses out of the barn. I think we're going to see how...

I would like to say we're going to see regulation coming. He has said he's not necessarily opposed to it. I don't know what else he could say at this point. Yeah, really. No, we're doing fine by ourselves. You know, we'll self-regulate. It's okay. Well, obviously not.

Well, we've got GDPR coming online in, what, two months. So that's going to change things. I've gotten so many emails this week about GDPR from everybody that's got my data. It's great. Yep. I'm hoping that it's going to work, but I think they're scared of the EU.

Well, you'll notice that, you know, all the websites you're visiting these days, they're all popping up and reminding you that they use cookies. That's a GDPR thing that they have to tell you. So what I wonder is the timing of this with GDPR coming, will we see broader adoption of GDPR-like rules?

Could that be, will there be enough political will here in the United States for people to say, hey, maybe we need something like that as well? I'm not convinced, though, that people, other than feeling creepy about it, that people feel enough personal pain to make this do anything but blow over.

Yeah, so the Delete Facebook campaign has been going strong. People have been deleting their Facebook pages and accounts. Even Elon Musk today deleted the Tesla and SpaceX Facebook pages. Oh, is that right? Yeah, it just came out before we went on the air, and he got rid of his, so that's done.

And share's gone, and I think Brian found the band Massive Attack was the first one that he found, the first band to get rid of theirs. Yeah, some people have done it, but in the grand scheme of things, most people aren't going to care, and most people like their Facebook. And yeah, well, and that's what we've always said is that, you know, if these people don't know what they're getting into, they're not going to complain when they get burned, and then they're just going to go, oh, it's just technology, and I didn't care anyway.

What do I care if somebody made me vote for Trump? I was going to vote for him anyway, because, you know, they're not going to change their opinion in their mind based on this data that's coming out. Yeah. That's not how psychology works. I heard a great quote from Molly Wood from Marketplace on NPR.

She said that, data has been weaponized, and Facebook is the world's largest arms dealer. You know, that is a great quote for this particular breach, and I still think that they're- Not a breach. Not a breach. Oh, that's right. Not a breach. I keep forgetting. Not a breach. Not a breach. It's not a bug. It's a feature.

It is. That's exactly it. Going back to last week's episode, people were using the platform as it was exactly intended to be used. Everything worked exactly the way it was designed to work. Everything functioned the way it was supposed to function. All the data was given away exactly the way that everyone clicked through and agreed to have it given away.

Mm-hmm. I want to follow on with that for a second, though, because, you know, right now Facebook is the quote-unquote world's largest arms dealer. Right. But there are other companies out there that are getting all the data that they can from Facebook already, and then merging that with your loyalty cards, your, you know, every other public thing that you have, your credit card transactions, all of that, and building even bigger databases than Facebook has.

And Facebook can do profiling on certain things for advertising and get some profile data out of it, but unless they're buying all of that data, too, which they very well may be. They have more money than anybody ever. Well, not since the stock dropped, but that's a different story.

Right, right. But, you know, these databases are out there, and there are big companies out there that are buying, selling, and merging this data and coming up with psychographic data on all of us that aren't just Facebook. We just don't know who they are right now. And that's kind of an interesting thing to start digging into.

And I think most of them are advertising agencies. I think that's right. And I think, will we see a push towards disclosure, where if someone starts gathering this data about you, they have to tell you, and, I mean, the dream would be to have, you would have to opt in.

That's unlikely. But will we reach something like that? I saw someone tweet today, and I have a link to it in the show notes. It was a gentleman, he downloaded his entire Facebook data file as a zip file.

I added that to the show notes after on how people can do that. So that'll be in the show notes on if you want to go get it and take a look at it. There's a link in the show notes for how to go do that. It's pretty easy. And I guess there are some tools that help you sort through things, make sense of the raw data. Is that right? There's a Ruby script out there right now that does some of that stuff.

But the actual pages itself, the dump that they give you is actually a nicely packaged little HTML package. Okay. So you can just use the data that they give you and click through all the different areas of it. And I did that before the show. And oh boy. Oh boy. So what caught my eye on this, and I think what caught this gentleman's eye, his name is Dylan McKay, is that they had call histories.

Yes. Yes, they do. What is that about? If you're making calls through Facebook and doing voice chat, I'm looking at my message history and it's got every private message that I ever sent to anybody in there. Okay. So this, but this is not, so in other words, this is, this is not.

I just never used that feature. Okay. Okay. All right. So I was confused. I thought this was the call history just from the phone. This is Facebook call history. Exactly. Yes. Well, that's, that's a half step. Not as bad, I suppose. No, it's not as terrifying as you think it is because if you're doing, you know, if you're doing voice calls on Facebook, you're, they're going to have that data.

A little quick aside to you, dear listener, when we recorded this, it wasn't clear to us that they were actually recording call and SMS information through the Android version of messenger. It is now out that yes, they did in fact do call recording and SMS recording through the messenger app on Android.

My problem with the data is there are things in there from apps that are at least eight years, seven or eight years old. I think mob wars was the first one that I found going back to early 2011 and there are status updates in there from that app. And I deleted that app a very long time ago and the status updates still persist in my history.

There's a lot of diamond dash updates. I haven't used that app in forever. And I, when I deleted the app, I said, delete the history on it, which I always do, but it persisted. So if there's a glitch in the matrix and whenever you hit delete all the data from an app and that feature doesn't work when it does it, that stuff persists.

And you can't go back and scrub it. I can't find any way to get to that data. That's they're keeping on me. It's pretty interesting. And in the data dump, they have all of the advertisers that you have shared your data with a whole list of them. Every IP address that you've ever accessed Facebook from, uh, just a ton, all your session data from when you signed in, signed out, did a change profile request, everything.

It's fascinating. I'm, I'm like surgical about how I use Facebook, but I want to see a normal person's dump. That would be fascinating. And imagine if hackers can start getting those dumps. Well, and using those. Ooh, that'd be fun. Another thing it reminded me of is, you know, with GDPR kicking in and which has a right to be forgotten rule and you are allowed to look at your data and have your data scrubbed.

I remember hearing, uh, not too long ago, someone saying that if you want to get rid of the Nazis on your Twitter feed, tell Twitter you live in Germany and the Nazis go away, right? So I wonder, is there a way to tell Facebook that I live in Europe or even that I'm a European citizen?

Because GDPR extends to European citizens no matter where they are in the world. Will not that I know of be beholden to give you that ability? The thing, I mean, what we're hearing with GDPR is that a lot of these big companies are just going to adopt the European model globally because that's the easiest, that's the lowest common denominator.

It's the easiest thing to do. Yeah. But if you're a company like Facebook and your business is all about vacuuming up this sort of data, I don't know. I don't know what we're in for. Maybe it's time to find a new business model. People would gladly pay to use Facebook to not be targeted, I think, because people are sick of getting targeted and seeing so many ads.

If you could pay, because we know exactly how much Facebook values you per year. It's like $7.80. Right. I'll give you a tenner, you know? It's ridiculous how little people, you know, are worth to them. It's just like, oh, but that doesn't scale. Oh, then we have to raise the rates next year, next year, next year.

And, you know, they just don't see it that way. They see this is the low-hanging fruit. Wouldn't it be great to have the option? I mean, I think about, I probably spend more time on Facebook than I do on Netflix, and I have no problem paying whatever it is we pay per month for Netflix. You know, I would pay for an ad-free, privacy-enabled version of Facebook.

I would absolutely pay for that. Yeah, that was app.net, and they went away. In a heartbeat. Yeah. I'd pay for that. Although that was more of a Twitter model, but still. Yeah. People are trying it, but it's getting the traction, you know, getting your friends there. It's that first step process of going there, and nobody's there, and then you forget about it and never go back to it.

Because nobody can migrate en masse. Yeah, it would have to be Facebook, though. In other words, if Facebook had a premium option, I would pay for that in a second. Or I would pay to be able to export my social graph, like you used to be able to on all of these platforms, until Facebook said, no, actually, you can't do it.

Then Twitter followed suit, and everybody else followed suit, because you can't take your followers and your friends with you if you want to leave and come back. Your social graph belongs to Facebook now. You cannot take it with you, which is incredible, because they gave it away. Up to 2015 to a developer, as long as you signed up for an app token.

So the thing's going to, it's going to come to a head. You know, the MPs over in England are asking Zuckerberg to show up, but he's like, you know, we make the decision that when the hearing is about one specific topic, we send the person that knows the most about that topic, and they're finally saying, you know what?

No, no, no. The jig is up, bro. Right, right. Put your hoodie on, hop on your private jet, and get your ass over here, because we're tired of this. Right, right. Yeah, more to come. There's a link in the show notes about how Facebook's new data restrictions are going to start causing problems to academic researchers and scientists, and I think it's interesting because I don't even know if researchers should have this information, because that is my data back out in the wild.

I don't know what their data protection setup is for the lab at the university. You know, I know Facebook now is trying to really lock it down, but giving out my data to a researcher doesn't really instill me with, you know, the greatest of calm.

But I know that there's an article in Wired that talks about how if you want to do research now on Facebook data, you actually have to go to Facebook, and it doesn't leave the lab, right? But that's not always been the case, and there are other factors that go into this, but I'm not sure that I care enough to have scientists going through Facebook data, because we know that it can be de-anonymized.

Anything can be de-anonymized. And I don't know if the value is there to have these people dicking around with the data. Yeah, I've certainly heard on the cybersecurity side of things that companies have been gobbling up as much data as possible, sort of in a race against time towards GDPR and other regulations, because they know that the day is coming when these big, huge piles of data aren't going to be as easy to get as they are today.

And so a lot of these artificial intelligence, machine learning, these big data projects rely on huge data sets. Right. So they want to get them while the getting's good, and they know the writing's on the wall that these restrictions are coming. Yeah, this makes me sad that I never finished my data ethics course at Coursera.

I just kind of got bored. But now it's really coming back, and I wish Brian was here to kind of dig into this stuff too, because he passed and got his certificate. Yeah, he's certified. I don't like doing homework. Imagine that. Yeah. That's why I graduated high school out of summer school from a typing class to get my There you go.

There you go. Yeah. Just because the Russian studies guy didn't like that I wore a hat to class, and he gave me a 59 out of 60, 12 years of schooling was out the window, and I couldn't graduate. They wouldn't even let me go through the ceremony, those rat bastards. I'm sure it was all about the hat. It kind of was.

The guy gave me one point off because of the damn hat. He hated me. But my happy moment is Dr. Joseph Dalpiez, the principal of Hinsdale South, who could have let me go through, and at least wear the cap and gown. Had a heart attack and died in his driveway a couple years later with nobody around.

So there we go. Vindication. Wow. Wow. I'm not bitter. I'm not bitter at all. Okay. So what's going on that's happy these days, Jason? I don't know, but I just want to say, here's a fun one.

In the history of bad timing, this could not be worse. Facebook is rolling out a Patreon-style subscription mechanism for their creators. Talk about, you know, trying to say, hey, look, we're still doing good stuff over here. Hey, hey, hey, anybody, anybody? Give us more money. Money, money, money.

Right. Right. We'll see how that goes. We'll see how that goes. I put a thing in the show notes from this guy, Dave Pell. Do you know who Dave Pell is? I don't think so. He's a writer, and he's pretty funny on the Twitters, but he did a post on Medium called The Flight of the Zuckerberg.

Oh, yeah. It's 20 quick thoughts about the Facebook scandal. They're pretty funny, but at the very end, number 20 is, let's be honest, we don't care about this story that much. We're just dying to talk about anything but Trump. Right. Which kind of, yeah. Cheers to that.

There's some pretty funny anecdotes in there. Yeah, it's good. Okay, if Facebook is really good about making us feel things, why are they making us feel so crappy about Facebook right now? Right, right. And we're talking about Facebook and all the problems with all the data and all the people mining it. And over at TechDirt, there's a great article that says, if you're pissed about Facebook's privacy abuses, you should be four times as angry at the broadband industry.

Did you get a chance to go through this one? I did. Seems old hat to me. Yeah, I mean, okay. I don't know that I can definitely agree with what they're saying. I get what they're saying. They're saying that the broadband industry has a history of bad behavior and injecting code into things and looking at what you're doing and so on and so forth.

But I don't know that it compares to the scope that – it's different. It's different from what Facebook did. Certainly, the broadband companies are cooperating with nation states to allow observation.

But, you know, we still have the rule of law when it comes to that. And I don't know. I just – this article came up a little hollow to me. What did you think? Here's the thing. Think about Facebook Beacon. Remember a while ago when Facebook Beacon came out and the internet crapped their pants within, like, two hours and said, you can't do that.

You cannot follow me around the internet and look at everything I click on and collectively shut it down. The broadband companies do that already. They see everywhere you go. Right. You can't package up that data and sell it to advertisers. You can yell at Facebook because you understand what Facebook is doing.

But when you think about the scope of every single thing that you do is tracked by your ISP and you don't do anything about it, it just seems like a little, eh, okay, well, I'm going to fight this little fight over here. I know I can win, but there's no way I can go against the broadband companies because you can't, you know?

So you turn a blind eye to that. And you kind of can sleep at night because you're thinking, okay, well, they're watching everything, but they're never going to do anything with it. But they do. And that's why I'm not so worried about anything that's going on with this Facebook story this week.

That's why I think it is overblown because there are other people out there that are doing far worse. This is just a story where people got caught and the masses who didn't understand what was going on are finally getting upset about it. But people like us who have been in this from the beginning know what's going on.

And it's like, yeah, this is nothing new. Why are you so surprised? And why are you getting butthurt about it? Because you've given them the keys so long ago. But have you had an experience in your life where one of these creepy incidents has happened and you have said to yourself, you know, damn this broadband company.

There they go again. Have you had anything happen where you've been able to blame them as opposed to Facebook? I've had Comcast putting in pop-ups over the content on some of the sites that I go to, giving me ads to go to other places or do other things. And I immediately dug into it and figured out how to turn it off and get to them and say, this is not cool.

You cannot be injecting crap into my stream, my HTTP stream, when I go to a website that I didn't ask for you to be putting things on, especially if you're charging me for bandwidth. Because the stuff that you're chucking in there is like a hundred and some K of bandwidth on every page that I go to, which is like, you know, it's a couple percent.

And you're charging me for you stuffing my, my, you know, my callbacks. And that's what really got my goat. Like, okay, listen to it, record it, do whatever the hell you want. If it gets subpoenaed, give it to them, whatever. But do not be, you know, sticking your nose in what I'm doing.

That's what really got my goat. And unfortunately, this is the problem with all the big ISPs is you cannot change it in most places that you live. There is no competition. You're screwed. It is a monopoly everywhere you move. Yep. And so that's, and thus endeth the rant on this.

That's why I just get, I get, I mean, we've been doing this for five years and telling everybody the same damn thing, but nobody listened until now. Fortunately, people are finally listening. So maybe they'll go back to the old episodes. It is fascinating to see when do things come to a head? You know, what, what's the, what's the, what's the straw that breaks the camel's back?

And is this that I, yeah, it could be, I don't know. Trump in the alt right. That's what got this guy, a guy who is obviously, you know, in all lives an alternative lifestyle with the pink hair and, you know, into technology. And I, I, I know this guy, I don't know him personally, but I know a hundred of this guy and they're cool guys and they have morals.

And when they, you know, it's fungible to a point when they're getting paid for it, but there comes a point when, you know, you hit your, your limit and you, you either leave, shut up about it or do whatever. But this guy had the balls to come out and tell everybody about it. So I, you know, I applaud that guy, but that's the tipping point right now is when somebody comes up and says something that this is what's going on and this is what's been happening in a way that is visceral enough to get people to understand that you have been getting manipulated and screwed.

Yeah. And that's what it's taken to get to this point. Yeah. It's, it's fascinating to watch. Yeah, it is. So, uh, let's move on. We have a couple of stories here about Toys R Us. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Let's get the hell out of here. Um, Amazon is looking at buying Toys R Us stores so they can get a deeper, you know, get their claws deeper into the retail space and the actual physical location space.

Since there's some really good Toys R Us spaces out there, lots of them. One near my house. It's sad that Toys R Us is going out of business. It is. It is. It is sad. I, yes, I will say it is. I am truly sad that Toys R Us is going out of business.

I loved going to Toys R Us when I was a child. I loved taking my children to Toys R Us. It was just a fun thing you could do. Even if you didn't buy anything, you could easily go and kill an hour at Toys R Us looking at Lego and Star Wars stuff and whatever.

When I was 30, I went to New York City for the first time and went to the big Toys R Us there and walked around for an hour and a half. It was awesome. And I did buy some toys. So there. Yeah.

And the thing that kills me is that it's not like Toys R Us wasn't a successful company. It's not like they weren't running a successful business. This whole thing with the investors sucking all the value out of it and loading them up with debt and making them uncompetitive. It just, it.

It really sucks. It sucks. It really does suck. It's just, it's awful. It's a good company. And to add insult to injury, Charles Lazarus, the founder, just died at the age of 94. I don't, I don't know that the two are related, but.

Yeah. Cause my comment was way to go Bezos, but I know that that's just being a dick. No, the guy was 94, but he, he created Jeffrey, you know, it's really sad that he's like it on his last days. He's seeing his company just, you know, pieced off to nothing. Yeah. And it's just a crappy way to go.

I think see your life's work, you know, just being torn apart because some asshole in a suit did that to you. Right. Like I said, sucked all the value out of it and loaded it up with debt. It's just, uh, it just, it's heartbreaking. It is. But if Amazon buys them, then you can just get stuff sooner because you know, like the front, those stores are massive.

I've never seen a small Toys R Us store. Yeah. So even if they take the first, you know, 10% of the store and turn it into an Amazon bookstore or one of those go stores, the back half can just be used for, you know, real time delivery of inventory for their fleet of ad hoc drivers who can just go around and pick stuff up and take it to somebody's house.

I can see why they would do it. I have to admit that I am part of the problem in that while I would take my kids to Toys R Us and we would walk around and we would buy things and, and it was great for a last minute birthday present or take your kid there for a treat to buy a Lego set or a video game or something like that.

When Christmas rolls around, uh, you know, my wife and I would sit in front of the computer and fire up Amazon and just knock it all out and it all gets delivered and no fuss, no muss. Toys R Us is just easier. And that's what we did.

So they, Toys R Us lost our biggest purchase of the year because of the convenience of Amazon. And it's interesting too, because the neighborhood I live in isn't what you would call like, or at least where the local Toys R Us is, isn't like super upper middle class.

It's, you know, like middle to lower middle class. Toys R Us at Christmas was packed. Oh yeah. It was utterly and unbelievably packed. So there was a lot, there were a lot of people out there who were still, still going at Christmas. Oh yeah. But there are a lot of people who just said, I'm not going to go to that parking lot in the middle of winter and try and buy some toys and fight the crowds.

No, again, if they hadn't had this huge debt load, they, they could have made a run at it, but it was a big anchor around their necks. And that's the heartbreaking part about it. Bye bye Toys R Us. You will sadly be missed. Sadly. Yeah. Jeffrey and baby G. Jeffrey and baby G will not be here for the birthday of baby Jesus this year.

Sorry. Oh, nice. Nice. Nice. Well played. Thank you. Let's move on to some blockchain news. Yes. This is really interesting. It is. Ah, so some German researchers have been conducting arbitrary blockchain content analysis to figure out what people are putting in the blockchain that aren't actually the transactions, because you can put a little bit of data in your transaction data.

Right. This is how it works. You know, people can put in links to kiddie porn. They can put in other things that are unsavory. So it's like, you know, keep your chocolate out of my peanut butter. I'll keep my peanut butter out of your chocolate, but definitely keep your kiddie porn out of my blockchain.

Because if I'm a crypto miner and I have a copy of the blockchain, I got kiddie porn on my system, which means anybody that's using Bitcoin is basically a criminal in almost every country in the world. Yes, it's interesting. And the blockchain evidently is up to around 160 gigabytes, I believe.

So there's a lot of data being slung around. If you're a Bitcoin miner and you have to possess the whole kit and caboodle of it, there's a lot in there. Some of the articles I was reading about this said that, you know, generally there's some there's there's common sense when it comes to these sorts of things.

In other words, people aren't generally looking for ways to trick people into being arrested for for kiddie porn. And also, it's not the actual porn. It's links to porn, which is different. But there's also interesting things like there's political speech in here.

People are saying it's a way to get political speech into countries where it's banned by slipping it into the blockchain. Right. Tag it and put in like sedition messages. Right. Right. Or, you know, like it's like it could be this could be like the new steganography, you know, blockchainography.

You can you can put in encrypted messages into the blockchain with the tag. And then like the spies used to do, they put in a classified ad. You knew what to go look for. But in the blockchain, now you know what to go look for. You can find the message from your the spy down the street to the handler and things like that. Right.

I'm thinking the fun ways to use it, not kiddie porn. One of the articles spoke about the possibility of basically consensus edits because the whole the blockchain is about consensus. But if you get a large enough group of people agreeing on a redaction, if you will, you know, blacking out a section with a note saying why it was redacted and enough people agree on that, that that's a possible solution to this sort of thing.

Wikichain. Yeah. Like Wikichain. Yeah, it's interesting. No, it's very interesting. And I think the thing that most people could claim is safe harbor because, you know, we're just we're just storing the chain for a different reason, kind of like ISPs do with the safe harbor provisions, because I think that this would really kind of work under that.

It's like, no, we're not doing it. If you need to if you can prove that I added that to the chain, then yes, then I'm accountable for that. But if I am just hosting the content that is coming in from thousands and millions of other people, then I should not be accountable for that.

Right. But the trick is people are looking at this as a way that countries can say we are going to ban Bitcoin and blockchain technologies as a whole because people can use it for dissemination of unauthorized data. Yes. It gives them an excuse. And that's the trick.

Yeah. That's the slippery slope that comes with this argument. Yeah. It gives them an excuse. But the flip side is that many of the many of those people who want to use that excuse are the same places where people want to do a whole lot of mining. Twitter is back in the news again because they are starting to crank down on automation and the use of multiple accounts.

OK, by me. We got hit by this. Oh, you did. Yeah. You know, we were using tools to sort of automate our tweets because our Twitter, the Twitter feed for the Cyber Wire has things like shout outs to advertisers and and things like that.

So we would send out there were there would be tweets that would be repeated at certain intervals. You know, thanks to our sponsor, XYZ Cyber Security. We do that, too. We actually do that, too, on the show. You know, sign up for our Patreon and go check out private Internet access and things like that.

So, yeah. And so this could put an end to that. It's going to put an end to that, unfortunately. Yeah. So, I mean, you can still use tools like Buffer and things like that to, you know, schedule your tweets. Right. But you need to make them unique. Right. The big, big problem.

So and that's very easy to do, I think, for a lot of people. Well, it just takes time because you don't want to send out the same link over and over again, but you can use a URL shortener, especially if you're using WordPress. You can just make a new one. Yeah. Throw it out there every time. But you have to recraft the message. And there are tools to do that.

You know, thesaurus engines where you just put in the same thing, it comes out with new words. It comes out, which can't have hilarious results, by the way. Right. Right. Thesaurus engines are awesome. If you just want, if you're just drunk and like sitting around with your friends and you have a thesaurus, throw in some like you guys come up with a sentence.

It's like playing telephone. You just keep throwing it through the thesaurus until you get to gibberish. It's kind of fun. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's a good thing, but it just means more work for some social media folks. So you mean work for social media folks, because social media folks don't do that much work.

Let's be honest about it. No, no. Let's be honest. Those interns. No, no, no, no, no. We have a fine social media person at the Cyber Wire. She works very hard and she does a great job. So I'm not going to be good at her. Yes. I know you shout her out on every show. Yeah.

Travis Kalanick's back in the news. Goodie. How about them apples? Yeah. Just so we wanted to hear from him again. Yeah. Somebody obviously kicked over the wrong rock when they were going through the cesspool and he crawled out again. And he's now going to be a CEO of City Storage Systems.

What else would he be, really? Yeah, of course. Some people are just born to lead. I think we should call him the scumbag Patton. He'll be the scumbag Patton. A holding company focused on the redevelopment of distressed real estate assets in the areas of parking, retail, and industrial.

So he's going to be a slumlord. Slumlord, yeah. It's exactly what he's going to be. Right. He probably took one of those online quizzes that says, what would you be best at, right? It popped up slumlord. The guy's got unlimited resources. So, hey, go with what you know, right?

Oh, my God. Yeah. He's already ruined the taxi business. So let's just ruin the areas where they live, too. Wow. And, yeah, if you can't get hired by a company, I guess you just buy the company and weasel your way in. That's kind of what he did. Memo.

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Yay. You noticed that View Image has disappeared recently, haven't you? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Yeah, it sucked. Yes. It really sucked. Evidently, this was a sort of, I don't know, making nice with the stock image folks.

Well, people who own the copyright for all the images that people are stealing by using the View Image button. Right. Like everybody does. Like everybody. Right. So I found a Chrome extension to actually bring back the button for it. So you're welcome, thieves of the internet. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That is a very practical tool.

It is actually a very practical tool. I use it all the damn time. Yeah. I don't use it to steal images, but for things to send to friends or, you know, anything, it just makes it easier. I don't want to have to go to the web page to steal the image. God damn it. Right. Saves you a click. It does. Saves you a click. A friend of the show, Anthony Rossbach, sent me a tip on Twitter a couple weeks ago, and I tried to find the thread, but I couldn't find it.

But here's the deal. I hate using the Instagram app sometimes on my phone because something's wonky or whatever. But he showed me a way that you can use Instagram on the web on your desktop and still get upload functionality, which is what they don't give you by default.

Very simple. All you have to do is change your user agent to a phone user agent. I'm like, derp. Why did I think of that? All the tools come back up. He had a couple tricks for doing it. I think it was in Opera before, but I just went and found an add-on in Opera to make it super easy.

It's just a little, you know, a little add-on button at the top, and you just do a drop-down, and you can pick your user agent, reload the page, and boom, you can upload straight from your desktop browser. Right. Instead of using an app like I use, I was using Flume, and I still use Flume, even though the guy drives me crazy.

It's a single-owner software operation. Those guys are just jerks, even though I was one for 20 years, because I was a jerk, too. What are you going to do? But, yeah, it's just a cool trick. Links for the user agent switcher for Opera is going to be in the show notes, because I still recommend everybody use Opera.

And Opera just came out with Opera 52. Massively faster ad blocking and new tab features. The new tab features are actually really cool. You can mute tabs. You can pin them. You can clone them. You can do all sorts of stuff. Copy the URL straight from just a right-click on the tab instead of having to go to the location bar, copying the URL, and pasting it in, which, for me, doing these show notes is a godsend.

Oh. Oh, God, it makes it so much easier. You can just right-click on the tab and get the URL and paste it wherever you need it to go. So nice. You have to check that out. Dude, Opera is so good. It is so good. I dip my toes into it regularly based on your recommendations, and somehow it hasn't quite stuck.

I still find myself back in Chrome. I'm not sure why. I think maybe because I have a lot of passwords still in Chrome or just in our show. Get them in 1Password and move on. Yeah. All my stuff's in 1Password, so it was an easy migration. Right. And the bookmark transfer, we talked about that on a previous show.

It's still not that hard. But, man, moving over to Opera has been the single best thing of the last, like, year that we tried. It is amazing. Well, just the ad load alone, every time. Actually, you know what? Here's what happens is that I will find myself on a site that is so invasive with the ad, so annoying, that that's when I copy the URL out, fire up Opera, load it in, and breathe a deep sigh of relief at how much more pleasurable the entire experience is.

So it's sort of my fallback of the, like, oh, yeah, watch this, and I've slowed stuff into Opera. Yeah. So just stay in Opera. Try it for a week. See if you can make the migration, because I tell you, once you get past the growing pains, you're going to be so much happier.

And you can always turn off the blocking for a page. Right. There's a little upper right in the location bar. There's a heart, and then there's a shield with an X in it. If you just click on the shield, you can turn off the ads for that site to get around any kind of ad blockers or whatever you need to do. And then you can turn it on when you're done.

You know? You suffer through the ads for that page, and then you just turn it back on for that site and maybe not need it again. But all in all, it has been just a wonderful experience, especially since you can use every single Chrome extension in Opera. There's a Chrome extension add-on for Opera that lets you just sideload any Chrome extension.

And it works like a charm. Highly, highly recommended. Oh, nice. Now, let's get on to some VR news. Magic Leap is in the news because their creator portal has finally opened for business. Oh. I really, really want to get in on this, but I'm losing my house because I'm broke.

I have to move across the country. So, yeah, signing up for a VR tool or an AR tool, I'm sorry, I don't even know what the hell they call it. They're not augmented reality. They're not virtual reality. They came up with their own term for it, which I can't even remember anymore. Do you remember what it was?

No, I'm looking at it right now, and I don't even see them saying it. It seems like they're sort of dancing around it. Yeah, they came up with their own term, and a couple people have gone, but it's basically augmented reality. Yeah. And I would really like to try it out. Even though those glasses are ugly, I would still like to try it, just because we've talked about it for so long.

But fortunately, in Los Angeles, a lot of people that I know are VR developers, so I'll be hanging out at their labs pretty often. So I'll give it a shot at some point. Back to Instagram. Instagram now wants you to start seeing more new posts again. Because Instagram announced on Thursday that it is once again adjusting the algorithm that controls the feeds to ensure that users will be more likely to see newer posts as they scroll through the app.

Instagram says that once the change is implemented, your feed will feel more fresh, and you won't miss new photos as they arrive in your feed. You know what would make my feed feel more fresh? Not an algorithmically adjusted feed. That would make it extremely fresh.

That would make it feel actually fresh. And are they doing it this way to be able to show you more ads and sponsored content and all that kind of stuff? I'm not an Instagrammer, so I don't... Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm not even really familiar with it. It's three photos and an ad now. I see. Three photos and an ad. Three photos and an ad.

Three photos and an ad. And they can't fit any more ads in. I mean, I think it's five and an ad or four and an ad. I figured out the math the other time, but I'm spending about 20% of my time scrolling through ads on Instagram now. Ah. And it's getting to the point where it is about useless.

Flume, on the other hand, when I'm using that on the desktop, I can fly through because they have a little ad label, so I know to ignore that post. Well worth the money when it works. Trained your brain. Yeah, pretty much. You're an Echo user, correct? Uh, no.

Oh, my God. You don't have a lady in a tube in your house? No, we, uh, I do not. We have an Alexa here at the CyberWire because you can now get the CyberWire read to you via her. I love it. The cybersecurity company has a listening device in their office.

Yeah. I love it. Well, I will actually, I will tell you that it spends most of its time unplugged. It really does? It really does, yeah. Yeah, basically, it gets plugged in for testing purposes. And now, I say this as I'm sitting here in a room full of microphones, you know.

Of course, yeah. Talking about the internet with cell phones everywhere, yes. Right. So, but, yeah, but she does spend most of her time unplugged, so we have her for testing. I keep trying to make the case that if someone wants to buy the Apple one, the HomePod, for testing purposes, I'd be glad to test that one out.

I'd test it. Yeah, me too. You know? The commercials are terrible, but I'll take one any day of the week. Yeah, but that hasn't happened yet. But, uh, no. But we do not have an Echo. Okay. Uh, well, then you can't get the new Echo buttons. They've kind of come out with a new pack, the, uh, the two-pack for these silly buttons that are only can be used for trivia games.

That's all we can figure out what it's for. It's a trivia game. So, they came out with a specific hardware product for people to play trivia games, and I don't know anybody that's ever bought one. But now we have, we have Gen 2 out, and they're, uh, 20 bucks for a two-pack, so 10 bucks a piece, and, uh, you can add up to four buttons per device per Echo.

I was gonna, I was gonna ask that, because if you get four buttons, you could play Simon. You know, that's pretty good. I think you should go code that up and retire. You heard it here first, folks. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, you could play Simon, and, uh, but you could also play Jeopardy. That'd be, I guess it's hard to play Jeopardy with something just spoken, though.

But it's still, but it's still trivia, so it's all about who, who rings in first. Right, right. We can't figure out anything else to do with them. But it could be fun at a party. But unless you have, unless you can, uh, tie track and field to your Amazon Fire TV through your Echo, put your buttons in there, and go.

Yeah. To jump, run and jump in track and field. I'm trying to, I mean, I'm trying to think, what were the, yeah, what were the classic video games that basically involved just mashing a button as fast as you could? I don't know, because you need a joystick for everything else. Right, right. Or trackball. Right. I don't know.

I mean, honestly, you could, you could have a grid of four, top, you know, top, bottom, left, right, and play something like Dragon's Lair, because that never really, I don't think that had a diagonal. But MXV, friend of the show, will tell me, in short order, if I'm wrong there, because he has a Dragon's Lair in his basement. Oh, boy.

I think he has a world record in that game. Wow. I will find out soon. So maybe we'll, then we'll need eight of them for the diagonals. But then you'd need two Echoes to tie them to. So that seems like a, it's a stretch. A lot of effort. Yeah. It's a lot of effort for what you get out of it.

Yeah. Especially because I hate Dragon's Lair, and it's a dumb game. Yes, I agree. Dragon's Lair, I wasted, yeah. So much money. Maddening money. It just seemed, you might as well watch a cartoon and just have random things, just have it eat up your quarters. Yeah.

Because it was 50 cents when everything else was 25 at the time, if I recall correctly. And you died immediately. Yeah, I died immediately with no real reason or explanation. Yeah. Oh, it's a horrible game. Horrible. Stupid game. Yep. Anyway, now, we talked about the Apple HomePod and Echo.

Yes. But now you can get your world's first blockchain speaker. Sign me up. Yeah, the Volero. Right. The Volero cost mucho dinero. Volero. Valerio. Valerio. Oh, Valerio. Yes.

Okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Recantare. Well, we know it has blockchain in it, so it must be good. It uses Musicoin. Mm-hmm. Which is? It's another stupid currency that we can't actually use here in the U.S.

No. It's another one of those things that people are sending us that say, hey, blockchain stuff, you have to buy an ICO. Well, guess what? We can't buy ICOs because, fortunately, the SEC has gotten some balls and said, no, you can't do ICOs unless I have a VPN and I can spoof my location and get a PayPal account in another country.

Yeah, not too hard to actually do that now that I think about it. But anyway, if you're dumb, you can't buy Musicoin. But what the point of this is, is that you can listen to Spotify and if you like the song and your Valerio is in the room, you can clap and it will give them a bit of Musicoin, about 10 cents worth, to up their payout.

So you're paying musicians a little bit more. That's the whole point of it. And about 2,500 musicians have signed up and they're waiting to be tipped because I don't know if you can get the Valerio yet, but because it was introduced to South by Southwest. I like the spirit of this, you know, if you could way to, for example, there are back in the day when we were all stealing all of our music instead of buying it, when MP3s were new and, you know, all that stuff.

Well, you were stealing it. I was ripping my CDs, but you were stealing it. Well, no, no, no, no. But but we were anyway, the there were artists. You know, that I would go out and buy their CDs because I wanted to support them.

They were my favorite artists. I wanted to give them the money, you know. And so this sort of, I think, is along those. But and I guess a better way to frame that is there was plenty of music out there that I wanted to have, but I didn't want to spend money on because I was just collecting it. And it was more like radio than collecting music that I loved.

But for the music that I loved, I had no problem paying for it. And I would make sure to do that to make sure those artists got paid. And I think if this decreases the friction to do that, then that's not a bad thing. I know. But I mean, we have things out there like Flatter already that is kind of an agnostic service to tip creators.

And if people like maybe say Spotify wanted to add in, hey, if you want to put in your tip account to that's what I'm seeing this as is a is a is a product that can be basically ripped off by anybody at any given moment. You don't need blockchain for it.

All you need is Spotify to say, hey, I'm going to create a tip account. So every time I give somebody a tip, take it out of my account and you spread it out across whatever I put in for the month. Say I'm going to put in ten dollars that month and I tip a thousand artists and everybody gets a penny. But if I tip only a hundred artists, everybody gets a dime and and spread the wealth out that way.

So I can give back to more creators. So I see this as a feature, not a product. Yeah. Well, you know what they needed blockchain for to get their seed funding? Exactly. To make money on the ICO to build the Valerio. Right. Right. Or to skedaddle off to Barbados with all the money that they're never going to actually do anything.

It was the most important word in the pitch packet. Yep. Actually, it was. You're right. Yeah. You're absolutely right. Yeah. Oh, my God. I hate the world. I also hate the blue microphone compass. You really? Now. All right.

Go on. Go on. Go on. It looks beautiful. I'm like, sign me up. Have you used one? I ordered my compass. Came last week. Oh. Hooked up my microphone. Yeah. The springs were completely underpowered.

Oh. I'm using an RE20 with a shock mount on it. Uh-huh. Which comes in under 2.4 pounds, which they say is the max load for the compass to function properly. It comes in just under that at 2.3 pounds. Nope.

Did not work at all. I even tightened the spring underneath. There's a little spring tightener on the bottom, which the Rode PSA1 that I used does not have, which I thought was cool. I'm like, okay, great. It's got cable management built in. It looks really nice. The travel on the arm was terrible because of the way, how blocky it is, and the maneuverability of it was terrible.

And here's the part that pissed me off the most. It only comes with a little clip that you can, you know, tie onto your desk and screw it in like a clamp. Right. So, the way that the physics work on the clamp is it's very high up compared to most boom arms, which get the pivot point of the arm as close to the table as possible.

That one's very high up. So, three times in a row, and this thing was cranked to the limit. I could not turn it anymore. It would slide off and pop off. So, my $600 microphone is slamming onto the desk every time I try and like swing the arm back in front of me.

Deal breaker. Absolute deal breaker. I'm sorry. Yeah. I don't want my shiny $100 arm to be jacking up my beautiful microphone. And by the way, I'm sorry. Yes, the RE20s are not $600. They're $450. But still, when you factor in the shock mount, it's close.

Right. But yeah. The shock mounts for an RE20 are $100. Yeah, the foam on the end of the mic isn't just for pop filter. It's a shock absorber as well. Well, actually, I don't have foam on mine. I've got the BSW metal screen. So, it weighs almost nothing.

Gotcha. The foam ones make you kind of too muddy. But anyway, podcasting nerdy aside. But yeah, that thing was just a shit show. So, I sent it back. So, yes, I did try it. I actually spent a couple days with it. And even once I got, I put some foam in between the brackets to make sure that it wouldn't slide off anymore.

Because my RE20s never do that. I move this mic and this boom, you know, 50 times a day. Yeah, me too. I'm moving it around like crazy. And it's never moved. Yep. I think popped off three times in the first day. And I'm just like, okay, this is bull. Yeah, I have the same Rode one that you do. Yeah.

Yeah. I've got three of these. And I've never had a problem with them. This one just looked cooler. It does look cool. It's not worth it, though. Yeah, but you haven't been a fan of any of those blue products, have you? That's because there are problems with the blue products. The Blue Snowball and the Blue Yeti are the two most recommended microphones for podcasters.

And they are the two worst microphones for podcasters. Why is that? Why do you say that? They're condenser mics that can pick up a dog fart three houses down. So, everybody that's buying those microphones are new podcasters who have no idea about how acoustics work.

Right. They put it in the middle of their living room table in their hardwood floors and just get everybody around it and start yelling at it, thinking it's going to sound like you're on the radio. Right. You know how I know this? Because the Blue Yeti and the Apogee mic were the first two microphones that Brian and I used for grumpy old geeks.

And they drove me mad. And over the years, I've just learned what good audio sounds like. New podcasters have no clue. And I moved away from them as fast as possible and moved to dynamic mics instead of condenser mics, which helped. And there are different types of dynamic and condenser mics.

But condenser mics are made for being in a studio in a room that is meant to be used for sound. Right. And it drives me mad when people are like, I got my Blue Yeti. I'm a podcaster now. And I'm like, you're a moron. I'm sorry. Burn it. Go buy an AT2005 from Audio Technica and you will sound a thousand times better.

That's what Brian uses on the show every week. It costs less than a Blue Yeti, by the way, by half. And you'll sound great. So that's why I hate Blue. But don't you think, I get where you're coming from, but don't you think that the Blue Yetis are a step up from using their earbuds?

Well, yes, but a Blue Yeti is going to cost you $130. Right. A Blue Snowball is going to cost you $50. For five bucks and a Blue Snowball, I did a show last week for the Jordan Harbinger show where the guest had a Blue Snowball. We could hear his girlfriend typing 20 feet away and she had to leave the room.

I'm not kidding. Yeah. I believe you. I run into that too. Yeah. And to fix it, I have to use a $1,000 piece of software. I have to use iZotope RX Pro Advanced to fix the audio so it sounds like he's good and then manually do it. So I have to use a $50 mic, you have to buy a $1,000 piece of software.

How does the math work on that when you can buy an $80 mic and not have to use any software? That's why I hate Blue. And just the problem is they look cool. You know, everybody thinks that, and that's why I bought it. I thought it looked cool. I'm not immune to that in any way, shape, or form.

But I'm just trying to tell people out there that Blue products for new podcasters are a waste of your money and you're going to eventually burn it and upgrade. Or you're not going to podcast anymore. Right. There are better choices for comparable money. Mm-hmm. The AT2005 is my go-to mic with a pop filter because it is not great with plosives.

But the ATR 2100 is what a lot of people buy. Even though the internals are the same, the AT2005 gives you a carrying case as well. And it looks cooler because it's black. And the problem with the ATR 2100 is the switch to turn it on and off is raised and they break off often.

The AT2005 is flat, so they don't break. So, I mean, that's the rationale behind what I recommend all the time. And I have sent hundreds of these microphones out to guests on different shows and they work flawlessly and they work for years. Yeah. So, and by the way, they're also XLR and USB.

Right. So, if you want to upgrade to a soundboard, you can take that AT2005, plug it into a soundboard and get even better quality out of it. Yeah. So, that was a very long aside that people should pay me for for my podcasting expertise. But you get it for free because I've said it enough times and maybe somebody will get the hang of it.

No, I think it's good, though. I think it's good to point out because I see you pretty regularly rail against blue microphones, especially on Twitter. So, I think it's good to dig in a little bit and find out some of the details. There's a little more nuance to it that we can provide here than, well, what used to be 120 characters allowed.

Yeah. No, there's a lot of nuance. And, you know, you can make them sound good if you know what you're doing. But the people that they're being marketed to don't know anything. And I went to go buy ink at a local store down the street, Micro Center today, for my printer, my horrible HP printer, which I would never recommend.

So, I'm not going to mention it on the show. There was a wall of blue microphones. They've got the new black ones out. So, they were selling those. And those were $139. And for $139, you can get two really good mics. So, if you're, like, trying to do a two-man show and you think, oh, I can put the blue in the middle of the table and be fine with that because it has the different pickup patterns on it.

No, just go buy two microphones, shove them in your gaw, and do a really good sounding show. Because it has been proven time and time again that audio quality matters when you do a podcast over and over and over again. If you do a great podcast that sounds like crap, people will unsubscribe.

If you do a mediocre podcast that sounds great, people will think that you know what you're talking about. Hence, Grumpy Old Geeks for five years. That's right, Jason. That's right. I'm sorry. Papa Bean is dulcet tones. That's right. And finally, Synology.

I've got a Synology here in the house. Do you have one of those? I do not. You should get one, man. They're amazing. I love this thing. It just is a media center. Or just a little Linux box to play with and throw, you know, crap on it. It's totally fun. The problem is it's really hard to back up because it's so big.

You've got so much crap on it that backing them up turns out to be kind of a problem. So, you have to partition it and then get external drives to back it up. Or it's a pain in the butt to back up. But now, Synology has their C2 backup service that has only been in Europe for a while, but now it's going worldwide. So, you can sign up for that.

It's not cheap. It's 70 euros a year per terabyte, which is not really that cheap. Well, it's originally, like, it's 60, yeah, 60 euros per terabyte per year. And it goes up to 70 per terabyte with a flexible plan and you can put more terabytes on top.

Faster terabyte speed, as the stupid cell phone commercials would say. If you have stuff that you need to back up on your Synology, like your photos directory of your kids, and it's like, you know, you've got two or three terabytes, 70 euros, 60 euros per terabyte per year is not that bad for peace of mind for that important data, you know, that goes straight into the Synology.

And is there no, you know, backblaze option or no Dropbox option for a Synology type device? Not for that much data. That's the big issue. The backblaze has changed their terms recently and I wasn't able to take my Synology over to it since it's an external drive and their terms have changed.

Yeah, because it's a network attached drive. There are some downsides with network attached drives, especially if you use Lightroom and you're a photographer. You can't keep your Lightroom catalogs on your Synology because they won't work if they're on a NAS. So there's a lot of different things about it.

But if you're using it as a media center and a backup drive, they're fantastic. I can't recommend them enough because this one was under $1,000. It was, I think the Synology box itself was like $299 or $399. And then you, it's, you know, whatever's on sale that week for, you know, server grade drives, you pop in four of them and then it raids and stripes.

And then you have, you know, you know, 14, 15, 16 terabytes to play with. Wow. It's redundant because on my desk, I've got two eight terabyte USB drives that back up to each other all day long, but those are single points of failure. That's why I've got two of them.

I've got one that's my main storage drive, then a secondary that gets backed up to it. But the problem is they're here in the house. Right. Which means I have a third one that I bring from my dad's house every now and again and back up because you have to have offsite. When you get into the amount of data that I'm an edge case because I do podcasting.

So I'm generating gigabytes and gigabytes of data every day. You don't have to tell me about it, brother. Exactly. So for most people, though, a Synology with this backup plan, a terabyte is going to be fantastic. So you get the Synology with four, like three terabyte or I'd say four or four terabyte drives.

That'll get you about, you know, eight or nine terabytes after it's striped and everything. And then just put your main stuff that you really have to have, the family movies and the family photos in a bucket that you use the CS2 or C2 to back up to. The rest of it is all of your movies that you ripped and you just want to watch them on your Roku enabled TV or whatever media center TV, because it's got all sorts of media sharing stuff or your music.

It's a really good solution. Yeah. All right. Check it out. Check it out.

Media Candy. All right. So this came across my desk this week and I thought it was pretty cool. I don't know about you, but I was and continue to be a huge David Bowie fan. I think I'm more of a fan now than I was back in the day because I'm finally rediscovering him because people like you have been talking about him so much.

I think I followed what was probably a common pattern, you know, back in the 80s, being a child of the 80s is that, you know, Let's Dance was my gateway drug to David Bowie. Mine too. Mine too. It was the first song I ever heard from him that was like, you know, popular. Right. Well, I don't even, I'm not sure I really knew who he was before that happened.

You know, Let's Dance. I thought that was his first song, honestly. Well, and the Serious Moonlight Tour and, you know, Modern Love and China Girl and all that stuff. Really, how he took advantage of MTV. And what I remember is there was an older kid across the street who, we were talking about music as you do, and I was saying, I like Bowie.

And he was like, oh, yeah, you know, what do you like? And I said, oh, let's dance. And he sort of, you know, looked at me and went to his stack of albums and pulled out Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and handed it to me and said, you know, come back after you've listened to this kid. And so I did.

When the student is ready, the master will appear. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So that started my deep dive into the older Bowie catalog, which fortunately, you know, I think I was just barely old enough to appreciate, but continues to this day. And of course, was very sad when he died back in 2016 already.

It's been two years. Still not our fault. I know people say it was. It's not our fault. But the New York Times has a pretty cool thing they posted. It's augmented reality. David Bowie in three dimensions.

And it's a bunch of his costumes. He had a lot of interesting costumes over the course of his career. And there are two versions of this. One, and I have not actually looked at the augmented reality one on your phone. I don't think the version of the phone I have is capable of doing it.

Honestly, I haven't checked it out. But the web version is cool enough that it's worth checking out. As you scroll through, they have these really neat 3D sort of, I don't know if you, you remember QuickTime VR? Oh, yeah. I worked in it a lot on Titanic, by the way.

Yeah. So there's their QuickTime VR-esque views of some of these iconic costumes from Bowie and the stories behind them and interviews with people that he collaborated along the way, interesting photos. It's neat to see some of these costumes in this sort of detail because you really get to see the fabrics that they were made out of and the way that they're stitched in a way that you don't generally see in the real photos from the day, you know, and how they've held up.

And some of them look a little ragged. But if you're into Bowie, this is a cool thing. If you're into costuming, this is a cool thing. Or just pop music, there's a lot here for you to enjoy. So I enjoyed it, and I recommend you check it out. I would also like to add, if you're into web design, it's a very cool thing because New York Times has been coming out with these interactive spots that have been killing it.

Yeah, they really have. All the talent for web design has gone over to the New York Times because I'm watching this thing, I'm going through it, and I am just floored by the quality of the build on that page. It is incredibly well done. And I'm just like, man, hats off to whoever's doing that stuff over there because this is what it used to be like, you know, craftsmanship.

Yeah. To build a page like that, it was just amazing. It's a great point. Yeah. It's a great point that how often these days do you see something where the actual innovation on the web page itself grabs your attention? And this, to me, did that.

Yeah, me too. And I went through it a couple of times. I was just like, man, this is some seriously talented work that those guys are doing over there. Yeah. So I'm glad that my, you know, my money for my New York Times subscription is actually going to people actually making good stuff.

Yeah. Because really, it's one of those things where I have not seen anything like what the New York Times is doing with web design and just interactive in such a long time. It's so refreshing. Because everybody now just wants to figure out how many ads they can put on the page and how they can time your click when you're trying to scroll to put an ad right in front of your mouse.

So you click on the ad, you know? That's true. Maybe that's part of what's so remarkable about it is that it's a pleasurable experience viewing a web page. And how, when do you get to do that anymore? Yep. And even the ads don't bother me because that new scrolling technique where you scroll and the ad is revealed and moves as you scroll.

So it just comes by your eyes and goes away. It's like, oh, I want to find the person that came up with that technique and give them a big hug because it's one of the most clever things I've seen in a very long time. The whole process with this just floored me. As an ex-professional website designer, I have mad props for whoever put this together.

And I'm sure it's a team of probably 30 or 40 people that put that together, knowing how agencies work. Somebody spent a lot of money on this. There's a big team on it. And it is exquisitely done and well worth the money. Yeah. Top notch. So you said you don't have an echo, but I have a very good tip for friends of mine who have an echo and anybody listening.

I wake up in the morning all the time with random songs stuck in my head. I have an earworm every morning and it's like, you know, one of 10 different songs, depending on my mood or how much wine I had the night before or whatever the stress I'm under is. And the way to get it out of your head first thing in the morning is to yell at your woman in a box and have her play the song.

The song that is the earworm song? Yes, exactly. Really? Then it goes away. This morning I woke up with Come On Eileen stuck in my head. Yeah. And I said, tube babe, play me Come On Eileen. Played it while I was getting out of bed and rousing the pooches.

Right. And by the time I got downstairs to take him outside, gone. Gone. If I did not do that, it would be stuck with me till lunch. Huh. And I would be just humming it under my breath. It is one of those things. Because in the old days, the way to get rid of an earworm is to sing the song to the Andy Griffith show.

That was always the get rid of an earworm tune. That was the that was the dark arts. Let's dance. Let's dance. Come on and dance the night away. Let's dance. OK. No, I mean, you don't sing this. You don't do the tune. You don't do the song that's in your head to the tune of the Andy Griffith.

Oh. You just go. You just, you know, just do the Andy Griffith song. Yeah. Oh. It'll just get rid of it. But then you're stuck with the Andy Griffith song. No, that's the trick. OK. Nobody gets the Andy Griffith song stuck in their head as an earworm. All right. It just goes away. I'm sure none of our listeners are going to write in and complain that they got this theme to the Andy Griffith song stuck in their heads.

Well, you know, there's always an edge case. I'm sure. Tweet at me if you're the edge case anyway. So that's my that's my earworm tip of the week. That seems counterintuitive to me. It's not, though. That's that. I got just so tired of hearing it. I'm just like, play the damn song.

Played it. And then I was just like, oh, sweet release. Sweet release of Eileen. Thank you. By the way, true story. When that song came out, my girlfriend's name, Eileen. Oh, man. Yeah. It's like having a girl named Jenny with 8, 6, 7, 5, 3, 0, 9.

Was that? Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. And as annoyed as she was with the popularity of that song, imagine how her mother felt. Hmm. Yeah. It was even worse. Oh, man. Nice gal, though. Nice gal. You didn't marry her, though, so she wasn't that nice. No, I did not marry her.

I did not marry her. Yeah. Hmm. Nope. Sometimes they're the dating type and sometimes they're the marrying type. You know what I'm saying. Honk, honk, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Speaking of wink, wink, nudge, nudge, Monty Python is walking on to Netflix. Silly walking, actually.

Silly walk, right? Exactly. And this is interesting. You know, a ton of the stuff is coming on. There's a big list of it. The link will be in the show notes. On April 15th, it's going to the UK and the US. It'll be trickled out over time.

And I'm wondering, this is big news for Monty Python fans. Not really. I'm a huge Monty Python fan, but I've seen it all so many times. I own it on DVD and other various medium, and I actually worked on Python Line. There's a picture of me demoing my first demo to a celebrity.

It was Eric Idle for Python Line. And I was blonde, which was even funnier. Punk rock days and all. Like Billy Idle blonde? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Okay. But it was taken with a Connectix Quick Cam from across the room as a spy cam, so.

Oh, I see. I'll dig it up and put it in the show notes. But, yeah, does anybody really care anymore? I don't think millennials know who Monty Python is, and oldsters like us have seen it all. But, and here's my question. How much, and this is going to upset some people, and I understand that, but stay with me here.

Welcome to the show, Dave. Yeah, I know. How much does all of this stuff hold up? Honestly. I think a lot of it does. But I think what tends to happen with some of these things, like, you know, like Holy Grail, for example. We all know the half dozen scenes that we can all recite by heart.

But if you were to sit someone down fresh in front of these movies, how much, are they still funny to a modern audience in the way they were funny to us? Absolutely not. I think that's right. Absolutely not. I sat down and showed my son, who just turned 19, we sat down and watched Caddyshack, which is one of my favorite funny movies.

And by the way, spoiler alert on does it have legs, we concurred that it still does have legs. Well, he did not. And while I was watching it with him, I could see that mostly he was glad. He said, I'm glad I saw this because now I know what all those things you guys reference all the time are.

But really, think about how much the pacing of a comedy has changed over the years. Oh, yeah. And the style of comedy, you know, there's just a lot of things in pop humor that have changed. And, you know, he could see why we thought it was funny, but it really, by modern standards, isn't that funny.

And so I wonder, I still think it's funny, but I wonder how much do these Python things hold up? I don't think they do. I think it's a money grab by the Python crew because they just need some cash. And they're like, oh, finally, just let it out. Let it go. Because I don't think from a, you know, a brand management side of things that this is going to make any difference.

It's not going to push the needle. Some people will go back and watch them. But I think most people will not find them as hilarious as we did because the landscape has changed. We've been through so much and we're different people. Right. Absolutely different people. That's why on Does It Have Legs, we review movies that we saw 20 years ago to find out that they're still funny for us 20 years later.

Right. So I'm guessing you thought Caddyshack was just as good. I did. Well, you know what? I didn't think it was just as good. In other words, I couldn't understand. It was still good, but mostly because it reminded me of how good I felt the first time I saw it and the half dozen other times.

Yeah, and I remember also, I think it was in heavy rotation on HBO, you know, the years that we had HBO when I was in high school. Yeah. So I think I had an audio tape recording of Caddyshack that I would listen to before we had a VCR, you know. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

And it's a movie that holds up. It's a movie that holds up just listening to. So it's definitely hardwired into my brain. But I don't know. I think a big part of it is just nostalgia. It's that feeling you have, that affection you have for that.

You remember how funny it was versus how funny it is by modern standards. Like I went to see the – when I went to see the Ghostbusters reboot, you know, the one with all the women. It really struck me how different movie humor is than it used to be.

How much humor is based on awkwardness now versus jokes, you know. The officification of humor. Right, right. It's discomfort. Yeah. You know, two people trying to do something at the same time. And then when we go, oh, no, you go. Should I go? No, you go.

Oh, okay. And that's funny. And it is funny. Weren't those the chipmunks from Disney back in the day? Well, yeah, no, no, no, you, sir. No, no, please. Yeah. But you know what I mean, though. You know what I'm getting at here. I know exactly what you're talking about, yeah. But there is an issue with, you know, how it made you feel back in the day because we reviewed Airplane and we all loved Airplane.

Airplane is the worst movie ever made. It has no legs. It is god-awful and terrible. There is no saving grace for Airplane whatsoever. If you don't believe me, go back and watch it. You'll tell me I'm right eventually. You know?

Yeah, I don't know. But, yeah, I guess it's hard to separate. But you know what I will tell you? I have watched Airplane in the past five years, and I agree it's not as funny as it used to be. I still think it's funny. It's hard to separate the two. What I think a movie that is very funny, that is funnier than Airplane and is underappreciated, is Top Secret.

Have you seen that? I've never seen it. So, nope. I cannot compare that. So, I have not seen Top Secret. So, maybe we'll do that for Does It Have Legs? It's the movie that the Airplane guys did after Airplane, and it is much more clever than Airplane was.

The jokes are smarter. Same sort of movie, but it's still funny. Same style, like Naked Gun and all that. Yeah, yeah. They do a five-minute bar fight underwater. Oh, God, okay. It's hilarious, yeah. If you say it's funny, I'll check it out.

I think it's funny. Check it out, yeah. Have a cocktail. All right. Moving on. YouTube expands firearm restrictions, and they're going to ban more gun videos. They have been on a tear now, banning types of gun videos over and over and saying, you know, okay, you can't show this type of gun video, this type of gun video.

All of these different types of gun videos in response to the Parkland, Florida shooting. Now, okay, I read that, and not three minutes later, without any warning, any parental controls or anything like that, I got to watch the Deadpool 2 trailer.

Mm-hmm. I would say that that is more destructive than any goddamn gun video that is on YouTube for people who are in a violent frame of mind. It is just pure violence and pure guns and swearing and all this. I'm not trying to be a prude.

I'm just trying to put apples to oranges here to figure out what the difference is between the types of videos that YouTube is restricting and when general violence and gunplay comes into effect. Thoughts, Dave? Well, I'll come at this from the perspective that not long ago, I accidentally stumbled across some YouTube videos that were promo videos for a...

I'm not even sure how to describe it because I'm not a gun person. Well, I am. Try and describe it, and I'll translate. It was a hidden holster. Okay. So, it was like a holster that you'd have in your jeans, and I guess sort of outside your jeans, there's this thing you'd grab onto and it would lift the holster out, and that way you could grab the gun really fast.

So, it allowed you to have the gun be hidden, but have quick access to the gun and be able to use the gun. Mm-hmm. Do you understand what I'm describing? Is this a thing that makes sense to you? Yes. Yes. Right. So, okay, that's interesting. I can see that being a useful product, and that's fine, but the descriptions from the company that went along with this were absolutely horrifying to me, and obviously, I have my own political

views, and I'm generally in favor of more gun control than we have today, although I am a gun owner, but, you know, I think we can do better than what we're doing. It'd be hard to do worse. Look, I spent my morning at a gun store, so.

Yeah. So, that said, but this ad was just, the rhetoric was, you know, if you're a patriot who's tired of being pushed around by bullies, you know, demonstrate that you're not going to take it anymore.

And I'm going, wait, what are you doing? What are you saying here? You know, like, and so this led me to another one, and it was all the same sort of things. You know, our founding fathers didn't start this country so that you could be told what to do.

I'm like, wait, stop. Yeah. You're talking about a deadly weapon, you know? Like, and so that was the part that sort of horrified me. I have no trouble with gun safety videos, you know, people, just regular sort of things.

But the rhetoric I found disturbing, again, that's me, you know, I'm probably more sensitive to it than many people. I think maybe just because I wasn't aware, I think I was blissfully ignorant to the degree at which these things are marketed that way.

Well, I mean, like I said, I spent the morning in a gun store, and there was a couple in there that had to be pushing 80, and they were both buying handguns for home protection. And I'm like, wait a week, and we can just steal your stuff. Don't buy a gun away. I mean, I'm not going to break into your house.

You're about dead anyway. Who's coming for you? But I was just trying to do a YouTube search on the Bed Buddy. You remember the Bed Buddy, which is a shotgun holder that slid in between the mattresses and you can put your shotgun in? Right. So they don't have the Bed Buddy anymore.

I think it's out of business. But there are videos up here for the gun bed in action and another one for the gun bed, which are, you know, and the guy's pointing a shotgun right at the screen. So it's like, obviously, they haven't filtered everything out yet. But, and I just don't know. I think it's too little, too late, and it's just, it's trying to placate the kids down in Parkland and saying that they're, saying that YouTube is doing something.

But I don't think that they can actually filter all this stuff. I don't think there's a way to do it. But to come out and say that they're trying, but still leave, you know, extraordinarily violent gun videos, even though they're fiction, seems just hypocritical to me. It's like, if you're going to go against gun violence, go against gun violence in its entirety, which we know you can't.

So just say you can't. I don't know. It angers you. I like the fact that they're trying. I like the fact that they're, that they see these things. Because I think it is, to me, it's different, something like Deadpool or the, you know, any of the superhero comic book things or even something like Die Hard.

I think people frame that differently in their minds than the videos that are really, I think, going in there and monkeying with people's brains. Honestly, ask the guy who dressed up as the Joker and shot up a movie theater in Colorado and ask if they separate them.

There's a case for all of this along the spectrum. It is just anger. Yeah. But are we, but again, I think, look, YouTube is a private company. Yeah. They can choose whatever they want to have on their platform. This is not a free speech issue. Shit, you took my argument.

Damn it. If they say they don't want this sort of rhetoric on their platform, then that's their right. And if someone wants to, you know, if the NRA wants to launch their own video platform, have at it. Scientology's did, so why not the NRA? It may come to that. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. We didn't even get to cover the Scientology channel this week, but next week in Media Candy.

Security? Ha! We're back this week on Security. Oh, shit. No, we're already here. Hey, how's it going, Jason? Did I miss anything? No. How's Brian? Brian? How are you doing, Brian? Wait, where's Brian?

Oh, I'm at Disney. I'm kissing tourist girls. That's me. Okay. All right. I'm an Uber. So, moving right into it. Do we have to do Security this week? Oh, we do.

We're going to run through it real quick. Okay. All right. Twitter's chief information security officer is leaving the company. Yes. I was going to say leaving the country. I'm like, that might be a good idea. Right. Yeah. And director of information security at Google is leaving, too. Also, you know, Facebook's, you know, Alex Damos is leaving as well.

This seems like rats leaving a sinking ship. Interesting, isn't it? It is. It is. All these guys at the same time of all these major companies is like, out, peace. You know, drop the mic, getting the hell out of Dodge, because I think that things are coming that they don't want them. They don't want to be on premises when these people find out what they've all been doing at the same time.

That could just be my tinfoil hattiness, but there's so much scrutiny going on. And, you know, when you're dealing with these people that are in the C-suite, dealing with other people in the C-suite who know that they've made concessions to other people in the C-suite, like the CEO, Jack Dorsey, go die in a fire, that I think that they're all, like, you know, scrambling to get out with whatever options they have left intact.

Well, and also, yeah, I think at peak ability to get work elsewhere or cash in whatever, like you say, options they have and choose what they want to do next. I think we saw one of them, was it Twitter's who's starting another company, he said? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, there's plenty of that going around.

Yeah, it could be market opportunity. You know, this is what we learned at Twitter. This is what we learned at Google. This is what we learned at Facebook. If those three guys got together and started a security company to protect people from the crap that they were doing at these companies, that would be a pretty good value proposition, actually. You'd think at the very least they have lucrative consulting careers ahead of them, knowing what they know.

Absolutely. Now, I wonder if they could be in for any liability as, you know, if fines start coming and things like that. I guess not. No, I'm not sure. That's against, remember, corporations are people, so it's against corporations, not the people that work there. Yeah. Unless there was, unless there was something illegal.

Right. But if there's nothing illegal, then they're free and clear. As soon as they leave, then the company gets fined and they crash out while their stock is still high. And if it is illegal, it doesn't matter if they leave or not. They're still, they still come after them for that. Yeah. There's always Belize. There's always Belize.

Yeah. It's just interesting optics that it's happening at the same time. Yep. And so I had an interesting email from my friend, Jeff Donaldson, from a fan of the show, my actual friend who sent me my first Echo, by the way. He sent me some interesting data on him getting hacked on Airbnb.

His Airbnb account was brute forced and hacked. But fortunately, he said that there was an easy way for him to recover his account through email and he got it back. And that got me thinking, I'm like, why the hell would anybody want to hack an Airbnb account?

So I started digging on that. And then I found an article on the register that said, your entire ID is worth about 820 pounds to crooks on dark web black market. Terrible, terrible title for your article, by the way. That would be on the dark web black market.

But we know that there are no proofreaders left. Yeah. This whole thing with foals, foals. So that led me to the dark web market price index for February 2018, the UK edition. This is on top10vpn.com. Right. Did you get a chance to look at this list?

Uh, yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? It's an extraordinarily interesting list. So PayPal logins get the most. People want your PayPal logins because that is directly, I mean, straight to the money. Right. The interesting thing was debit card details only go for £6.30.

Which seems like, uh, well, if I had your debit card details, I could clone a card, walk to the ATM and get your money out. And that's going to be more than £6.30. Yes, I'm taking a risk because there's a camera there, but I can hire my little, you know, minions to go up and do it for me.

I suspect it's supply and demand there, that there are so many. Because of skimmers, there are probably many, many debit cards available. True that, true that, but also the, since this is the UK edition, they have such an immense net of security cameras that it's probably really hard to get away with skimming or like using an ATM with a skimmed card and getting back to your hideout without being traced all the way back home.

That's true. And they are, and, um, they're much farther along than we are when it comes to the chip and pins and things like that. I don't, I don't even know if you, I don't know if you swipe a card over there anymore. You don't. I'm not sure that you do. Yeah. So that's probably has something to do with it as well. Yeah. To clone a pin has got to be expensive.

Probably, probably more than the, the most you can get out of the account that day. That makes sense. Interesting. Good point. Good point. That's why we have you on the show, Dave. Thank you very much. Thank you. Now, uh, the one that got me though was when you come down at the big, at the end, there are two food delivery logins, the Deliveroo, which is three pounds 74.

I don't know who Deliveroo is. I don't know, but I think you, you pronounced it exactly the way that I would have a Brit pronounce that word. Well, I mean, you come over here, it's Yahoo. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm guessing over there, it's Deliveroo. Yes.

Your majesty, your majesty, where shall we have the food ordered in this evening? Deliveroo! Make it so. Oh my. But in this list under Deliveroo is Pizza Hut.

So they will pay two pounds 62 for your Pizza Hut login. Dear God, why? Unless, unless, unless they are, unless they are a retro Dave Bittner in college trying to do shenanigans with surreptitious pizza delivery.

That's true. I can't see why anybody would want a Pizza Hut login. Well, what does a pizza cost? Check and mate. So I guess as long as it's, as long as it costs less than a pizza and there's going to be reason for somebody, you know, some, somebody's, some stoner is going to be sitting around.

Hackers do live on pizza. I mean, I was in, I was in England in 1991 and me and my girlfriend and her friend went for a pizza and it was 18 pounds and it was the worst pizza I ever had.

I would have paid two pounds 62 for a Pizza Hut pizza at that point because the, the Brits do not know how to make pizza. So if there's a standardized pizza delivery service, I can actually see that going. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. You, you win. You win the internet today, Dave.

Sorry. Sorry for ever doubting you. Uh, well, it's interesting that, uh, one of the cheapest things on here is a Gmail account login. Yeah. Cause you can get them anywhere. That's what I say. It's, it must be supply and demand, but you think about, I mean that, that is something potentially that could have value, but I, I suppose it's more of a crapshoot if you're not doing any sort of spear phishing.

There's so many of them. Yeah. Proof of identity is 4614. Passport is 3976, which also I can see what, with, you know, how difficult it is to make passports nowadays with, with ARFIDS and all that stuff. And except it would probably be higher if they listened to the show last week and figured out that nobody's doing any of the verification on the check sums on the passports.

They could have been making bank on these. Anyway, I just thought that was a fun, fun thing that, uh, no, it is pizza hut, pizza hut and deliver. So, uh, saw this, you know, just this week I was thinking about how we have seen very few articles about face ID being cracked.

I think when, when we saw face ID coming, we all thought, Oh, you know, here, here come the articles, face ID being cracked. And there were a handful when it first came out, but I think overall it's been pretty successful. Same thing with the fingerprint, uh, IDs. Mostly they work right there.

They're there. You know, it's good. It's good stuff. It's functional stuff. It does what it's supposed to do. Uh, I saw this article come by in Forbes. Uh, the article is yes. Cops are now opening phones with dead people's fingerprints. Mm-hmm. Now, this is interesting from a couple of points of view.

Um, one of them is who, who, when, if I die, who does my phone belong to? Nobody. What if I have a will? It depends on, I think, who, what, who you are and what you've done to get you dead. Right, right.

If you are the person that made other people dead and then the police made you dead, then your phone is owned by the police. If you are a victim, it seems to me that your phone belongs to your heirs. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um. Yeah. One of the interesting things in this article is that the dead have no privacy rights.

So it doesn't matter who the dead are. It can be any dead. That's right. Okay. That's kind of, that's kind of upsetting. Right. Right. It says once a person is deceased, they no longer have a privacy interest in their dead body, which means that.

That's their body though, not the. Right. But that means they can use your finger to unlock your phone. They don't have to get permission from next of kin to use your remains to unlock your phone. But the phone should ergo be property of the next of kin, not the police.

Well, that's right. That's another component of this. Mm-hmm. Who does the phone belong to? And who, who exerts rights over your phone once you're dead? And this article doesn't really answer that question, but that's an interesting question as well. Yeah.

Cause I don't think anybody, I don't think anybody knows that right now. Yeah. I don't know. I'm going to ask our policy expert next time I talk to him soon. So I'll get back to you on that one, but yeah, that would be fantastic because I can understand where if, if the person died in a violent manner in a situation where they may have taken video of the person that killed them or the act of like somebody who was committing a crime that they could then use for proof.

But, you know, if you die on a bus from a grabber, they shouldn't be able to unlock your phone unless they're trying to figure out next of kin. There should be, there needs to be limits and parameters on what they're unlocking the phone for. But I understand why they can do it, how they can do it. I'm surprised this is an article now, but now that you, that it is an article and you brought it up, there definitely are legal complications with that because yeah, if I die getting hit by a car and my phone's in my pocket, there should be no reason that they need to unlock

my phone unless it is to call my next of kin and find out who I am. If I don't have identification on me, if I have identification on me and they can find out who I am, then they should be able to use normal methods to find it. But even then though, I can see where that, where it'd be easier to look at my call log and find out the last person I call or look at my contact list and find my dad or my, or my next in line for who should, you know, come make sure that it's me and reclaim my body and take care of everything.

Right. The only problem, I don't have a problem with that actually. I have no problem with that. And, and also, you know that Apple with their new stuff, they've got the, the health kit information that you can have unlocked by, you know, EMT people that can look at all of your next, next of kin contact information on who to call.

Right. But that's just only on the iPhone. I don't know how Android works. It's probably been hacked in his mining cryptocurrency. And so they can't get to it. Right. Right. You know, I honestly, you know, honestly, once I'm dead, I kind of don't give a shit. So it just depends on, it depends on the circumstance and they're going to have to define these circumstances going forward for sure.

Yeah. I think it's interesting. Keep a copy of it. They should not be allowed to keep a copy of it unless it is in the act of committing a crime or in the investigation of committing or someone who committed a crime. Like, you know, if a terrorist commits a crime and kills me and I'm there, do whatever you want to with my phone to see if it will help, you know, with pings or whatever to figure out what's going on.

I don't care about that. But if it's just, you know, me dying on the shitter and you come in and you find my phone in my hand and I'm playing Clash Royale, then stay out of my phone unless you're going to finish my game and, you know, boot the boot the laggards in the clan. But otherwise, leave it alone.

What do you think? Well, I don't know. I think I mean, this is mostly an intellectual thing, I think, for me at this point to just but not for much longer. It's not much longer. Well, I'm not planning on dying anytime soon, but then really, who does? Well, that's the point, yeah.

I'm going to live forever. Right, right. So far, so good. Made it this long. Yeah, all right. Every day I break my record of consecutive days alive. And I don't know. I tend to err on the side of needing a warrant to go through things.

Why not? Yeah, I don't want the cops to have access to my dickies. That's for sure. That would not be good. Well, I mean, so let's extend this. Suppose, you know, my neighbors call the police and say, hey, we haven't seen Dave in a while and there's a horrible smell coming from his house.

And they come to my house and they find me, you know, dead in my bed. I died, you know, peacefully in my sleep painlessly. And so the cops come in. Is it okay for the cops to search my home without a warrant? I believe so, because they're trying to find out if you died under suspicious circumstances.

So they came into the house. And by the way, I'm not a lawyer. I don't even know what I'm in there. I know. I'm just trying to puzzle through this. I'm saying, what does their entrance into the home under suspicious circumstances, right? In other words, they think there's foul plays.

Someone may, I may be dead. Someone may have killed me. They come in the house. So we're all okay with that. Right. Is there a point where them switching gears and saying, hey, while we're here, let's flip the place. Yeah. Is there a point where that becomes where we think they need a warrant?

I don't know the answer to that. I don't either. That's an interesting question. I don't. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely ask your policy experts on this. I will. I will. All right. Come back next week and let us know. I'm giving you homework. I love having good. Oh, goody.

Homework. Because you don't do enough podcasts every week. Nah, it's fine. It's fine. Sure. Yeah. Feel free to use it on the Cyber Wire first. Yeah. Shouldn't we assign Brian to go look this up? Yeah. Like Brian does homework. Yeah.

I guess, I mean, unless it's Coursera. You know what? Here, Brian, we're going to give you a certificate in dead forensics. So come back and tell us how it goes. I will actually sign it myself. Okay. Let's move on to some more fun stuff. All right.

So last week we talked about drones. Mm-hmm. And we talked about shooting down drones. Yes. Turns out Raytheon's on it. Raytheon's on everything. If it's shooting down or blowing up, they're on it. If there's a blank check to be written by the Department of Defense and a problem to be solved, Raytheon is on the case.

And in this case, they have a high-powered microwave and laser dune buggy, baby. You know? I love it. I love it. I love it. I do, too. Yeah. Who wouldn't want to have one of these? If you were driving this thing around in a resort beach town, you'd be the man about town with this thing.

Driving around, shooting lasers. This is straight out of Megaforce. I'm sorry. This is straight out of Megaforce. Drones falling out of the sky. Yeah. Cats and dogs living together. Yeah. Yeah. I grew up in the 70s, and I have to say that I'm very sad that I'm 46 now, and I've still never driven a dune buggy.

Because those were the hot thing in the 70s. Oh, yeah. And I've never driven a dune buggy. But maybe I'll change that. Maybe I'll put that on my bucket list. I'm going to go drive a dune buggy, and I'll bring a laser pointer, and I can pretend to be Raytheon, and I'll drive around going pew, pew, pew. Right. Yeah. The person sitting next to you can be flying a little drone around.

You can aim at it. Throw beanbags at a drone. Yeah. So this thing looks pretty badass, and they successfully brought down 45 UAVs that were flying in a swarm. Impressive. Most impressive.

And it has a high-energy laser that can bring down Class 1 and Class 2 UAVs. I think those are the big ones. I'm not familiar with how they classify UAVs off the top of my head. But I think those are the big ones. I'm guessing they're not going after DJIs.

You know? I think they're going after bigger game with these to find out if they can take down a predator or the like. Yeah, but I think the swarming ones, though, are that size. Yeah, the smaller swarming ones. Small explosives, things like that, you know, surveillance.

So, yeah, they're on it. You don't need that. Put away that sawed-off shotgun that I recommended last week. There's no price tag on this thing, but I'm sure it's affordable. I'm sure it is. It's only, you know. On a Raytheon budget, yeah, you know.

450 mil, no problem. You know what it is? It's probably 10 mil a drone. That's probably what it works out to. They bill you per drone shot down. Dude, we live in a subscription society. Right, right, right. This is a per drone buggy.

The buggy is free. We drive around all day and take out as many drones as you want. We'll just send you the bill. That's how it works. And if you want a subscription like Lyft, then you get 35 drones for free as long as they're only small drones. But if there's a big drone, we're going to tack you on the top. You know, that's how it works.

Perfect sense to me. Yep, absolutely. In infuriating news on somebody who I do want to shoot with a fucking laser from the back of a buggy, Equifax, the credit bureaus netted $1.4 billion in fees from all the rubes who got their credit info stolen and then went and freezed their credit.

$1.4 billion for losing your info. Hulk smash is all I got to say about that. Right, because everybody went and froze their credit. But these companies charge you to freeze your credit, so leak our data and profit.

That's kind of how it works nowadays. Yeah, this doesn't not seem right. Well, when the people who profit from your data being leaked are the same people that own the data that get leaked. What do you expect? So, yeah.

Well, finally, this week we've got, at least in security, we've got an article from the Atlantic. This is called China's New Frontiers in Dystopian Tech. It's about facial recognition. My favorite article of the week. Yeah. So, I'll just read the lead paragraph here.

It says, dystopia starts with 23.6 inches of toilet paper. What's that metric? What's that metric? Ooh, I don't know. That's how much the dispensers at the entrance of the public restrooms at Beijing's Temple of Heaven dole out in a program involving facial recognition scanners, part of the president's toilet revolution, which seeks to modernize public toilets.

Want more? Forget it. If you go back to the scanner before nine minutes are up, it will recognize you and issue this terse refusal. Please try again later. So, you've got nine minutes walking around with a half stinky butt because, right?

I have so much to say about this. Go on. First off, you need to have asshole recognition to get the toilet paper to find out how big your bunghole is. And they need to use big data to find out what you ate last night. Because if you are having some chimichanga from Taco Bell, they know that you're going to need more than 23.6 inches of toilet paper.

Or especially those new taco fries or whatever they have at Taco Bell. I know this is China, but China has very spicy food. So, if you're just having some fried rice the night before, you're going to be good with the standard issue roll of toilet roll. But if you are getting, you know, your super dim sum, chow, kung, fuck you, then you're going to need twice the amount.

And this is where big data comes in. So, China is really going into the dystopian future with the standard toilet roll. But what they need to do is leverage big data to match it with big bunghole to make sure that all of their citizens are happy with the great leader.

Don't you think? Well, I'm with you to a certain degree. I think perhaps the amount they give you- Yeah, I lose you at big bunghole? Well, so anyway, I think that, yes, it does make perfectly good sense for this to be based on evidence.

So, the more you need, there should be some sort of measurement. If we're taking pictures of things, there should be some measurement, either of what's in the bowl or what's on your bottom or whatever. And then it can make a determination of how much toilet paper it doles out.

Ah, by weight. By weight. So, there's a smart sensor in the bowl that says what the load is, and the load generates the amount of toilet paper that comes out. Well, I don't know, though. Because a 64-pound Chinese woman is not going to need that much toilet roll.

So, I think this should be a toilet problem, not a facial recognition problem. I don't know, though, because is the weight of the load always proportional with the mess? Ah, yes. What do you call the consistency of the load?

Right, right. Yeah, so then you need a molecular scanner to figure out what the water density is, because if it is just pure water, then you're definitely going to need more toilet roll because of splashback and things of that nature. Seems to me like we're throwing an awful lot of technology at a problem that has pretty much been figured out already.

Right? Kinda. Kinda. I mean, really, if we're going to apply technology to something, if we're going to hold back on people, what is the public benefit? What is the benefit to society of limiting this, right? Like, what are we trying to do? What's the money we're trying to save here versus people walk?

I mean, there's a public health issue. People walking around half clean. You know, I don't want to sit on the bus after the guy who came out and couldn't get decided it wasn't worth the nine minutes to wait. Yeah. He doesn't have time to wait for nine minutes. He's got a bus to catch. Oh, God.

Yeah, definitely missed the mark on the actual problem here because unless there are toilet paper cartels who are going around to public restrooms and stealing the toilet paper and shipping it off to parts unknown, I see this as a problem that doesn't need to be solved.

You know what? You know what China now has? They have their own Silicon Valley. They've got a bunch of 21-year-olds out there solving problems that don't need to be solved. I was also thinking that this could open up a black market. There's a guy standing by the door, you know, with a long coat and he's like, he's like, I got, yeah, he's got like four rolls.

Yeah. He's like, I got, I got double ply quilted, you know, right here, you know, 20, you know, five bucks, you know, right? Oh, Jesus. He got wet, wet wipes, you know, don't, yeah. You look like a man who knows his toilet paper. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I don't, I don't generally do this, but I'm going to show you the other coat.

Yes, we, we, we, we have, this is where the wet wipes are. This is where the triple quilted are. And some silk wipes for a man of taste. And yeah, my boss is going to kill me for doing this, but for you, I got a special deal. Yeah. Yeah. Now they are using this facial ID stuff for other things.

They say it's been successful at basically shaming jaywalkers and has actually cut way down on jaywalking, which I suppose is a good thing. Um, but, uh, it's kind of creepy though. It's kind of, it's, it's, it's, this is the Adam Carolla public shaming aspect of how technology is going to go.

It's like, yeah, if everybody's doing the same thing and you step out of line, then you are just shamed in front of everybody. It seems like bully. It's cyber bullying almost. Yeah. But I mean, there are, but there are cultural differences as well, right? I mean, isn't there, isn't there a lot more, um, there's a lot more, I guess, value placed on fitting in with everyone else in those cultures than, than compared to ours.

Is that accurate to say? I guess that's how communism works. No, I don't, yeah, but I mean, I think that's so in Japan as well, where, so you, you know, the, the, um, I don't know, I'm, I'm probably making horrible stereotypes that people are going to complain about, but, but my, my, my understanding is that, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a sense for fitting as a cultural sense of wanting to fit in such that shaming is a very successful way to influence people.

Yeah. And, uh, if, you know, I could be totally wrong on that, but that's my sense. Yeah. I mean, when, when people live in such close quarters and somebody comes out of the social norms show, like putting them out to the public about being a dick, it's kind of how it works. That's, I've read enough about the topic that that seems to be the way that that's how you keep order in such tight knit communities.

And it's like, Hey, you know, we're all doing fine here. And then Joe over there is peeing outside the bucket and Joe need to not pee outside the bucket. So Joe, stop peeing outside the bucket. You pee outside of the bucket again, you're peeing outside in 20 degree weather. So, you know, that's how it works.

Right. Now, the one thing that scared me about this article was at KFC's China's smart restaurant, customers stand in front of a screen, have their face scanned and receive menu suggestions based on their age, sex, and facial expression. And I know that it's not just those three things that are going to do it.

It is going to be historical ordering preferences. Now, what bothers me about this is if I go to KFC and I'm ordering my, you know, special, which I like, I like, you know, like a three piece extra crispy original recipe with some coleslaw and no mashed potatoes.

That's my thing. And then I have a friend like my friend, Mike, who hates flavor and I'm ordering for him too. And he just wants, I want plain mashed potatoes with no gravy and some dry white chicken. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to go and order it for you.

I think that you're a horrible person for not liking flavor. And then that gets tacked onto my profile. So next time I go, they try and just give me dry mashed potatoes. They recommend that to you. Over and over again.

Yes. Right. This is, I mean, this is what I think of what it's going to be like with real life ad retargeting. When you search for a gag gift for your friend on Amazon and you're followed by it for a week. And when people are looking over your shoulder, you have to explain to them why there are ads for poop emoji pillows on every page you go to.

And this is a true story because I did this because my friend Jordan Cooper used to run a show called The Morning Dump. And I won a contest where he was sending me a prize that was up to $25. And so I found a poop emoji pillow on Amazon and I sent him the link.

I didn't buy it because if I think if I buy it, then the retargeting would end, which it never does, obviously, because we talked about that. They don't know if you bought the product. So, right. Anyway, different topic. But for a week, I was inundated with poop toys.

And I could just see this happening with these really dumb systems who are trying to profile us because we're in the, you know, the early days of all this technology, which goes back to the same crap we talked about Facebook earlier. Yeah. I could see it saving time if you're a regular and you get the same thing.

Like as a starting point, you know, if I go to McDonald's or let's say, you know, I go to KFC every day for lunch and I nine times out of 10, I get the same thing. So it sees me. I walk up to the line and it says, would you like your usual?

And so and if nine times out of 10, I say yes, then we've all just saved a lot of time together. And we're probably not a whole lot worse off than if I say, you know, you know what? Today, I think I'll have the plain mashed potatoes. But you sort of, yeah, I think you're sort of in that culinary asking for a friend thing if they kind of, yeah.

And what happens when, you know, you have your set to preorder because you always go there and you want them to have it ready for you when you walk in the door. And then they go and then they search through the algorithm. The algorithm's like, oh, we're going to give him less gravy because he usually likes a lot of gravy.

But this time he ordered no gravy. So we're going to split the difference and he gets medium gravy. And then you're just pissed. Well, but what happened? I mean, but even what if they know your car's license plate and so they see you pull up in the parking lot and while you're walking into the store, they've already got your order ready to go.

Well, we're sort of in the fast food version of what happened with Spectre and Meltdown, the predictive processing problem, right? This is exactly it. What if I was pulling into the restaurant to actually just use the bathroom? Because I know that's the only restaurant in the bathroom that doesn't require me to get a token to go take a quick dump because I'm like, you know.

Use your 24 inches of toilet paper. So I got to run in and take a quick poo and run out and get back to work. But I'm just coming in and then I'm coming out and they're like, sir, your food. And I'm just like, what? And they're like, your food. I'm like, I wasn't here for food. They're like, but we made it.

So you have to pay for it now. So then there's like, you know, a 200 yuan poo that you just made. Yeah. Well, at that point, you might as well take the food. I mean, come on, you know. Well, you're empty. So, yeah, you might be hungry now. You know, that food's going to get eaten.

Right. So maybe not right away, but it's not going to go to waste. I mean, it's KFC. Come on. I mean, that's true. That's true. I found this one this week, Dave, because I knew you were coming on.

It's idea. It's not idea. It's idea because it's a take on Ikea, an ongoing series of nonverbal algorithm assembly instructions. This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. They're algorithms in the vein of Ikea instructions.

Yeah. Now, the problem with it is I'm really good at Ikea instructions. I cannot figure out what the hell is going on with these things. So since you're probably smarter than I am, at least you have a better voice than I do. Maybe and I'm hoping that's the qualification here.

You can tell me what the hell is going on with some of these. Well, I love these, and I also love how they're riffing on the whole Ikea thing with the umlauts over the letters and the intentional misspellings. I think there's the quicksort is probably quicksort.

Publicly crypto? Yeah. So they've got the little guy looking at a bunch of different things with a question mark, and then he gets them all sorted, and he's happy. And it tells you what tools you need. I love that one of them is a die.

You need a dice. Right, right. Yeah, because you need to generate a random – yeah. So these are a lot of fun. I imagine – I think these are humorous. I imagine these are hilarious if you're a computer science major. I'm not a computer science major, but I kind of figured out – the quicksort I understood because I had to deal with quicksort at Technorati back in the day.

The rest of them I am way out of my depth on. Yeah, I remember – the only one I remember is doing bubble sorts. Do you ever do bubble sorts? I never did a bubble sort, no. I remember doing bubble sorts, but I was probably 13 the last time I did a bubble sort. So, you know, I don't really remember.

But, yeah, these are fun. And the riffing on the Ikea standards is perfect. The little guy is perfect. These are great. Highly recommended. There's one that I really wanted, which is the shortest distance between two points in a graph.

I talked to my friend Dave Siffrey when I worked at Technorati, and he was trying to explain it to me because he's a computer scientist and I'm not. And he was trying to explain how these algorithms work to find the shortest distance between two points in a graph on a map. And there's a very smart algorithm that's already figured that out because I was trying to figure it out.

And he's just like, oh, go use this algorithm and you can figure it out. And I looked at the algorithm and I'm like, I don't speak that language. I have no idea what that says. And he's just like, oh, oh, that's right. You're self-taught. Oh, you poor little bastard. You know what this is tangentially this reminds me of is is solving Rubik's Cubes in that, you know, when Rubik's Cubes came out when we were youngsters, people had solutions to them.

But over the years, those solutions have gotten so much more efficient. The algorithms for Rubik's Cubes solving have gotten way better than they used to be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're being solved in seconds now. Oh, if you have a robot, sometimes in under a second, which is crazy.

Right. Right. But even the humans, they can move so many, you know, positions simultaneously. Yeah. Compared to how we used to do it. It's amazing to see the evolution of that. Yeah. The reason I never got down to the Rubik's Cube, like super solving thing, I liked girls and I kind of wanted to have a date at some point.

So I kind of stepped away from that and it worked. It actually worked out, but not for long, but it worked out in the moment. It worked out fine. But as funny as it is, I have a Rubik's Cube on my dining room table, which I play with all the time because I don't have a girl to play with.

But anyway, yes, those algorithms do evolve over time. And it's just but this is just a fun thing that I thought was I thought it was a cute take on how to simply explain algorithms. I don't know if they've succeeded in this, which is the one thing that I wanted to ask you about, because since you're not a computer scientist as well.

And I would have asked Brian, too, because he is certainly not a computer scientist. Yeah. That does this actually explain it. I'm going to send this to our to one of my favorite computer science scientists, Jonathan Katz from the University of Maryland. He's a crypto guy.

And we'll see what he says about it. More homework for Dave. I'll get his take on it. Yeah, I know. It's all right. It's all right. This is good. I like this a lot. It's good. It's fun. It's cute. Closing shout outs. Now, Dave, I know you have a morality clause and I've been nice to you this entire time, but you are on Grumpy Old Geeks.

And I need to close this out with something filthy. All right. This is a joke I came up with this morning. Oh. What do you call a malicious network of sex toys? Hmm. I don't know, Jason. What do you call a malicious network of sex toys? A twat net. Of course you do.

Of course you do. That is absolutely what you call it. I just, I, I look, I looked it up. It's a, it's an original joke. It's not in Google. It's good. I made it up. It works. You should sell that joke. I, I don't know who would buy it, but.

I don't know. Look, man, I came up with dickies instead of dick pics. So now I have, you know, a twat net. Twat net. That's good. I like it. As these, as these vibrators go viral, literally and figuratively sometimes, then you need to have a name for it. And I think, you know, when the world's first twat net comes online, it will be a Torminator event.

Well, yeah, you should, uh, you should figure out how to patent that. Uh, yeah, that's not going to work. Why not? I've failed about every other patent. So my shout out this week is to our, my, my missing cohost, Brian Schulmeister. I, I am, I'm not going to send thoughts and prayers to your dad because we know how fucking useless it is, but I'm thinking of you, buddy.

And I'm hoping you're going to come back soon and, uh, I'm, I'm pulling for you. So, yeah, me too. A shout out to Brian. And, uh, and I have also, I'd like to say, uh, I have newfound appreciation for just how much time and energy it takes to do this entire show.

I'm spoiled only doing the security part every week. Wow. This is a, this is not a sprint. This is a marathon. Uh, but I had a great time. Yeah. And you didn't even do any of the research. No, no, I had a great time. I'm, I'm, I'm happy to have been able to fill in for Brian, but I look forward to having him back next week.

Uh, thanks to, uh, never having to do this again. Don't bother asking. Uh, I, uh, shout out to my, uh, coworkers at the cyber wire to shuffled some things around this week to, uh, sort of plot, uh, you know, map out the time to make this work.

And I'm glad we were able to make it happen. And I thank your cyber wire cohorts as well, because I love those guys. I listen to your stuff all the time and I know it takes a team to do what you guys do over there. And I think what you're doing is fantastic. And thanks for lending me Dave for a few hours.

I really appreciate it. All right. So until next time, I'm Dave Bittner. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 252. 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. Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching to the stars.

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