273: Hacky Hack Hack

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I'm a very sweaty Jason DeFilippo. These people lie, lie, lie. It is not cooler in sunny Los Angeles like they said. No. This is going to be a very sweaty, very sweaty Grumpy Old Geeks. I thought we had kind of dialed in this weather prediction stuff, at least in the short term, but apparently we don't.

In addition to that, why do I have completely different temperatures for my Apple weather and my dark sky weather and then the Amazon weather? Like all three of them are giving me completely different degrees. I am going to tell you right now that dark skies sucks since I moved back.

Told you. It sucks here. It is 10 degrees cooler in the app than it is when I walk out the door. I've got thermostats everywhere. I've got one in my car. I've got one in my studio that I can take outside and get the actual temperature. And they are consistently off and they know to a T where I'm at.

Yes. So I don't understand it. I don't understand how that app got so much worse in the two years that I was gone. Well, you know, you thought I was lying. Actually. Well, I knew it wasn't going to work for you because you're on the leading edge of, you know, the rain for you comes from the ocean. It's not like there's somebody out there like saying, oh, it's going to rain soon because you're there's no prediction.

But for here, I'm in the valley. There's lots of ways to predict the weather here. Jesus. Yeah. It's funny, though, the one that actually works the best is the built in crappy Yahoo weather app. Yeah, that Yahoo weather one seems to be the most consistently correct one.

I just don't understand how they can all be so often this day and age with this technology. I guess they need to pivot. I even tried weather bug, which is, you know, networked thermostats. You'd think, oh, a bunch of network thermostats. That should work. Nope. Nope. I guess it's a it's a bridge too far, I guess.

And speaking of that, you have continued to stay off of Facebook. And I'm just I'm so I really noticed this week because I've been kind of solo parenting as my my wife's been off at a conference, how much time I spend clearing notifications on social media, just clearing them out because I don't care.

And I and I'm OCD. I'm too OCD just to let the little red number sit there on my. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't you cannot do that. Yeah, it drives me insane. So I'm launching Facebook or Twitter or Instagram constantly just to clear out notifications. And Facebook deserves a special place in hell for page notifications, especially with grumpy old geeks and some of my clients and things like that.

Those things are so hard to clear out. They put them in three different places. You have to click like four to five times just to clear out the damn number that appears next to it. Curse my OCD soul. Well, you can turn off the red dot in iOS. You know, it's not that hard. It really isn't that hard. I haven't had the red dot on any of my apps in well over a year.

I never do that. I get the only notifications I get to my watch are from my security cameras when somebody's where they're not supposed to be. And it's bliss. It's total bliss. Yes. And speaking of bliss. Yeah. Okay. But I have to say they're going to be there when you come back so that there's no reason to get notified.

You know, somebody is going to be bugging you all the time. I know. I know. It's my problem. It is. But I'm just going to complain about it anyways. Speaking of bliss that has gone away. Well, it was good while it lasted. But the unfortunately, the Santa Monica police have stopped enforcing the scooter prohibition on the bike path.

And it has once again been completely overrun with idiots. My bike rides this week have been disastrous at best. Here's hoping they come back this weekend to start patrolling again, because apparently putting up the big sign saying it's illegal and spray painting on the path itself saying it's illegal to ride electronic scooters doesn't stop anyone.

You have to sit there and hand out tickets. And I don't understand why they're not doing that, because they make money. You think it's a cash cow. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Well, I think what they did at first is they gave some tickets away, but they were mostly warning people. I hope that they're just sitting out there with their little ticket machine this weekend.

Stop it, people. This is ridiculous. Yeah. I mean, it's free money for them. What the hell? What do they have for like real crime to go patrol? Surely not. In the news. I just saw this and it really depressed the hell out of me.

We've talked about it in the past, but another study had come around from Forbes and some other people that basically GoFundMe has become one of the biggest health care systems in the country now. God, really? $250 million raised each year to attack rising health care costs.

All done on GoFundMe. One in every three GoFundMe campaign is a medical thing for people that cannot afford their medical care. That's insane. It's beyond insane. It's ridiculous. It's actually disgraceful. And every politician in office should be voted out at this point.

This is unacceptable as a company or company. Well, you know, might as well be. This is unacceptable as a country. This is ridiculous. Absolutely stunning. It's just read this article and you will weep. And I'm sure GoFundMe is happy as a clam because I'm guessing they, yeah, they're like making money hand over fist.

Business model. Oh, they actually have a business model. That's right. Yeah, some people do that. And Kickstarter has to be kicking themselves for not allowing this on their service. Exactly. I mean, look at one in three on GoFundMe are as medical. That's one third of their business. That's a lot.

That is a lot. Yeah. So let's fix this, people. Let's fix this. Now, my favorite bit of news this week. Apple was hacked by their biggest teen fan. A teenager in Melbourne, Australia is facing criminal charges after reportedly hacked Apple's secure computer network multiple times.

I guess he downloaded a bunch of, you know, documents and whatnot. 90 gigabytes, I believe, was the last word I saw on that. Well, when you think about it, 90 gigabytes isn't that much anymore. Just a couple podcasts nowadays. Just a couple podcasts these days, you know. So they found they found him.

He wasn't all that bright. He was bright enough to get in, but they were able to check and find figure out. Basically dial in exactly what laptops he was using, exactly what phone he was using. The serial numbers match devices that accessed Apple's network. The one big thing and only reason that I wanted to put this in our news is because this is genius because you can tell it's a dumb teenager.

They found all the evidence of his hacking espionage in a folder he labeled hacky, hack, hack. Hacky, hack, hack. Well, he also told people on WhatsApp about his hacks. Yes. Yes. You know, right there, not so bright.

No. Bright enough to get in, but not bright enough to hide it. Hacky, hack, hack. Hacky, hack, hack. MoviePass is back in the news. Oh, God. Again. I feel like this is our new bird. No, I think we were talking about MoviePass long before Bird. But, because it's another company with a crappy business model.

Now, you can do three movies a month now. This is the big deal. $9.95. Mm-hmm. Three movies. Mm-hmm. And they only tell you that you can, there's six movies that you can see. That's it. They tell you each week what six movies you'll be able to see. And I went and I looked at the website, and there is not a single movie that I'm interested in for the next month coming out that I can go see for MoviePass.

And I love this, because I went to the MoviePass website to look at the movies that they're saying, you can go see today. Enjoy three movies per month. It's on us. It used to be as many movies as we wanted. Nice pivoting, guys.

Nice pivoting. Yeah. Pretty soon it'll be, hey, for $9.95 a month, you can go hang out in the movie parking lot. And maybe, like, you know, hear the movie through the wall. But, yeah, for now, you're not going to get into that blockbuster movie. No. Well, these guys can't be around for too much longer, but we'll see what happens.

Another company that just doesn't make any money but seems to be worth billions of dollars, Uber, isn't expanding the global footprint of its ride-hail service at breakneck speed anymore. It's slowed down, and as the article then points out, it also isn't even close to being profitable yet. Oh, not even remotely close.

That's crazy. So, yeah, they're using a lot of their money to build out the next chapter, the Uber of tomorrow, which will include food delivery, scooter, and bike sharing, because those business models are going so well. Car rentals, flying cars, partnerships with transit networks, plus expanding its ride businesses in key global markets such as India, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Cars are to us what books are to Amazon. Hmm. I love in the middle of that that you said flying cars. Yes. You know what you didn't say in the middle of that? Self-driving cars. Oh, yes. Well, because they've gotten rid of that division, haven't they?

Yeah, they have. Or at least they're not promoting it at the moment. I hope their flying cars are a little better than their self-driving cars. That's all I got to say on that. Well, that's true. So, yeah, this is another one of these companies that everybody loves, and Wall Street seems to love them, and investors love them, and Uber still lost close to $900 million last quarter.

That's just one quarter. Whatever happened to companies have to make money to be valuable? That's three Snapchats right there. What'd you do this quarter? Lost three Snapchats. Where'd you, did you check the couch? In the cushions, maybe?

Oh, my goodness. Jack Dorsey's back in the news. He's rethinking the core of how Twitter works. Because everybody went, you're an idiot? Yeah, I think pretty much everybody said, you're a Nazi, from what I read and heard over this past week.

Everybody basically just said, Jack, you're not really fooling anybody. This isn't about freedom of speech. This is that you're alt-right and you're a Nazi. But now he says, the most important thing that we can do is we look at the incentives that we're building into our product, because they do express a point of view of what we want people to do.

And I don't think they are correct anymore. Here's what you should do. Besides dying of fire. I mean, honestly, I don't even know anymore. It started out as fun. It was 140 characters. You could tweet and you'd be done with it. But as feature creep has come in, they've killed their API, and all the fun has been drained out of Twitter.

I really don't even know anymore. Well, I'll tell you what they're doing to fix it. They've taken the bold move to suspend Alex Jones for, wait for it, seven days. I was going to say, I just went to his account, and it's there. It's up. Well, I guess they didn't take it down.

That was a really quick, yeah, that was a really quick seven days. Twitter issued a week-long suspension on Tuesday. And, of course, it is just his personal account. They left, InfoWars was totally fine. They let them keep that out. So what?

I don't get it. So Twitter stood out as the only major tech company that did not take an action against Jones and his media company. Jack Dorsey has defended the decision in tweets and interviews, arguing that Jones had not violated the platform rules. And then every single journalist worth their salt went in, found the exact tweets where he did break all the rules, and started forwarding them to Jack Dorsey.

So perhaps this is why he's starting to maybe sort of change his mind a little bit, but very slowly. But, again, if you take him down and he's still up, what's up with that? Yeah, maybe he's not allowed to post, but all of his stuff is up there. Last tweet was on August 14th, but I can see all of his tweets up here.

And the scary thing, six followers you know. Oh, no. That's the scariest thing I've seen all day. Six people I know follow Alex Jones. Well, six people for you to unfollow, Jason. I don't know. I like to have people who have diverse opinions.

Oh, please. Actually, most of them are comedians, so I'm pretty sure they're following them for material. Yeah, that's true. And Twitter's other big misstep, of course, occurred this week where basically they've killed their old API, and their new API is the only thing that is available anymore. And most of it, most of the third-party apps no longer work or have to put in a lot of work to get their stuff to work again because Twitter is trying to push everybody to use their inbuilt products, all of which suck.

Yeah, apparently a lot of people have gotten off a tweet bot this week, which really sucks, really sucks, because I love my tweet bot. I paid for it. I would like it to work. Now, this is interesting because we talked about Google's employees not too long ago getting butthurt about having to work on drones for the U.S. government.

AI for drones, you know, and apparently now Google is going to be going back to China. Okay. And they're going to be making a basically a redacted search engine called Project Dragonfly. And people are very upset about this.

They're like, we like the fact that we're not in China because we don't believe in censorship. 1,400 of them, to be precise, or at least 1,400 is the time of this recording, have signed an internal document that says, this sucks, don't do it. So, I think, whatever about the Google in China, I really don't care about that.

What I care about is the fact that a lot of these tech companies now have people rising up in the internal ranks saying, no, we're just not going to blindly go along with stupid shit anymore. I think that's actually kind of cool. It's interesting. I mean, of course, the old school way of doing that would be you'd quit in protest, but I guess they're not quite willing to do that.

And hopefully, they can change things from within. Yeah. Have you been to the Google cafeteria? I wouldn't quit either. I'll bitch a lot, but I'm not going to quit if I got a job there. I'll sign a document saying I disagree with this, but. But I still want my lobster bisque on every Tuesday, you know. I have priorities.

You do. Yes. Now, what have we been saying all the time, Jason, about Facebook and building your brand on somebody else's platform? Don't build your business in somebody's backyard and get pissed off when they turn on the sprinklers because it's a dumb idea. We've been saying that publicly since we started this podcast.

We've been saying that privately since well before that. Yet, somehow, somebody else saying it makes the news. Yeah. Yeah. Digiday president and editor-in-chief Brian Morrissey talks about how digital media and marketing businesses are pivoting towards live events and away from Facebook growth hacking.

He said he's happy to see the end of flimsy, overly engineered media brands, many of which were too dependent on other platforms to make money. And he basically says, I think it's stupid for you to build your brand on the back of somebody else's platform. Yeah. Well, no shit. Yeah, I think we've been saying it at least personally for 15, actually longer than that, probably closer to 20 years now.

Yes. Because we used to build the platforms and we're like, anybody that builds their business on our platform is a moron, but we'll take the money. Yes. Because, yeah, you can't play by somebody else's rules and get butthurt when, you know, they change the rules. And it's going to happen over and over and over again.

Yes. Now, have you ever heard of something called TBH? TBH, to be honest? Yeah. What is it? It's the anonymous polling app for U.S. high schoolers that Facebook bought about a year ago. You know what? I'm not a U.S. high schooler. So, no, I have not actually heard of TBH.

Right. Well, they bought this and it was a very popular app and they did a different viral thing. So, Facebook basically bought it, in theory, for the psychological trick that they used to target teens, which is they would do things like the app would go in and create a private Instagram account and visit the location page for a particular high school within Instagram and then follow every single account that's included in that school's name.

So, basically, every single student. And then teens were being followed by what seemed like a buzzy new app and also included a call to action asking them to stay tuned now that they've been invited to this cool new app. And they would just do that for every single high school, basically tricking kids into thinking, oh, wow, look, this is cool.

They like me. They want me. Woo. Isn't that kind of how Facebook started, though, by sticking to individual schools as they went along? This seems like kind of a, you know, a modern twist on how Facebook actually got started. Yeah. So, it does seem that way. So, it looks like they might be trying to bring that back, although God knows what markets are left open for them anymore.

Because, I mean, why would you even have to pay for that trick? Like, that's just something you could do, especially since Facebook owns Instagram. Yeah. Who knows? They could probably write a bot to do it. This is what happens when you have too much money, Jason. Okay. You buy things that you don't need. That's true.

That is true. But Facebook could be in a bit of trouble. Apparently, they are shedding massive amounts of traffic these days, and it's going to YouTube instead. So, $4 billion, according to a new study shared with CNBC by SimilarWeb, is the number of monthly page visits Facebook has lost in a slow drip, but nevertheless huge decline over the last two years.

$4 billion is quite a lot of clicks. That's a lot of page views there. And it's interesting that in the top five, it's Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, and Amazon. And I just still can't believe that Yahoo is still there. I know. I really can't believe that it's still there. Other than their weather, their aforementioned weather, which actually seems to work.

Because it's just old people who have it bookmarked on their crappy PC that they bought, and they can't figure out how to change the bookmark. So, it's their start page. That's true. And I figure these people got to be dying off soon enough. So, that number is going to be going down. If you look at an actuarial table, Yahoo's, you can probably track Yahoo's decline by just looking at a standard actuarial table going forward.

Right. Now, since it's going to, all this traffic is going to YouTube, I've got a link in here for a Chrome extension I use called DFTube. It's called Distraction Free for YouTube. It's just a simple Chrome extension. It runs on Opera and Chrome. I don't care about Firefox, because after that last experiment, things go screw themselves.

You can turn off just about everything. Most importantly, the comments. Yes. Isn't that lovely? Oh, man. YouTube comments. You just, oh, man. A cesspool. A cesspool. Like, it's just so bad.

It's so gross. So gross. And a hat tip to Gwydian on Twitter, who sent this over our way, thinking we would be interested. And it's been a little while since we've thrown AI out there too much. So the World Economic Forum is warning that AI may destabilize the financial systems. Okay.

Anything in particular? Well, they're going to come up. The worry is that these companies are going to come up with these machine. Well, I love the fact that it says AI in the title. And then everywhere that it's mentioned throughout the rest of the document, machine learning is mentioned, because that's the way it works. So they're worried that machine learning-based services that live in the cloud will be generated by these different companies, and they will be so much better than human investors that anybody who gets the lead on it will make gazillions upon gazillions of dollars and screw everybody else.

Well, I mean, you've got quants and all this automated trading and stuff going on already. But nothing's quite gotten there yet. So they're waiting for the next iteration where it gets even better. Okay. Gotcha. Now, we talked about Elon Musk last week and his 420 tweet, his famous 420 tweet.

Apparently, Elon's had a bad week. Apparently, Elon needs sleep. He does take Ambien when he can't sleep, but his board is worried that that is leading to lots of his crazy late-night Twitter ramblings because I don't know if you've taken Ambien before, but I have, and it works about half the time.

Half the time, I'll fall asleep and it'll be awesome. The other half of the time, I don't remember what happened, and then I wake up and people are like, you were really weird for the last four hours. I'm like, oh, okay. I guess some people react differently. But, yes, he was being investigated because of that tweet, and he even did come out and say, no, no, the 420 thing wasn't a pot thing.

It wasn't a pot thing. It's like, I don't like stoners because you're like stones, and they don't do anything. Right. Well, I'll shed a single billion-dollar tear for Elon Musk, but there's a great article over at Slate talking about this by Felix Salmon who kind of goes through what he said in the New York Times interview that basically just says, yeah, this dude's got sleep deprivation, and he better start dialing it back a little bit.

Just take a nap, dude, and maybe stick to maybe three different companies at one time, not ten. Seriously. I mean, this week alone, he then announced that he wants to do the boring company to bore an underground tunnel to Dodger Stadium. Take a nap. Just take a nap.

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The Cyber Wire is a free, community-driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland, which I have been told is awesome. And I must go sometime. That's the spirit, Jason. By everybody in Maryland. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, don't whack that hornet's nest.

No, no. And Dave is also the co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. So, Dave, what are the top stories in the Cyber Wire this week? Well, you know, I missed you guys last week because I was out in Las Vegas for the Black Hat Conference.

How many pounds of sweat did you have to wring out of your clothes? You know, one of the nice things about Vegas, which I can't believe I'm saying, is that they provide convenient shopping malls in between the casinos for you to walk through to get from one to the other.

So, this conference was at Mandalay Bay. I was staying at, what's the pyramid place? You were staying at the Luxor with the crazy elevators. The elevators. Thank you very much. Yes, yes, the wonk-a-vators. And so, that was fine.

So, I actually did, I probably spent a grand total of five minutes outside the entire week I was there. Maybe a little more, waiting for a cab or something like that. It was 110 degrees the week we were there. So, but as they always say, a dry heat. It's a dry heat, yes.

I think with all the money that goes through Vegas, they should be able to just build a dome, you know? At this point, just make the whole thing inside. Right. Because that's what everybody wants. The other thing I noticed about Vegas is somehow it escaped me the previous times I'd been there, is how dingy it gets.

I think because of the lack of rain, unlike, you know, like where I live on the East Coast where it rains fairly regularly, stuff gets rinsed off. Oh, yeah. And it doesn't get rinsed off out there. I noticed how dirty my shoes were after coming home from Vegas compared to where I live.

So, that was just an interesting little side observation. Well, you are technically surrounded by dirt on all four sides. Right. And in the desert. Right. So, it was an interesting conference, a busy big conference, probably about a third the size of RSA, I would say, but still a lot going on.

And two particularly interesting takeaways that I came home with. The first one was from Craig Williams. He heads up communications for Cisco's Talos team. That's one of Cisco's specialized teams. They did a live podcast from Black Hat and I was their guest on that.

And one of the things he brought up was that when ransomware rose to prominence, companies were quick to offer products and solutions to fight that specific threat. So, when you walked around at a trade show like Black Hat or RSA, there would be lots of people saying, hey, we're going to be able to fix ransomware for you.

Well, in the meantime, we've seen cryptojacking pretty much replace ransomware. It's not that people aren't doing ransomware, but they're doing a lot more cryptojacking. That's the place where people seem to be making most of the money these days. And we're not seeing that response from sellers of defensive software, which is an interesting – yeah, it is an interesting observation.

And Craig's take on it was that cryptojacking is more of a nuisance, not so much a showstopper. Craig also said that if you think there's no cryptojacking running within your organization, you're not looking hard enough. Oh, yeah, definitely.

Definitely. It's there somewhere. Yeah, but that is. It's just a nuisance. It's just taking up cycles and eating power. It's not locking you out of files, which is the real issue. Right, right. And in many cases, you won't even know that it's happening.

It really won't have an effect. Computers these days are so fast that if you're sitting at your office desk doing your normal browsing on your email and writing in Word or whatever, you may not notice that behind the scenes something is running. And also the sophistication of the cryptojacking software, a lot of it is programmed now to wait.

Wait until it senses that you're not doing anything. And that's when it starts doing its thing. Yeah. So that could be in the middle of the night. That could be while you're out at lunch. It could be while you're on the phone. So I just thought that was an interesting observation that when cryptojacking happens, unlike ransomware, where you might call the police or the FBI, you're probably not going to do anything.

You're going to uninstall it. You're going to uninstall it and get on with your life. Yeah. It's kind of like the difference between someone robbing your house or stealing the change out of your car, you know? Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a really good analogy, I think. The people who make their way through the neighborhood stealing the change out of all the cars that are unlocked.

Yeah. I've seen that happen before. They're not breaking windows. No, not breaking windows. And if you go to your car in the morning and you see, oh, they took my change, and you look and you say, oh, gosh, I left my car unlocked. Well, shame on me, right? Yep. You know, I lost a couple bucks worth of quarters, but I'm not going to call the cops over that.

Yeah, exactly. As long as everything else is there, you know, I mean, nobody leaves anything in their car in L.A. anymore, so. Right, right. Now, the second interesting tidbit that I came home with was, while I was out there, I interviewed a pair of Russian journalists, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Barogan.

Easy for me to say. Rolls off the tongue. Exactly. Really, really interesting conversation with them. You can find that over on the Cyber Wire, the Friday of Black Hat. So, I guess that's a couple weeks ago, if you want to hear that interview.

But they're authors of the book, The Red Web. And that book is all about how the Russian government kind of coexists with the Internet, how they use it for surveillance and also for control. And one of the things that they pointed out was that Russia made a huge mistake when they tried to block Pornhub on the Russian Internet.

That was so fascinating. That was one of the most fascinating things I've heard in a long time. Yeah. So, the reason why was because when they did that, that provided the incentive for normal people to learn how to circumvent the Russian content controls.

Yeah. As we've learned. How do you say? VPN? Right. Exactly. There are few things more motivating to clever humans than their desire to go find pornography online and all the related activities that go with that.

Yes. But what an interesting thing that this inadvertent consequences, right? That all of a sudden people were learning all about VPNs and Tor browsers, things that are not necessarily easy to do. But if you have the proper motivation, you sure are going to go find out how to use those tools.

Boners have taken down the upper logic. Yeah. Yeah. So, if you're interested, check out the interview. I enjoyed it. It's one of the more interesting interviews I think I've enjoyed in a while. And thanks to our buddies over at Terbium Labs for setting that up. It was a pretty neat time there at one of their event.

So, what's the difference between Black Hat and DEFCON? Don't they happen like about the same time? They happen sort of one after the other and kind of cross over about a day or so. Black Hat is more corporate. Black Hat has the big conference showroom floor where companies have their booths.

And there's still a lot of training going on at Black Hat. It's more corporate presentations. Here's our research. Here's what we're learning. So, a traditional trade show, I would label Black Hat. There's a lot of educational stuff that goes on the week before the actual trade show.

So, you can go and get trained on things and certifications and so on. I mean, DEFCON is really for the hardcore hackers. That is more the hacker community, a lot more community driven. That's where you have things like the social engineering capture the flag, things like that.

Right, yeah. I think Chris Hadnag, he runs that. Yep, absolutely. Which is really cool. Yeah, I love that guy. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Actually, we're hoping to have him back on the Hacking Humans podcast. He just brought out a new version of his book, his social engineering book. Just came out with a second edition. So, I got to hang out with him and get drunk at DerbyCon and see Crystal Method and hang out with those guys behind the scenes.

Well, that sounds like a hoot. That was a very fun night that I barely remember, but Chris is awesome, so I can't wait to hear him back on your podcast. Yeah, yeah, we're looking forward to it. And DerbyCon is another one that I got to say. I haven't been to Black Hat or DEFCON. I know I'm a bad hacker, but I have been to DerbyCon.

And DerbyCon, Dave Kennedy runs that, and he's friends with Jordan Harbinger, so I got to go hang out with those guys. And that was one of the most fun things I've ever done in a hotel. It was just, everybody there was just so lighthearted, so nice.

If you have to, if there's one hacker conference to go to, I recommend DerbyCon, because, man, everybody there is just so awesome, and I learned so much. Yeah, good to know. I haven't been to that one myself, but, you know, it's hard. There's so many of them these days, and obviously, it's hard for me to get away having to do the daily podcast and all that.

But I'm definitely on my list. I'd love to check it out, so it's good to know. It's right down the road from you. It's over in Kentucky, I believe. Well, yeah, well, right, okay. It's East Coast. It's closer than Vegas. Yeah, that's true. All right, that's true. That's true. Speaking of Black Hat, lots of reporting going on during the late days of the event, Defcon as well, with Vegas hotel room privacy.

Now, what is your expectation of privacy when you are in a hotel? Well, expectation and reality generally don't kind of go hand in hand, because you have maids coming in and things like that. Right. Well, let me extend that.

If you put the Do Not Disturb sign on your door, what's your expectation of privacy then? It should be 100%. I agree. You would think so. Now, what has happened, the reality is that there's been a shift in Las Vegas after the big shooting there earlier this year.

They have changed their policy where if you have the privacy hanger on your door for more than reports vary, it could be 24 hours, 48 hours, 36 hours. It doesn't seem to be consistent.

If you have that on your door and or if you've requested to not have maid service for security purposes, they will send security to inspect your room. I feel like this is, you know, a little farther after the fact than it needs to be, because in the old days, remember, we still have to take our shoes off when we go to the airport because one guy put a bomb in his shoe.

And I think from now on, this is going to be the standard, and I think that might be a little overkill and a little overreach. I agree. And it gets worse, as it usually does. There was more than one report of women who are in alone in their rooms, having their having their doors banged on and people coming in, claiming that they're security guards and not providing adequate ID.

Anybody can go to the uniform store and buy a shirt that says security on the sleeve. You don't even need that. You just need a suit and a clipboard. Right. Right. So I think it's a legitimate security concern for the women who are staying there.

You know, not just women, anyone, but women in particular are bringing this to bear, saying that if this is going to be the policy, I'm not coming anymore because I don't feel safe in my room. So it'll be interesting.

To their credit, the folks at DEF CON are working with the folks at places like Caesars, which is where it was this year, trying to get a handle on this to figure out, at least let's make this predictable. Let's decide what the rules are. There was another side story about an organization had put video cameras in the room because they had valuables there.

And while they were out of the room, security came in the room and not only did an inspection, just a visual inspection, which is what they say they're going to do. But they started taking pictures. And one of the security folks joked that he was going to put this stuff on his Snapchat, pictures of what he found in the room.

So there's a firing, right? Well, not in this day and age. Nobody gets fired anymore. Remember? Yeah. Yeah. No, that's creepy. That's extremely creepy. I agree. So we're going to see how it plays out. It's a hot topic right now. And I think there's a lot of legitimate concerns.

I understand the impulse coming from the folks in Las Vegas after that horrible thing that happened. But I agree with you that I think perhaps we've swung too far in the other direction and might be shooting ourselves in the foot. No pun intended.

Yeah. Oh, gosh. Sorry. The horses have left the barn. And it's funny. I wrote an article a long time ago when I was in Bangkok because I put out my do not disturb sign. And I noticed that on the back of the do not disturb sign was the maid service sign. And I thought, OK, well, this is kind of like Schrodinger's door hanger.

In what state, once I put it on the outside of the door, will it stay in the state that I think it should be? Because I could walk along the hall and take everybody's do not disturb and flip them around for immediate maid service. And, oh, Bob's your uncle. You get a little surprise when the maids just walk right in. I've had that thought myself, actually.

Yeah. Again, another little side story to this is that evidently during people's stay, while they had their door hangers out on their doors, Caesar's staff came through and swapped out the door hangers with new door hangers that had more explicit legalese on it describing what they may be doing, including coming in your room and searching it.

Well, that is a really weird change of EULA, especially if they're hanging it on the outside of the door and you don't get to see it before you hang out your door hanger. I think there's a definite lawsuit that could happen there if they come in when you didn't agree to the terms that were on the door hanger when you put it outside because they changed the door hanger.

Yeah. I suppose they'd back up and say that you agreed to these terms when you checked in, which probably is the case. Probably is the case because nobody reads the fine print. Yeah. Yeah. But it's kind of a mess right now, so we'll see where it goes. Other interesting story this week.

Do you ever play Fortnite? No, I haven't. I've been meaning to get into it, but I have not. My youngest plays Fortnite a lot. And it was big news that Fortnite was coming to Android, but the folks who make Fortnite didn't want to pay the Google Play Store the 30% fee that comes with putting your app on the Google Play Store.

Right. So what's the other option? Side load? There you go. There you go. So just like we were talking about with the porn thing in Russia, now we have a lot of kids highly motivated to learn how to side load apps onto their Android devices.

What could go wrong? What could go wrong? And wait for it. Lots of companies or lots of bad guys are taking advantage of this by posting versions of Fortnite that have malware installed. Who'd have thunk that would have happened? Oh, us.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. Somebody at Fortnite needs to get a good smacking. Yeah. It's a shame that there's no happy medium here. I mean, again, I can understand why the Fortnite folks wouldn't want to give up that. But is it really worth the potential bad blood with your users that you're getting all these kids to sideload apps?

And, you know, the vulnerabilities when we're talking about kids. Yeah. Is it worth it? See, and part of that 30%, I mean, that's the tax for being professional and making sure that you are a legitimate app that's going to go on that phone. And when you try and step around it, I mean, penny wise, pound foolish, I think is the term for this one.

And they should just suck it up. They're a big company. They make more money than, what are they making, like $300 million a month on digital assets or some crap like that? Come on. They're doing well. Yeah. They're doing well. Yeah, they're doing well. Now, it's just greedy when they do that.

I mean, granted, you could say that Google's being greedy for 30%. Same with Apple for their, you know, their highway robbery for the app store. But that's their business. And it's their devices. So you've got to play by the rules if you want to play. Right. And there is an upside to it. By having those walled gardens, you know to a certain degree that that app has been vetted.

And nothing's perfect, but it's certainly better than nothing. Right. So moving on here, an article that Graham Clewley posted on his website, of course, a friend of our show. And I really like the way he's framed this. You may have seen there's been someone who's been making the rounds on TV news.

I believe her name is Amorosa. Oh, her. Yeah, I heard a little something about her. You really have to search her out to find her. But she has been making the rounds. She's flying under the radar. She's trying to stay low. She doesn't like to draw attention to herself. So you really have to look for it.

But she has a book out. And as part of her promotional tour for this book, she's been making the rounds with recordings that she allegedly made. And one of them, at least, was made in the White House's Situation Room. I've heard that one.

Yes. Now, what I love is the way Graham frames this. The title of his article here is Security Breach in the White House's Situation Room. And I think he is absolutely dead on correct about this. The Situation Room is a skiff. What is a skiff?

So a skiff is a secure room. It's a room that is shielded from RF penetration. A skiff is a room where you are not allowed to bring in devices that haven't been approved ahead of time.

So skiffs are not that unusual, especially around here where, you know, in the shadow of NSA, there are lots of organizations who are doing work for the government who have skiffs. But when you go into a skiff, you leave all of your devices behind.

You don't take your phone into a skiff. You certainly don't bring anything capable of recording into a skiff. And the Situation Room is a skiff. You hope so. Well. Yeah. And now the understanding that I have from there's been other people, you know, former White House officials who've said that it's on the honor system.

You work in the White House, that's kind of hallowed ground for a government employee. You respect the rules there. And they have tables outside where you leave your devices, unless you're Omarosa. Some people aren't very honorable, it seems.

They don't like playing by the rules. I'm sorry. I've seen her on The Apprentice. She is not an honorable person. Yeah. So evidently she made these recordings, some of them inside of this skiff. Now, I don't know if they can come after her for that or if it's at this point, like you said earlier, you know, the horse is out of the barn.

So, yeah. But I think it points to, again, this cavalier attitude towards security in this White House. It's really disturbing. It's so far beyond disturbing that you just kind of expect it now.

That's the really sad part. And nobody's backing it. No one's going after them for it. No one who has any ability to go after them for it. We're so beyond what would be considered the norms in a situation like that that everyone – I think everyone's just so beat down about it.

Yeah, they really are. And it's interesting, on the Jordan Harbinger show yesterday, we were actually talking with General Michael Hayden about some of this stuff. And that show will be coming out in a week from the day that this show airs. Okay. And I highly recommend listening to that show.

Oh, I'll bet. It's a damn good show. I'll bet. I'll bet. He is one smart guy. I don't agree with him on a lot of things that he did. I disagree with him on most things that he did. Right. But I think his – I think where he was coming from, it's what he saw that needed to be done.

And he's willing to back that up. This White House is just like, eh, fuck it. That's about it. That would be the T-shirt and the logo for this White House. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. I let them in because they said nice things about me.

Yeah. That seems to be how it goes here. Well, at any rate. Finally this week, a story about an entrepreneur, a cryptocurrency guy. His name is Michael Turpin. And he's suing AT&T for permitting, in his words, permitting a $23.8 million theft of cryptocurrency

from him because of a SIM swap scam that was facilitated by an authorized AT&T agent. So, we talked about these SIM swaps where people can get access to your phone, basically steal your phone number by getting someone at AT&T or one of the providers to assign your number to a different SIM than the one you have in your phone.

Right. So, basically, if you're using text messaging as your second factor for authorization, those messages, those verification messages will go to your phone and go to the bad guy's phone once they get the SIM swapped to the new phone. And evidently, one of the ways that they do this is by either social engineering the agents at the providers or paying them off.

And, you know, give them $100 to do this for them, and then they go profit beyond that. So, it's an interesting question. What's your take on this? How responsible do you suppose AT&T is in a situation like this? I don't know.

I really don't know. I mean, this is one where you kind of need to run this through the court to figure out where the responsibility actually lies. He's suing them for $223.8 million. So, basically, he took what was lost and multiplied it by a factor of 10.

And he's saying it's fraud, gross negligence, invasion of privacy, unauthorized disclosure of confidential customer records, and so on and so on and so on. And he's suing them in district court in Los Angeles. We'll see how far it gets. Well, you always sue for more than, you know, more than what was stolen, because then if you have to negotiate your way down, you have wiggle room.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, we'll see how far this one gets. And because if it does go through, I think that'll certainly get the attention of these service providers, and perhaps we'll find more security when it comes to locking down these SIMs. Yeah, I hope so.

I really hope so. Yeah, I think we all do. All right. Well, that's what I've got this week. Well, we're glad to have you back, Dave. We missed you. Good to be back. Good to be back. Give my best to Brian. Will do. He's off nannying. So, that's what you got to do. I was going to send him a copy of You'll Never Nanny In This Town Again, so he could, you know, kill the time while he's nannying.

But I don't think that's really up his alley. You know, just this week, I was lamenting to someone that it used to drive me nuts. Back when my kids were toddlers, I would take them to the playground, that sort of thing. And inevitably, someone would come up to me and say, oh, look at you, you're babysitting today, and I'd say, no, I'm parenting today.

Zing! Yeah. Back off. All right. Great talking to you. I'll talk to you next week. Talk to you next week. Well, I'm getting ready for our trip to the Fireside Conference.

You know, I worked my ass off in my 20s and 30s to get to a certain degree of luxury in my life, and now I have to go fucking camping for this stupid off-the-fucking-grid conference. So, you know, I got to figure out a sleeping bag and things of that nature and pooping in the woods.

It's going to be awesome. So I figured I'm going to definitely have some power needs, so I picked up the Anker PowerCore 2 Slim 10,000 Ultra Slim Power Bank Upgraded Power IQ 2.0 Up to 18 Watt Output Fast Charge for iPhone, Samsung, Galaxy, and more, parentheses, black, and parentheses, from Amazon.

Okay. I've got one that's a little bit better. It's even better than yours. It's got two USB ports. And mine is the Portable Charger Anker PowerCore 20,100 mAh Ultra High Capacity Power Bank with 4.A Output External Battery Pack for iPhone, iPad, and Samsung Galaxy, and more, parentheses, black.

Yes. Yours is a little bit nicer, but it's also 10 bucks more, so. For double the, for more than double, but mine actually fits in my, because I have one of those crazy Giro luggages things. Oh, right. Yes. So I can put it in the Giro, and it's got USB ports on the top, and I can just plug it in there and go for it.

Very nice. Well, I think we'll both be happy with our purchases. I think so. And yes, if you, if you still want to come to the Fireside Conference, go to firesideconf.com slash grumpy. It's only like 2,500 bucks Canadian, I think. And, which is like, you know, 12 bucks American nowadays. Yes. I think it's a pack, a six pack of Bud Light, I think.

Something like that. But it'll be fun. It'll be fun. Actually, it's $2,000 Canadian. So if you want to go apply and come join us September 6th through the 9th at Camp Walden, come on down. Bring your own toilet paper, apparently. Yeah.

And don't shake hands with Brian in case you forgot his. And I got another thing that I want to talk about. I've been using my Kindle Paperwhite dash black dash includes special offers recently. Did it include special offers? It does include special offers that I have to swipe past every time I turn it on.

Oh, how nice. It is. It is very nice. But I've been trying to get back to reading more, like actually reading more. Because when we're doing those murder bot books, those are, you can only get those on Kindle. So I picked up a couple other books that we'll talk about in at the library on Thursday. I'm getting some Warren Ellis under my under my skin there, which is always really good because Warren Ellis is kind of crazy and creepy.

And I love his books. Dead Pig Collector is the one that I'm reading right now, which is a short story. And it's very good so far. And I also have the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite Leathercase, comma, Persimmon. It is a very nice case, I have to say.

So between the two of those, I think this is my favorite Kindle I've ever had. My mom's got one of these. I think it's great. I've looked at it every time I've been over at our place. I still do okay doing my reading just using the Kindle app on my iPad mini because the size is, you know, perfectly right for me.

But these do look great. Yeah, the Oasis is out, but it's more than twice the cost. The only thing nice about the Oasis is it's got more lights. It will do stuff from audible.com. And it's also waterproof, so you can read it in the bathtub and not be afraid to drop it, which is actually kind of a good thing.

Yeah, that's a plus. It is definitely a plus. So, I mean, it's like over $200 versus like $100 and something for the Paperwhite. I don't see the upside there. I think a friend of the show, Dr. Teeter, has one and loves it. But I can't pull the trigger on that much extra money.

Yeah, that's quite a lot. And somebody wrote us on Patreon asking about DRM-free audiobooks and things of that nature. And I just wanted to point out, I think we've talked about Overdrive on the show before. So, I just want to mention it here again. And per one of the complaints we got last week, I'm fairly sure that Overdrive is U.S. only because it connects to local libraries.

And basically, you can borrow and read on your Kindles or other devices audiobooks and regular books free. So, check it out if you're looking for some free stuff. That's actually really cool. I'm looking at library near you. No, with more than 30,000 libraries in 40-plus countries, chances are there's a library near you.

So, it is not U.S. only, actually. There. That's fantastic. See? Look at us doing the extra work. I know. We did legwork on that one. Give us another dollar on Patreon. Damn right. So, if you're looking for some audiobooks and just from regular books and you don't want to spend, you know, 20 bucks per shot or whatever, get yourself a library card and get yourself this app.

I have never heard of this app before. I am going to do that, except my driver's license is in Illinois, so I can't get a library card. Damn it! You're going to have to fix that. Well, no, you're not, because you'll probably move back to Illinois before you actually need to get the California driver's license.

Every time I get my California driver's license, within three months, I move. So, at this point, I'm holding out until this damn thing expires to make sure. Awesome. Brick-a-brick! This could be one of those moments, again, where I feel like we've talked about this story before.

And there are certain – I've been getting really a lot of deja vu recently, a very Berenstain Bears thing going on with my social media feeds. Yeah, have you been Berenstaining it up? I just feel like there are certain articles that just seem to come in and out of the zeitgeist on a fairly regular basis. Now, I did search our show notes to see if we had talked about this and nothing came up.

That's not saying anything. And by the way, people, we are moving to WordPress.com, so hopefully they will have a better search than their free, self-installed WordPress. So, in the next couple weeks, we will hopefully have better search on the website. Yes.

So, at that point, you may be able to find out that, yes, we did talk about this article before, but we're doing it again now anyways because I find it damn interesting. This is over at Mental Floss, why the metric system might be screwed. Now, the main reason being the entire – the perfect kilogram is this hidden in a vault outside Paris in a vacuum sealed under three different bell jars.

There's a small metal cylinder known as the International Prototype Kilogram or Le Grand K. Le Grand K? Le Grand K. It was forged in 1879 from an alloy of platinum and iridium, and it is hailed as the perfect kilogram, the gold standard by which other kilograms would be judged.

So, there are basically about 80 official replica copies, and every 40 years, it makes an appearance as they test the copies against the original to make sure that the kilogram is holding up. Unfortunately, at its most recent weigh-in back in 1988, it was found to be 0.05 milligrams about the weight of a grain of sand lighter than its copies.

Interesting. Which means it's losing weight. Now, they don't know why. Some say that the replicas are handled more often, which could subtly add weight, dirt, and things of that nature being put onto the replicas. Others are saying Le Grand K's alloy is outgassing, which means air is gradually escaping from the metal, making it lighter.

Whatever the reason, we could lose the entire basis for the whole metric system. So, take that, rest of the world, with your stupid system that makes sense. Yeah, the one that we really wish we had. But that's really interesting. And now that we've talked about Le Grand K, now I want a Royale with cheese.

Hmm. Yes. So, what they're actually starting to do is they're trying to figure out a way to do this that isn't based on one thing. That would be based on a scientific principle or that they could recreate the exact weight of a kilogram with a different alloy that they would worry about less, that could be handled better, et cetera, et cetera. So, technology may come to the rescue on this one.

But it is damn interesting, and it's a hell of a long article. But I would read a whole book about this right up there with salt and sand. Salt, sand, and kilogram. That's right. And the other thing I came across is Atlas Obscura, of course, also throws up some great stuff all the time. And this is the world's newest, most gloriously designed maps.

As you know on the show, we love to talk about maps, particularly the West Wing episode. But what I did not know is that every year there is an atlas of design that is released. And the 2018 atlas of design is now coming out. So, they've done this every two years since 2012. NACIS, a nonprofit organization that supports and promotes cartography, releases a new volume of maps, carefully selected from hundreds of entrants by a panel of judges.

And they're all over the place. They're really cool. I would highly recommend checking out the link in the website, if not actually going and getting this. It's only $35 anyways. One vertical map depicts the boundaries of Earth's tectonic plates in luminous colors. Another shows the life of a King Eider sea duck. And another is in the style of a 19th century strip map.

It depicts the Annapolis River and runs over six feet long. Holds up. These are damn cool. Yeah, these are really, really cool. I love maps. I'm a map nerd. So, I really dig these a lot. Unfortunately, I'm not going to go buy it because I bought the Atlas Obscura coffee table book a long time ago.

I have read three pages of that book so far. So, this would just be another $35 that goes to waste because I have no time to read. Well, I mean, isn't that the very definition of a coffee table book? It's just supposed to sit there and look pretty. It is. It's supposed to make you look smarter to the people who come over to your house.

You're not supposed to actually know what's inside of it. That would be silly. That would be totally silly. Closing shout outs. Unfortunately, last week we had a little shout out to Aretha Franklin.

And when our show aired, it was the day she died. So, farewell, Aretha. You will be missed. Yes, you will be missed. That was very sad news. This is an interesting thing doing two episodes a week because, you know, we were just talking about how she wasn't doing well. And now here we are a couple of days later and she's passed.

Not our fault, though. Not our fault. No, no, not our fault. Definitely not. Not our fault. Had nothing to do with it. And in other female singer news, do you want to feel really old, Jason? I already do, but go ahead. Yeah, well, here we go. This is going to make you feel even older. Madonna, the material girl, is 60 years old.

Yep. Sure is. Prince would have been 62. That is crazy. Yeah. That is crazy. And Michael Jackson. Do you remember when 60 actually looked old? I know. Seriously. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulman. 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 273. 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.

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