275: Now With More Breasts

This episode is brought to you by Hover. Go to Hover.com slash GOG to get 10% off your first order. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo, discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. We got some follow-up from last week's episode, or last week. That's also confusing now. Everything's different. The previous episode, we'll go with that, where somebody wrote in about how Netflix was starting to do self-promoting ads running in between your binge-watching and whatnot.

There is a way to opt out of them, because it is just a test feature. And apparently, if you use your web browser, you have to do it in the browser, not in the app. You can go into your settings and remove yourself from test participation, which I would probably do anyways, because who wants to be a test subject for Netflix? Yeah, really. And what was this auto opt-in for test and beta features?

That's kind of some BS. That's such old-school complaining on this show, Jason. I know. Opt-in is the way it goes now. That's how it all works. So, yes, you are obviously automatically opted into everything that everybody wants to do to you these days. You never have to go in and do it yourself.

They do it for you, because it's a feature, not a bug. Right, Jason? Oh, that's right. That's right. Yes. And last week, I did it again. Last show, you talked about the New York Times article about the anti-refugee violence being stoked by social media in Germany.

And there's a good article over on Slate that talks about how the New York Times really shouldn't have done that and about how the study was not a completed study, that some of the facts that the New York Times pulled out of there weren't even in the study, that it's posted on a site that's known to be works in progress.

And then that they already changed things from the time that the Times wrote the article. Basically, as we said, this seems dubious at best. It is. Slate laying the smacketh down. Yes. We've talked about Snapchat quite a bit on this show, because you're in the land of Snapchat.

I am. So Bloomberg has this really long article that says, nobody trusts Facebook. Twitter is a hot mess. What is Snapchat doing? And this article is very, very interesting. I doubt you got a chance to read it, because I just realized I put the wrong link in the show notes.

Yeah, you did. I tried to look at the note, and I did not see it. But I did do something. So I will let you tell me what your article says, and then I will tell you what my experience was. Okay.

This is basically an article about, you know, Snap as a company and the founder in general, and some of the silly things that they do at the company, like they have basically a room where people can talk about their feelings and things like that, where they pass around the little orb of speaking.

Wasn't that Arianna Huffington's solution for Uber, creating the lunch heaven place? Kind of, kind of, yeah. Yeah, they've got a full-time staff at this place, too, just to have the room of feels. But what I kind of got out of this article was that there is no way that the regulators should have let this company go public.

This guy has no idea what he's doing. Yeah, I agree. That's the TLDR for the whole article. All right. Well, all I could see was the title, so I saw, what is Snapchat doing? And I went, you know what? That's a damn good question. I haven't launched Snapchat in months. So I did, and I went over to Discover to see what Snapchat is doing.

Let's see. A storm did this to someone's sunroof. Some stupid article there. Breasts. Breasts. More women pushing out their breasts. Women pushing out their breasts. 10-second talents. Our bodies can do this. Can yours? More breasts.

Some more breasts. What are deep fakes? More breasts. Some really yolk dude. Some weed. And some more breasts. And some more breasts. So that's what Snapchat is doing. Okay. So Snap is basically now with more breasts.

Yes. Now with extra boobies. Although they're not nude anymore because, you know, they're a public company. In the news.

And we also talked the previous episode about WeWork, the company that is going around and doing the office spaces for lease and things like that. You know, the office 2.0. Yeah. They're in a race to the bottom with Uber to see who can lose the most money every quarter. That's basically what we were talking about last week, about how they're just insanely unprofitable and just hemorrhaging money left, right, and center.

But, you know, that doesn't matter in this day and age because they're also one of the largest private office tenants in Manhattan. If it leases just another 74,000 square foot office, which is what they typically look for, it will be bigger than JPMorgan Chase, currently the biggest office occupant in New York's Manhattan market.

So you can own or at least rent most of Manhattan and still just lose money all the time. How does this work? How does WeWork work? And imagine what's going to happen to the real estate market in Manhattan if WeWork goes under. Actually, that's interesting. In the article, they were talking about how this is basically keeping the New York City rents higher because they have so much space that's not, you know, being left vacant and things like that.

So it is pushing up the market and it's all faked. They don't actually have money to pay rent. Disruption. Ain't it grand? Ain't it grand? Well, 74,000 square feet. That's a big effing office. I've never been into one of the WeWork ones.

I've been into some of the other ones that have been in this area for a while, but, you know, they're all over the place. This is a booming business, apparently, except you can't make any money. Well, and speaking of disruption, the earth is being disrupted. This is this isn't really tech news, but it's just so terrifying to me.

This is over at the Hill. Arctic's oldest and thickest sea ice breaks for the first time. This thing has never broken up. Scientists said that, you know, given the way that we're going right now, it will eventually break up. But they were still thinking 20 to 30 years from now. No, it's happened on Tuesday.

On Tuesday. Well, you know, it's got to happen on some day of the week eventually when it does happen. That is true. That is true. But 20 to 30 years earlier than believed. So we're in. We're fucked. It's time to move inland. Well, it's pretty funny. I did see an article where Maersk, the big shipping company, well, it was one of the big targets of the hacks not too long ago.

They are running basically an icebreaker through that ice now to see if they can create a new route from Asia to Europe. Oh, that seems wise. Because it'll save a couple of weeks. Right. And wow. And speaking of wow, Venezuela has been having some problems with soaring inflation rates.

So they've issued a new Bolivar called the Sovereign Bolivar, which is a new currency that will remove five zeros off the value of the old Bolivar. This is supposed to help out a little bit. But the kicker here is it's supposedly backed by a cryptocurrency called Petro that the government created in January.

OK, so this is the first national currency that is being pegged to a cryptocurrency. However, having said that, they did an interview with this guy, Steve Honky, who is a professor of applied economics at John Hopkins University and looked into it.

And he said, this whole thing is just a public relations operation. This currency doesn't even exist. The cryptocurrency, it doesn't exist at all. They just made it up. You can't buy it. You can't get it. You can't trade it. It's completely fabricated. So in other words, it's basically just cryptocurrency.

Completely fabricated money. Yeah. So what's what's the difference between that and any other cryptocurrency? Yeah. Well, the difference is other people you can trade. Yeah. This one you can't even touch. It just supposedly exists to back up this hyperinflated new currency. So good luck with that. Yeah.

It's probably on some intern's laptop in the back office who just downloaded like, you know, a Bitcoin fork and just said, OK, he renamed the folder and launched it and said, ah, here, see, we have we have cryptocurrency. Yeah. So fan times. Facebook is going to be rolling out their reputation score, which is wonderful.

Yay. Yay. So this is their attempt at basically getting people to to monitor things themselves instead of having to hire people to do it. You'll be able to, you know, rate things and as well as to how newsworthy they are, as to how fake newsy they are.

And the more on you are, the higher your rating will go. And the more trustworthy you'll be, apparently. They're making you do their job for them. Exactly. That's all that is. Now, I can't. It's actually smart. I've built systems in the past that kind of did the same sort of thing, like, you know, any kind of like image uploading system.

I would allow people to to flag things. And if it hit a certain amount of flags, then I could go in and look at it. That's kind of theoretically sort of what they're doing. But it just feels weird. Well, because when you did that, that was to make the service a little bit better. But it wasn't tied to a reputation score.

No, it wasn't gamified is basically what I'm trying to say. You didn't gamify it. They're gamifying it with your reputation, which I think is definitely not a good thing. Now, it's it's funny. I saw a boing boing link on this, and I just wanted to read a little clip from the article because they were just talking about, you know, is it a bad idea?

Probably. Yes. And this is from Cory Doctorow. I wrote a dystopian novel in 2000 called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in parentheses, which many people have mistaken for a suggestion rather than a warning. That that alone right there pretty much sums it up because, yes, the and he's calling this new trustworthiness system, the reputation score, whatever weaponized woofy, which I thought was fantastic.

Nice. Yeah, that was a good book for his first attempt. I thought I thought he did a good job, but that's all this is now. Yeah, they've weaponized everything. Yeah, I mean, and this is exactly what we were talking about in security a couple of weeks back about the China's rolling out their citizen scores.

There's not much of a difference to this, except it's not government backed. At least at the moment. Well, yeah, kind of. I know Facebook, like we said before, is bigger than many governments. That's true. Facebook also had one of their apps pulled from the Apple Store this week.

OK. It wasn't it wasn't technically pulled. Apple demanded that Facebook, quote unquote, voluntarily remove the app. There's a lot of that going on. These these supposed voluntary things. Yeah. Yeah. So what what it was, was they had a VPN that they bought called Onava.

OK. And it's been running for a couple of years now. But what they kind of do with it is not what a VPN is supposed to do, which is protect you from people snooping on you. They were just following all of your your browser data wherever you went on the Web, cataloging it and trying to figure out more ways that they can make money off of you.

Oh, excellent. So it's kind of just like the normal Facebook app. Yeah, for the most part. And what I like at the end here says, in short, who you get your VPN from is incredibly important. And if the person pitching you said VPN has a rich history of privacy abuses, be it Facebook or a giant incumbent ISP like Verizon, you should probably know better than to trust the integrity of their promises, whatever form they take, which is why here on Grumpy Old Geeks, we like private Internet access.

Yes, we do. The only VPN that we have found so far that is tested in court to not actually track where you go. So if you want to go check out private Internet access, go to GOG dot show slash VPN. Yes, it's great. I use it on everything. It's like put that shit on it.

Yeah, put that shit on everything. I found this article over at the Atlantic, which was kind of saddening to me. Posting Instagram sponsored content is the new summer job as long as you're a teen with a following. Oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah.

I read this and it was just this was a shake my head moment for most of it. I read it and I just I really have to start even though my son is only two. I've got to start figuring out what the hell I'm going to do with my kid about social media and tech, because this is freaking me out, man.

Well, here's the thing. Well, you better start his account now so you can get his follower numbers up, because then by the time he turns 13, he can make some serious scratch. Right. I mean, right now, these kids are like not making a whole lot of money out of it, but they say that it's harder nowadays for kids to get seasonal minimum wage work.

The problem is you're you're a kid, you know? Well, also, I mean, traditionally, it was you would work at a brick and mortar, right? Unless you were lucky enough like me to have something like Disneyland around, you would work at a shop and there aren't any brick and mortar shops anymore. That's true. I worked at a bookstore after I worked at Disneyland.

There aren't any bookstores. I worked at a record store. There aren't any record stores. I worked at a golf course. That was I was it. That was the only thing I could get when I was a kid. And I lasted one day. They fired me in one day. So you started your trend of your employment early then, Jason. I did. I really kind of did.

But the thing about this is, is it's just these kids are so young. It's not there's no oversight whatsoever. These people are contacting them directly through Instagram and, you know, bypassing their parents for the most part. Some people have actually gone to their parents and had them do it.

But there are kids that are making fake ad agencies to pretend that they're older to, like, you know, work the deals with these companies, which is genius. That is genius. I'm pretty damn impressed. I'm very impressed with it. I just think the whole situation is kind of gross because I think a lot of these brands are taking advantage of these kids by paying them just next to nothing.

You know? Oh, yeah, of course. Of course. You know, they're not getting paid what what anybody else would be getting paid. And it's exploiting them. It really is. I can't believe this stuff is happening, but why? Of course, I can believe this stuff is happening. Why wouldn't it be? Exactly. Now, these kids are getting like a three dollar CPM, you know?

Yeah, it's ridiculous. They need to really pay these kids more. But and also, you know, some brands are just walking away, not paying them at all. Yeah. Yeah. And what are you going to do, especially if you're not telling your parents that you're doing this and your parents have told you not to do it or other things of that nature? You know, that's not good.

No, there's one last thing in here that I want to just really kind of made me scratch my head. Overall, however, most teens said they were thrilled to be advertising on social media. It's easier to grow on Instagram than it is to get a raise at a job, says Angie, a 17 year old from Montana, who says she's made fifteen hundred dollars since she started posting sponsored content in June.

You manage yourself. Well, good luck making a living off of that, because, you know, this is August. So, you know, that's like five hundred bucks a month. Maybe that's like better than we do. Oh, no, not quite, not quite.

But still, it's like if you're 17, you can get a real job and make more than that. So, yeah, it's not the best. So I don't know. I don't know what these kids are going to do. It's pretty weird. Well, Dan Rose has left Facebook. This is the second of its big, big, big, big, big business executives leaving in the past few months.

He oversaw the company's business development team and he's he's heading out. So this is a, you know, usually Facebook does not lose high level people. And this guy's going, but he's not going to be anywhere else. He is doing exactly what I would do. He is moving to Hawaii and just leaving the job, going to go surf and live the life.

So well done. Yeah, man. Sometimes you've got to actually cash out those options and say, screw you guys. I'm going home. Exactly. So well done for him. The only caveat here is we're obviously Recode is asking what role did he have with the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

Is that why he's leaving, et cetera, et cetera. But hey, he's off to Hawaii. He's he's living the dream, man. He did exactly what we all got into tech to do. Well, actually, not all of us. I got into it because I actually love doing it. But making money would have been a nice side effect. But that never came to fruition.

But they do. They do say that he's leaving to be with his family, which is always code for either he diddled somebody or he just did something wrong. Well, I'm hoping that he's just doing the right thing. But yeah, you're right. Usually when people say that and they don't go to another job right away, it's because they're kind of unhirable.

Yeah, that's the thing. Oh, man. So I found this over on Motherboard. It's an extremely long article. It's called The Impossible Job Inside Facebook's Struggle to Moderate Two Billion People. It's a giant post on how Facebook moderation works.

Did you get a chance to read it? Yeah, I did. I read through all of it. I mean, especially because I was already thinking about how they're rolling out this new scheme where it's self-moderating or hopefully that they're outsourcing it to the users because this is not working, what they have been doing. And it's obvious that it doesn't work.

I don't know how this is going to affect the great people of the Philippines who have been looking at nude photos of everybody for years now. It might actually tank the Philippine economy if everybody can police themselves. Well, I don't think of it. OK, you know, hopefully Facebook won't take it that far.

I think the smart way to do it is obviously if you see something that's getting to a certain level, then you have the Philippine moderators get in there and still do it. But, you know, it is an impossible job. I mean, you and I have been doing this sort of stuff for years, online communities. I mean, I started doing it as a BBS when I was 13 and policing people is hard.

It's it's 90 percent of the job. Yeah. And the interesting thing about this is is once you start to moderate, then you're responsible for all the content. That's really the thing. And, you know, that's why they can't claim that they're a platform anymore. Now they're a media company. So exactly.

We went through this on First Contact when when we built the website for that for Star Trek First Contact, I should point out, for older or for younger people out there who don't know what that is. Our lawyers came in and said, you can't have live chat with taking out swear words because once you start to remove a swear word, then we're responsible for everything that's said on the site.

So so instead of being able to say fuck while you're on the bridge, we actually had to write drop downs for everything. So it was all scripted chat, which was actually some people did have fun with it. You could have a fun conversation with it, but it was still nothing like it would have been if you could actually be on the bridge and chat with other people, which is what I built back in 1995 or six, which was insane in Pearl.

But it was I mean, as we know, as we see with Bird and things like that, the problem is people, people are horrible. People will always misuse things. I mean, it's the same reason that I used to tell bands, you know, no, we're not going to put up message boards. It's going to become a mess. Yeah. And you're going to be liable. Mm hmm.

No, it is. It is. It's a slippery slope. So it's ironic because the whole point of all this Internet stuff was to build communities and we discovered that we can't really. Yeah. How'd that turn out? Not so well. Not so well. Yeah. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Hover.

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People think it's pretty cool when I tell them that's my email address. So be cool like me and get your own domain. And I've been buying domains for almost 25 years and for a large portion of that time, buying domains was expensive, problematic, and just a terrible experience. You were charged for every little thing and as domain registrars grew and margins shrank, the upsells grew.

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Apps and doodads! I can't remember if I've talked about this on the show before, but I've been checking out Screens 4 for Mac OS. Do you remember me talking about that? Because our search obviously doesn't work well enough for me to find it. I think that you have talked about Screens.

I don't know if it's version 4. I feel like it was a couple years back. Okay. So Screens 4 is basically like doing screen sharing on your Macs from Mac to Mac, which I do all the time because I used to run a bunch of headless Macs to do the Skype recordings before Zencaster came around and made me twice as frustrated with my life.

But what Screens 4 is it's like a really nice version of the screen sharing and like a hybrid of back to my Mac. So when you're out and about, there's a service that you sign up for that's just basically included with it with your account. So your machines will ping back to the servers.

It makes it really easy to tunnel into your machines from outside your network. Gotcha. Which is really good because we're going to Canada soon. Yes, we are. And I'm only taking one computer with me. I have six, but I'm only taking one. So if I need to get something from my home network, I need to be able to get back to it.

So I've been, you know, just kind of running this through its paces. And so far, it's fantastic. I've got it running on everything. Nice. I put that shit on everything, too. Oh, and just I'm going to skip ahead one story because I don't remember if we talked about this site or not, too.

I feel like we did. There's a new social media site that just hurdles your life updates into the void. It's called Brizzly. It's not new. And this is why I believe we talked about this probably a few years. I think we made fun of this a while ago. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It's pretty genius.

But I guess they've come back. It was hibernating for a while. So it's come back. It's called, again, like I said, Brizzly. It's the brain cub, whatever that means, of internet entrepreneur Jason Schellen. And it debuted back in 2009 as a Twitter and Facebook interface. It was acquired by AOL before AOL shut it down in 2012.

And it has returned. So if you feel the need to go and make an update and get all those endorphins that come with it, you can go to Brizzly. You can type in whatever you want. You can hit send. And it goes nowhere. What's really funny about that is Jason Schellen is a friend of mine, and he's the one that sent me my first Twitter invite because he worked on Twitter in the early, early days.

He was one of the first employees there. So that put me in the first 140 on Twitter, which I then deleted. Well, like a dumbass. Could have been a gazillionaire. I could have been selling like $3 CPM Instagram posts and cross-posting to Twitter with that.

Anyway. Because you're the teen influencer. Yeah. The funny thing is that, you know, all this is is a form that just doesn't post. Yeah, exactly. It's great. It's pretty great. Wonderful. Yes. I stumbled across another site called the Mom Project.

This is described as an Airbnb for talent. It's a career platform that connects moms and dads to with flexible work, freelancer contract projects, remote positions, reentry programs, and maternity ships, which are opportunities to fill gaps created by parental leaves of absence. Pretty interesting stuff. And I definitely, I think, fills a real niche need, you know, for both the employer and the employees.

So pretty cool. So if you're somebody out there that just had a kid and wanted to kind of dip your toe in and get some more money because you're getting only $3 CPMs on your on your Instagram page, I'd check this out. It looks pretty cool. And going back to unintended consequences.

Oh, Facebook. Oh, Facebook. What have they done now? Well, they have all these crazy little things that make you want to engage with the service more like they create, you know, these little algorithms that pluck your most favorite images out of the past and add dancing, whimsical cartoon characters. So you can then post that so all your friends can see.

Well, this happened to one guy. Patrick Girard tweeted. Facebook is pushing that share a memory junk where they make custom videos out of your old photos to boost engagement. And I literally just got shown a bunch of happy cartoon characters dancing on my mother's grave. Oh, my God. Yes.

Boy, that Facebook AI is doing great, isn't it? Tell me about it. Wow. I'm just speechless on that one. I know. I can't even imagine. I would just especially, you know, I just lost my father. If that would have happened to me, I'd be so pissed.

Yeah. Oh, well. Oh, man. So I saw this one, which is pretty cool. LG adds an exoskeleton to its line of Chloe robots. And there's an overrunning gadget. There's a picture of this guy and basically like robot legs, which is kind of cool.

Yeah, it kind of is. They look good. They look very early Apple design. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not the loader from aliens, but, you know, eventually someday we'll get there. Someday we will. Yeah. And I saw a new review of the Sony AIBO, which I think you definitely need to get your hands on, Jason.

Although it is $27,000 or $2700. Sorry. $27,000. That better be more than just a dog. Let me tell you that. Yeah. I could get a lot of real ones for that. $2,700 bucks. It's pretty cool. But we're going to need some more Patreon donations if you want to get Jason this, guys.

Yeah. I mean, we're still waiting on Han Solo's jacket and all that to come back. So we've got AIBOs a little farther down the line, but it looks cute. It looks better than the other ones, you know, but it's still $2,800 for a plastic dog. No poop.

That's true. That's true. I mean, I bet Bam Bam would like to play with it. Dino, maybe not so much. I think Bam Bam might eat it. Yeah, no doubt. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast.

The Cyber Wire is a free, community-driven cybersecurity news service based in lovely, beautiful, undeniably awesome Maryland. Dave is also the co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering and talk about porpoises. Dave, what are the top stories you covered in the Cyber Wire this week?

Well, first of all, it's good to be back, and it's good to be back with you, Brian. Hi, it's good to be back here as well. We missed you in security, on planet security last week. I missed being there as well, but, you know, settling into this new schedule with the kid going off to school, it's all been pretty weird.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, I understand, and I certainly remember. So good luck to you. Thank you. So, yeah, I mean, lots going on this week. Our first story here, this is about how an international hacker network turned stolen press releases into $100 million.

We should all be so lucky. Yeah, really. Or work so hard, or I guess in this case, be criminal. Well, my understanding is that basically three U.S. newswires were hacked using a variety of different methods, and they were able to get company press releases well ahead of them hitting newswires, thus able to do some insider trading, as it were.

Yes. Quite smart. Who'd have thunk it? That's really smart. I mean, that's way smarter than hacking Home Depot's credit cards. That's all I'm saying. Except there, he still got caught. Well, yeah. There's that. Well, and a couple of interesting things about this is that, first of all, the story made the point that this is a shift that they've seen a lot in insider trading,

where it's not so much anymore you have to know somebody in the company who's going to meet you in a dark alley and whisper some secret about the company, that hacking into the company and finding out information before anyone else knows it, this is the way it's done these days.

Yeah. Yeah. It's quite ingenious. And, yeah, people just don't seem to understand how important security is, even for something that you would think wouldn't be too big of a deal. Well, you know, I'm sure these newswires didn't think that they would have to lock everything down as hard as they do, but they do.

Everybody has to now. You just can't have this data out there, right? Well, I mean, the whole point of their company is to make things public. Yes. You know, the whole point of it. It's like, hey, they've given us information that we need to get to as many people as possible. What could go wrong with that?

Well, now we know. But this article, it's one of the most well-done web-designed pieces I've seen in a while. It's beautiful. They've done a great job with all of the illustrations. It's very detailed. It's very long. It's almost like a novella.

And I really enjoyed it. And I think that there should be more stuff like this, especially, I mean, it's coming from The Verge, which is very surprising. It's a true crime story. A couple other things that stuck out to me about this one. One was that, as is often the case, it's really the human side that is these people's downside.

Their downfall, I guess, is a better way to say it. You know, people not being able. How many times do you think about if a criminal had just kept to themselves, not told anybody else what they were doing, minded their own business, carried on with their crime, they would get away with it. But they can't do that.

They have to go out and brag about what they're doing. They have to show off the fruits of their crime. And this led to these bad guys getting busted. I suppose we should be happy that most criminals aren't Lex Luthor and they tend to be stupid and lazy.

That's true. I think it's a good thing that we don't have more super criminals running around. Well, if we did, how would we know it? Exactly. That's the point. You know, this is like the opposite of survivorship bias. This is, you know, idiot bias that we get that we hear these stories because these guys have screwed up.

But how many people are out there that are professionals in a ripping everybody off and not saying we would know we have Google Maps of the whole planet. So we would find their volcano hideaways. Let's do a search for where all the hairless cats are being shipped.

And that's exactly where we know where to look. Yeah. Well, speaking of hacking, we heard this week that the DNC says it caught an attempted hack of its voter database and took it to the FBI. But life moves at you pretty fast, doesn't it? Yes, indeed, it does. It turns out.

Nope. Not so much. No, this was, of course, news had broken that the DNC had been hacked and people jumped all over this. Not the least of which were some people in Congress who said that this just goes to show how the current administration is not doing a good enough job to protect us.

And while that may or may not be true, depending on whether or not you're right, this turned out to not be an actual hack. This was a simulated phishing test, which, you know, many companies do.

In fact, the sponsor of our Hacking Humans show, Stu Showerman, you guys know Stu, right? His company offers a simulated phishing test. And so evidently somebody had ordered up a simulated phishing test on the DNC. Now, as of the as of when we're recording this, I don't think we know who ordered it up.

There's some speculation that it might have been the Michigan Democratic Party. But somebody is going to get a stern talking to you'd think they'd send out a memo. But here's the thing now. Now that we know that this can trigger like, you know, oh, the sky is falling. The sky is falling.

I might just go out and order phishing attempts on, you know, people I just don't like and see how see if that triggers it. You know, it's like it's like ordering a bunch of pizzas. This is to somebody's house that you don't like. Right. Right. Yeah. Some people. I mean, there were some security experts who pointed out that the thing about false alarms is you don't know they're false until you've showed up to investigate.

So it's good that people called the FBI and said, hey, we think something's going on here. And then then and only then they figured out, no, this is not not anything going on. So it sounds like the folks in the DNC who I think it is not surprising are a bit gun shy these days about these sort of things.

It sounds like they did the right things in terms of reporting it and getting people to look at it. But it ended up really not being anything. Yeah. Yeah. The moral of this story is don't call the press until you figured out where it's actually coming. Well, I was thinking about that.

Is this is this just I mean, obviously, this is going to happen more and more. Is this a function of our 24 seven news cycle, need for page views, et cetera, et cetera. Nobody waits anymore. You know, as soon as something breaks, we have to get out there and get ahead of it. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Back.

Yeah. It's funny. I was talking with my wife about this not long ago, about how newspapers had the benefit of being able to have a few hours before they had to hit the print button to roll the presses. So if things changed or as things develop, they could be working on a story and even to the point of spiking it at the last minute.

But that ain't how it works anymore. Nope. We have to hit publish right away. Yeah. It's a contest for who gets the eyes first. That it is. And speaking of eyes first, I found this one over on The Independent. When the Paul Manafort verdict came out, along with the Michael Cohen news, a mysterious bunch of Russian bots on Twitter started tweeting a lot about Molly Tibbetts's death.

Yes. Imagine that. Which is very interesting. Hashtag no collusion. Hashtag misdirection. Yes, exactly. Hashtag Fox News. Yes. And I haven't found out. Do we know if Twitter has actually killed the accounts yet of those people?

Or is this one of those, oh, no, we have to let the press figure that out on their own, Mr. Mr. Dorsey says. I haven't heard either way. I haven't heard either way. But it seems like this is pretty routine these days. Whenever, you know, bad news breaks for, I guess, the current administration, these Twitter bots spin up and start spitting out things to try to get people to think about something else.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, no collusion. That's all I'm saying. No collusion. Oh, and poor reality winner is not winning this week. You can't win for losing, can you? No. It was really funny is, so she was, she was caught because she sent over, didn't she fax over a printout that she'd made?

And then the, well, they, then they found it from the micro dots on the printout. Correct. That she was the one that leaked it. Correct. They tracked the printer back based on the micro dots. And then that was able to, you know, narrow it down to a handful of people. And then they got her. Yes.

Right. So we had a story earlier in the show about basically how Facebook is doing all of their moderation. And there are slides that are in the presentation in that, that news article that says this has been recreated from an original slide to protect the identity of our source.

Thinking like, okay, well, at least they're getting smart now about like not just doing a, like a screenshot and pasting it in case there's like digital watermarks. Yeah. So like reality wouldn't have been in jail if somebody had just retyped it. Right. You know, that's it. That's, that is it.

Right. It's, it's pretty, pretty insane. But, um, I don't know. This is a, I feel really bad for, uh, for good old reality here. Yeah. Five years is a pretty harsh sentence for what she did. Don't you guys think? I think so. Uh, that's, that's considering the importance of the information that we got.

Yeah. But, and, and, and to, I mean, to be fair, this was something that the Obama administration was really, really, uh, strict about was coming down on journalists for leaks. So this is not a Trump thing, you know, where, where he's coming after people.

This is a continuation of that policy. Uh, you know, Obama really ramped this up of trying to, to shut down the leaks within the government. So thanks Obama. That's right. Exactly. Yeah. Um, yeah. They're saying it's a harsh sentence, uh, what'd she get?

63 months or so. And, uh, yep. Yeah. Yeah. So what is she going to be about 30 when she gets out? Yeah. She's 26. Uh, I'm not going to be able to work any government jobs. That's for sure. So yeah. Yeah. They're saying it's the longest civilian sentence in U S history for leaking classified government information to the public.

Well, I wonder what, you know, if she can get out early. Because of, uh, good behavior or something like that. Who, who knows? Maybe she'll get pardoned. There's a lot of that. Or maybe she'll have a sex change. There's a lot going, going around about that these days. Oh yes. Yeah. That's just going to depress me. Let's not talk about that.

Yeah. Moving on. So we talk a lot about spyware, of course. Uh, but what do you guys know about deliberate spyware? Uh, I'm aware of some of it, uh, because parental sort of stuff, it's, it's often being discussed in parental, uh, message boards and things of that nature as kids, uh, are getting their first cell phones or computers or things of that nature.

So, um, I know there's some products out there that are meant to be just for parents. Yeah. And this is one of those, this is a product called spy phone. And they're one of those companies that, uh, does exactly that. You can put this software on a device and it will copy text messages and calls and emails.

Bad branding for somebody that would just use it as a parent. I don't think spy, I would, uh, you know, monitor or something of that nature. I would consider rebranding. Well, I guess they, it also attracts the, uh, is my spouse cheating on me? Oh, right.

Group as well. So, so you can't, uh, and, and I guess the gumshoe private detectives are probably, you know, maybe, maybe they use it as well. I don't know, but, uh, at any rate, um, these folks who, I guess it's a legitimate business, right? I mean, yeah, I'm there, you know, I mean, parents in this day and age where we're, where kids as young as eight, nine are getting cell phones, um, and, and, you know, not every

parent understands technology enough to be able to do things like lockdown phones or restrict access or things of that nature. So I suppose this is a legitimate business in and of itself. Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about, uh, that, that type of monitoring of my kids. I guess it depends on what age they are.

And I, I just don't know what that's, it's, I, I have mixed feelings about it. I do too. But then again, you, I, and well, Jason, you know, if his dog ever gets a cell phone, we are all aware enough of, of technology to be able to hand over a device to our children and be able to restrict access and not worry.

And it's not even so much, I don't think the parents are so much worrying about what their kid may be doing, but what may be coming at their kid. Right. Right. Well, at any rate, the, the point of this story is that this company, the makers of this spy phone software, they were storing their data where else in an Amazon S3 bucket, which was wide open to the world.

So figure. Yeah. So they, how does this happen? Lazy programming. It's lazy programming, right? It's, you actually have to manually turn on world access. You, it's not something that happens by default. I've, I've run enough, uh, APIs through S3 buckets to know that when you set up an S3 bucket world is not set by default.

You have to do this because you're lazy and you don't want to have to make authenticated requests every time I've done it. I know. And until I didn't do it because I'm like, ah, this is bad. This is not good. So is this a matter of someone turning it off for their own convenience and then forgetting to reactivate it?

Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. Think of it as file permissions, like in a Unix server, you know, you have, you have a set of permissions that you can use and it is so easy. Like when you're setting up WordPress to just say a world writable for all of my configuration files instead of creating a new group and creating, you know, the ACLs to go along with that.

So they just set it to everybody can read it and it just makes it easier for them. So it's, I, I see this as laziness all around. Anytime this happens or inexperience, this could be inexperienced programmers because all of the, the good programmers have gone, we've faded away.

We all do podcasts now, right? Exactly. So we should do a podcast on how to secure your AWS S3 bucket. Oh yeah. Hot talk. Hot talk. Oh yeah. Here on AWS street. Well, if we can somehow get the word blockchain in there, it's sure to be a hit.

Damn right. Oh yeah. So anyway, they, they, uh, exposed over 44,000 email addresses, uh, looking at, uh, 2200 customers, 3600 tracked phones, photos, text messages, and on and on and on all the usual stuff.

And, um, the folks who run this are saying, thank you very much for pointing this out to us. And we're looking into it. We're flipping the switch now. Yeah, exactly. But I think it also, you know, points to this, this thing where how it's who, I guess who watches the watchman is one way to say it, but how do you know you're, well, Brian's not going to watch the watch for me because Dan Lindenhoff is doing it.

So we know that's not going to happen. That's true. I'm out. Perhaps I chose an imperfect metaphor. Uh, call back, call back. Yeah. Inadvertent callback. So how do you know you're, you're like, this is the whole, this is the whole, the joy of cloud computing, right?

When everything's being stored somewhere else, you have, who do you trust? Well, we've talked about this in this segment before too. What, what is enough to actually put you out of business? It doesn't seem anything anymore. You know, in the past, a company that made this egregious of a mistake would just go away, but they're probably not going to.

And we see this repeatedly with all these tech companies. It's the forgiveness level that the public has for them is extraordinary. Yeah. Brian, they're getting an award for participation. Probably. I mean, that's the, it used to be, you know, the, the, the, uh, uh, invisible hand of the market that would take care of these sorts of things, but it doesn't seem to anymore.

No, I think we're fatigued. We've been beaten down by so many of those, of these, we, and, uh, we, we don't necessarily blame the good guys for their, we, even though they're being negligent, we don't automatically consider them to be bad guys, I guess is a better way to say it.

Yeah. And it's just crazy to me that, that, you know, we'll, we'll talk about this company again in a year. It'll probably have happened again. And that to me is astonishing. Or someone will have bought them for $4 billion. Right. Yes. Exactly. Right. Right.

Uh, well, anyway, our next story. So last week, uh, Jason and I were talking about, uh, some of the, the, uh, my hijinks when I was out at Black Hat this year. And one of the things I did was I talked to a couple of Russian reporters and, uh, we talked about how the, um, the Russian government had made a big mistake by trying to ban Pornhub

and that this was the incentive that use, internet users needed to figure out how to use things like Tor and how to use VPNs because they needed to get their porn. And so that's, that started a conversation about, um, getting people to do things about, um, what's the word for it?

Um, um, um, um, um, help me out here, guys. What's the word? It's on the tip of my tongue. Influencing. Influence. No. Um, no, um, no, no, no, no. Persuasion. No, um, convincing, convincing. No, uh, anyway.

So, um, that'll be fun. I know. Sorry. Leave it in. I speak for a living. Uh, uh, so similar to that, the folks at Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite, they are using a clever way to get people to use two-factor.

Persuade. Persuasion. Persuasion, perhaps? Persuasion? Persuasion, yes. They're persuading their users to turn on two-factor auth. Yes. They're persuading their users to turn on two-factor auth by giving them a free Fortnite dance if they do two-factor.

Now, what's interesting about this is I've been following this on Twitter and I've seen a couple people say, my kid came up to me today and said, how do I help me, uh, enable two-factor? What is it and how do I do it? And the parents are like, what? Why? Why?

Have you, who are you? Right. What are you doing here? Yeah. And it's because they want to get this free dance on Fortnite. So I think this is a great idea. And I wonder how we can get these sort of incentives. Incentives. That's the word I was looking for.

They're incentivizing. Oh, God. I can sleep well tonight. Incentivize. They want to incentivize them. Yes. That's what it is. Incentivize. Well, this is literal gamification because it's in a game for kids, which I'm fine with.

The problem that I have, and I know where you're going with this, is how do we get adults to do things like this? And it's sad that we have to gamify because there are no adults anymore. Porn. That's how we do it. You get free porn. Free porn for every two-factor audience.

I mean, what if you get a free Big Mac or a free Five Guys burger or something? I don't know. A coupon or even a $5 Amazon gift card. Something like that that would, if you enable two-factor on your Google account or on your Amazon account or whatever.

Then all you have to do is turn it off after you're done with the burger the next morning. Yeah. Yeah. I guess for the people for whom their stupidness is more than their laziness, right? Stupidity. Well, I mean, the real trick here is stop offering one-factor authentication.

Yeah. That's easy enough to do. Just require it. No. Yeah. Don't make one-factor optional. Say, you need to have two-factor auth. And there you go. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. But, I mean, I get where you're going with that, too, because for a lot of these companies, it would behoove them to get all their people switched over because, you know, less chance of data breaches and things that will cost them more money in the long run.

So why not? Why doesn't Amazon give away like a $5 gift certificate or something of that nature? Because it's going to cost them less in the long run to do that than deal with another massive hack or breach or whatever. Yeah. Yubi Keys for everyone. Well, it's in everybody's best interest, right?

Everybody's best interest. So, except for the bad guys, I guess. I was going to say, there is one group that is definitely not in the best interest of. Right. Yeah. The anti-security lobby speaks with a Russian accent. Well, finally this week, I just have a recommendation.

There's a new podcast out. It's called Cybercrime Investigations. It's by a British journalist. His name is Jeff White. And he's dropped his first three episodes, which cover his investigation of the WannaCry campaign. And he digs in and tries to follow the money.

And it's just a fun tale following him. He describes what he got right, what he got wrong. He ends up chasing people down the street with a microphone and camera crew and where it leads him. He does a good job spinning this tale with his co-host, whose name I do not know nor remember.

But it's really an entertaining listen. It's three episodes. They're only, I think, about 20 minutes long each. So, check it out. It's worth a listen. It's a fun story if you're into this stuff. It's called Cybercrime Investigations and all the usual podcast places. And it's by Jeff White. I will definitely check that out.

I've got another podcast recommendation that's in the same vein, almost, sort of. It's called Intelligence Matters. Have you heard of this one? Not in this universe. Yeah, that's right. Well, it's by former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morrell. Huh. And he basically does a bunch of really cool interviews about the spooky stuff.

Cool. It's really cool. I highly enjoy it. And it's done with CBS, so it's well produced. Okay. There's 39 episodes so far. And, like, you know, he's had people on, like, the person who does HR and hiring for the CIA and the farm, which is pretty cool.

There's just tons of stuff in here. If you just look at the list, most people won't recognize them unless you're really into this kind of stuff. But, yeah, it's one that's worth definitely checking out. That is Intelligence Matters. So, it's more than just a half an hour of people saying, I'm not at liberty to say. I'm not at liberty to say.

Where did you work? I don't recall. I work for the government. Yeah. No, it's really well done. All right. Good. All right, gentlemen. Well, that's what I have this week. And I will wish you well. And I guess I'll talk to you guys next time. We've had an awful lot of cool space news recently.

And we've got some more really cool space news. NASA has found definitive evidence that there's water ice on the moon. How cool is that? Did the Space Force find it? Yeah, the Space Force is going up there to get it. Let's get that water.

Yeehaw. Damn it. I'm thirsty. I need a drink. Let's go to the moon. You took a wonderful story and made me angry. I'm just hoping we can go to the moon soon because it'd be better than here sometimes. Would be nice to go again. So, yeah, it could be used by future lunar explorers, according to a NASA statement.

With enough ice sitting at the surface within the top few millimeters, water could possibly be accessible as a resource for future expeditions to explore and even stay on the moon and potentially easier to access than the water detected beneath the moon's surface. Very, very cool stuff. Nifty. Now, Eric Repair, the chef.

I think it's Repair. Is that correct? He's French, so I'm pretty sure that's how he says it. Good friend of Anthony Bourdain's and was on a lot of his shows. And unfortunately, he's the one that found him dead. Unfortunately, he is the one that found him dead. But he had a really good interview on fatherly.com talking about how he leads a healthy life, a healthy and happy life.

And the big thing for him is what he calls his rules of threes. He dedicates a third of his life to his family, a third of his life to his business, and a third totally disconnected from both on myself. Pretty cool, right? Very cool. Very cool. Yes. Hopefully, it still holds because this article is from May.

Yeah, man. But yeah, I'm sure he's having a rough time of it. But it's a good way to do things. I agree. Yep. One good thing that I think is good, but is probably the most terrible thing that you could ever eat. Instant noodles. Oh, boy.

Cup of noodles. I love them. It's basically salt, fat and sugar. Yes, it is. 60 years old this Saturday. Probably some of them still on the shelf that are 60 years old. You can get them on eBay.

They're the classics. They're literally antiques. And I found out about this because my friend Joey Ito from the MIT Media Lab is actually speaking at the giant convention that they're having over there in Japan. Right. For noodles. Okay.

It's a noodle convention. Look, do yourself a favor, people, and go and get a really good bowl of ramen. Don't do instant noodles. Yeah. And it's actually the World Instant Noodles Summit. I can't believe we weren't invited to go speak. As much as I spent on that stuff, for sure.

And I found this over at Dig. It's an article titled, I Want to Log Off. Right. Did you read this? I did. What did you think before we start? I want to log off. Yeah. I mean, the title obviously hooked me because we're online all the damn time.

And after, I mean, for 25 years-ish been online. And it's an interesting story because it chronicles one of the guys at Dig who has to look at crap online all day. Kind of like what we have to do to make this show. And yeah, by like halfway through it, I'm like, oh, quit your bitching.

And then I'm like, I kind of want to do the same thing. Oh, yeah. That's terrible stuff. Oh, yeah. It's making me insane. I'm like, oh, well, time to go do a show. Go see what's new in the news. I suppose on the plus side, we make fun of it all. Yeah. See, that's the thing. Yeah. Dig's not very funny. No.

Not very funny at all. And like their videos have actually gotten really bad. There's ones like dog digs hole in sand and then loses his shit when ocean fills it in. And this comes back to like really terrible headlines. The dog just looked at it and went, eh, no more hole and walked away.

Right. Didn't really lose his shit. But anyway, yeah, it's an interesting read if you want to hear about some of the crazy things that happen to you when you read the news all day long. If you want an insight into Jason and I's lives during the week. Yeah. Basically what this show is doing to us. Yeah.

And you talked to, we talked to us about soda streams before and what we can and cannot carbonate with it. And I found this over at CNET and this goes back for like 2016. Yeah. So it's six things you can carbonate with your soda stream.

And it's interesting because I didn't know that there were soda streams out there where you can kind of modulate the carbonation. Yeah. The more expensive ones. Yeah. Yeah. I have the cheapest one you can buy because I'm poor. So mine makes water real good.

Yeah. But it's pretty interesting. I'm drinking some right now. Uh-huh. Yep. So they have, you can carbonate orange juice, coffee, tea, which they say is actually not bad. I might try that one. I might try the tea one. Cocktails, which, yeah. Okay. But they do say you can carbonate wine.

I don't know why you'd want to, but yeah. I mean, we talked about that before. That was the first thing that I think before, like, you even got one. Yeah. I wanted to see if I could make booze. Yeah. But you can also carbonate various liquors like gin, rum, tequila, whiskey, and vodka. Mm-hmm. No, officer.

It's not vodka. It's a fizzy drink. See? It's fizzy. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I think I'm just going to pass on these. I might try the tea. I think I'm going to try the tea, but the rest of it, I don't think so. I don't even buy the flavors. Like, I just like my fizzy water. It's better than buying a Pellegrino all the time.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it tastes great, and there's no crap in it, and it's cheap. Yeah. That's why I go through, I go through one tank about every two weeks. That's about the schedule I'm on as well. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. But actually, speaking about that, because I wasn't going to put this info, this news story in the news, but since we're talking about SodaStream, PepsiCo has bought it for 3.2 billion, billion dollars, and it's a smart move on their part, they're saying, because

people just aren't drinking soda like they used to, and this is a good step in the right direction for them. Yeah, it's also, yeah, because basically, I think they're just buying the competition at this point. Yeah, exactly. Because Pepsi knows how to make fizzy water, you know? But the interesting thing about it is SodaStream has been very antagonistic with Pepsi over the years, so if they have to merge the teams, it might be a little tense.

A little pushing and shoving in the office? Yeah, a little bit. They might throw some elbows. Now, my final one for Brickabrack this week is over on Instagram. It's called Forgotten Computers. It's a really cool Instagram account that just has a lot of old stuff on there, and I used to own most of this stuff, so it's kind of fun.

Me too. Yeah, I'm looking at this Casio PDA. I loved this thing. This was like the first PDA where I got a cell modem to plug into the top of it. Right. Never worked. Could never get the damn thing to work.

There's a Palm Pilot. I had that. Yep. There's so many cool old ones, like the Casio one with the keyboard. I had that. This is just a fun account to go look through if you're old and you used to buy a lot of tech that, you know, does not exist anymore. Fantastic.

Closing shout outs. I'm so confused with our new schedule about what day it is and what day this is coming out, so I'm just going to say 30 years ago, a few days ago. I think we're safe with that. We're safe with that. Jane's Addiction released Nothing Shocking. This is one of the ultimate albums in my life.

I was already well into what was considered alternative music at the time, but that all came from England. This came from L.A., and it was a game changer for me. I may have only been 15 at the time, but I found a way to get into these shows. I also attended Jane's Goodbye Show, or at least the last one that Eric Avery, their original bass player, ever played in.

They, of course, got back together and wrote horrible new songs since then. But the original Nothing Shocking album, one of my favorite of all time. I have a link to Mountain Song, one of my favorite tracks of all time, in the show notes. It's just, I'm old, but man, good times.

Never a fan, but I'm glad that you could go down memory lane with this. I did. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. 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 275. 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 time. And I totally lost you for half of that read. Yay, Zencaster.

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