281: The InterCops

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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. Let's do this thing, Brian. I woke up this morning and apparently there's a huge fire somewhere in West L.A. And I did my bike ride and I had PTSD flashbacks to the fireside conference. Yeah, the little fire pits there were definitely annoying sometimes.

They just seemed to follow us. The smoke would follow you. Yes, smoke on the water. Yeah. No, I woke up with a migraine, so I'm looking out of one eye trying to read the show notes. Well, that'll be fun for everybody. Exactly. So anyways, I don't really have any follow up.

I just have two annoyances from this morning. Have you ever heard the term meet cute? I have never heard that term. Neither have I. Where the hell did it come from? And why have I seen it in 20 different stories today? Well, I've never seen it once before. Bader-Meinhof, maybe? Maybe, maybe. I've saw it in stories about Tinder and college students and stories about the celebrity hookups and the celebrity Tinder app, Rhea, and all this other shit.

So meet cute, for those that don't know, is in film and television. A meet cute is a scene in which a future romantic couple meets for the first time. This has been around apparently as a term since 1941, yet I never saw it anywhere until today, in which point I've seen it in about 35 different stories.

I have never heard of that before at all. Well, now you will see it everywhere. Okay. And the other thing that is just annoying the crap out of me, stop it with the sticky video shit. Oh my God. I'm so sick of sticky video. If I'm scrolling away, I obviously don't want to keep hearing or seeing this video.

I don't want it to appear in a corner where I have to spend 20 seconds figuring out how to kill it. Why do people do that? Oh, right. Views. Yep. That's how it works. Analytics are bullshit. No, they are. CNETs are the worst one out of all of them. You can't mute it. It's auto plays and auto with the sound like on auto max volume.

Oh, so annoying. In the news. Brian, it seems we're not alone in the universe. Okay. Apparently, SETI has actually found some radio bursts that might be from an alien civilization because of AI.

Well, okay. First off, the headline says AI, but the very first paragraph of the story says machine learning. I know. I had to put that in there just for you. God, this is the Annoy Brian show, apparently. Let's find everything that journalists do that annoy the hell out of me today.

Spell check, anyone? Yes. No. 72 new fast radio bursts from a mysterious source. Some 3 billion light years from Earth have been discovered. Okay. Which means nothing. Which means absolutely nothing. I feel like the story we do once a year. It is. It kind of is.

Yeah. And we're still stuck with the same idiots on the same planet. Nobody news showed up. Yeah. 3 billion light years is a little too far to go to actually go say hi. Well, maybe, maybe not, because I found a very interesting story yesterday.

I have checked for follow-up on it this morning, but I haven't seen anything new. But we appear to be having a real-life X-Files moment occurring. As the story in Gizmodo says, this is how it happens when extraterrestrials make contact with Earth. It starts with a newspaper report about suspicious activity at a space research facility.

Government agents and military vehicles appear. The local sheriff gets angry and confused. Then the TV news reports features interviews with locals saying things like, Nothing really happens here very much. And since nobody knows, it could be almost anything. And that's actually happening right now at the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, 130 miles southeast of Roswell.

And nobody knows what's going on. Swamp gas. It's swamp gas. It appears to have started last Friday. The observatory was temporarily closed because of an undisclosed security issue. Sherry Lifson, a spokesperson for the group that manages the facility, which is the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, or Aura, told the Almagordo Daily News.

Almagordo. We have decided to vacate the facility at this time as a precautionary measure. It was our decision to evacuate the facility. And then Otero County Sheriff Benny House told the Daily News that FBI agents told his officers to stand by and would not explain the security threat to him or why the federal law enforcement agency was involved.

But for the FBI to get involved that quick and be so secretive about it, there's a lot of stuff going on up there, House told the Daily News. There was a Black Hawk helicopter, a bunch of people around, antennas, and work crews on towers, but nobody will tell us anything. Oh, my God. This is awesome. Isn't it, though?

This is kind of cool. So we don't know what's happening. I'm definitely going to be monitoring this. I set up a Google alert. Nice. Oh, man. That is fun. We do have aliens here. Could be. Could be. Oh, wow. Somebody gets Scully and Mulder on the phone.

Exactly. Pretty cool stuff. Exciting. It brought a twinkle to my eye. Man, they got Black Hawks out. It's got to be serious. Right? That's what I'm thinking, too. So hopefully that's really. Well, I mean, I guess we could all be dead. Who knows? We'll see what happens. If you don't hear from us again, shit happened.

Shit happened. So on to what is pretty big and important news that will affect us in one way or another. The EU has approved the controversial copyright directive, which includes Internet link tax and upload filters. Yeah.

So there's Article 11 and 13. So these are the important ones. The fallout is going to be pretty far reaching. Article 11 is intended to give publishers and papers a way to make money when companies like Google link to their stories, allowing them to demand paid licenses. Meaning search engines and everybody will.

Our show notes would have to pay when we link to stories. Who did this? Who is so stupid? Well, hang on a second. Let's finish here. Article 13 requires certain platforms like YouTube and Facebook.

Stop sharing. Stop users from sharing unlicensed copyright material. Now, honestly, both of these things are good. If only the Internet would have started that way. Yes. What we're talking about is that, you know, this ship has sailed and trying to stuff things back into Pandora's box.

I don't see how this can even happen. Like it would basically shut down the Internet as we know it. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it would. This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Somebody who obviously has never used the Internet is behind this.

Has to be. It hasn't been completely approved yet. That vote is coming. But it does seem like it's going to go through in January 2019. Now, I don't know what the implementation of this is in terms of the U.S. I doesn't is it going to fragment the Internet into different parts where everybody in the U.S.

has this open and free free for all going on while, you know, in Europe, the Internet basically shuts down because nobody can link to anything anymore and nobody can post anything anymore. Yeah, it's like it's so dumb. You cannot put the deal.

You said you can't put the genie back in the bottle on this one. This is the way the Internet works in the, you know, Tim Berners, Lee is against this. And, of course, Jimmy Wales, but this is just so ridiculously dumb. Well, looks like it's going to happen. So this is going to be something to watch.

We might be showing down our show notes. This is something that everybody's just going to say. That's so stupid. We're not going to. And who are the Internet police that are going to go out there and enforce this on every website in the world? The implementation is going to be interesting. And again, you know, I'm not necessarily think that these things are wrong.

I just don't see how we're going to do it. And it's a bit late, guys. I think they're absolutely wrong. If you can't link to somebody, that is the foundation of the web. You can link. It's just going to cost you some money. Then why would anybody link to anything?

That's stupid. Nobody will. Yes. That's what I mean. It is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Yeah. I don't see how this can be implemented at all. But we'll see what happens. Well, the fact that it's already, like, got through the first vote is... Yeah.

Politicians are dumb. Well, the EU also did something that I'm actually okay with this week. Google, Facebook, and Twitter now must remove extremist content within an hour or face hefty fines, which can be up to 4% of their annual global turnover, which would be massive.

Again, who are the internet police that are out there enforcing this stuff? I don't know. I think we have a new job, Jason. I think we should come up with a logo. We should come up with a snappy name. We're the Intercops. Intercops. Get on Fiverr and get us a logo right now. Take that link down.

Damn it. Son, do you know why I pulled you over? You were linking without a license. Linking without a license. Intercop. Bum, bum, bum. We need a theme song and everything. Call Andy Snijansky. Yeah, get Dick Wolf on the line. We got a new show coming. All right.

So that's going to be interesting to see how that also gets, yeah, how this all gets policed is beyond me. But one must assume there has to be some sort of Interpol for online now. Yeah, but, oh, God, I mean, there's so many websites.

How the hell can you even fathom policing that? Well, I mean, I think that they're just going to be looking at the big networks, you know, obviously. Your Google's, your Facebook, the platforms, YouTube, all that sort of thing. So if there's some extremist stuff posted, take it down.

God knows they can. They certainly can if they want to. Of course they can. Yeah, but it is the policing aspect of it that's interesting. But, I mean, I suppose you only have to hit them with a couple fines that are that huge. And they will hopefully self-police after that point because it's about the money. Yeah, this is, I mean, so everything is just going to end up getting held into a queue that has to be approved.

Then we're in an approval system. Yep. Because nobody's going to let, you know, just everything go through. And, you know, but I figured it out. Rather amazingly, there's a 100% employment rate in the Philippines now. Exactly. If there's anything left after their typhoon that's coming through. But you know who's going to police this?

AI. They're going to write an AI. And the entire internet will be on the blockchain. Intercop AI. Interchain. All right. So let's move on to stuff that is on the blockchain and cryptocurrency. Our favorite subject. The Republic of the Marshall Islands has been warned against adopting a digital currency as a second form of legal tender because that Petro went so well in Nicaragua.

Oh, yeah. So the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, says the country consists of hundreds of islands in the Pacific Ocean should seriously reconsider. They just passed a law to adopt a digital currency named the sovereign alongside the dollar, which the American dollar, which is the only current currency in the Marshall Islands.

The first virtual coins are due to be issued to members of the public via an ICO later this year. Oh, ICO. Yeah. The problem is there's only one commercial bank that runs in the entire country. Banks hate cryptocurrency. And the IMF is basically saying, if you do this, you might lose your only bank and you will not be able to get money in and out of the country anymore.

Well, that sounds like a threat. Yeah, it does sound like a threat to me. So the IMF is not strong arming the marshals, they say, so they disagree with us. What they are doing is describing what will obviously happen if they proceed. The large correspondent bank will be quite worried. Their ICO just turned into an icy no.

Icy no. Yep. And keeping up with crypto news, it's been a fun few days for crypto. 80% plunge. This couldn't have happened last weekend while we were at Fireside. I know. Yes, they're calling it the great crypto crash of 2018.

And apparently. Yep. It plunged 80%. Wow, 78% peak to trial decline after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. So they're saying that this is even bigger than the dot-com bubble that we all lived through the first time around. At least during the dot-com bubble, I had a job.

Yeah, me too. Yeah, so cryptocurrency not doing so great. Really fun article over at TechCrunch about this. It's the end of crypto and I feel fine. I like that. But this guy is actually saying, well, yeah, all of these things, a lot of these, nearly every ICO launch in the last few years is going to fail.

Yep. Does it matter? No. The market is currently eating its young. So basically, we're going to lose all these things. It's going to become homogenized. It's going to become backed by governments. It's going to whittle down to like one or two different things, probably Bitcoin is obviously going to survive. Ethereum will probably survive.

And that'll be about that. So what we're just seeing is this massive shakeout of a bunch of nerds that have tried to go out there and get a lot of money really quick. It's still the Wild West, like the old internet where you and I used to be in and we'd cry missing. And that's about to go away for you crypto folk. Yeah, fun times.

I love it. I love it. And I put a link in a YouTube link in our show notes because we can still do that without paying money for it. Hat tip to friend of the show, Mike, who sent this to me. This is a Jimmy Kimmel live basically doing a monologue on bird scooters. It was pretty funny.

I got to say, he did a good job with it. He did a really good job with it. So I encourage everybody to go check it out. Pretty fun stuff. Tesla is also having a continued no good, very bad news cycle. Go figure. Yeah, so they're looking into Tesla's autopilot now because news has come out on an incident from earlier in September when a Tesla Model S crashed when the owner tried to activate the summon self-parking feature.

So not working so well. Within an hour, then all over the air updates to customers, Model 3 cars have been disabling the autopilot functions altogether. So that's not going so well. Now, I feel like we've been talking about self-driving cars roughly three years on this show.

At least. At least. At least. And everybody was so high on this stuff. And you and I were just saying, it's going to be 20 years before this shit works. Yep. And I think we're right. Well, we got 15 more years to prove that one out. So go to patreon.com slash GOG and keep giving us money so we can do the show for 15 more years, please.

Yes. Just so we can say, told you so. Now, Tesla has also dropped some color options to speed up their production because of their much publicized production delays and everything like that. So if you were ordering a silver metallic or obsidian black Tesla, you're shit out of luck now. Actually, you can still get it.

It's just going to cost you more. Yeah. And you have to wait even a little bit longer. Oh, fun times. I got to find out what my brother ordered. I bet he got the red one. It's funny because apparently the red, which is their signature color, takes the longest for them to produce. So why not get rid of the red?

Exactly. Well, you'd think maybe let's get rid of the one that takes the longest if we're having a time constraint. Too much weed. I think too much weed. Snapchat. Oh, we love to shit on Snapchat. Snapchat, which has a user base that isn't growing and a stock that's near an all-time low, needs a jolt to its business.

So it came up with another revenue stream. Yes. Our stories, curated collections of user posts around a particular event. They have now opened up to some companies and well-known publishers like CNN, Cosmo, and NBC News. So they will let them do their own curated stories and they will introduce ads into them, which they will split the revenue on.

So more ads. Great. So basically what they're doing is they're trying to recreate the hashtag and just do it with people power. Yeah. They're outsourcing it, basically, instead of doing it internally or just letting normal people do it. They're giving it to professional media organizations in the hopes that that will get people to pay attention to Snapchat.

Have you seen CNN lately? I wouldn't call them professional. No, I only watch it from Bourdain's on, to be honest. That's true. Although that Dan Lemon guy could be a hoot when he's drunk. Oh my God, when he's drunk, he's great. Mm-hmm. I mean, who the hell nuts and newscast are on air drunk? CNN does.

CNN does. Yeah. Amazon, a store, is now stuffing its store with ads. Yeah. Yeah. And they're putting a lot more in them. And they're selling those ads to people that sell stuff on Amazon to get increased views.

And it's doing very, very well for them. Amazon cannot not make money, apparently. No. No. They basically shit gold. Yeah. That's what they do. That's amazing. One thing that you and I have known all along, but it's always good to remind people of that. When you purchase music, movies, or books from Amazon or iTunes or any digital vendor, you might think that you actually own it.

No. You do not. No, you don't. You do not. So the story's going on the rounds right now because of a Twitter feed that went viral about somebody whose movies were pulled out of his Apple store that he purchased because Apple stopped keeping up the license with the distributor and the owners of the said movies.

So it goes away from their library, which means it goes away from your library because it's not your library. That's right. It's Apple's library and you don't get a refund. Nope. They offered him, I think, two rental videos in exchange for the movies that he lost, which is, of course, ridiculous.

And, of course, it is ridiculous that we don't own it because we buy it. And I say, I think we need a class action lawsuit to change all buy buttons on these services to rent. Yep. I think you're correct on that one. Yeah. This happened. I think the first book that Kindle actually pulled back in the day was 1984, which was so ironic.

So ironic. And they eventually gave it back because my copy disappeared. I had bought 1984 and it disappeared. And so it was fun to watch the news about that. But they eventually fixed it and put it back. But, yeah, you don't own squat. I mean, look at me.

I mean, I've got hundreds of books in Audible. And, yeah, none of them are mine. And if the if the licensing goes away, because there are books in there that you can't even buy anymore that I have. But they still at least let me download them if I want to again, which is nice.

I don't know how that worked out with the license deal. But, yeah, this is just going to continue when rights holders pull up, pull their contract and say, look, no, you can't distribute our movie anymore. Yeah. And it's unfortunate because when you think about it, like I haven't I buy some physical books still. But I usually read them digitally first.

And if it's an author I really love and a book I really love, I generally go out and get a hardcover because I like to have it in my library. But as far as movies or music goes, I haven't had a physical item in 10 years. Oh, wow. Easy. Like, I just don't.

I don't I don't buy DVDs. I don't buy records anymore. I don't buy CDs anymore. Everything I own in those in those areas is digital. So I could just like lose my entire library at any point in time if need be. I mean, it sucks to think about that, but it happens. No, that's why I have a synology with all my music backed up to it, which you can always just go to.

Sweden, exactly, which is where a lot of things come from. And I do have. Yeah, I have my entire music library because I was like the other day. I was trying to find a song and you couldn't get it on streaming. And I'm like, oh, let me let me, you know, warm up the synology and find my iTunes library.

And boom, there it was. So I could listen to the song that I was looking for. And I do the same with movies. But I also do. I have a Blu-ray collection in my house. You have a big one. No, I have a small one. There's like 25 movies in it. It's like it's my favorite movies of all time. So I just want to have a physical copy.

I have them digitized as well. But just in case, I like to be able to pop in a Blu-ray disc and get the extras and things like that. Right. And the commentary is kind of what I do with books. If it's if it's one of the favorites, you go out and get it. Exactly. Yeah. So I just have and nowadays Blu-rays are so cheap. It's like five bucks a movie.

So I'm like, oh, it's a box for him. You can have the whole box for five bucks. Yeah, that's the thing. It's actually cheaper to buy a physical Blu-ray most of the time than it is to buy a digital copy that you don't own. Yeah. Crazy, right? Mm-hmm. So we were talking off the air right before we started recording about our we're both Microsoft stock owners and it's been performing rather well.

Microsoft is doing something I don't like right now. Now, they have their I bet you didn't know this, Jason, but they have their own browser still. It's called Edge. Oh, the Edge. As Engadget says, Edge has a reputation as the browser you use to download other browsers. Exactly.

And Microsoft clearly doesn't like that. That's what it's for. So they've started to add some not so kind tactics to try to drive people away from the competition. Users have discovered that a recent Windows 10 insider preview pops up a warning when you try to run the Chrome or Firefox installers. And Dialogues box tells you that you don't need to install the competition.

You already have this wonderful browser right here called Microsoft Edge. Yeah. I have never gone to a website that says looks best on Microsoft Edge. Have you? No. I actually don't go. I don't see websites that say look best on anything anymore.

No. Yeah. I mean, that was so long ago. Yeah. I so remember programming for that, though. Oh, God. It was so annoying. Okay. You have to build. Microsoft is giving us money for this, so we have to build it for IE first. I know. Really? Oh, God. Do you remember having to use server side includes to sniff the browser and then have a completely separate website just for IE?

Because I was such a steaming pile of shit. And then everything else worked on the other version. Oh, the good old days. The good old days. I just actually pulled out. I've got a Windows 10 laptop that I bought. I got it on Woot. I talked about it on the show, and I got a Woot laptop for like $150 and then upgraded it with like $600 worth of SSD and RAM and all that crapioca to make it work good.

And I just plugged it in the other day to do the updates because my roommate needs to use it. Six hours it took to update Windows before I could use it again. I do not miss that about Windows. No. That's the only thing I really don't miss about Windows. No. So hopefully this will pop up because I want to see it.

I'll screen cap it if it pops up. Awesome. I have to remember how to do a screen cap on Windows, though. That's, you know, was it a shift command print screen? I don't know. Print screen, I believe. Yeah. God. So long ago. Now, let's get back into some blockchain news. All right.

The blockchain. The JPEG committee is exploring blockchain to put DRM into JPEG. But I've been able to bring JPEGs into Excel for years. I know. So this is this entire episode is about people that are trying to fuck up the Internet.

First, we have link tax and now they're trying to make images like DRM for just JPEGs. Guys, guys, guys. Time out. Time out. Time out. Yeah. Yeah. The beast has left the barn. You know, you cannot take a standard that is so ubiquitous as JPEG and then try and think that, oh, we can just put it on the blockchain and then we can DRM it and you get you get your pennies on the dollar.

No. It doesn't work like that. Somebody just build. Listen, everybody, EU, JPEG committee, all you guys build in something like Flatter. Make it optional for people to do micro donations. Yeah. Why don't we just do that? And now that Flatter is back in the news, I actually I sent it to you, but I didn't put it in the show notes.

Flatter is actually taking podcast donations now. So we're going to get that set up. But I'm glad to see that they're still around and actually doing something because I love the idea. The concept is fantastic. It is so much better than the trying to police things. The Internet cop thing is just so much better.

Yeah. You put in a bucket of money every month and when you Flatter something, it just comes out of your bucket. That's it. And if you only Flatter a few things, then those people get more of the bucket. That's how it works. That is awesome. You know, just everybody should put in 10 bucks a month into Flatter and then the Internet will just work like everybody says we if I ran the world.

But yes, JPEG is exploring blockchain and distributed ledger technologies at the 78 JPEG meeting. 78 meetings. That's a lot of them. That's a lot of meetings. And why do they have to have meetings? It works. It's done. JPEG. What are they doing?

What are they doing? I would like to see the minutes of 77 of these meetings. Yeah. Okay. How's those JPEGs going? Yeah. You see what's up with GIF recently? No, I haven't talked to them. Yeah. Okay. It still works. Yep. Okay. Let's go to the bar. I heard PNG's got a great party going on today.

Yeah. Oh, my God. Talk about make work. Yeah. So for five years now, we have done a very good job of ignoring all the Apple events when they happen. And we're going to continue that tradition. We're just going to briefly mention that they announced three new phones, none of which seem very impressive to me.

Yeah, same here. Quite expensive. The big news that I saw in the articles that I really liked, I saw one about how Apple has normalized the $1,000 phone and how that sucks for everybody. It does. That's why I'm not upgrading. I'm not going to buy a $1,000 phone. Fuck that. Yeah, I'm not upgrading either. I have no reason to.

And also, the only thing I was actually interested in and intrigued by is the Apple Watch 4 does sound pretty badass. The problem being, of course, I just got a 3. They're really putting a lot of health stuff in there, including the ability to do electrocardiograms and basically a I've fallen and I can't get up detector that calls 911 for you.

And the big thing about this is it's basically crushed Fitbit. The Fitbit stock has dropped about 2%, more than that, actually. Sorry, I don't even know. It's 7% hit after Apple unveiled their watch. So Fitbit, you're kind of screwed. I remember reading an article about them or talking about them on the show a while back about how they were trying to pivot to professional health care.

Yeah. Better do that quick. Yeah, yeah. In another bout of irony this morning, I sold all my Fitbit and bought a share of Apple. There you go. Because that's how it works. Yeah. I really want this Series 4 watch, but I just can't afford it. So I'm going to stick with my Series 3 for now and I'm going to try not to fall.

That's about it. I have to wait. Look at the output, the expenditure that you have to make if you want a new phone and a new watch. That's like $1,500. That's insane. That is five months of my car payment and insurance. Yeah. It's insane how much these things are expensive, how expensive these things are now.

Just crazy. Yeah. I mean, there's supercomputers in your pocket and on your wrist, but still, that's a little too much, honestly. I like my 8 Plus. I do want a smaller phone. That's the one thing I noticed in Canada that I pointed out. All of your friends in Canada have really tiny phones.

I'm like, I kind of miss the tiny phone. Yeah. Well, that was another interesting article that I read about the Apple thing is about how they're not going back to smaller phones. They're all getting bigger and bigger now. Nobody's making a smaller one. So you basically just have to stick with an old one. Luckily, they'll still work. I will probably stick with my small 7 for at least another cycle.

Minimum. Maybe two. Yeah. No, I would like to get one of the X's because they do look kind of nice. I don't like the fact that there's no home button anymore because I like pressing a button to turn my phone on. And, you know, I also wanted to know if there's a what they actually need to do in the iPhone for the iWatch Apple Watch for whatever the fuck it is.

They need an alcohol detector in that watch because how many drunk people are going to fall over and have the EMT show up? Right. I mean, you know, it's going to happen. It's going to happen. Mark my words in Gizmodo or in Gadget in about two weeks.

Once these things start actually hitting people's wrists, there is going to be stories about people who got drunk at the bar, fell down on the way home, and had to pay a huge bill to the EMTs that showed up. Bet you. From what I remember about trying to head back to our cabin around 1 a.m.

at the Fireside Conference, there would have been a lot of helicopters coming in. Except we didn't have any goddamn cell service. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah, I want one. But Patreon.com slash GOG. Get us some new watches, people, please. Yes, please.

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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 Maryland. Dave is also co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. What's up, Dave? Hello, gentlemen.

Welcome back. Safe travels. I enjoyed listening to your live show from last week. Sounds like you guys had a good time. There was a liberal application of alcohol. That always helps. Yes, it can't hurt for a live show, right? No, it can't. I counted the cans of beer that we drank while we were just getting ready for the show, and there were 13.

Oh, wow. Wow. We are professionals at what we do. Evidently. Yeah. All that rock and roller history that you guys have, you can pack them away, I guess, huh? And we did stop drinking a couple hours before the show, though, but then had a couple shots right before the show because, you know, a little liquid courage goes a long way.

Yeah. Yeah, but the event was a success. You had a good time? It was fun, yes. Yeah. Yeah, it was good. We wish you were there. Yeah. You know? Maybe next time. I've never actually been to Canada. I've been close. I've been to the very northern tip of New York State, but haven't crossed the border. It's much better in Canada.

Trust me. Things are better. Everything is. Yeah. I came back with three boxes of maple cookies. Ooh. Oh, yes. And my roommate tried one last night, and she's like, oh, my God, these are so much better than Trader Joe's. I'm like, yes, from the source. Right.

Oh, man. Right. All right. Well, shall we dive into some cybersecurity news here? Sure. If we must. Let's scare the peoples. Well, I don't know if you guys caught wind of this, but Trend Micro had a very, very bad week. Okay. Trend Micro, of course, a very well-known, well-respected company in the cybersecurity world.

They got a number of their apps booted from the Mac App Store. Dr. Cleaner, Dr. Cleaner Pro, Dr. Antivirus, Dr. Unarchiver. There's a pattern here emerging. Dr. Battery and Duplicate Finder.

Is Dr. Pepper still up there? That's a good question. That's a Dr. Love. So it turns out that these applications were sending data back to Trend Micro. Yes. Browser, user browser data, and some researchers discovered this and reported it to Apple, reported it to Trend Micro.

Apple yanked, well, I guess it's not a hundred, people assume that Apple yanked the apps from the App Store. There's speculation that it may be that Trend Micro pulled them on their own, but it's, I would say it's probably more likely that they got yanked.

So Trend Micro says that this was a case of sharing code between apps that in some of their, for example, antivirus software, it makes sense for the first thing for the software to do to kind of take a picture of where you've been browsing over the past 24 hours to figure out if you might have any existing problems and this was why the software did this.

And that's a plausible, plausible explanation. You know, these pieces of software need to know what's going on in order to do the work they do. But other software, Dr. Battery didn't need to know what your, what your browser history was.

So Trend Micro says that this is a case of sharing code between applications and they have apologized and they've said they've taken that functionality out of the software. So we'll see how quickly it makes it back to the Mac App Store.

But a real egg on the face for Trend Micro. And it'll be interesting to track to see if they really suffer any long-term reputational damage for this. Well, the track record, as we know on this show, is probably not. Yeah. Yeah. We've got a story coming up that illustrates that with glaring clarity.

Yeah. It was an interesting one to watch play out in real time, though, because the accusations came from the researchers and it took quite a while for Trend Micro to respond. And of course, in a vacuum, the speculation is going to fill that vacuum.

And so lots of gloom and doom, but we'll see how it plays out. It was an interesting one. And speaking of Apple, they have started paying bug bounties for iPhone exploits. Good. Rewards as high as $200,000. I made a joke about this earlier on Twitter that Apple announces bug bounties and Patrick Wardle puts a down payment on that new vacation home.

He seems to be the guy. Whenever you see something about any sort of Mac vulnerability, Patrick is somehow attached to it. But I think it's good for Apple to get on board with this. Yeah, me too. The interesting thing here is, do they allow previous employees to actually put in the bug bounties?

Because this would go back to the story that Brian wanted the proof on when I talked about it in Canada. He's like, I want to see the proof that people who worked at Apple could be putting in bugs that they could cash in on later. I'm sure that there are some legal issues there that would end up not letting people get away with that.

Right. But if I worked there and I gave you the bug and then we split the cash later, that's plausible. Okay. I'm just saying. I suppose. I would think that Apple has some pretty sophisticated version tracking. Yes, I think Apple would have a lawsuit. Yeah.

Yeah. They could look for that sort of thing. But it's an interesting thing to think about. Yes, it is. It is. Now, this one's interesting. I like this. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the GCHQ data collection regime violated human rights.

They're basically hoovering up of everybody's data. Right. They say it's not kosher. Now, this is a long article talking about it. This is over at The Guardian. And it lays out the case that, you know, yes, GCHQ overstepped their bounds. They have shut down that program.

But what they don't talk about is what are the, you know, what's happening with it? Did they get a fine? Did they get a speeding ticket? Nothing. There's nothing in here about, okay, you violated human rights. Right there, that should come with, you know, something.

Right. But it doesn't. I'm going to have to drag you to the Hague. Yeah. There's nothing about, you know, what they have to do to make up for what they've done. Nothing at all. No. I mean, it does outline in the future what sort of safeguards they have to include.

It says new laws must indicate the nature of offenses which give rise to an interception order, a definition of categories, a limit on the duration, that sort of stuff. So that's been outlined for future legislation.

But you're right. I didn't actually think about that when I was reading through this, that it's kind of like, hey, all that stuff you did that we determined is really, really bad. Don't do that again. Don't do it again. That's about it. Yeah. And knock it off. Knock it off. It's like, okay, if I, you know, break into your house and steal your TV, they're like, that was bad.

Don't do that again. You know, it's a slap on the wrist. They just point out that, okay, they did bad stuff. Yeah. They dismantled the agency, but no consequences for anybody or whoever came up with this program in the first place or whoever was running the agency who should be taking the fall for this. But no, nothing. Exactly.

And we had talked about in the past about how, you know, cyber warfare is becoming a thing and these countries don't actually want to talk about it, really. Us being the main country that doesn't want to talk about it. It's like, let's just let sleeping dogs lie. There's a great article over on foreign policy dot com called in cyber war.

There are no rules why the world desperately needs digital Geneva conventions. Did you guys get a chance to read this? I did. In fact, I was just talking to a researcher earlier this week about this very thing. And I think we've talked about this here, too, this sort of reticence of nation states to draw clear lines in the sand for what constitutes a cyber war.

They don't want to say what it is because there are benefits to having it stay fuzzy. Well, it also ties into something that Jason and I were discussing a little bit earlier in the podcast when we were talking about what the EU is doing with their copyright directive and extremist posts and things like that.

Who are the cops that will monitor this? Like we don't who's who's going to keep track of who's doing what in cyber war and saying, you know, do this, do that, don't do that. I guess we make that part of the UN somehow. I don't know. We need a massive artificial intelligence living on the moon.

That's what I said. AI is going to police everything. The thing about this is we know that attribution is famously sticky when it comes to the cyber attacks. It is really hard to nail down who done it. It's not like clue. It's not like Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick, you know?

And unlike traditional, you know, terrorist attacks and things like that. Nobody is coming up and claiming credit for these sorts of things in general. Right. Or you've even got people raising false flags, trying to throw people off the trail. Yeah. One thing I pointed out, I included a link to is the Talon Manual, which I think is the closest thing we have right now to a guideline for norms when it comes to cyber operations.

It really takes a look at the existing laws and how cyber operations intersect with them, I suppose, is the best way to say it. So questions like, you know, if my nation gets attacked by cyber means, is it within international law for me to respond using guns and missiles and tanks and bombs?

And the answer in the Talon Manual is yes, it is. So if this is something you're interested in, go check out the Talon Manual. I won't go so far as to say it's an entertaining read. But I guess if you're someone who's into this sort of thing.

Not a real page turner? No, not really. But if it's your thing, you know, it's your thing and you go and go go enjoy yourself. Yeah, I'll definitely give that a read because that is kind of my thing. I'm very interested in this stuff. And I like in the foreign policy article where they said that, you know, they talked about was the embryos that got destroyed because somebody forgot to flip a switch.

And they're like, is it there a difference between a foreign soldier with an ax coming in and in busting the power supply or somebody in a keyboard doing it? There should there's no difference. It's still an act of war if somebody is destroying your infrastructure, whether it be from a keyboard or physical means.

And I really I really thought that that kind of drove the point home. I really enjoyed this article. Yeah, there's a lot to think about here. The thing that I think about over and over and over again that this article points out that if there's one take home sentence, it's the nature of cyber warfare is that is it is that it is asymmetrical.

And I think that's been the real game changer here. Countries for a very small investment relative to bombs and tanks and planes and missiles can cause great harm to other big, tough nations. And that's the that's the change we've seen.

That's that's yeah, that's where we are. So, yeah, you don't need to build a nuclear weapon when you can go to Best Buy and buy a PC for a couple hundred bucks and then put some kids in front of it and say, take down the power grid, you know? Right. Yeah. Or just, you know, hire a bunch of Russian social media agents to post online all this crazy stuff and then install some idiot that doesn't know anything about government in charge of the biggest company in the world, country in the world.

I mean, what could possibly happen? Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. I don't know. I'm going to throw a call in audible here because it just reminded me of you guys been following this this series of house explosions up in New England. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So what's been interesting to follow with this is you could almost count down and say, wait for it for someone to say, must be critical infrastructure attack from foreign adversaries. Right. Right. Yeah.

You know, it's coming. You know, it's coming. Couldn't be failing infrastructure because we haven't because we don't invest in it. Yes. Right. Right. And so I have a good friend who I saw on Twitter. He he's actually a fire chief. So he's a professional firefighter.

But he's one of those career firefighter guys who's taken the time and taken the classes and studied all the things. So his conclusion, without knowing a whole lot about it, and he did say, granted, he's never seen anything like this to the scale. But his conclusion, it's probably the simple answer that somebody screwed up and just sent too much gas and under too much pressure down the down the line.

And kaboom. And it's probably not much more complicated than that. And then you have other people like the folks at Dragos, who obviously are experts when it comes to industrial control systems. They're saying, OK, everybody, just let's let's let's be calm here.

You know, we don't know anything about this yet. It's no good jumping to conclusion. I think the what people have the tinfoil hat folks on Twitter have been saying, this is a weaponized version of Stuxnet. Oh, right. Yeah, that's.

That's what's been making the rounds and people have been trying to respond to. So but but how interesting that when something like this happens, people now reflexively turn to nation state attack. Right. It's a cyber act of war.

Right. And I guess that's what reminded me of it. So, yeah. When in doubt, go to Putin. That's how it works. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad that today I'm glad that my house does not have gas heat. Mine does. So I'll be standing outside if it smells a little fishy.

Right. Right. Now, this one is this one's kind of funny. Hackers can steal a Tesla Model S in seconds by cloning its key fob. With about 600 bucks in radio and computing equipment, you can basically clone the fob. But this is this was making the rounds on this is for a wired story.

And it's not the current Model S's because they fixed this problem a while ago. But if you have an older Model S, which I know a few of my friends do, you might want to go get a new key. Now, is this piling onto Tesla because, to be fair, almost any older fob you can do this with.

Right. Exactly. This is not news. I mean, this attack is not new. No, with the I guess one of the cars that have the proximity key, right? You get close enough to the car and it just unlocks and then you can press a button and start the car.

They're all vulnerable to this. Yeah. You can do this with my BMW. Yeah. You can do this with my BMW right now. If you want to invest $600 and stand outside my place and steal my BMW, you can. Yeah. That's the thing. And I wanted to point this out because this is like clickbaity headlines because everybody is like piling on Tesla nowadays.

And it really annoys me when I see things like this because it's like, oh, OK, Elon smoked a joint. Oh, OK, OK. Open season on Tesla now. We loved him last week. You know, we loved him last week. But this week he's a piece of shit. So, yeah, this story could have easily been BMW. This story could have been Mercedes.

This story could have been Toyota. But they chose Tesla because that's that's the fun thing to do right now. Right. Yeah. It just it pisses me off. Yeah. Either way, go get a go get a new key and set that pin for your for your car. Right. The fact the fact that we have pins for our cars is pretty amusing, though, you got to admit.

And speaking of no repercussions for people who treat your data like it is last week's underwear. Mobile spyware maker M spy back in the news. We talked about them when they first had their big data breach and they're back with the same exact thing.

This has all happened before and it will all happen again. Yeah. Yeah. Fool me once. Shame on you. Fool me twice. Shame on me. Yeah. Buy me once. Shame on you anyway, because, you know, it's spyware for your kids, whatever. But, yeah, I mean, this is just points out the fact that there are no repercussions for fucking up nowadays.

You keep your job. You keep your company. You don't get you. I mean, you might get a small fine for that dollar per user class action lawsuit, but you can just keep on trucking. Just keep on trucking. Now, I'm just I'm thinking in real time here.

What would what would be the GDPR implications of this? If this was a European company, they could come after them, right? I mean, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're relying on the marketplace to do it. And it does not seem to be working. So what they need is someone needs to prove that they have one European citizen customer.

Yeah. At MSpy. Yep. And and there you go. Right. Yeah. I'm sure they have to have European customers somewhere. Somewhere. Maybe maybe look in Europe. Perhaps. It's a good place to start.

Good as any. Wow. I like the way you're thinking. Capital idea. Capital idea. See those sale records. And what country did they put down? There we go. Yeah. And yep, still for sale. You can buy it right now. One month basic, $29. One month premium, $70. Yep.

That's pricey. It is pricey. For what you're paying for, you ain't getting that much else. Oh, I have a session code. Great. They're tracking my session, but they can't track their own damn data. Yeah. Just what I want. Now, Keybase.

You guys heard of Keybase? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So, Keybase has a browser extension that lets you chat, right? Okay. You can open up a Keybase chat from a website, mainly Facebook. Well, there's a problem with their browser extension that lets you do this.

You can basically open up an unencrypted chat or at least steal the keys for the chat if you run the website that this thing works on. Right. And Keybase came back and said, like, the security researchers said, hey, guys, this is a big problem.

You should check this out. And they said, eh, we don't care. Their entire business is based on secure chat, and their product is basically not working. And they just said, eh, edge case. Right.

Mm-hmm. That's it. Yep. I mean, is it an edge case? It's a complete edge case because you have to have access to the website to run it. But you can do other things with iframes and just tracking the DOM to get the keys for the chat and things like that.

It's just one of those things where it's like they're leaving out a – they're basically putting in a huge hole for people to exploit. And this researcher basically put it out there that, yeah, this is kind of a bad thing. But their response was, we don't care. Like, we know it exists, you know.

And we're not going to fix it. We're not going to fix it because we don't care. And this is the state of things right now. You know, it's just – why even bother thinking that anything is secure? Well, I got a story for you, Jason, that dovetails nicely.

In India, they have a program called ADHAR. It's the world's largest biometric identification system, and they've been – the government's been trying to grow it for years and years. There are over 1 billion people in it right now. And guess what? You can access all of their personal data for just $10 through WhatsApp because it got hacked.

Nice. So billions of people's data for $10 in WhatsApp thanks to this program. Now, this includes fingerprints, retina scans, names, addresses, phone numbers through which SIM cards can be purchased and important government services and bank accounts can be accessed. So they're using this system, and they want it to be a main form of identification that you base everything on, and their security sucks ass.

And the thing that drives me crazy about it is they're interviewing some of the people in India that are tied up with this, like this Saket Modi, the CEO of Lucidius, a digital security services provider, says, You know, it's something that's doing much more good than harm. These are small little bumps which have been over-magnified.

One billion people's data is a small little fucking bump? Are you kidding me? So, yeah, I just – I don't get it. Like, what do you do when a government is pushing you to enter into these programs and you know the shit's going to get hacked?

It's insane. One of the things I thought was interesting about this was that when the system was originally launched, they went ahead and they did that, and then they found that it had certain vulnerabilities. So they did what you do, which is you send out patches. They patch the hardware. They patch the software. And so what these folks are selling, part of what they're selling anyway, is the older versions of the software and patches to downgrade the hardware to a previous version.

So to make it less secure, sort of restore it to that initial version that it was when it started shipping. Yeah. Which is kind of interesting that you can do that, that the upgrades don't keep you from downgrading.

Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah, you'd think you'd build that in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, sometimes you just want to say, yeah, who cares? Give up. Well, on the one hand – Well, the problem is that it seems to be what everybody who's supposed to be protecting us is doing.

Who cares? That's what I mean. We give up. Yeah. It really does wear you down, doesn't it? I mean, you think – Yeah. On the one hand, you say hats off to India for attempting something like this. You know, somebody had to be first. Yeah. And I don't think India was first to do this, but I think they were first to do this on this kind of a scale.

And so yay for trying. And now whoever comes along and does it next will have a great example of what not to do. It reminds me, before you joined the show, Dave, Brian and I were doing Hack of the Week in this segment. And we literally got what we called breach fatigue because every week there was such a massive breach.

This was back in the Home Depot days and, you know, all those others. Oh, my God. Yeah. Targets. Yeah. So many of them. And it's just like, okay, who gave away my credit card number this week is what it boils down to. Yeah. And this one is just like, oh, you want my fingerprints and my retina scans?

How about some DNA? Would you like some DNA with that? Right. Says the guy who willingly gave his away to 23andMe. Exactly. So that's why I – because I gave up. I just gave up. It wears you down. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I wanted to close this week with something that came by I thought was interesting.

This is from a company called VPN Mentor. They sent this to me, one of their PR folks. And they had some researchers who were doing some work on some of these personal assistant devices, the Amazon Echo, things like that. And they discovered how easy it is to hack into these.

They have a little video that they posted that shows how they do it. I guess there's a little – I don't know, a rubber gasket on the bottom of the device that you can peel off. And that gives you access to a port that you can then connect to and hack away at these devices.

Ooh. I'm going to try that. Yeah. Now, the interesting take-home, though, and how they caught my attention when they emailed me was the way – where they were coming at this from was these devices are starting to show up on the used market. So, on eBay, on Craigslist.

So, their point was, think twice before you buy one of these things used because they are relatively easy to hack. Right. And you could have a live microphone in your house.

It may not be sending the data to Amazon now. Right. Right. And – but to the larger point, would you buy – are we at the point now where you should think twice about buying any piece of sophisticated electronics used? Your phone, your computer?

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, unless you know you can do a complete wipe. But even then, there could be some hardware thing that's staked in that you're not aware of. What does that mean? If someone's able to get in and monkey with the firmware or, you know, whatever, how do you know? How do you know?

You don't. It's actually a really interesting point. I think – I think I have a little screenplay coming up about that. That's good. Yes. Pre-hacked Amazon Echoes. I think we can definitely do something with that because, yeah, if it's that easy to basically throw in a SIM card and have key loggers and voice, you know, recorders on it, that's kind of fun.

I like that. Deep thoughts for the day. Yeah, yeah. I do want to do a quick shout-out to Dan Tentler, who is one of the great security guys out there. We got to hang out with him a bit at Fireside and saw one of his talks. He didn't have his slides for the talk, which was kind of a bummer.

But his talk was really fun. So we had some videos that – I think, Dave, you sent me his first videos. Yeah, I think so. The, like, 115 batshit crazy things that you can put on the internet. Right. He's a great speaker and a really cool guy, so we'll have his Twitter linked up in the show notes.

But definitely check out Dan's work, especially his Shodan work. Yeah, it's good stuff. Yeah. The fact that you can basically, you know, fire up an Amazon instance and scan the entire internet on one port in about eight minutes for, like, a few bucks is pretty cool.

Yep. Yeah. And simultaneously terrifying. Completely terrifying, yes. The entire IPv4 space in a few minutes. That's nuts. So – but he did get me – I'm going to go buy the Shodan, like, you know, business package, which is $45 and gives you basically everything in the world with notifications and – oh, I cannot wait to play with Shodan.

This is going to be – this is going to be so much fun. All right. Well, we'll wait to get your report on that. As soon as I find my own camera on Shodan, you guys will be the first to know. Of course, of course. Yes. That's amazing. It all – it comes full circle, doesn't it?

It comes full circle. It always does. All right, gentlemen. Well, that's what I have this week. I'm happy to have you guys back. Nice to talk to you again. And I'll talk to you next time. Cops and doodads. Well, we were talking about Amazon earlier and how they can do no wrong and they basically just continue to print money.

Well, they're going to sell full-size Christmas trees starting in November, shipped direct to your door 10 days after being cut down. That's crazy. Live Christmas trees. Live Christmas trees showing up at your door. Now, I admit that's super convenient, but don't ruin the holidays.

Go out with your family and go pick a tree. Don't do this. Well, I like the fake Christmas tree. That's kind of my jam. I love the ones with the pre-built-in lights with the disco mode and things like that. And we're in the market. We're in the market for a new one this year. So I'm going to be going to Amazon to get a Christmas tree, but it's not going to be a live one because I like my house not burnt down.

Thank you very much. Okay. Well, fair enough. I say go out and go out with your family. Do it the right way. Don't order this off Amazon. This week, I went down the Ancestry.com rabbit hole. I would not do DNA, but I did enjoy the hell out of Ancestry.com. It was a lot of fun, actually.

It didn't get very far, I've got to be honest. Like, I got to about my great-grandparents, and then it just started to shit out with the hints, and I'm not getting anymore, which is a bummer, because the real reason that you would use this is to go a little bit further than that. I mean, I can get most of this information from my parents. But it was cool.

It's a good interface. It's neat. I like it. Yeah, it's kind of fun to do that. Fortunately for my family, we have an Ancestry person in the family who actually has gone through and traced our family history back to, I think, the early 1600s.

Wow. Impressive. Yeah, so our last name is Kidder, and the Kidder was the deer keeper for the King of England. So, you know, keeping the kids, get it? And that's where our name came from, and that line of the family goes there. The other side, the DeFillippo side, unfortunately, ends at Ellis Island around 1907, because everybody that came from Italy changed their name when they got off the boat.

So being a DeFillippo is actually rare. Most people change their name to Phillips, which is kind of interesting. So trying to find that is hard. My record's kind of petered out at Ellis Island as well. Yeah, but Ancestry's fun. It's a good way to waste an afternoon. Yeah, I mean, the really interesting thing is all the documents that are scanned out there, like seeing the documents for, like, my grandparents when they came to Ellis Island.

Like, you can see their signature and everything. That's cool as shit. So it's worth it just for that. Yeah. Worth it. I mean, I'm just using the free level. Yeah, that is kind of cool. That's fun. I should dig up my great-grandparents, because I know they came over in 1907. Yeah. I'm sure they probably got those documents.

Like I said, they have scans of most of the Ellis Island documents, which is cool. It's really cool. Yeah. My dad actually still has the trunk that they use to bring all their belongings over with. Oh, so do my parents. Yeah. They've got it. So that's pretty cool stuff. Yeah. So that's cool. I like that.

You and I have talked about Facebook Purity, the plugin that makes Facebook useful. Now, Jason, you're no longer on Facebook, so you're not using it anymore. But I'm here to tell you that Facebook Purity is definitely having some fails with Facebook. I think there's a battle going on as I loaded my timeline, and as I was doing the story notes, the second story on my timeline, which should be in alpha, or not alphabetical, should be in chronological order regardless with all my friends, because that's what the plugin's supposed to do.

The second story on my timeline is from September 13th. Today is the 14th. From a post, is a post from a friend, oh, I'm sorry. On my timeline yesterday, the 13th, was a post from a friend that was done on September 10th with the most recent comment on September 11th. There's no way that should be second on my timeline.

Nope. Yeah. I mean, it's a battle, because as soon as they change the DOM or do any kind of design changes, then the plugin's going to have to update, because it's an arms race with that thing. Yeah, it totally is. So keep at it, because I love that plugin. I even donated. Yeah.

Yeah, I did too. I did too, even though I don't use Facebook anymore. I thought he did the Lord's work by getting rid of the Zuck. So I ordered my Oura Ring this morning, so it should hopefully be here soon. A couple people had them up at Fireside, and I was really just bummed I didn't get mine yet, because I had some issues with getting my sizing kit, because I moved, and their customer service sucks.

So I actually had to get the CEO on the phone, because I had a friend who knows the CEO, and get the CEO on the phone to get my sizing kit. But it is now in the mail. So hopefully soon, I will have my Oura Ring, and we will have an update on that soon. I also wanted to talk about my keyboard.

I got an Editor's Keys keyboard from the UK. And it's one of those things, you know, you've seen those overlays for keyboards? Yeah. They just have all key commands for different apps that you're going to use, like there's a Photoshop overlay. So I got the Logic keyboard from Editor Keys.

Nice thing about it is it's a desktop keyboard, USB, so I got to plug it in, which it doesn't matter. I don't care. It doesn't go anywhere. It's backlit, which is great, because none of the fucking Apple keyboards are backlit. I know, that's a bummer, because I like to podcast in the dark, and I can't see my damn keyboard.

Exactly. And I mean, I'm working late at night, and I don't want to have the lights on, because it keeps the dogs up. You know how it goes. Anyway, so this thing is backlit. It's got all the key commands for Logic on it, like in all of the, you know, option keys and control keys and all that stuff. So I've actually gotten better at Logic since I've gotten this keyboard, because there are a lot of key commands that I just didn't know, and they're just laid out here.

I'm like, oh, that's where that's at. And I'm like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's great. Yeah, back when I was a Pro Tools guy, I always had the Pro Tools keyboard when I was using it. Just everything goes faster. It's quicker. Yeah, it's a nice build quality. The keys are a little different than the Apple keyboard I'm used to, because I still use the Apple extended wireless in the house.

Plus, you have the pound sign instead of the dollar sign. Ah, no, no, no. I got the American version. Oh, okay. But I think it was like $130, but well worth it. I mean, it's a little pricey. You can get an overlay for much cheaper, but I needed a backlit keyboard.

So now I've got my Contour Shuttle Pro V2 on the left. I got my editor's keys, logic keyboard in the middle, and I've got my Logitech MX Master 2 mouse. And that's so I've gotten actually no Apple products like that. I work with every day except for the iMac, which obviously I need.

But so far for editing, if you're doing audio stuff, this is an unbelievably awesome setup. It is so easy to use. And you can just once you get everything dialed in and you're doing an edit, you actually don't have to touch the keyboard, which is kind of funny that I got a keyboard that I use with that I actually don't have to touch because you can get the shuttle program to do almost everything you need to do along with the mouse.

Because all of these things have different settings for each app that you use. So you can have different commands for every app. And it's a really great setup. I highly recommend it if you're doing any type of audio editing. It has saved me a ton of time and well worth the capital outlay, as they say.

I found a new podcast, Jason. It's called The Secret History of the Future, and it's a joint venture between Slate and The Economist. The reason I stumbled across this is we talk about AI a lot here and about how it doesn't exist. We shit on AI a lot here. We shit on AI a lot. So this is the first episode is called The Box That AI Lives In.

And it says the arguments about AI go much further in the past than you might think. It goes back to 1783 in Paris when there was a chess match between one of the consistants, a human who is considered the greatest chess player in Paris, Francois, and possibly the world. And everybody's excited because he's about to go head to head with the other biggest sensation in the chess world at the time, a machine.

It's actually just a mechanical Turk. It was a lie. I was going to say, was this a mechanical Turk? Yes. It's basically where the original, to some degree. But it did spark this huge intellectual conversation about man, machine, and intelligence. So AI has been going around for a very long time.

The podcast was fantastic, obviously very well produced, super interesting. I highly recommend it. They've got a second episode now. They're looking at what they were considered the first cyber attack, which they say happened in the 1830s. And they figure another one will be about how Victorians actually invented virtual reality.

So I love this idea of taking these very, very in the nose, you know, what we think is cutting edge technologies and tying them back to like 200 years ago and the genesis of the concepts. It's amazing. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. I will definitely have to check this out.

I listened to a new podcast called Micro Mobility, which we talked about on the last show. And wow, that show is weird. I mean, these guys are like serious about micro mobility.

Basically, what they call is like anything under 150 kilograms as a vehicle is what they term it as. They're talking about battery length and, you know, city dispersions and things like it's I mean, they are serious about this shit. Don't listen to it.

OK, so I'm going to say I listen to three episodes so you don't have to. It is the most boring podcast I think I may have ever listened to in my life. Besides this one. Yes. Yes. So so thank you, Gabriel Pagan, for putting me on to micro mobility.

And when you come to town, I owe you a dick punch for wasting three hours of my life. Well, speaking of batteries, I stumbled across this over at Lifehacker, which I now basically look at just for the shits and giggles at this point. You really can charge your phone with a nine volt battery.

What? Yeah. You can charge your cell phone with a nine volt battery and they show you how to do it. But I would say outside of guitar techs because of all those pedals and yanking one out of a smoke detector, who the fuck has nine volt batteries around anymore? Yeah, seriously. I walk into anything's house.

I'm sure I'll find a charger way before I find a nine volt battery. I have nine volt batteries in my house because one of my microphones requires a nine volt battery. But right there. Nobody has a nine volt. Seriously. And all right.

And this take us to the story that I saw you put in the show notes and I've been dreading ever since I saw it. Paul McCartney and John Lennon masturbated together to Bridget Bardo. The only reason I put this in here is because you used to work for Green Day, right? I did. So if you look at the picture of Paul McCartney in this post, he kind of looks like Billy Joe, doesn't he?

Yeah. Yeah, he does. Yeah. I remember a story that my friends used to tell me that Green Day used to do this exact same thing around their house. And I'm like, OK, well, they're the new Beatles. That's it. I know.

I always like to end on a low. Well, you usually bring the low. So who died this week, Brian? Oh, did anybody die? No, I don't think so. OK. I was like, did I miss something? Closing shout outs.

Until next time, I'm Brian Schilmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com 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 281.

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 talk to you next week. I bet none of you were expecting to hear stories about Green Day and the Beatles masturbating. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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