283: Hi, Victim.

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. What'd you do this morning, Brian? I'm a little tired. Okay. Did somebody go out last night? We are the Grumpy Old Geeks, so let me just quickly tell you the difference between 25 versus 45.

Yeah, friend of the show, Fergal, and one-time guest host, moved to Ireland recently. He flew in yesterday to drive his daughter off to college, her first year in college. So he came to stay with me. His flight was delayed by about three hours.

So come 10.30, 10.45 p.m. last night as my wife is sleeping and my son is sleeping and I'm sitting on the couch waiting for Fergal to arrive still. I thought about the 20-year difference between me as an old man sitting on that couch at 45, kind of grumpy and wishing I was sleeping and aware of the fact that I'm about to just go out versus 25-year-old me who would have just been getting ready to go out.

Yeah. At 10.45, Thursday night, I believe I would have been going to Perversion, which was my favorite of the Hollywood clubs. I had one for almost every night. Mine too. I like Perversion the best because it was the mixture of goth and industrial and electronica. So you would hear like a Sisters of Mercy track and then Nine Inch Nails and then Underworld.

It was right in my wheelhouse. Loved it. I spent so much time at Perversion because I lived like three blocks away. So I was there every week for a very long time. I went through many pair of vinyl pants dancing on that stage. Yes. So a 25-year-old Brian would have just been getting ready to go out and 45-year-old Brian desperately did not want to just go out.

He wanted to go nappy time. Yes, he did, but Fergal did arrive three hours late, and out we went into the night, and I am a bit slow this morning. Oh, great. Yeah. I was up at five in the morning chasing Bam Bam around the yard for two hours trying to get her to pee in a ladle because she's been sick all week, and that's what you have to do to get your dog tested again.

You've got to get him to pee in a ladle, and if you miss, then you've got to get him hydrated again and lather, rinse, repeat. Does one have a specific ladle for this, or should I just never have soup at your house? One has the 99-cent store in the neighborhood, so we have a pee ladle just for the dogs.

Literally, there's a pee ladle because when the dogs get sick, you've got to catch the pee, and that's how you do it. Yes. Yes, and sometimes if you're craftier than I am, you put the ladle at the end of a stick so you're not trying to bend over and get any splash damage.

Right. I probably could have used a pee ladle this morning. Fun, fun. So a little follow-up. The Apple Watch discussion that we had last week talking about the EKG and AFib stuff, there are a lot of people that are saying, yeah, it's never going to work. It's going to be the sensors suck, you know, and they're going to be averaging the six times when it happens to make sure that it's not just a false positive.

Well, you're going to be waiting a while for that anyway, so it doesn't really matter. There's some very small print that says it'll be out later. It's not ready at launch. It's not coming at launch. That's one of the things that they use to promote you, to get you to buy it.

It's like featuring heavily in their marketing. Yeah, no, at the very bottom, it says ECG app coming later this year, which means next year. Yeah. Which means Apple Watch Series 5. Exactly. It's going to show up the same time as that Power Pad is going to show up that they pimped.

It was going to be our one-stop charging for all of our Apple devices, and that's still nowhere to be seen. Yeah. Well, to some degree, that actually makes me feel good because I was like, oh, man, I can't believe I'm going to have to upgrade my watch already. Now, I'm happy that I can wait for the next one because I hate going every single iteration.

I want to skip at least one, if not two. Yeah, maybe three. Maybe three. Hell, I may never change this watch. I like it. Oh, speaking of which, I upgraded. Did you end up doing your upgrade to iOS 5 or whatever they're calling it?

I-O-Watch 5? Watch-O-O-S-K-A. I could probably use some of that during that upgrade cycle because that was a pain in the ass. Big thanks to Justin Vanderberg over on Twitter for helping me out with that because he dug up what my problem was.

I had to go in and I had to delete all the beta certificates from the phone and the watch. Reboot 75 times, kill six chickens, and then it would finally let me upgrade. It's the chickens that always makes the difference. I know. I'm like, is it four chickens or five chickens? And is it Wittershins? Or which way do I turn? Yeah.

That's how it goes. I've got a little bit of follow-up about the EU and their upcoming laws and the brouhaha that's going on about that, about how it's going to ban memes and other things of that nature. There's a really in-depth, long article over on Slate called the EU's long journey towards banning memes that basically is stating, we shouldn't be all that surprised about this because Europe has been heading towards that way with their copyright laws anyways for a long time.

And, yeah, it could be a problem depending on how it's specifically enacted, and we'll see what happens, basically. I don't want to get too into it because much like the music thing that I didn't want to discuss last week, it hasn't passed yet. So we'll see what happens, but if you want to kind of get up on it and see what could potentially happen, I highly recommend you read this article.

It gets you in front of the game, as it were. Yeah, we're not dead yet. And we have further information about that New Mexico observatory that was mysteriously shut down for over a week with the FBI showing up and black helicopters in the sky and all that sort of stuff.

Sadly, sadly, we haven't had first contact. There may have been some contact, not good contact. Very dirty contact. Yes, the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, was evacuated and remained closed for over 10 days in September because a janitor was using the Wi-Fi to download child pornography.

And upload and basically leaving a laptop in different spots and somebody found it. And they thought he was going to get violent because he thought that there was a safe, secure location where nobody would steal his laptop. Well, guess what? They didn't really steal it.

They just handed it over to the feds and the feds are like, oh, let's track this guy. But then the guy started to get violent or like have violent ideations towards the staff. Yeah. So it wasn't the FBI actually that decided to evacuate and shut down the observatory. That came from the observatory's management because they were worried about how the janitor might possibly act as they were trying to basically catch him.

So, yeah, sadly, not very interesting. No, no, pretty much run of the mill kitty porn problems. Never thought I'd be saying that. That's a really sad indictment of our society that we've put together the phrase run of the run of the mill and child pornography. Yep. Yeah.

In the news. Our favorite Bird scooter is back in the news. Oh, boy. They have hit 10 million scooter rides in their first year of business. Okay. Now, the fun part about this is they announced this after Lime had already announced earlier in the day that it had surpassed 11.5 million rides.

So, and this is interesting. I did not know that Bird currently operates in 100 cities. Yeah. That's a lot. Well, they've dumped those things everywhere. I mean, we've been hearing, I tried to let this story die, but our listeners won't because they keep telling us when they show up in different cities.

Because there's a hundred of them now. That's a lot of email that we get. Speaking of that, Heather over on Facebook wrote us, the Pentagon hates your scooters, too. Nice. So, this is an article on defense1.com. And basically, they are in Washington. And the Department of Defense would like you and your ride-sharing company to know that if you leave your scooters or shared bicycles anywhere on their property, they will be impounded immediately.

So, don't take your birds over to the Pentagon. Now, I wonder if they're going to actually take that rule and move it over to the military bases like we were talking about before. Because they were showing up on some military bases. Yeah. And I thought that was a really sneaky way to get electronics onto a military base.

You know, like stick a stingray in one and then be able to catch all the phone calls or something like that. I don't know. It just seemed like having third-party bird scooters or just any kind of electronic scooter that has this giant lithium-ion battery that has a tendency to catch fire all the time and let it roll around on a military base.

Outside of the fact that they're GPS tracked, I mean, the military's had issues just with like that one app, Stravos or whatever it was called. Yeah, Strava. Yeah. So, yeah. You know, what the hell's going on here, people? Did we all just collectively get stupid? Yeah. Okay.

Just checking. Because it just seems like we're, as technology seems to have outpaced not only law, but also just human stupidity. It just, I don't get it. Like the idea that we would allow this stuff onto sensitive locations. What are you people thinking?

Well, I mean, the Strava thing was a little bit different because it was an app that anybody could download onto their phone and bring that phone onto a base. And those bases happened to be secret bases. You're not really going to get somebody dropping off a big batch of birds at a secret military base in Afghanistan. Yet.

Yet. If Coldplay can get it together that I have to stick my cell phone when I worked for the band in a goddamn bag and leave it outside before I go to a concert, the military can't sort this out? Well, neither can the White House. Thank you, Omarosa. Yeah, no shit. Yeah. Have you been keeping up with the Ticketmaster News?

I saw. Yes. This is something that I am definitely interested in and keeping abreast of. Am I surprised by this? Hell no. Well, let's talk about what actually happened. The CBC News, which is, you know, the Canadian broadcasting either corporation or company, I can never remember, in the Toronto Star had a great report about how Ticketmaster is letting scalpers basically use their platform to sell their ill-gotten tickets so they can get a double commission.

They're double dipping. Now, they're saying that, no, we would never do this. No, this is rogue people gone crazy. I call bullshit on that. I bet this is going to shake out that Ticketmaster has been doing this all along and they're happy to do it because it doubles their revenue.

It actually more than doubles their revenue because the, you know, the fees that they're going to get on the more expensive tickets are even higher than the first time they sold it to you. Look, stopping bots and scalpers is hard. It would involve spending money.

Letting them continue to do what they do involves them making money. Yep. Is Ticketmaster working very hard to stop them? No. Yeah, let's just apply Occam's razor to this, you know? That's really all you have to do. And then you can just say, no, Ticketmaster has been doing this all along and they're very happy to do that because as soon as they shut this down, their revenue is going to drop through the floor.

Yep. Or they're going to double their already ridiculous service fee. So annoying. That's why I don't go to shows anymore if I actually have to buy a ticket. Yeah. Who pays to go to a show? Not me. Bitcoin, Jason. What have they done now?

Well, Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the gold standard, as it were, except there's no gold or standards involved with cryptocurrencies. That's true. Of cryptocurrency. On Tuesday, the developers of Bitcoin Core, the software that effectively powers the Bitcoin blockchain, released a new version that patched a major vulnerability that would have allowed malicious users to crash the entire network, making everybody's digital coins effectively useless.

For less than $80,000, you could have brought down the entire Bitcoin network. You know, that wonderful thing that all you bit bros say is going to change the world? Yeah. No. Yeah. And here's the nice part about this. Some people are already patching their versions of Bitcoin because since Bitcoin's open source, people have been taking it and using it to generate their own cryptocurrencies, you know, based on Bitcoin.

So, you know, now we have a lot of, you know, crappy coins out there that probably still have this vulnerability in there. So, you should be able to basically take down just about any coin that has used the Bitcoin Core code. Yep. Nice.

Love it. Nice. That's awesome. We've also talked about 3D printing on the show and particularly 3D printing guns and how terrifying that is. And yet another example of there not being laws that catch up to technology quickly enough. The spearhead of this movement has been Cody Wilson, who has been basically just going around everywhere saying, this is our right.

Damn it. We have a, we're America. Gun, gun, gun. We can do this. It's freedom. Freedom. And has been publishing 3D printed firearm plans everywhere online. Well, I'm not a big fan of this guy. And as I always say, if you find one rotten apple, chances are there's another one in there somewhere.

So, surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, in my case, not only is he a bit of a douchebag because of, you know, wanting to distribute 3D guns everywhere, he made headlines for another reason. He was charged with sexual assault of an underage girl whom he allegedly came into contact with the, I'm sure, totally legit website, sugardaddymeat.com.

I just get, ah, my skin's curling just from that domain. Yeah. Actually, I think they have a big ad right by LAX. I drive by it all the time. It's kind of weird. Right next to Ashley Madison's ad? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. According to the arrest warrant, he met the girl at a coffee shop in Austin, Texas before taking her to a hotel where he allegedly sexually assaulted her and then paid her $500.

So, basically, you hook her? Ah, hey. Can you, can, does one assault somebody if they're, I don't know. Anyways, whatever. Not a good guy. So, yeah. So, he picked, this girl is apparently under 17. Oopsies. Oops. He's over 30. Oopsies.

There is surveillance footage of him meeting her. Oopsies. And, apparently, he's in Taiwan and magically and mysteriously missed his flight back to the U.S. Yes, and this just in from Ars Technica. He is reportedly trying to rent an apartment in Taiwan from local media, like a Chinese local media outlet has posted that.

So, yeah. Let's see if he gets that apartment and sticks around for a while because I bet he's not coming back. I'm thinking he's not coming home. I'm thinking he's not coming home. But, luckily for him, he continued to just distribute 3D printed guns online anywhere. So, good on him.

Yay, people. Yay, people. Let's see. There's a new documentary coming out called Swiped, hooking up in the digital age by journalist Nancy Joe Sales. The only interesting thing here is it tells us something that we already knew and we talk about all the time.

The fact that these apps, particularly things like Tinder, but we also know Facebook, etc., use basic psychological principles to game you and addict you. Shocking. Yeah, this goes a little deeper than just the BF Skinner stuff using psychology against you.

There's a lot of stuff in there that gets a little bit deeper. And Dr. David Buss, who we just interviewed yesterday for the Jordan Harbinger show, goes pretty deep into that. And when that episode comes out, I'll link to it in the notes. But Jordan actually watched the documentary and said it was actually really good. So, I'm going to check it out.

It's on HBO. So, I don't have HBO. Ah, sweet. Or maybe I'll just get HBO for a little while. I'll send you my password. Ah, thank you very much. That's what I wanted to hear. Now, there's some interesting news in the podcast world.

BuzzFeed News has closed their in-house audio production studio. Okay. They're shutting down their podcast division and going more towards on-demand video stuff. Right. So, they're pivoting to video. Yay. Right. Fine by me. Go ahead. Stay out of the podcast world.

And this comes on the heels of Panoply actually leaving the podcast content business, which is kind of a big deal because Panoply made some pretty big shows. That's a – what's his face? Malcolm Gladwell's over there? A couple other people, right? Yeah, there were a lot of really popular podcasts over there, and they're shutting down, and they're going to focus on their technology side called Megaphone, which is kind of like – we use Libsyn to host our podcast.

They have their own in-house thing called Megaphone. I actually got a demo from them, and it's really funny. Their technology is what it is. It's basically, you know, ad insertion in a podcast that people can come in and bid on and pay for so you can sell your back catalog, which if you're a podcaster, you know your back catalog is basically worthless.

Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. Nobody wants to advertise on your back catalog, and it's – this is one of those things where it's like, okay, we spent all this money on this great content, and, you know, we have to pay more money to get more. And we think, oh, we're just going to go technology, and it'll be recurring, and then we can just build that up, and it'll be a great platform.

Well, yeah, that's – the money that they want to host on Megaphone for even a remotely popular show is going to cost you more than half of what you're going to make on it. Their prices are so redonkulously high that there's no way that this is going to work until their prices come down.

I mean, it's ridiculous. It's like 15 cents a megabyte. Right. And I think we pay about 0.2. Right, yeah. And that's so you can use their technology, and it's a mess. But I like this because this also comes on the heels of a big shakeup at Audible where they killed all of their short-form originals, and there were some really good stuff over there, like the butterfly effect with John Ronson, which I reviewed on the show.

It was a really good show, and stuff like that. So they canned the entire division there. So what we're seeing here is a lot of these people who put a lot of money into podcasting are now going away because it's hard. There's not much money to be made in podcasting. Well, you have to spend a lot of money to make a lot of money unless you are a dedicated, scrappy startup.

They're trying to bring in their mindset from big media days, and they're finding out that, oh, it doesn't work. So what I'm happy about is this is going to thin the field quite a bit, and all they've done is basically pumped a lot of money in to the podcast space to get people to understand what a podcast is.

So now we have a lot of new listeners to podcasting who know how to get a podcast, and we didn't have to pay for it, and now they're going to go away. I love that part. So there will be vacuums to be filled, except Malcolm Gladwell is going to go start a new company with Jacob Weisberg, who is the chief over at Slate of the podcast side.

So they're going to go start their own company based around revisionist history since that's like a property that they can work with to go from. That makes sense. Yeah. No, that's the way to go. And so I'm guessing that there are going to be a lot more of these in the coming, you know, two, three years.

I'm just really surprised it happened this fast. I was given it another two or three years before we started to see the big players drop off. And, you know, like Gimlet has, you know, a hundred and some odd people working over there. Why? Nobody knows. It doesn't take that many people.

But we're going to see, like, you know, I don't think the returns are going to be as high as these people think they are, but they're trying to get ahead of all the investment they took. Right. And, you know, it's like, oh, if we can hit critical mass, then we'll be able to pay for everybody before our runway runs out. I think that they are going to be sorely mistaken when that final bill comes due.

Well, you know, we've had our experiences trying to join podcast networks, and we are well aware of the fact that they do absolutely fuck all. So it's not surprising to see these things going away. Yeah, that's a whole different story on podcast networks. You want to hire us sometime to come into your organization and tell you about it?

We're more than happy to. Yes, we are. Security? Ha! We are 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, which we love.

Dave is also a co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. Dave. Hello. One of the top stories you covered on the Cyber Wire this week. Well, I guess. Drum roll, please. Yes, exactly. I feel like sometimes I want to do like a Casey Kasem style, number 25, you know.

If only we had a production budget. Right, exactly. Right. Then there's something about some fucking dog dying. Right, exactly. Right. And now it's time for our long-distance dedication. You do a damn good Casey Kasem.

Oh, thanks, thanks, thanks. That's really good. Thanks. I think all security needs to be from Casey Kasem. Right. I would certainly feel much nicer, and I'd feel more secure. That's right. That's right. All right. Well, let's dive in here. The White House released the National Cyber Strategy.

Oh, we have a strategy for the cyber now? We have a strategy for the cyber. Excellent. Oh, my God. I'm looking at the URL that you posted. Would somebody like to point something out here? Yes. Our current government runs off WordPress. Whitehouse.gov slash wp-content slash uploads.

How much you want to bet if you log into the admin back end for that? There's a lot of updates that need to be made. And black helicopters will show up at your house within 10 seconds. I suppose there is a certain amount of irony there, isn't there? The site where we release our national cyber strategy is a WordPress site.

Yes, it is. I guess it went to the lowest bidder. Yes. Which one of the pillars is WordPress. Yeah. Wow. So, overall, the strategy is being well-received. They're emphasizing deterrence.

In fact, there have been interviews with several people from the previous administration, and they think that this is overall very good. They're saying it's got good continuity and evolution toward a clearer, more active policy in cyberspace. There are four main pillars.

They are protect the American people, the homeland, and the American way of life, promote American prosperity, preserve peace through strength, and advance American influence.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but we did liquidate the position of security czar, did we not? Nothing to see here. Please drive through. So, we're not going to look into this too closely, then, are we? This may be one of the reasons why it's on a WordPress site.

I don't – I'm not connecting the dots here. There are no coincidences. Yeah. So – Yeah. So, generally well-received, except for all the snark that we just threw at it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. All right. You know, I think this is an example of one of those things – Well, I think this is an example of one of those things that really was written by the folks who actually know their stuff when it comes to policy,

and it was done with very little interference because the folks who like to interfere with things really don't know much about this and probably recognize that. Right. Okay. So – I don't know if I can go that far. Do you think Herr Trump has the login to this WordPress site?

Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Log in. Huge. Huge. Huge. Huge victory. WordPress is the best, most secure platform. Right. Don Jr. told me that it is the best. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. All right. I'm staying out of this one. Emails go to Brian at GrumpyOldGeeks.com. Right. Right. Our second story this week. I mean, to be fair, our Grumpy Old Geeks website is a WordPress site, so there's only so much we can say. I see.

All right. We don't have a national security budget, so – We don't have any budget. Yeah. Do as I say, not as I do. Right. Yeah. All right. Number two, our second story this week. Number two. It's time for our long-distance dedication.

So Magecart, have you guys heard of Magecart? No. Magecart is basically a credit card number skimming scheme, and this time they hit Newegg, and the way that they do it is they are inserting their code into Newegg's credit card processing routines on their website, and then that information gets rerouted to some servers, which are, wait for it, in Russia.

Right. And they get the credit card numbers that way. So, clever in that the code is being put right into the website itself. It's obfuscated, so it's hard to detect. These guys have already hit British Airways and Ticketmaster.

Well, good on the second one there. Thank you for that. Yeah, we're down for anybody hitting Ticketmaster. Yeah, it's a company it's easy to love to hate, right? They don't do themselves any favors. Yeah. But Newegg gets over 50 million hits on their website a month, so – I didn't even know Newegg was still around until this story came out.

I'm like, Newegg's still a thing? Yeah. Yeah. Apparently. Yeah. So, pretty standard Russian theft kind of thing. But if you're a customer of Newegg, probably a good idea to keep an eye on your credit card numbers if you've done anything in the past couple months.

I'm trying to see here when it was – oh, yeah. It says the skimming scheme has been in operation since mid-August. So, if you've done any recent business with Newegg, keep an eye on that credit card, and you might want to even change it proactively. Or, better yet, go to privacy.com slash GOG and sign up there so you can actually get a new credit card that you can use on Newegg.

Right. Silly of me. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Next up, this is an interesting story because it relates to some other stories we've been covering. This is about an IoT botnet that is removing crypto mining malware from the devices it infects.

Oh, so is this a good guy bit of malware? So far, who knows? Who knows where this may go? Right. The researchers over at Kihu 360, they're a pretty well-known team.

That's a fun name to say. I know it is. Kihu 360. Yeah, I actually like it every time it comes up on the CyberWire. It's one of my favorites. But they're calling it FBot. And it's based on Satori, which is based on Mirai. And so far, it looks like it goes through and looks for some cryptocurrency mining software and removes it.

Nice. Yeah. Now, what's interesting about this, it reminded me of a story that we did over on our Hacking, not our Hacking Humans, on Research Saturday, our Research Saturday show. We did a story about Baba Yaga, another fun one to say, which is WordPress malware.

Yeah, no such thing. WordPress is an incredibly secure environment in which we shouldn't trust our entire governmental security system, too. But here's what Baba Yaga does. It goes in and does its own thing. But in the process of doing that, it goes in and it cleans out any other malware you may have on your WordPress site.

It makes sure that your WordPress installation is up to date with the latest version. It applies all the patches. Basically, it makes sure that you have a clean, secure, safe running copy of WordPress. Kicks out all the other bad stuff. It limits its own ability to take over processor cycles.

So, it doesn't make a nuisance of itself. Basically, it tries to run as quietly in the background as possible, keeping your WordPress environment as clean as possible. So, it's this strange sort of symbiotic relationship that it has with your WordPress installation.

And I was talking to the researcher. His name is Brad Haas. He's an analyst of a company called Defiant. And towards the end of the interview, he said, well, so, you know, let me get this straight. So, this stuff goes into your WordPress. It keeps it up to date.

It cleans it out. It monitors it to make sure that nothing else gets in. Your site functions normally. Your users would have no idea that anything's going on. And what's the problem? You know, like, it's like, is there, it's an interesting thing to think about, isn't it?

Because is there a point where the symbiosis is enough where, hmm, maybe it's worth, maybe it's worth it. If somebody says to you, hey, I'm going to keep your site up and running and clean in exchange for that. I just want some of your processor cycles. I don't know.

I'm surprised that's not a business model for a company already. Well, you know, it actually is. It's called Jetpack. And it's what WordPress is supposed to do. They're supposed to keep your site up to date and do all that stuff for you. But we did talk about this on the show when it first came out. It was a while ago. Baba Yaga.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I was a fan of whoever wrote it. I was, I'm still a fan of whoever wrote it because it's clever as hell. It's like, be a nice netizen, clean up after yourself, make sure that people are up to date. Now, what it comes down to is that Faustian bargain with the malware writer.

It's like, what are they doing with those extra processes? And if you find out they're using those extra processes for something nefarious that you don't agree with morally, then you have a problem. That's why I'd rather pay the software company that I use to take care of it, you know, like Jetpack on WordPress.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. That makes total sense. So it's interesting to keep an eye on. It's an interesting little evolution, I think, that we're seeing with some of these systems, botnets, whatever you want to call them, the malware of different flavors that are going in there, and before they do their own thing, they're cleaning out the competition.

Right. Right. And it could be actually somebody who is in competition with the people who are doing the crypto mining and taking the money, and they want to knock them out of business. So they're actually going in and cleaning out all their bots, so they're not going to make money. So then they can come in later and take over the business, like starve the competition.

Mm-hmm. Could be. Totally could be. Yeah. Now, have either of you guys heard of this app called Tiger Text? No. It is a self-deleting messaging app. I'd never heard of it either, but apparently the Long Beach Police Department has. Al Jazeera's investigative unit has discovered that the self-deleting message app has been adopted by at least one U.S. police department, which may have used it to share sensitive and potentially incriminating information that they wouldn't want to be disclosed to a court.

So this was found in Long Beach here in Southern California. And yeah, so these Tiger Text app is designed to erase text messages after a set time period. Once they've been deleted, they cannot be retrieved at all, even through forensic analysis of the phone. So obviously, this is not good.

Two of the officers claimed that they were also instructed by their superiors to use the app to have conversations with other officers that wouldn't be discoverable. That's a problem. Yes, it is. Yeah. That's a problem. And okay, so yeah, forensic analysis of the phone.

But what about forensic analysis of the server? Well, as we know, things generally never get deleted on the internet. Well, one would theorize that the very business in which these apps find themselves, be it Signal or Tiger Text, is that they are not saving these things on a server anywhere.

It's direct person-to-person communication in theory. Well, when we assume that with somebody like Snap, and then we find out that that's exactly what they do, why would we be surprised anymore? Yeah. Well, I just find it interesting that this was sanctioned by the police officers by their superiors, which is very troubling.

You know, in this world where we're moving towards everybody has body cams and things like that, the police are finding ways to have confidential conversations that cannot be admissible in court. Well, Tiger Text is now not Tiger Text anymore. It is now Tiger Connect. That's all you have to do.

You get swapped up with that, then you just change the name of the company. Right. Yes. Now there are Tiger Connect. I used to think that, and to a certain degree I still do, but I used to really think 100% that automated law enforcement is a super creepy thing.

And, you know, things like red light cameras and those sorts of things. But there's a part of me that starts wondering more and more that is, would automated law enforcement, what was that movie with Sylvester Stallone that had it? Was it Judge Dredd?

There was some movie he was in where it took place in the future and there was some, you know, you cursed on the street and you got fined $10 automatically. I think that was Demolition Man. I think you're right. I think you're right. And nobody still knows what the three shells do. But there's a part of me that wonders, is that the way to take this sort of thing out of the equation?

If we had all of these police officers who are up to no good, if you took the human element out of it, so your robot policeman wasn't biased or racist or sexist or whatever, would we have better law enforcement?

But then the other side of me says, yeah, but automated law enforcement is just so creepy. Sadly, this is, this is one of, this is like, we're going to go ahead and embrace AI because people are just horrible. That seems to be where we're going. Right, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to see how this plays out. I mean, if it is, if what they're describing is true, then it is also illegal. It is against the rules of collecting data. And so hopefully they'll put a stop to it. But I, I was, surely someone will be appropriately punished, but that never happens.

Yes. Of course. This is a long history in this segment of how people get punished for these sorts of things. Interesting thing about Tiger Connect is it's actually touts itself as secure clinical communications for physicians and nurses. Oh, interesting. Oh, all right. Yeah. Learn why five out of the 10 largest hospital systems in the U.S. rely on Tiger Connect for secure clinical communications.

Interesting. So it's, yeah, it's used by a lot of healthcare providers, which maybe that's how the cops ran into it because they shoot people, take them to the hospital and they see the, see the nurses and doctors using Tiger Connect. They're like, oh, what are you doing there? Oh, it's secure communications. Oh, we like that. Go on.

Yeah. Do tell more. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Tim over on Twitter sent us and you as well, Dave, I saw that you got involved in this. It's a cloud ready black view dash cams illegally broadcast your exact GPS location and live video from inside your car without permission publicly on the Internet, which is obviously stupid, but they do it.

Yeah. Tim was really spun up about this and I can understand why. Oh, he still is. Yeah. Yeah. No, he is. What is your take on what's going on here? Jason and I's long standing pet peeve is that you should always be opt out, not opt in.

And this is a perfect example of it. There's no way in shape or form that this ever should have been an opt in automatically option. This should be, you know, this should have been turned off unless you want it on. Yeah, I agree. And the folks at Blackview have have finally responded to Tim, I think, what, a week or more later, I think after after he got our attention, you know, all of us, Graham clearly was in on this as well.

And they've said, basically, our security team is evaluating what's going on here. So it's sort of a non answer other than we hear you. Yeah. It's not even an oops, actually. It's not even an oops. It's we're looking into it.

Yeah, I actually downloaded the app and looked to see what I could see. And sure enough, you can you can see the locations of all these vehicles. You can basically comes up on a Google Maps kind of thing. I did not go all the way through to be able to look at live video.

There's a registration process and it just got to be I just didn't have the time nor the patience to deal with the difficult registration process. But according to Tim, anybody could download this app and just start looking at other people's dash cams. And and he made what I think is a great point that it's not so much while you're out and about driving around.

It's while your car is parked in the parking lot or in your garage or on your street or and still rolling live video from inside your garage or whatever the medical clinic where you are. Yeah. All sorts of privacy violations that could happen inadvertently.

And I think you guys are right. I wonder how this bumps up against GDPR. I'm not sure about that. Oh, GDPR. Raising your ugly head. But we have not seen anything come of it yet, have we? Not really. Oh, it's interesting. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are we have.

OK, well, Dave has. No, there's some I'm trying to remember what it was. There was one in the past week or so. I'm not going to be able to remember it now, but there there's a big one. That's exciting. Oh, you know what? It might have been. No, I know. It might have been the British Airways thing with the where they're saying that they're going to use it as a test case for GDPR.

It might have been the British Airways thing, which was another mage cart thing where they might not have notified people quick enough or something like that. Pretty, pretty big breach. Don't don't count on that being correct. I'm sort of remembering off the top of my head.

But I think there was that. Yeah. It's OK. So we can. Yeah. So we can do that. Yeah. The interesting thing that my new ring cams came with is there's a there's some settings where you can kind of share data with the neighborhood. Which I was very like, of course, I'm not going to do that because why would you?

But it's got the opt in, opt out form for it. And yes, thank God I am opted out. Right. So hopefully my new ring cams will not be on Shodan anytime soon or anything like that. But there is a pretty basic setup for these things.

So I don't know what they leak. I'm going to do some more work on it. But I don't know if you guys have ever seen anything about ring being hacked. And I haven't. And that's kind of why I decided it was one of my last things besides the pricing structure to go with them is you never see ring hacks in the news. No, I don't.

I don't think I have seen anything with them. Me either. I will be Googling for next week, though. Of course you will. Of course you will. Yes. Now, I normally wouldn't share spam mail. We all get it. We're all kind of immune to it at this point. But I got one of the best ones I've ever seen in my entire life.

And I just wanted to share it with you guys. Hi, victim. This is my last warning. I write you because I put a malware on the web page with porn, which you have visited. My virus grabbed all your personal info and turned on your camera, which captured the process of your onanism. Just after that, the soft save your contact list. I will delete the compromising video and info if you pay me 500 US dollar Bitcoin.

This is address for payment. I gave you 30 hours after you opened my message for making the transaction. As soon as you read the message, I'll see it right away. It is not necessary to tell me that you have sent money to me. The address is connected to you. My system will delete everything automatically after transfer confirmation. If you need 48 hours, just reply on this letter with star.

You can visit the police station, but nobody can help you. If you try to deceive me, I'll see it right away. I don't live in your country, so they cannot track my location even for nine months. Goodbye. Don't forget about the shame and to ignore. Your life can be ruined. This is my favorite spam mail ever. Your onanism. Onanism.

Onanism. Do they even think most people know what that means? Know what it means. In my teens, I redefined it. I also really enjoyed the specificity of even for nine months to track locations in a different country, but the kicker for me was the payment of 500 US dollar Bitcoins. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So this is the best one I've ever gotten. Yeah. These have been making the rounds for a couple weeks now. This basically porn scare spam thing has been making the rounds. And the thing is, they've gone and looked at the Bitcoin wallets, and these guys are doing pretty well.

They're making a lot of money off of this one. Really? Yep. People are stupid, Jason. Yeah, but we covered it on the show. That's why more people need to listen to our show. Yeah, but only 10,000 people listen to our show. We've only saved 10,000 people from their forbidden shameful onanism. Well, since probably 25% of those don't download, and then another 25% don't make it this far, and then nobody listens to us, maybe three people we've saved.

All right. Well, spank away, boys. Present company excluded, right? All right, guys. That's what we have this week. Good talking to you. I will talk to you next time. Talk to you soon. Apps and doodads.

Brian, we got a lot of Amazon news this week. Yes, we do. Yeah, and the first bit of Amazon news is not some of the stuff that I had thought we were going to be talking about, but I found the Amazon Kindle trade-in program. Have you ever seen that? I have used it before. I got rid of one of my old iPhones with that.

You can trade in an iPhone for a Kindle? No. Sorry, sorry. I thought it was just their general trade-in program. No. Because they have a general electronics trade-in program. Okay, I haven't seen that yet. This is just for Kindle. So I went and I was looking at the new ones. I'm like, oh, that waterproof one is kind of sexy.

I wonder how much I can get for my paperweight because it's in beautiful mint condition and it's been in the case since I got it. And I paid $114 for it new a couple years ago. I don't know why you'd want a waterproof one because I often see you just sitting around a beach or a pool reading, Jason.

Well, when I'm in the backyard, I have spilled beer on my Kindles in the past. But the new one has better backlighting too. But anyway, moving on. It was just a test. I wasn't going to actually get one. So here's the money that came out of this.

So my paperweight cost me $114 new. I paid $40 for a case. So that's $154 right there. And if I got a new one, I'd have to re-spend that $40 because they're not going to trade in a case, right? So that just gets thrown away. The price that they were going to give me is $25.

Ooh. Yeah, I'll pass. I'll keep my paperweight in the case and just get, you know, maybe a lid for the beer. Right. That's a good idea. Yeah. You still don't have a Kindle, right? You just work on your iPad mini? I just, yeah, I just use the Kindle app on my iPad mini. I've been using that too on my phone since my phone's so damn big.

It works pretty well. Yeah, it's fine. It's more than, I don't feel the need to get a Kindle. Although as my eyesight is starting to go, it might be a good idea with the backlighting. But, you know, right now I'm still okay. They're actually really nice at night. Much better than looking at it on the iPad. Even with night mode on on the iPad, it's much easier to read and you don't get as much eye strain.

Right. So you might want to, like, check out a used one. Or you can, they're pretty good. Okay. Now, back to the land of Jason's security camera quest. I've got, you know, I've got the five Logitech cameras. I like those, the Circle Ones, not the Twos.

They've been pretty good. I don't mind them, but I need some more outdoor stuff for the front door and then some more for the backyard because there have been a rash of break-ins in my neighborhood and they haven't been like the ones where you're not home and people come and break in because if I'm not home and the dogs are here, ain't nobody coming in this house.

But they've been violent break-ins. People come to the door and, like, they bashed some old lady over the head the other day and robbed her house. Well, that's not fun. No. So I want to get something that is a little bit more proactive. So I have decided to bite the bullet and I went with the Ring Video Doorbell 2 because I can't, I don't have, I don't have power in the front of the house.

So I can, that's one of the ones that you can use the rechargeable battery on. So far, so good. I like it. I like it a lot. I mean, it was 200 bucks, which is expensive, but it's working great so far. And, you know, I get a notification when somebody even just comes to the door right on my phone. It's nice.

It's a nice system. Yeah. Everybody I know that has it likes it. Not something I need. I'm in a complex, so, you know, you have to ring to get in anyways. And, you know, by the time they get to my door, it's too late. But if I had a self-standing home, I would definitely have one of these things.

Yep. And as I've been walking around the neighborhood, a little Bader Meinhof, I see them everywhere now. Now that I know what they look like. Yeah. Then I got the Ring Spotlight Cam Battery HD Security Camera with built two-way, not built in, built two-way talk and a siren alarm. White works with Alexa. Mmm.

That was another 200 bucks down the drain. But that covers the backyard. And so far, it works great. Does everything that it's supposed to do. I haven't gone with any of their packages yet for the, you know, remote recording. Right now, it just sends it to my phone and I can do live two-way chat.

Chat on the phone, which works out pretty well. But the nice thing about it, I was looking at their pricing packages and it's a flat fee for $100 a year for as many Ring devices as you want, which is completely different from every other camera company. Yes.

Because every other camera company, you have to add per device. And I'm like, yes, one of the reasons I've always stayed away from this stuff is that those prices just get ridiculous. And how much you have to pay per camera is stupid. So Amazon is doing something pretty smart there. Yep. Yep. And I picked up a couple extra batteries for these things because they, you know, you don't want to have to sit there and have your battery charging while your doorbell is not working if you have to go anywhere.

So the batteries are $29 a pop, but they... Is there a... Are you capable of hardwiring them into power if you have that available, you know, in your own home and things like that? Or is it must be a battery? It's only battery? They have different versions.

Like, they've got spotlight cameras that can be hardwired into a junction box. And this Ring Doorbell, Video Doorbell 2, is one of the ones that you can do either one. You can power it by the wires in the wall for a regular doorbell, but our electrics are all screwed up right now.

So those wires don't work. So it's cheaper to just get another battery than it is to hire an electrician to come out and fix it. You know, because we don't know where the wiring went wrong on that. It's just like, oh, man, that's going to be a pain in the butt. So I'm just like, ah, I'll get another battery.

And these batteries are pretty big and pretty powerful, and they take forever to charge. So I just have, like, a backup ready to go so I can swap it out and have it, you know, just cycle through them. But so far, I'm very happy with it. I really like it. And I got the little ding-dong for in the house.

It's like a Wi-Fi extender, and it's also got the speaker for the doorbell, and you can have some very fun doorbells on there. I did the one that has dogs barking. So when you press the button, the dogs bark. My dogs went bug nutty and actually knocked it off the wall. So we went with the ding-dong that sounds like it's in Downton Abbey.

It's pretty cool. Oh, very nice. So far, so good. So I'm going to be selling all of my other cameras, basically, to pay for these. And they're great cameras. I've got five of the circles, and I've got four of the Amcrest, because I wanted to have, when I was trying out the different types.

And it makes more sense financially to just go with Ring and stick to just one platform, just for the pricing on the amount of cameras that you can run through their system for the recording. So, now, Amazon has announced a ton of new products.

Yes, they have. They want an Alexa everywhere in your house now. And in your car as well. We'll get to the car in a second. But they look like, you know, just iterations. Nothing really, you know, tickled my fancy. The new show. I've got to say, I'm pissed. I don't know. I like the new show.

What's the difference? The new show is much sexier. It's more streamlined. It looks much better than this big, blocky thing that I currently have right now. And it seems now, I don't know how this is going to work, but it seems to have an upgrade in software, which you think I would be able to get on the old show.

Because it just looks, all the screens look better. The design is better. The interface seems to be better. Just, I hope that that rolls out anyways. And I'll be getting that. And it's just the box itself that I would have to pay to upgrade for. Because it does look so much better.

I'm quite jealous. Well, save up and get one. And you can put it right next to your Amazon Basics microwave that works with Alexa. Yeah, I don't get that. Nope. It's still got a keypad on it. So, what's the point? Yeah, I don't quite understand that. And they didn't roll out the one thing that I really am waiting for, which is a nice, sexy alarm clock.

That's got like a, you know, USB charging power so you can plug your phone into. I just want a new, cool alarm clock. Not one of these iHome old things I've had sitting around for ages. Yeah. I still can't believe they haven't done that. So, and no camera in it, motherfuckers. No camera.

Yeah. I would get one if it, yeah. Just a sexy little Alexa alarm clock. That's all I want, Amazon. Get on it. Yep. They've got these new smart plugs that you can talk to to turn off and on. So, maybe that'll be your TV one that finally makes your TV work after all this time.

Turning it on or off, that's the problem. That's it. I want to be able to change channels. You know, where the hell's that? That's the other thing I'm waiting for here. Come on, people. Yeah, well, the Alexa, the Echo TV will be next year, I'm sure. I hope so. Because they had to go with a microwave first, which I don't. Yeah. And, yeah, the wall clock, don't need it.

Don't understand that. Nope, nope. I love how when you go down, there's the Billy Bass. I don't need the Billy Bass. I don't need the wall clock. The auto, I want, though. This is the one that I actually want. I love this. Yes. It's going to be 49 bucks right now.

It's $24.99. But here's the rub on that. You have to sign up for a goddamn invitation. Yeah. It's invitation only, which, you know, I figured they would be sending out invites to customers who buy a ton of stuff on Amazon, which I thoroughly should be at the top of that list.

But you have to request an invitation. So I'm guessing what they're going to do is send you a survey at some point to say what kind of car do you have and figure out if it's going to work with your car. I am requesting an invitation right now. Yeah. Yeah. Link in the show notes who has the link to go request an invitation if this is something you want.

And I totally want it because. Yeah. I mean, I'm looking forward to this being baked into the system when I get my next car. But for the time being, I'll give this a go. I mean, it's certainly I've I find myself already wishing that I had Echo in my car. So I'm very excited about this and I definitely want to give it a go.

But I'm very curious. Like how is it going to integrate with my BMW audio system already, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm sure that's going to be really intriguing. So we'll see what happens. Yep. Yep. It can connect with Bluetooth and it uses the over the air stuff, use the Internet from your phone. You can just check it out. All the specs are up there.

But I would like to try this one out, especially for twenty five bucks. Yeah, I agree. I agree. So on the flip side of all this, there's a great article over on Slate called Amazon's terrifying new product lineup lets you fully black mirrorify your entire home, which is so true, which is.

Yes, it's very true. So the one thing that I'm really curious with Amazon about this is they're not really addressing addressing security at all whatsoever. So as this article says, you know, once you put these things all throughout your house, there's only four possible wake words and anybody can just be sitting outside your window and figure out a way to unlock your door just by going through four different words if they know all the different devices that you have and what's hooked up, which, as you just said to yourself, you walk around the neighborhood now and you can tell everybody you know what a ring looks like.

Yeah. So, you know, once you figure all this out, it's very anybody can break into your house, do anything, control anything in your house easily. Why has Amazon not rolled out voice recognition and locking down to different voices yet? They're working on it.

I'm sure they're working on it, but it needs to be there now because we're ceding everything to these voice enabled devices and there's no security in it. None. Zero. Zilch. The next version of the Blues Brothers is going to be them driving around with that big-ass speaker on their car going, Echo, unlock the doors.

Yeah. I mean, we've always been talking about the Internet of Things and the worry that, you know, there's no security involved with it. We're there now, especially with what Amazon's rolling out and pushing now. These devices are going to be everywhere in everybody's houses and there is literally zero security.

There's no passwords. There's no nothing. Anybody can control it just by knowing what you have and just figuring out which of the four words you use to control your Echo. Yeah, especially because some of these rings are Echo enabled, so what you can do is just yell loud enough, Echo, turn off all the cameras, and then go rob the house.

I saw a tweet that was really funny this week. This guy has his ring set up so it recognizes his face and if somebody comes to the door that has a face that it won't recognize, it automatically locks the door and he walked up with a Batman shirt and it saw Batman and recognized Batman and locked the doors.

I thought that was pretty cute. I don't know if it was real or not, but it was a pretty funny tweet. Right. But yeah, Echoes are banned from my house. My roommate won't let me put them in there. So it's like, oh, I can't even use the damn things. And, you know, I can see how, I mean, I have to respect that opinion because you just don't Yeah, you do because you live with someone that, you know, you're basically married.

So yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have to respect that. Luckily, my wife is a fan, even though she still gets angry because she has to phrase things in certain ways and that pisses her off. So she's she has a love hate relationship with the with the Amazon Alexa. My kid is very close to being able to control it.

Exactly. We are definitely 100 percent in that ecosystem. I am. I am 100 percent Apple. We're 100 percent Apple as a family. And we are 100 percent Amazon for voice recognition. So we're we're in and I'm more in because, as I just said, I want to get the car one.

And once I move to a self-standing home, I'm going to be, you know, getting rings and all that sort of stuff. I love all this technology and how it integrates with each other. But I do desperately want some security in it. Buy a shotgun. That's about it. Basically. Yeah.

You have to go buy guns to protect yourself from your own home. Jesus. I'm going to end up becoming a gun owner. My God. A little bit of technology here, which I thought was pretty funny. It's called Alexa. Shoot my gun. No. Sorry. Oh, man.

A long time ago, I had the domain vapid dot com. I bought it in 1997. I'm surprised. I thought you still had it. So when you put the story in the news, I was like, when did you let that one go? About a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago. Sold to these guys for like five grand.

So I'm like, yeah, I'll take it. They offered. I'll take it. I could use the money. And they're like, yeah, we're going to build a CMS. And I'm like, good luck. Good luck with that. Yeah. Hello, 1995. Well, they said that it was going to be out in a couple of months and they were ready to go. That's why they wanted the domain.

And it just came out now. And it's called vapid. Why you would name a CMS vapid? I don't know. I just died. How funny. Because I just said, welcome to 1995. And the first sentence on this article is we've been working on the web since the late 90s.

Yeah. No, these guys. Back when we first had this idea of doing a CMS. Yep. No, these guys are very much like us. They're like, we're tired of building CMS. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to build a basic one that's very easy to use. Apparently, it's already been deployed at scale by Cards Against Humanity. So it's doing something out there.

I haven't even bothered to go install it because I just don't dare enough anymore. But give these guys a shot if you're looking for a CMS. It is running on Node. So that's another no-no for me. It's a no-node for me.

No-node. No-node drives me absolutely bananas. At my heart, I'm an Apache guy. I'm basically a lamp stack guy. And I'm never going to change because if I ever need to do anything, I know how to do it intuitively. And I don't want to have to learn anything new because I'm too goddamn old and too curmudgeonly.

Good luck, guys. I hope you do well. And this last one I have here for now is I was looking at the new GoPros because they came out with the new GoPro 7 Black. Or Black 7. I don't know which way it goes. And it looked pretty nice.

It's got some pretty good tech in it. It might actually save the company. But I was bouncing around the store. And then I found the Fetch. Oh, hey, hold on a second. This website, GoPro.com, is asking to display desktop notifications. Why?

Why? Why do you need to notify me? Why developers? No, why marketers? It's the marketers that do this shit. Okay. Sorry. Go ahead. Anyway, so this is basically a harness to put on your dog so you can put your GoPro on it and let Fido run.

$40. $40. $40 for a strap to mount your GoPro to your dog. Well, you know, it's got to be pretty sturdy. It looks kind of like a torture device. Yeah. Sure. Okay. Look at the, oh, my God, the sad dog.

The dogs look sad that are wearing it on the second photo. They just look like, are you kidding me? Yeah. Like, you know, this is kind of what it looks like when you put reindeer antlers on your dog at Christmas. They're just like, dude, really? This is what these dogs look like. Yeah. All right. Well, you know how much I love my moleskin, Jason.

Yes, I do. Year in, year out. I get it. It's become a standard stocking stuffer item for my wife. Every Christmas, I get a new moleskin. I might have to make an exception for 2019. I was sitting around the other day, and I realized, you know, this is around about the time that we should be getting a new Discworld novel.

And then I went, yeah, we're never getting another Discworld novel. And I got a little bummed out, but I went over to the website because I just wanted to see what was going on. And I found the City Watch 2019 diary, which looks basically exactly like a moleskin, except, you know, it's the City Watch diary.

It's cute. I like it. It's very nice. So, unfortunately, right now, the entire site is English. And in the UK, it's 15 pounds. I don't know how much shipping would be, but I think I might just get this for next year instead of my standard moleskin.

Yeah, and it's funny. You did actually bring this up on the show before, but I just love the fact that you said, it's cute, which is my line. Yeah, I think I'm actually going to do it. I am definitely pulling the plug on this one, and I'm going to go for it. Yeah, I was looking at it this morning. Because it seemed like you couldn't figure out how to get it to the U.S. from your notes, but it is not hard.

Oh, I just haven't gotten that far yet. Yeah. I just want to, you know, I was worried that I was going to click it and the shipping was going to be three times the cost of the actual item. Oh, it probably is, but yeah, you know, you pay for a little bit, but it'll be cool. I think it'll definitely be cool. So I lost a couple of my USB and lightning cables from Fireside somehow, so I went to Amazon and just ordered some of their basics lightning cables because they're a hell of a lot cheaper and they're a bit more sturdier than the Apple ones are.

And they're great unless you have a case on your stuff. I'm not entirely sure why they didn't measure apples and match it exactly, but they're slightly bulkier and I always seem to have problems connecting it with my case on my iPhone. Very annoying. Get a Dremel from Amazon. That's a good point.

Shave that sucker down. Exactly. Yeah, kind of defeats the purpose of the quick and easy and cheap ordering, but there you go. So hopefully Amazon will sort that out and, you know, have a look at it and maybe, you know, match specs. That would be nice. You'd figure they'd have to because it's licensed by Apple.

You'd think, but they didn't quite exactly. So there you go. And the other day I had a good friend ask me the best way to sell old electronics and I was a bit stumped because I had done things like close five and let go. And things like that. And those were completely useless. And I still found the best way to do it was Craigslist.

So if anybody out there has any ideas and stuff that they've used that worked well, please do let us know. I don't know if there's anything new out there. I know that you put Gazelle in the show notes and I've used them before, too. So I was just wondering if there's anything else. Yeah, I'm sure there's got to be something new. These things got to be coming and going.

Gazelle has been my favorite. It just saves a little bit of extra time. Yeah. Now, this one's an interesting one. Our last story of apps and doodads for the day. Walmart is putting 17,000 Oculus Go headsets in its stores to help train employees in VR.

Now, that's got to be the most Oculus headsets ever sold. That's probably all of them. Yeah, that's all of them. Now, when I first read it, I was confused because I'm like, why do Walmart employees need to learn about VR? But it's helped to train the employees using VR, not, you know, semantics, I guess.

So I read it. And what they're doing is they're sending a couple headsets to each of their 5,000 stores so people can actually train on new things that are coming into the store. This actually might be a fairly good use of VR, I think. It's kind of self-referential and up its own ass.

But yeah, okay. This is the shelf. This is a box. Put the box on the shelf. This is a curmudgeon. He wants to find out where that box is that you just put on the shelf. Point him to the correct aisle. If only we were in a gigantic store that had nothing but boxes and shells.

Right. And, you know, I guess if you have to train them after hours, though, you may have to pay them more. So this might be cheaper. Right. Okay. Well, fair enough. It's good to see that Oculus has a business plan involving selling all their units to Walmart. I think Oculus just got redonkulously lucky.

Yeah, me too. That's what they got. Brick-a-brick. We didn't have a lot of time between shows this week because we recorded a bit late for our week show. So I didn't. And then, you know, hang over and out with Virgil and all that. So I didn't have a lot of time to find stuff this week. But I did cook something with a new recipe.

And I always did want to throw recipes in here every now and then. Bon Appetit has a coffee rub cheeseburger with Texas barbecue sauce. And they leave out the kicker and bacon. And it is delicious. So I highly recommend trying out this recipe. It was phenomenal. All right. I will have to check that out.

I'm still running through all my blue apron for the week because sometimes I just don't like to go to the store. Damn right. Out! Out! Yesterday would have been my parents' 50th anniversary. They missed it by that much.

I miss you, Dad. So shout out for my dad. 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 283. 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 that's what we've got this week. So remember, till next time, keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.

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