287: 20 Grand Wang

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Eero. Get $100 off the Eero base unit and two beacons package in a year of Eero Plus by visiting Eero.com slash G-O-G and at checkout enter code G-O-G. That's E-E-R-O dot com slash G-O-G.

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. Brian, I had something happen to me this week that just made me giddy as can be. Okay, let's see if I can ruin it. I'm sure you will. So, you know, the Jordan Harbinger show, which I'm part of, is on podcast one and they have house ads that they run on other shows.

Yes. And I was sitting in bed the other night, like 11 o'clock, just listening to my podcast as I'm going off to sleep. And then I'm listening to Penn Sunday School and there comes a house ad for the Jordan Harbinger show, which I've heard on there many times before. But my name was on there.

So I got to hear Penn even say my name and kind of screw it up. But it was fun. It was very fun. So that was a bucket list item for me. I listened to Penn Sunday School for the first time in ages just to hear him say your name. So congratulations, Jason. Thank you. Thank you.

I will play the clip right now. You know, if you like my show, you're going to love the Jordan Harbinger show on podcast one, also pronounced podcast.

Along with, man, Jason DeFilippo, Jordan taps into the wisdom of the world's top performers from intelligent operatives to legendary musicians, iconoclastic writers to visionary changemakers to teach you the strategies and insights that are most successful to use in your everyday life.

Check out the Jordan Harbinger show every week on podcast one or wherever else you get your favorite podcasts. Clip played. Moving on. Okay. Little follow up on the California. Oh, I have to say I am very proud to be a Californian right now.

I will. I'm sticking with that. But yes, the net neutrality law that Jerry Brown signed in immediately. The entire broadband industry sued California. I wonder why. Yeah. Oh, I thought it didn't matter. What interest would they have in stopping that?

Hmm. Hmm. Show your true colors much? Yeah. I think it's a pretty good sign that when the entire broadband industry is suing you, you're doing something that's probably pretty good for people. Exactly. Yeah. So I have a feeling we're going to lose.

But. Yeah, me too. But we're fighting the good fight, right? Yeah. Somebody's gotta. Somebody's gotta. Somebody has to. I agree. So, you know, we're going to follow this for sure because this is a California is the only people only. Nobody's doing anything else.

No one. Just California. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. But we're big enough where we can. That's true. And all the all the people are here. So what I'm interested in seeing is the big content platforms and what side they're going to fall on. Unfortunately, I have a feeling it's not going to be the one that we'd like, but it would be nice if a Twitter or a Facebook or a Google came out and said, hey, we're down with this.

I'd think they would be. You'd think so. I would think they would be. But I've been wrong before. Yeah. As 286 episodes of the show show us, we're often wrong about these sorts of things because because believe it or not, we have a small kernel heart of optimism.

Yeah. I mean, we're right about a lot of things, but some of these big ones. Yeah. We forget that there are people with a lot of power and a lot of money out there. I'll tell you a good predictor of every time we're wrong. It's when we're optimistic. Then we're wrong. Yeah. When we really, really want something to happen, then, yeah, we're usually wrong.

Yeah. So we talked a little bit about Elon Musk and Tesla and the the was it the FCC? No, the SEC. SEC's punishment of him. And I said that I thought this was actually a good thing. And a lot of people seem to agree. So what was intended to be a punishment of a rogue executive whose rash tweets has misled investors might turn out to be the best thing to happen to the electric car company in some time.

Yeah. Tesla watchers have been calling for an adult in the room to help oversee the company's operations and serve as a check on Musk's power. And now that, of course, will happen. He has it at SpaceX. Their COO who runs the company and he basically just, you know, stays away and as somebody else runs the day to day operations.

Not so with Tesla. We've heard stories about him being a micromanager on the factory floor and he just cannot stop messing around with it. But now he's going to have to. He's stepping down. So this is going to be a good thing for Tesla, as many people are pointing out. And I have bought more stock. Of course you have.

Yes. And this is an interesting one. So, you know, AMC rolled out their MoviePass competitor because they own the theaters and they can say, go screw yourself, MoviePass, which is what they did and why MoviePass is now turning on people's accounts without their permission. Well, so AMC had a goal of 500,000 subscribers for the first year.

They got 400,000 in the first 14 weeks. Okay. That's not bad. That's not bad. No, not at all. And here's the thing. Now, the finances are going to work on this for them, just like they did for MoviePass. Well, it's 20 bucks a week. So you can go see up to three movies or you can see the same movie three times in one day even, but three movies a week.

Okay. For 20 bucks. Right. Yeah. Who has the time to do that? I don't know. Apparently, 400,000 people do. I guess so. No. So this is a much steeper price, right? Because this is basically 20 bucks per week as opposed to 20 bucks a month or whatever. Right. Yeah.

I didn't look into all of the different pricing options. I think this is the top tier pricing option. Right. So, but still, that's not bad. That's way more than I would ever pay. Yeah. Considering I see one movie every three months, that would not work out financially for me. No, definitely not.

I'm actually going to open it up and see what the... No, I don't want... You're not going to get my location. Sorry. No, I don't want a tour of your fucking website. Where is the club? Where can you sign up for the club?

AMC, no programming. AMC stubs, offers and promotions. I think you should just leave this in about how difficult it is to find. Okay. I take that back. The article that I was looking at said $19.95 a week, but it is $19.95 a month. Okay. So it's the same pricing structure.

Yep. See up to three movies every week. And you get free popcorn refills. Okay. Well, you can get very fat. Yeah, seriously. Because you... I mean, if you're sitting in a movie theater for six hours... You can sit for six hours a day, eating as much popcorn as you can eat.

This sounds awesome, America. In the news. I got a weird sext from the government yesterday. How about you? I did too. Yeah, that scared the crap out of me, actually.

Because stupidly, I did not... I had seen some of the news articles that was coming, but I just didn't pay attention. So it did shock me a little bit. But there was a lot of outrage. Yeah. I don't know why. This is actually a fine thing. This is a good thing.

We should have this sort of technological advancement taking place to warn us about emergencies and different things. It's not like... It's not connected to fucking Trump's phone, people. There are lots of channels that you have to go through to get this done.

This has started with President Bush. Obama kept it going. So it's just happened to roll out while we have the tweeter-in-chief in office, sadly. But this is a very good thing. So everybody calm the F down. Yeah. It's not like a Twitter replacement for Trump, you know?

Can you imagine, though? How amazing would that be, actually? Oh, my God. The first thing he would do is, like, you know, just completely troll everybody. It's like, Putin's coming, duck! Oh, wow. So there's that. Actually, the first one would be butter emails. Butter emails, yes.

It's not a mushroom. Oh, God. Yeah. So it's no big deal. Everybody relax. I'm glad that we have it. Now, I found a really interesting article over on Slate called Why I'm Worried About Google. And it really does talk about a lot of the things that we've talked about. And the article goes over many of its missteps recently and how it's scaled back.

It's don't be evil to basically we're going to be evil. And basically, this guy is stating, I'm moving away from the Google ecosystem as much as I can because I don't like the way this company is going. It's obvious they're not trying to fix it. And they could.

They could make good, usable products to strike a balance between privacy and profit. They're just choosing not to. Okay, I'm sticking with them because it just makes my life easier. Yeah, well, you're not that into the Google ecosystem, though. I mean, you use Google as a search engine and you use Gmail, but that's about it, really.

Well, it's a little more than that. I use G Suite for all my docs, all my storage. I'm pretty heavily invested in the Google ecosystem, especially with some of the companies I work for. It really is, you know, all the privacy crap aside, it is actually a pretty good service.

I mean, it's a damn good service. Yeah, everything that they do works pretty well. The privacy issues are troublesome, but it all does work. Yeah, I mean, we moved over from Dropbox to G Drive for Jordan's show, and it has been blissful.

It's been amazing because when you have a business account with more than five users, you get you literally get unlimited storage. If you have less than five users, you only get a mere terabyte per user. So I can put all of my show files up there and not have to worry about, you know, the house burning down or the drives failing or things like that.

And everybody has access to it. So it eliminates the beer truck problem. Right. And it's really handy. And it's not that expensive. It's only like 10 bucks per user per month, which, you know, in the grand scheme of things for an enterprise product is not bad. But, yeah, there's that whole evil thing.

There is the evil aspect. Yes. Yeah. Because and also you have to think about where do you separate Google from Alphabet? Yeah. Because they're they're they're they're separate identities now. And that's just for reasons. Yeah. That's just tax fuckery. Yeah. And yeah, that and trying to get away from, you know, monopolies and things like that.

Yes. While still being a monopoly, but still being a monopoly. Exactly. OK. But wait, we're many companies. Yeah. Are you, though? Yeah. Fun times. When we were first getting into all the cryptocurrency stuff, primarily just to make fun of it, I signed up with Coinbase because they were one of the first apps out there that made it easy to trade in Bitcoin and Litecoin and some of the other Ethereum, the big ones at the time.

Yep. Can you believe that Coinbase is financing a deal or finalizing a deal right now that's going to value the company at eight billion dollars? I cannot. I cannot. Yeah. Unbelievable. What are their revenues? I want to see their revenues.

They make money on every order. Yeah. And I guess a lot of people are still stupidly trading Bitcoin. I don't get why, but, you know, I just, an eight billion dollar company based on a nothing based on a nothing is where we're at now.

Yeah. I mean, it's, yeah, it's a trading platform for nothing. But, you know, some bros made a lot of money on it. That's right. Bitcoin bros are happy. Yep. And there's also the sunk cost fallacy where a lot of people basically spent their house and their mortgage and they're just waiting for it to rebound. Yes.

While their, while their wife has left them. The children are going hungry and shoeless. But, hey, they've got, hey, they get to watch six hours of movies a day and get free popcorn. Popcorn. Popcorn on the blockchain. That's what we're going to get next. Speaking of, speaking of Bitcoin, there's a great story in BuzzFeed News called how a hapless Bitcoin entrepreneur got swept up in the crypto craze and started a multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme.

So, basically, everyone? Yeah, yeah. No. This guy was, like, robbing Peter to pay Paul, like, all Ponzi schemes and finally got shut down. But here's the thing. Since there's no regulation, he doesn't really have to pay anybody back. Right.

Doesn't that suck for a lot of people? Yeah. Regulation bad. Yeah. No, people weren't, like, barely doing any due diligence on him, sending him tons of Bitcoin. And, like, his plans, his great plans for miners, like, to invest them in miners and, you know, build it all up.

Yeah, it didn't really work out. Yeah. So, poor Canadian guy. Well, what are we going to do? We've talked about Uber and the various studies about what the drivers actually make. There was a study a while back that said that, you know, the average salary or something per year would be less than $20,000 or whatever.

And then Uber came back and said, surely that's not true, and funded their own study, shockingly, that showed that they make more money than that. But another third-party study has now come out. And, basically, it averages out to the median hourly pay with tip for Uber drivers is $14.73.

All right. As you back out vehicle expenses and all your personal costs and the fact that you're not an employee, so you have to take care of your own health care and all that sort of stuff, it is significantly less than $10 an hour. You would make more money working at an Amazon warehouse. Yes, you would, actually. You would make quite a bit more because, yeah, it brings it down to $9.73 an hour.

Yep. And, potentially, much less. That's if you're actually working 40 hours a week. Yep. Below the poverty threshold. Yep. Nice. Well done, Uber. I totally believe you. Well, then, get Bernie on the Stop Uber bill.

So, the Super bill. I am waiting for some smart politician to realize this gig economy stuff is a bit of a sham and start looking into it. So, Bernie, get on that. Yeah. He's too busy taking his Uber to work. Now, somebody he doesn't have to worry about for much longer is Snapchat.

Yes, Snap stock fell more than 6.5% on Thursday to an all-time low after two analysts cut their target on Snapchat to $7 a share. It's now trading below $8 and has plunged more than 45% this year alone. I would like to point out that when Snap went public, I said, no way in hell should anybody ever buy this.

Damn it. Yeah. So, sometimes we are right, and it's on the things that we think are stupid. So, we were not optimistic about Snap. No, we were not. Although, we did say the same thing about Facebook, and look how that turned out. Eh, now I actually have some Facebook stock, which I need to divest in.

Get rid of that shit, man. I'm just lazy. Yeah. It's a click. It's a click, bro. I know. I know. It's a click, bro. The last goodbye, Path shuts its doors. And when I got this email from Path, I was like, wait, you're still here? I didn't even know you were still around.

I was like, okay. I didn't realize it was still a going concern. I thought they were just doing t-shirts like Ello. Yeah. No, because I got it a while ago, and I logged in, and there was, of course, nobody there. And it was just like, oh, yeah, everybody's gone. So, now we know what happens when your social network goes away.

So, they are going to be basically killing it on November 15th. Okay. And it will be a day that will not live in infamy. Yeah. Well, actually, the termination of service is October 18th. So, in 13 days from this recording, they will be done. And Path-related customer service will be closed on November 15th.

Now, why you need- Why would you keep customer service going? Keep customer service going. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to make a note to myself on the 19th to write customer service asking how I can set up an account because I'd like to get going on Path. Yeah. It's like, what the- That makes no sense.

And you already can't download it. You can't download the app anymore. It's pulled from iTunes and Google Play. So, sorry, bro. I'm sure there's some legacy install somewhere I can find. That's probably been hacked. Yeah. This episode is sponsored by Eero.

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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 the co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. So, Dave, anything new happen this week?

It's a slow week. Pretty slow week, right? No, nothing. Nothing at all. No, we'll get to—this is—it's not very often that you have things that can truly be labeled as being bombshells, but there was definitely a bombshell dropped this week, which we'll get to.

I had a couple of things I wanted to get to first, though. I had some follow-up on that story we covered a couple weeks ago, I think it was, about the Blackview dashcams. Yes. Remember, a listener sent in his—he made a YouTube video about the lack of security with these Blackview dashcams.

They were, by default, sharing the live video feed from your dashcam, as well as your GPS location online for anyone to be able to see all the time. Yes. This, of course, is not good. So, this gentleman had reported this to Blackview, and it heard nothing, and it heard nothing.

Of course, it got some attention from us and from some others. And Blackview did finally respond on Twitter, and they said, hello, all— Where everybody does nowadays, of course. Well, yeah, yeah. He said, hello, all. We understand your concerns and want to do the right thing. We will set every user's settings to private on the server mid-October and update the app to communicate on this, as well as set every sharing feature to private by default for newly registered dashcams.

Thanks. So, I guess this gets filed under better late than never. Yes, we're being tagged left, right, and center on the responses to this, which are, why are we waiting until mid-October? Right. Exactly. Right.

Yeah. Because we're in Barbados spending all of the money, and we're never going to touch this company again. Yeah. So, I don't know. I'm not sure what to make of this. If I were in the market for a dashcam, I think this would knock Blackview off my list, certainly.

Oh, you think? I know. I'm so good at an understatement. Yeah. That it got to this point at all, just- Well, having to be publicly shamed to do the right thing is a little ridiculous. Mm-hmm. And as Graham clearly pointed out, this was first brought to their attention back in April.

Yeah. So, they've had plenty of time, and it just seemed like, as so often is the case, the buzz had to get loud enough online, and enough people had to talk about it, where they couldn't pretend not to hear it anymore. So, until the internet outrage machine gets its engine warmed up, nobody listens anymore.

That's right. That's right. We had another story this week about the Feds forcing someone to unlock an Apple iPhone with their face. I think one of you gentlemen put this in here. Yes, I put it in here, which was an interesting story. What did you guys think about it? Well, it's going to put a lot of Israeli security companies out of business.

Well, first of all, this is not surprising. No. We've talked about before how you are- the way that U.S. law works right now, you are allowed to keep a password secret, but you're not allowed to use something- Any of your biometrics.

Yes, yes, exactly. Any of your physicality, your biometrics cannot be kept secret. So, before we had Face ID with Touch ID, people could use- the police could force you to unlock your phone with your Touch ID. And remember, we had stories about them using dead bodies to unlock things using Touch ID.

I suppose- it's an interesting question. I wonder if a dead body would work on Face ID, because it's my understanding that one of the components of Face ID is that it looks for movement in your eyes. That's one of the things it checks off to make sure you're not a 3D model of yourself or something, you know?

I thought it tested for heat, too, so maybe give him a hot towel, open his eyeballs up, and shake his head while you're holding it in front of the phone. Right, right. We never fail to get incredibly morbid. Yeah, the lucky intern at the morgue who- Hey, it's Bob's first day.

Yeah. Bob, remember other duties as assigned? Well, the sheriff's coming by at noon, and we've got a special job for you. Yeah. Shake vigorously. So, if you are someone who really is concerned about this, don't use Face ID, don't use Touch ID.

The in-between workaround is that I think if you hit the side button on your iPhone, I think it's five times in a row, it'll automatically put it into a mode where neither of those will work, and you have to put the passcode in to unlock it. So, that's sort of your middle ground there when it comes to that.

And the interesting thing about this one was they let it go too long, so they couldn't actually, like, hook it up to any forensic devices. So, they were just, like, taking pictures of what they saw on the phone for evidence. Because, and then it finally locked up again, and then it required a passcode, and they couldn't get back into it because I guess they'd hauled the guy off to the who's cow.

Mm-hmm. So, but I guess they could just go down there with their, you know, Israeli gear and plug it in and say, hey, looky here, Joe, and open it back up and then get all the stuff off of it. But that probably would take a court order. Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But, you know, it's one of those things where it's coming.

This did not surprise me at all. This just happened to be the first, you know, first case where it actually happened, and somebody found out about it. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's on its way. Now, before we go into the big news, I put this in here because you guys are our two uber Star Wars nerds, and I figured this, it's a little out of bounds for this segment, but since I know you guys like your Star Wars, I wanted to get you- First of all, Star Wars is not out of bounds for any segment.

There is no conversation that could not be made better with some reference to Star Wars. So, so- Case has been proven. Proceed, proceed. Jon Favreau's new Star Wars TV show has a title, and it's called The Mandalorian. Did you guys check it out yet? The story about it?

Very impressive artwork. We don't know much about the story yet. I think it'll be interesting that other than Solo, this will be the first non-Skywalker movie in theory. We don't really know the time period of it yet. Now, now, now, now, there was that Ewoks movie.

Oh, true, true. Yes. And this is not a movie. It's a TV show on the new Disney streaming network, so you'll have to pay for that one, too. Hello, Sweden. Sweden. Yeah. Well, did you watch Star Wars Rebels? I did, yes.

I enjoyed that. I thought that was a worthy addition to the Star Wars canon. So, I'll certainly check it out. Yeah, and I enjoyed the Clone Wars as well. Yeah, it's a very impressive artwork. It looks great. I would like to have this for my Halloween costume already. Yeah. I'm wondering, a friend of mine brought this up.

Are we reaching a point where, because there's so much Star Wars to be had, that that's taking some of the specialness away from Star Wars? Oh, yes. I think that's partially part of Disney's move in not rolling out a movie every single year now, is they realize that we've hit peak Star Wars and it's no longer a singular special event.

Yeah. Yeah. The interesting thing about this helmet on the new guy, I swear, if you made red light go across his eyes, he's a Cylon. That is a Cylon helmet. Right. Right. Somebody get on that. By your command.

Pretty cool. Pretty cool looking. Yeah. So, I'll definitely check it out. All right. Let's get, let's, there's an elephant in the room. In my room, for sure, and probably your room as well, Jason. Yeah. I think I literally have some of these devices sitting around now. So, let's see how worried I need to be.

Do you really? All right. Yeah. All right. So, the big bombshell that got dropped this week, this is a story from Bloomberg Business Week. It's called The Big Hack, How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies. And the long and the short of it is, is that Bloomberg found 17 people who are corroborating this story, none of them on the record, none of them named, which we'll get to in a moment, how that could be problematic.

But basically, what they're saying is that these motherboards of servers being manufactured in China, somewhere in the supply chain process, there was an extra chip added to the motherboard. And this chip would be used to provide access to the motherboard, a backdoor, if you will.

And it's been complicated because, of course, all the speculation has started to spin now as to how could this actually work? How would it work? Is this plausible? Well, is this the best way to do this? But the long and short of it is that if this is true, this is a big deal that servers used by some of the biggest companies in the world, folks like Apple and Amazon, they mentioned having these servers on U.S. warships.

So it could be an issue of national security if the Chinese have, in fact, been able to infiltrate these servers to get data off of them. So my question is, if there are so many of these servers that are out there, how come somebody can't show us a chip?

Well, you can bet – I mean, this story broke, what, in the past couple days. So you can bet that is what's going on right now as people are looking around as much as possible. Now, I put a link in the show notes for an interview that they did over at Risky Business, which is another cybersecurity podcast, a good one.

And he did an interview, the gentleman who runs Risky Business, he did some asking around. And he said one of the people he talked to who couldn't say much more or wouldn't allow him to say more on the podcast, but this person had done research into similar things and had found extra unlabeled components on sensitive buses.

Right. So this isn't the only place where people seem to be finding these things, I suppose. Well, there's already speculation that they may be in supply chains for things even like iPhones or Alexas, you know.

So it isn't just big servers. Salon – or sorry, Slate did a really good article about how we can't stop this. The problem is a global supply chain, and the only way that we could stop anything like this is to basically stop any manufacturing or development in any country that could be considered hostile, which means more expensive and less of them here.

Right. Because we'd have to build them all ourselves. Well, and I think one of the unique things about this, why it's getting attention, is that it is a hardware hack. It's not unusual for these sorts of things to be hidden in firmware. We had stories about Huawei and what was it, ZTE, where they were found multiple instances of bad stuff hidden within the firmware.

And that's one of the things that people have been asking about with this. They've said, if you have access to the manufacturing process, why put an additional chip on the board? Why not just infiltrate an existing chip, put some extra code, hide something in a chip that's already there?

That way, somebody inspecting the board isn't going to compare it with the blueprints for the board and say, wait a minute, what's this extra chip doing here? And other people have good reasons for why you might want to do that, practical reasons for why you might want to do that.

Starting with it, how often does anyone actually go and inspect the chip count on a board? And supposedly these chips were disguised to look like things like capacitors, just, you know, run-of-the-mill sort of surface-mounted components that wouldn't draw your attention.

Right. That would make the most sense to actually just disguise it as something that's there, hide in plain sight, not add to it, not be additive, but just, you know, okay, we've got a chip already. Or, you know, pull the chip up that's already there and figure out a way to hide something underneath it or in a way that is not visible.

What was the NSA's program where they would get UPS shipments in, you know, in flight and then take them apart and replace pieces and then put them back in the UPS boxes and send them out? Yep. I can't remember the name of the program for that. I don't either. Yeah, I mean, that's obviously a different thing because you're getting it later in the supply chain, but the end result is the same.

Right. But if you don't know how the supply chain works, I mean, it could have just been the NSA putting these chips on the board if these chips even exist. Well, and another thing they said in the Bloomberg article was that they'd heard about them, this technology being placed between the layers in a multi-layer circuit board.

So, circuit boards, modern circuit boards don't just have a front and a back. They have in between layers sandwiched, you know, in between the layers. And so, if you could hide this within the layers itself, that makes it even harder to find.

You'd have to x-ray the board, something like that. Now, so, the other interesting part of this is that all of the companies named in this piece are vehemently denying that any of this happened at all.

Apple, Amazon, of the Chinese government, obviously, but everyone is saying- The FBI? I don't know that we've heard from the FBI yet. I'm pretty sure we heard from the FBI that they did not receive any of these stories from Apple or Amazon. So, here we go, right?

Because Bloomberg stands by their story. And these are not wishy-washy denials from these companies. These are firm. This did not happen. And, of course, that gets everyone with a tinfoil hat spun up because, well, that's exactly what they'd say, right?

Yes. I read a good piece this morning on that about, you know, when the NSA stuff came out before with Yahoo and Facebook and Apple all saying the same thing about how they did not, you know, give the NSA direct access to their servers.

That was language that was given to them by the NSA because they were under a gag order and they could not say they were under a gag order. Right. And because when you get a gag order, you're not allowed to say you're under a gag order. Apple has come out and said, we are not under a gag order. Which, right there, you know, just clears the playing field for the fact that this probably didn't happen because they wouldn't be allowed to say that if the FBI had said, you can't say anything about this.

Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm. So what does that mean? It means somebody is either mistaken or lying or putting together – it's possible that Bloomberg is putting together bits and pieces from lots of other different things that have happened and coming up with a conclusion that isn't accurate.

And without them revealing their sources, it's kind of hard to know. And I saw another article that basically, you know, did the trail of evidence from Bloomberg to the article. And it says it's like a friend of a friend story because they didn't have direct access to the people who were the people who said the thing that was said.

Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah, I did see someone – it was a New York Times reporter yesterday, Kim Zetter, a very well-known, respected reporter. She said that she's heard that this could be perhaps one in a series of stories on this. So this – there may be more to come along these lines.

So time will tell with that one. But this certainly has grabbed everyone's attention. We are surely still within the speculation phase of this story. Lots of intrigue. I do recommend that you listen to the Risky Business segment on this because there's a lot of good information about the plausibility of this that is worth hearing.

And I've read a couple pieces from engineers who actually specced out how they would do it. Mm-hmm. If they were going to do this. And it says – they say it's kind of plausible but not the – like we said before, not the best way to do it if that's the access you wanted. It's just like fabricate a counterfeit chip that does the things that you want.

Mm-hmm. Why put another chip on the board? But you can feasibly do it if it has to be done. It's just a dumb way to do it. Right. Yeah. Could be. So like you, I'm waiting to see one of these boards actually pop up. You can bet. I mean, that's the thing everybody's searching for right now.

Oh, yeah. All these boards. Or they're not because maybe they just know it's bullshit and they're just going about business as usual. Could be. Of course, the other possibility is the government has gathered them all up and we won't be able to see them. That's right. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do.

Yeah. I'll just stoke that fire. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's move on to some more fun news. Yeah. Facebook and Instagram. There's a prototype out in the wild that somebody has seen where Instagram is asking for permission to share your location data from your photographs to your Facebook profile.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think this might have been one of the impetuses for Kevin Systrom getting out of town. He's like, I just, I can't deal with you guys doing that. And they're like, no, we're going to do it. He's like, okay, I'm out. Right. Because that gives Facebook access to more location data when the Facebook app is not running.

Mm-hmm. Which is an interesting thing. And, of course, this will probably be opt-in by default. You know how that goes, as we've seen. But, okay, I just don't understand the outrage from people on the Instagram side of things going, oh, my God, it's being shared with Facebook.

Facebook owns Instagram. Yeah. It doesn't make a difference. Right. It doesn't matter. They have your information anyways. If you were posting it on Instagram, Facebook has your information. Well, who cares if they do this? Well, the thing is, I guess from the terms of service, they can't just grab it already.

Okay. I own the company. Yeah. Who wants to put money on the bet that somewhere in the Instagram EULA, it says that they can share this with their partners and corporate cousins? Yeah. I'm not going to take the time to go read the Instagram EULA.

We don't actually do real work here on the show. We are not journalists. And that's how they get you. Yeah. That is how they get you. I mean, I get it. I totally think that this is, I agree with you, Jason. I think this is one of the things that they were pushing for that caused them to leave.

But just the outrage, the mock outrage over this is ridiculous to me because they already have this data. They own the damn company. Yeah. Right. Facebook is the alphabet of your information now. Yes. They have all these companies and they're just slurping it all up.

Good times. Okay. I thought that might go a little longer, but I guess not. We're just beaten down to a bloody pulp when it comes to this. Kind of are. It's like, oh, look, it's just, we're just hamburgers. How am I to be outraged anymore? Right. Right.

Just exhausted. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Kavanaugh's going to get appointed. Yes. Yes. Facebook has our data. Yes. Yes. China's putting chips in everything. Would you like some chips with that? Okay. Now, here's another fun one.

Alexa can be hacked by chirping birds. Now, that's kind of a misleading headline. I do believe, don't you think? A little bit. Yeah. This is a basically scientist at Universerstadt in Bochum, Germany.

Phlegm. They've discovered a way to hide inaudible commands in audio files. Commands that, while imperceptible to our ears, can take control over voice assistants. Now, the interesting thing about this is they're testing this on the AI that does the voice to text recognition stuff that is built into Alexa.

Right. That's what they're testing against. So, they haven't really tested it so much against Alexa. They're actually shoving this thing, audio files. So, they haven't actually tried it in the air yet. But what they're doing is, it's called psychoacoustic hiding, which just sounds awesome.

I love that term. That's a great song by the Talking Heads. Psycho-acoustic hiding. So, what they're doing is they're layering sub-levels of audio over people speaking because with our ears and our brains, we don't hear certain things when they're a very loud sound.

So, we skip out the little sounds. And there's a video in this article where they actually show how it works and they isolate the two different frequencies. It's a very interesting video because you can see how the different sounds are layered and they show how basically the engine is listening to it and it's slow.

It's not like very fast. It's very slow. It's like, you know, word by word and it just pieces it all together. And, you know, you can basically hide an audio file like, say, in a podcast and say, you know, turn off the security cameras and unlock the front door. That's their example, which I thought is a pretty good example.

And you could blast this out on a radio station. You could blast it out anywhere like to get a, you know, mass people. And then, oh, my God, then we have the purge. But I might have been going a little too far with that one. But it's a cool technique.

I couldn't help thinking of the little security bird in the Incredibles movie. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. On the island, there's a little bird who turns out to be a security camera. That was the first thing that came to mind when I was thinking about this.

Somebody would build. Was that bird manufactured in China? Probably. I mean, he must have outsourced all that stuff. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. But. Well, again, I mean, this is something that if they do what they need to be doing, which is get the voice recognition strong and, I mean, enough that it has to be your voice or your wife's, it has to learn your voice and only recognize your voice.

That solves this problem. Or put a pin on it. Yeah. What do you mean? If you say, girl in a tube, unlock the front door, 42672. Oh, I see. So you have to have your command. You know, you cannot just blow up the Enterprise without your command and control codes.

Initiate self-destruct. Exactly. Yeah, it's not that easy. Hmm. Yeah. Command override. Riker 272. You know, whatever. And so if things like that that are safety oriented, it would be better to have some kind of in-home pin that you can read off with it instead of just saying, do it.

You know? Yeah. You know, let's look to Star Trek to solve this problem. Yeah. That's all I'm saying. Two-factor. Star Trek or Star Wars, Jason? I'm a Star Trek guy. I'm a Star Trek guy. There's no, nobody talked to the Millennium Falcon, you know? No. You can talk to the Enterprise, but you can't talk to the Millennium Falcon.

Well, all right. I'm not going there. But you can talk to it, but it just won't answer back. Well, I mean, C-3PO says what a peculiar dialect the Falcon has. And, of course, anyone who's seen the Solo movie knows where the Falcon got. Anyway, I digress.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But. Oh, my God. Hey, you started. You're the one that brought it up this time, man. Yeah, you brought. You opened. You opened that can of worms. Now we all have to eat them. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah.

That's true. But anyway, I don't think I've ever seen any sort of self-destruct thing in the Star Wars universe. Yeah. Oh, no, now all you have to do is warp your ship into everybody and, oh, everything's done. Right. I wasn't even going to mention that. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from that. No, I'm angry. Yeah.

All right. It's your turn. It's your turn to go home angry this time. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Send an angry tweet in about 10 minutes. Yeah, right. That's how we do it. Those guys are jerks. Yeah. All right. You wait for it.

It'll happen. And then everyone will listen to this and they'll go back and they'll see it. And they'll laugh and they'll say, ha ha, those guys are so clever. Or not. Said no one ever about our show. Right. Yeah. All right. Well, gentlemen, have a nice weekend. Have a nice week.

You too. Have a nice time. Enjoy tearing apart all your electronics looking for chips. Right. Yeah. It's like the end of the movie, the conversation where the guy tears apart his apartment. We're heading in that direction, I fear. Yeah. Chips, dips, chains, whips. There you go. All right.

Always a pleasure. I'll talk to you guys next time. Ups and doodads. Now, normally I wouldn't put this kind of thing in our show because it's not technically technology and it's actually somewhat embarrassing to me, but I figured why not. I've talked about like a shaver that I bought in the past on the show, which was absolutely fantastic.

I even use it to cut my kid's hair now. But I, you know, the kid is enjoying swimming. Okay. He's got a fondness for the pool and obviously that means swimming lessons is coming up soon. And my wife has three swimming moves.

She's got hot tub. She has a sit with her feet in the water drinking a cocktail. And if absolutely pressed, she's got doggy paddle. So mommy and me classes is going to be daddy and me in my case. All right. As I've gotten older, I'm no Robin Williams or anything, but the hair has started to appear in places that one generally doesn't want it.

And I'm going to be, you know, going to these classes in a couple months, I'm sure. And I want to, you know, look all right because the Santa Monica mommies are, well, let's just say they've had a lot of work done. They look right. You don't want to be all schleppy in there. And so, you know, next week I'm starting the no sugar, no grain thing.

And I did a little search for a hair removal in hard to reach places, as it were. And I came across the back blade 2.0 plus. And the main reason I'm actually reviewing this is because when you find a product that actually works, you're just shocked these days.

This thing works. This thing, I'm blown away by how well it works. I can make all kinds of jokes about Magnum PI and wishing that hair, you know, came back in and all that. But whatever, it works phenomenally well. And I was just so blown away by it. I was like, I've got to talk about this on the show.

It's just so rare to get something that does exactly what it says it does. There you go. Okay. Back blade 2.0 plus. It does exactly what it says it does. But you have to read the whole title. Back hair removal and body shaver DIY easy to use curved handle for a close pain free shave wet or dry.

It's a long title, but it isn't as exciting as all the product ones that we normally do that have like codes in it and black parentheses. So, you know, but okay, there you go. Well, there's parentheses in here. Parentheses DIY. It's had a paren. That's true. Yeah. Well, it doesn't come with somebody who does it for you.

So I'd assume it was DIY. Yeah. It would be nice if it came with someone that does it for you. Yeah. Those are usually the products that I would like to buy. Yeah. So anyways, I recommend it if you happen to be hair stute. Ah, yes. Yes, I am. I am not.

So I will not be getting that. Okay. Friend of the show, Mike, sent me a great link over at USA Today. Check out how much a computer costs the year you were born. Assuming, you know, you're not too old because it does start in 1971, which I believe is Jason. So it starts with you, old man.

That's my birthday. 1971. So the notable computer of that year was the Kenback One with a price tag of $750. And the inflation adjusted price is $4,659. Well, that is a goddamn steal compared to me in 1973.

No shit. Which the notable computer is the Wang 2200. Yeah. A price tag of $3,500. Inflation adjusted price, $19,832. Good Lord. Good Lord. Now, it goes all the way up to 2016.

I was hoping to get, let's see, that's a Lenovo Yoga. Yoga. There was a computer named Yoga? Yep. 100S for $1,000 adjusted inflation price, $1,152. So there you go. I'm going to go get my $20,000 weighing out. $20,000 weighing.

I believe we have a show title. Oh, man. So I work in the audio business, as some people may know, because they're listening to it right now. Not many people know, unfortunately. Yeah, we could use a few more people to know, so get on it.

I often use iZotope products to clean up my audio, get rid of unwanted noise and sounds and things like that. And their RX series has been just phenomenal. And they have just come out with iZotope RX-7. And I go for the advanced copy so I can get all the bells and whistles.

So yesterday, I picked up a copy of iZotope RX-7 Advanced, which is pricey. But the main reason I got it is because I have a discount for an upgrade from some plugins I had. And since it just came out, it's like $500 off the street value, because it's usually over a grand.

It's like $1,200 new, which is pricey. But when you think about it, this is like Photoshop for audio. And, you know, in the old days, I'd buy Photoshop sometimes. And maybe once. I bought one version.

Surely that counts for all the upgrades, right? That was Photoshop 3. So anyway, I picked this up and oh my God, what an amazing thing. It can do just about anything. It can make anybody sound good and can fix all sorts of stuff. To prove it to you, I'm actually doing this show on top of a garbage truck.

Do you hear it? You do not. In the wind with no mic filter. Backwards. And so, yeah, if you're into audio, definitely check it out. There is a demo that you can get. But the difference between RX-6 and RX-7 is just unbelievable.

It's twice as fast. The filters are twice as good. It's one whole number. It is. Yes, it is. It's a whole number. And in iZotope RX-7, they use machine learning. Oh God, of course they do. Yeah, but I tell you what, it fucking works. So I don't care.

Then I went over to ask.video and I got the RX-7, the unofficial video manual, which is a great course. It's like $30 and teaches you all the ins and outs. I stayed up like way too late last night watching all these videos. It was like 28 videos for a couple hours. And it's great. So even if you have been using RX and you don't know what it all does, because it doesn't come with a manual, of course, at least not a decent one, it's great videos.

Totally. And I was complaining on Twitter, because that's what you do on Twitter, even though I'm supposed to be off it. I was complaining about some hosting stuff. And a friend of the show, Anthony Rosbach, wrote me. He's like, hey, why don't you check out the company I work for, Node Host? And I'm like, okay, okay, I'll go check them out.

And then I just went and, you know, jumped around a bit and looked at what I thought was going to be, you know, just a normal hosting thing. And then I scrolled down and I saw their prices and my jaw hit the floor. For just a basic blog setup, it's $1.20 a month.

A month. The portfolio, which gives you twice the web storage, is $2.40 a month. And it goes up to $9.60 a month. How do they make money? That's exactly what I said. Because also, it's free if you're a student or a teacher. Right.

So I wrote them. And I went back and forth with the Node Host Twitter account. I'm like, no, but how? How? And they're like, we're just very smart about how we do things. And I'm like, it helps keep our cost out.

And I'm like, okay, well, let me give it a shot. So I set up an account last night and I'm moving one of my sites over to give it a shot. The setup is easy. And you get a bunch of time free when you sign up. So I didn't even have to put my credit card in. But you can recharge your account through your PayPal account, which is nice. So I put a whopping $5 on there, which should get me another like 20 years at their pricing.

But so far, it's pretty straightforward. The dashboard is nice there. Their DNS panel leaves a lot to be desired. But it is workable. But for the price, the fact that they have one is a miracle. You know? So far, it's pretty cool. And they've got, you know, one-click installs for a bunch of different things.

And I ran across one that had me kind of interested. It's called Koken. K-O-K-E-N. Okay. I'd never heard of this before. It's kind of like the WordPress for video galleries. Ah, interesting. Yeah, it's free. You can download to open source. And they can do an install for you on there.

And I think I'm going to give it a shot. I'm just going to spin up an instance and try it out. Because I am not happy with the site that I have over at jpd.me. I'm sorry, jpd.photos, which is a you-pick site. Because they have just too many add-ons.

And they don't have a way to export your photos, which is my biggest pet peeve ever. But this way, it's on my server. I run it. It's got themes and plug-ins. It looks really cool. It looks like the WordPress for photography, almost. Nice. Yeah. And it syncs with Lightroom, which is also really, really cool.

Because all my stuff's in Lightroom. That's very helpful. Because that's how you do everything. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. I'm going to check this out. I'm going to dig into it. But check them out. Nodehost.ca. So, they're Canadians. Which, you know, means you like them. Yeah. Oh, speaking of Canada. Remember that oil infuser that they gave us at Fireside that we used the entire trip?

I brought it home, because you already had one, and I cranked it up last night, and I put the oil in and, you know, started to lay down to do some reading. And it just brought me back to Canada. I felt like I was back in the woods in my room, because I used the same oil. Were you pissed when a bucket of beer didn't show up at night?

I kind of was, yeah. There was no bucket of beer. But the nice thing is, I have heat in my house. And Wi-Fi. Oh, we did have Wi-Fi. Never mind. Yes. And a shower that's bigger than a midget's ass. That's true. That was the worst. The first time I got in that shower, and it was freezing, and my butt hit the back of the shower, I just almost jumped out of the thing.

Oh, camping. We were supposed to be glamping. That was not glamping. Anyway, one thing I told you about that I was having an issue with, with opera, with this new version, like once I updated to, whatchamacallit, not Maverick, was it Mojave? Mojave is the new.

Mojave, yes. Yeah. I'm not digging the dark mode. It's kind of all over the place. I think I'm going to go back to light mode. That's what I told you. Yeah. It's not working all that great. So I think I'm just going to go back to light mode. I wish you could go back to light mode and just make the title bar dark, but you can't anymore.

It's all or nothing. And I love having the normal interface with just the dark title bar. It just makes me happy. Anyway, so in opera, I was having this problem when I was doing these show notes where I would copy some text from one page and try and put it in our show notes on Quip. And I do shift command V, which it should be paste and match style.

And every time I would do that, it would open Google and search for the text. And I'm like, what? So it turns out in one of the new versions of opera, you can go to the edit menu and see, you know, paste and match style, which is shift command V, because we taught people how to do that in a previous episode in the system preferences using the keyboard system preference and the shortcuts.

You can manually set it up for set up app shortcuts, which is a great thing to do. But they hijacked it in in opera now. So they changed it to paste and go. I hate you, paste and go. Yeah, paste and go sucks. Took me an hour this morning.

I'm like, I am bound and determined to figure this out because that's part of my workflow and my muscle memory. So for the opera fans out there, and surprisingly, there are a lot of opera fans out there now. Everybody I talk to is like, yeah, I listened to your show and I tried opera and it's great. I love it. So there are a lot of opera fans out there.

So if you are using this particular thing, you want to go to advanced settings, shortcuts and configure shortcuts. And there's a list of every key command that you have the option for in opera. So which is a nice thing to know anyway, if you want to change something or add something, just go find paste and go and delete the key combo and that will fix the issue for you.

Woohoo. Yeah, I know. Exciting stuff. Yeah. Brick a brick. Well, Russian trolls didn't just screw up our election. They've apparently meddled in our most sacred American institution, Star Wars fandom.

Oh, no. Yes. In addition to the 2016 presidential election, Russia may have gotten involved with the backlash surrounding The Last Jedi online, sowing discontent and dissent amongst Americans. Oh, no. Comrade Fett. Yes.

A new study by researcher Morton Bay examines online discussion of the film and finds that on Twitter, the discourse was affected by deliberate organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments, including possible Russian trolls. He wrote. I don't know if this is a book or just a blog, but it's called weaponizing the haters, the last Jedi and the strategic politicization of pop culture through social media manipulation.

And he found that basically, yeah, Russian trolls got involved in, you know, basically all the negative, super, super, super negative, like the stuff that went like sexist and all that discussion about The Last Jedi. Now, before you go crazy about this, there are plenty of us that just hated the movie and talked about it.

Yeah. There are some of us who think it just sucked. Yes. And I am one of those people. Yeah. I found a lot of science news this week, a lot of space news, actually. So apparently we have found our first exo moon or a moon that is circling another planet.

Obviously, we've had trouble seeing them because they're much smaller than planets. But some researchers thought they saw it about, what, I think two, three years ago or something like that. And then they got time with the Hubble telescope to look at it because of their math and work on that. And they say that, yeah, we pretty much think we are 100, not 100, but 99% sure we found a moon.

Pretty cool. Right. Nice. I dig the moons. Except when my moon hits the back of that shower in the morning. Yes, that is a problem. You want some Martian dirt? Nah. That'd be kind of cool to have on your desk, right? 20 bucks a kilogram, except it's not the real stuff.

It is made in a lab to basically match exactly what Martian dirt is like. Okay. So you could actually own some, which is kind of cool. You can also own some for- Don't let Matt Damon poop in it, though. Yes. I would get one and put a potato in it. Exactly. See if it grew.

Yeah. So you can also apparently get lunar and asteroid soil, but this is more difficult to make and much more expensive because some of those ingredients can only be sourced from actual meteorites that have fallen to Earth. We can only source it from the moon. Sorry. Yeah. So I guess a Martian soil is a lot easier to make.

And finally, because the world is a gigantic garbage trash fire right now, I have some Halloween news. An asteroid shaped like a goddamn skull is currently headed towards Earth. Nice. Hey, man. If we got to go, that's the only way to go.

Somebody call Bruce Willis. We have a link in the show notes. Oh, my God. It looks like a goddamn skull. It does. And it is hurtling towards us. It's a 2,000 foot wide asteroid. It was initially discovered a few years ago when it first made a pass by our planet in Halloween 2015.

And it comes like this advice says a cosmic spooky skeleton meme. This time, the asteroid, which is likely a dead comet, is going to do a pretty tight flyby coming within 1.3 times the distance between us and the moon. It'll be a little later. It'll be here November 11th. And as they say, at this point, let's just hope it ends it all.

Seriously. But, man, if we got to go, come on. That's the way to go. That is the way to go. It is the most metal. That is. Oh, Jesus. Closing shout outs. Sorry, Jason, your Cubs are out, but the Dodgers have won their first game against the Braves, and I'm looking forward to this.

Let's go, Dodgers. There you go. I got my L.A. hat now. You know, screw the Cubs. Yeah. 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 287. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy, and we'll see you next week.

Begin auto-destruct sequence, authorization Picard 47 Alpha Tango. Computer, Commander Beverly Crusher, confirm auto-destruct sequence, authorization Crusher 22 Beta Charlie. Computer, Lieutenant Commander Worf, confirm auto-destruct sequence, authorization Worf 37 Gamma Echo.

Command authorization accepted. Awaiting final code to begin auto-destruct sequence. This is Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Destruct sequence, Alpha 1. 15-minute silent countdown. Enable. Self-destruct in 15 minutes.

There will be no further audio warning. So much for the Enterprise E. We barely knew her. I think they'll build another one. Plenty of letters left in the alphabet. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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