289: Tanqueray Beavers

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by RxBar. For 25% off your first order, visit rxbar.com slash GOG and enter promo code GOG at checkout. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo, discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I just got to say, really quick, if you want to look into the hell that is modern life, just spend five minutes scrolling down the Reddit homepage. I made the mistake of doing that recently. Everything is so dumb and misspelled and horrible. I did that. They could be tech journalists for all we know.

That's true. I did that this morning, but I did find one cool thing. It wasn't steaming dumpster fire of, you know, crap. Yes, the front page of the internet is a steaming dumpster fire. It really is. That's all you need to know about the internet these days. True that, true that. But this is an animated GIF of the Mercator projection going to the true size of the country in relation to the other countries.

Ah, very nice. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. Russia is a lot smaller than I thought. Hmm. I also found out this week, I never knew the population of Russia. I just always thought it was on par with us, but they've got like a third of the people that we have. Yep. But all the power. Yeah. And all the hackers.

All the hackers. That's what they've got. And I found this on New York Mag. Speaking of Reddit, it's from Dan McComas, the former senior vice president for product of Reddit. And the title of the article is, I fundamentally believe that my time at Reddit made the world a worse place. You don't think?

You don't think? But what I find funny about this. Yeah. The other part of his title is, he's also the founder and CEO of Imsi. Was. Was. Was the former. Yeah. Yeah. Did Imsi make the world a better place? I don't think so. Well, it didn't live long enough to even try.

Well, it was a flash in the pan. It was a flash in the pan, and they yelled at me on Twitter. So that's not nice. But they gave me a free shirt. That's true. Which somebody at Fireside went home with. Gave that one away. And a little bit on last week, I forgot.

I completely buried the lead on my Moron of the Week with Banksy. Right. And so Banksy, you know, he's underground, super underground. We don't know who the hell he is. But his fucking Instagram account is verified. How? Well, I mean, we don't. How the fuck do you verify an account for somebody that supposedly doesn't exist?

We don't know how any of these accounts are verified. So fair enough. That's true. He must have had the extra money to, like, pay the 10 grand to get backdoor. Verified. We talked a bit last week about Amazon's pay raise and the backlash that came with it. Because to pay for the pay raise, they were getting rid of some incentive-based programs that the people were making there.

And it does point out a reality that when you're as big as Amazon, you can't win for losing. Ain't that the truth? There's always going to be a hater. There's always going to be a hater. A lot of people don't like it. Some people are happy with it. And, you know, it is kind of Amazon's fault.

They've done a kind of bad job of doing good PR for themselves over the past couple of years. But they are big enough now, much like Apple or Google or Facebook or all these other companies we talk about all the time, that even when they try to do something good, people will dig into it and find the things that aren't so good. That's usually us, but on this one, we didn't actually do that on this one.

We thought, hey, $15 an hour, that sounds pretty decent. It does sound pretty decent. And, you know, they did have a point. You know, the stock thing was doing really well for a lot of people because the Amazon stock has been doing really well. But they said, well, there's no way for us to guarantee that. Would you rather have a guaranteed wage or take your chances? Right, right.

And it just dawned on me. Amazon warehouse workers now make more than we do for their time in the warehouse than we do doing the show. Uber drivers make more money than we do. That's true. We should just go work at Amazon and say, screw it.

We can podcast from the stacks. You'd podcast from the stack. I'll podcast from my car driving people around. Okay, that'll be it. And we'll see who gets more money. Oh, man. It's a mess. It's a mess. And I was thinking about this Intelligent X beer, the AI beer.

Yes. And I was going to the site. I signed up for the newsletter. And then I'm like, wait a minute. The beer's getting smarter. But me drinking the beer is going to make me dumber. Right. I can't. I can't have that. I cannot have my beer being smarter than me. Close the tab. Get out now.

Who knew Skynet would be frosty? Exactly. Hoppy. Hoppy net. I didn't think it would be an IPA. Yep. Seriously. And you thought we were joking about all of these fitness trackers giving you crap data. Mm-mm. Over on Science Alert, they've got a video, which is one of the funniest things.

They put these, you know, fitness trackers on inanimate objects. Right. And who knew a banana had a pulse? See, I've been saying these things are full of crap since day one. Yeah. And, you know, they go into some of the science on why these things would give back data.

But it really shouldn't. It says that the green light that these things use can get confused by the reflectiveness of inanimate objects. But how, why, that makes no sense to me. There's no way a banana burns 752 calories today.

I know. It would be a very skinny banana. Seven flights of stairs. Oh, my God. But you haven't met your stand goal. That's pretty funny, pretty funny. And my roommate, when we were watching TV, pointed something out to me about these new iPhone 10 ads.

And when they hold up the things next to each other, they kind of look like a mammogram x-ray. No point. So she's like, all I see is boobs. And what has been seen cannot be unseen. So every time you see an iPhone 10 ad now, enjoy the knockers. Thanks for that.

You're welcome. You're welcome. And we talked about the Fyre Festival and more on another week when that happened. The, oh, my God, yes. Well, the founder is going to jail for six years and three years of supervised release because he is basically just a con man.

Yeah. Yeah, he is. You know, I think that all the, it shouldn't just be him that gets in trouble. It should be all the Insta celebs that help promote the hell out of this. They should all get in trouble, too. But they're not, of course. Of course not. Of course not. The world needs their Insta celebs.

Yep. In the news.

Google has dropped out of the Pentagon's $10 billion cloud computing competition. Okay. Citing AI principles that they have come up with recently might actually be a conflict. And they're, yeah. And I mean, the funny thing about the project.

Wait, hold on. Google came up with principles? We're going to get to those in a second. Okay. But what I love about the project is known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud, or JEDI, or JEDIC. It should be JEDIC. It should be JEDIC. It should be JEDIC. They're cheating again with the acronyms.

Yes, they are. So they have pulled out, and I had to just, I scratched my head because when I was reading this article, they're like, you know, it would not align with our AI principles. So I'm like, AI principles? Let me go research the AI principles. Okay. Here we go. We will assess AI applications in view of the following objectives.

We believe that AI should, one, be socially beneficial, two, avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias, a topic we will cover shortly, be built and tested for safety, be accountable to people, incorporate privacy design principles, uphold high standards of scientific excellence, and be made available for uses that accord with these principles.

Okay. Okay. None of this shit exists, so. Nope. But this is what they're moving towards. Isn't this basically don't be evil, which they've gotten rid of? Kind of, yeah. Okay. But I think what they've done is all of their applications that they have so far, they just wrote down the opposite of what they are, and they're like, ah, this is what we should be going for.

Right. And we need a PR stunt to do it, so this is what they're going for. And their AI applications will not pursue, they say, in addition to the above objectives, we will not design or deploy any AI in the following application areas. General harm.

The need of the few outweighs the need of the many. Yeah, that's kind of vague, though. Yeah, that's kind of vague, though. Yeah, that's kind of vague, though. But they go on to say, where there is a material risk of harm, we will proceed only where we believe that the benefits substantially outweigh the risks, and we'll incorporate appropriate safety constraints. Okay.

Who decides what the benefits are versus the risks? Exactly. Definitions, please. The devil's in the details. Yes, it is. Weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people. Okay.

Okay. Technologies that gather or use information for surveillance, violating internationally accepted norms. Well, I think you're a little late to the party on that one, because I'm pretty sure you've been doing it. Mm-hmm. And technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.

So those are the AI principles at Google. What do you think of those? Well, sounds great, but you're right. The devil's in the details, right? Mm-hmm. And the implementation. We don't know what a lot of this means. We don't know what the implementation is. There is no AI yet anyways. They're just laying the groundwork for it, which is what you wanted.

You wanted rules. That's true. It's a good step. And I'm happy that they pulled out of the Pentagon defense thing as well. I'm happy about that. That's good. Yeah. No, the revolt at Google has actually done some good over there, so we'll see if it sticks. Yeah. Or they're just going to spin off a new letter in the alphabet and then put all the defense stuff under that.

Yeah, probably. We have a real-world example of a—God, I hate reading this title—AI, because it's not AI. But thanks to Amazon, they've given us a cautionary tale about the perils of teaching computers to make human decisions. According to a Reuters report published on Wednesday, the tech giant last year decided to abandon an experimental hiring tool that used artificial intelligence to rate job candidates.

This began in 2014 when a group of Amazon engineers in Scotland set out to mechanize the company's headhunting process by creating a program that would scour the internet for worthwhile job candidates and probably, you know, fire HR staff that were going around and actually interviewing people or looking at resumes.

So they wanted an AI engine that would give—you know, you'd put in 100 resumes and it would spit out the top five, and those are the people that we hire. Seemed to kind of be working, except they realized that they completely discriminated against women. The machine learning learned to discriminate against women because there are far more male applicants out there.

So as it learned what these successful resumes were—I mean, far more employees as well—it started to basically completely discriminate against women. If it started to—if you said you were in a women's chess club, you were out. If you graduated from a women's college, you were out. If you, you know, used words that were very masculine, like executed and captured and things like that in your resume, that was good because the vast majority of the resumes were like that.

Oops. Okay. Well done. This is—again, this is the world we're heading towards right now. So we've got to be very careful with these machine learning algorithms. Yes, and speaking of, over at Wired, there's a fantastic article called, What Does a Fair Algorithm Actually Look Like?

And it's a fairly long article, and it goes into a lot of detail on, you know, some of the algorithms that are out there and people that are working to actually, you know, fix these things. So there are, you know, people watching this and trying to figure it out. Right.

But, like I said, it's a really long article, but it's really well worth the read if you want to kind of know what's going on on the other side of it with people, like, really trying to do the regulations and figure out how these algorithms have to report back to people. And the things that I really liked about it is some of the accountability things that they're talking about is saying, okay, we put data into this black box and the person doesn't get a loan.

If the AI is so smart, tell us what the person has to do to change to get the loan. Exactly. Which would be fantastic, you know, unless it comes back and says, be white. Be white and be male. And be rich already. Yes.

There are a couple different paths that these people are talking about to figure out the best way to do it. And at least people are thinking about it, and they're not saying, okay, this is the one way it should be. Let's come up with a couple different solutions and figure out which one is going to work the best. But, you know, the explanation series of events with these AIs is really something that people are kind of digging down into.

And here's one thing that I found out. There is a conference called the International Conference for Machine Learning's Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. So people are actually having conferences around this stuff. So there's only three people that go, but at least there are good guys on the other side of this.

Three really disillusioned people. Yeah. Picked by an AI to get free tickets. Yeah. So back to Amazon for a second. If you ask Amazon's Alexa, what is Wikipedia, it will tell you that Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free encyclopedia based on a model of openly editable content, which is taken directly from Wikipedia's entry on itself.

Right. As meta as it could be. Amazon's Alexa gets a lot of its answers from Wikipedia. So perhaps what it should have said is Wikipedia is the source from which I take much of my information without credit, contribution, or compensation. Well, that's the thing about Wikipedia is you don't have to pay them to use the data.

It is true. That's written on the tin. That is very true. And Amazon also recently donated $1 million to the Wikipedia Endowment, a fund that keeps Wikipedia running. So basically, the question is, again, if you build a multimillion-dollar business off something that is basically free, don't you have some social responsibility to help them?

And, you know, okay, $1 million, that's fine, but it's a billion-trillion-dollar company, and Bezos himself is worth more than $160 billion. That's the equivalent of me tossing, like, three cents into a busker's cap. It's nothing. Yeah, but, I mean, it's written on the tin.

You can't use it. It is written on the tin. So if Wikipedia is going to get butthurt about it, then – and here's the question. Is Wikipedia butthurt about it, or is this just somebody putting out a piece against Amazon to say, you know, they're just being cheap? That is a good question, and also surprising that Wikipedia doesn't do what many different non-for-profit organizations do, which is you're free to use this for your own personal use, but if you're making money off of it, you've got to pay up.

Yeah, see, I think that's one of Jimmy's big things is he just wants it to be free for everyone. Since everybody is contributing freely, and, you know, people are donating to keep the servers online and things like that, it's one of those things where it's like, eh, I can see both sides of this.

Me too. As a side note, though, just, you know, it is Wikipedia. We need to remind ourselves of this. Shouldn't we be the least bit concerned that we're pulling information from Wikipedia and just accepting it from our smart devices? Well, I mean, I don't know.

It's up to you. Depends on, you know, when somebody's edited it and has it been hacked and what information you're getting. It ain't a real encyclopedia. It ain't the Britannica, is what I'm saying. No, it's not. But, hey, if you want regular, real data, do your own research. Don't just, you know, expect it to be handed to you.

But nobody does that anymore. Nobody does that anymore. And this is, you know, when you're asking Wikipedia for something or, you know, the lady in the tube for something, it's generally around the house, like, you know, like the first commercial, it's like, you know, how many teaspoons in a tablespoon? A, you're dumb for not knowing that.

But B, you can look it up yourself or you can ask the tube lady and the tube lady just might be wrong. There's never, in the terms of service for my echo, it does not say that if you ask it a question, it will actually be right every time. Yeah.

You know. Fair enough. Now let's go back to Toronto, the smart city that's been doing very well with their pursuit of AI and things of that nature. We talked a little bit about how a Google sister company called Sidewalk Labs a while back was going to build a smart city in the middle of Toronto, which was going to be basically kind of creepy and heavily surveilled.

And critics have pointed out that letting a foreign corporation gather continuous surveillance data on residents of a city as they go about their daily routine is a bit dystopian at the least. Sidewalk Labs has said, no, don't worry about it. We're not going to be creepy and we're going to recruit an independent advisory board to keep ourselves honest so that we won't creep you all out and just grab all your data.

A key member of that board just resigned. Sadia Muzafari is an entrepreneur and tech activist and she wrote a scathing resignation letter where she described an unholy confluence of Sidewalk Labs greed for data collection, the city of Toronto's indifference, and a lackadaisical approach taken by Waterfront Toronto.

So your independent advisory board is saying, oh man, you guys are fucking it up. Yeah, I'm glad that they're stepping down because this just shows that there are still good people that are saying, stop it. Yeah, next time I'm in Toronto, I'm going to swing down there and take a look at it.

Okay. And it's interesting because we always talk about how Toronto is becoming the AI capital of Canada. Well, it turns out Montreal is on their heels. They've actually got the most investment in the country in 2017 with $800 million invested across 63 major deals, which is not a huge thing compared to the U.S., but for Canada, it's the biggest one.

And most of them are AI. Oh, interesting. It's very cold there in the winter. It's very cold everywhere in Canada in the winter. I don't know if you've noticed that. I've, you know, I've been around a bit. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Moving on. We got some scoot, scoot news.

Oh, joy. Yeah. So I always thought Bird were the biggest dicks on the block, but it turns out Lime is vying for that title. Okay. We know that San Francisco put out their little bid thing to figure out how many scooter companies will be unleashed on the city.

Two of them won, and neither one of those were Lime or Bird. Or Bird. Yes, they were unknowns. Yeah, they're semi-unknowns. And the thing about it is Lime is butthurt about it. And they're whining and crying. And instead of going through the appeals process, which the city set up, they're saying, no, this was unfair and we're going to sue.

Yes. So they're going to the courts instead of following the rules again, like, why just not follow the rules and do your thing? But no, no. So they're seeking emergency relief in the court to stop the whole process. So way to go, Lime. Sounds awesome.

Yeah. It's just par for the course for all of these companies, it seems. Yeah. Well, they're all doing the slash and burn version where screw the rules. We got to win. So good times for that. So if you're pissed off about that and want to get back at some of these companies, hat tip to Morton on Facebook, who sent us this link, Inside the Lawless New World of Electric Scooter Hacking over on MelMagazine.com, in which this person obviously listened to our show and collected every single hack that we made up to destroy these things.

Every one of them that we made up. Yes. Like, all the blue skying we did when these things first came on the market is in this article. Yes. Except the only one that chaps my dazzle is they use stickers instead of the black spray paint to cover up the UPCs, which I think you should really.

I mean, you could even just get a paint pen and do it, but stickers peel off. You just need a Sharpie. Yeah, that's true, too. But, you know, and if I was in another country where people used UPC codes for payment plans all the time, I would actually be putting those on there like they did in, was it India or China?

I can't remember where they were, you know, putting stickers over the payment UPCs, so if somebody went to a store to buy something and they hit pay, it would just transfer the money to whoever put the sticker on. Yeah. But since we don't have those kind of payment systems here yet, they're coming, it's still funny that you can do that kind of thing.

It would be great. But yeah, Sharpie, just get a Sharpie. This is a great article, but I mean, first off, it does go through every single way to, you know, totally screw with these things. It's just taking off the GPS tracking, et cetera, et cetera. There's even a quote saying every homeless person has like three scooters now, and they just basically take the brains out, the logos off, and they literally hotwire it to get it running.

The article is great because it does give you like basically a how-to list on how to destroy these things if you want to, including that there's a glitch in Bird where you could basically just lift the bird off the ground when you sink it and then cancel the ride. But it doesn't turn the motor off, so now you can go wherever you want without paying for anything.

Apparently, that one's been fixed, though, in a later version. Somebody will figure out a new way around this because here's the main thrust of this article, believe it or not, is they're saying that if major corporations and voting infrastructures can be hacked, then it stands to reason that a $400 electric scooter should be a piece of cake. And these companies don't seem to care that much.

They figure things out once they've become aware of them, but they haven't done any of the work themselves ahead of time. So they're saying, how are you even – are they even budgeting for this? And apparently that they aren't. So they don't know how much it's going to cost to service and maintain these things. The average bird here in Santa Monica earns $16 a day, recouping its cost in about 20 days.

But there's no idea about the service and maintenance and wear and tear and theft and vandalism, and are they actually going to make any money because of this? And the question – the answer is starting to look like not really, especially if people keep destroying them. Yeah, but I mean if it just comes down to replacing – if you get like 45 days out of a scooter, then you're profitable for that scooter.

Right. But chances are these things are going to last 45 days if this keeps going. Exactly. And it's interesting though to watch all the hacks. And what I found kind of scratched my head was a lot of these people are putting their faces in these videos. Well, they're idiots.

Yeah. That's – it's like, okay, you literally just posted, you know – Your self-destroying property. Exactly. And you know that these people are going to – there's going to be some repercussions at some point. Yeah. But they're too busy doing other shit right now. But, you know, in the future, if – I don't know.

I just don't get criminals these days. I don't think these people are really criminals. They're just idiots. Well, they're committing a crisis. Well, yes. But, you know, hardened. They aren't out there to make a living destroying scooters. They're just morons. Yeah, okay. But they're criminal morons.

Yes, they are. That's what I'm saying. Look, if that happened to me when I was a kid, I would have gotten busted for it. Yes. If not even by the police, my parents found out they would have – I would have been in so much fucking trouble. It's insane. If I were one of these companies, if I were Bird or Lime or whatever here, I would just hire some kid to troll through these different sites where people are posting all these things and just start taking snapshots of people.

And then just Lars Ulrich, show up at the police station with, here is a list of every – here's their handle. Here's their address. I was able to find all of this. They have destroyed our property. Yeah. Here's video proof. Yes. But I think the money is so small for these scooters and these guys have so much money that they just don't – I don't think they care.

They don't seem to give a crap right now. Yeah. Yeah. And you know when people actually like are talking about the cost of these things, they're talking retail. These people are buying them in bulk. I bet they're getting a hell of a discount over retail. So they're probably even cheaper than that. Yeah. Anyway, fuck Lime. Yep.

We've talked a lot about the guys leaving Instagram, the founders, because they were pissed off about what's happening. Well, we kind of know why now or at least what Facebook intends to do with Instagram. Instagram – Facebook's advertising revenue is stalling, has been stalling for years. And basically, they need Instagram because Instagram's ad revenue is going up.

So it's going to be push, push, push, ads, ads, ads on Instagram. Even more? Jesus. Yes, even more because that's where it's all coming from these days. I mean, there's an ad every three posts right now. It's pretty crazy. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Now let's talk about something that isn't supposedly TV but is really just kind of ads.

Snapchat's plan to reinvent TV may actually be working. My problem with this article, Recode, is that the only way that we have any understanding of if it's working or not is what Snap is telling us. There is no third-party verification of this. They have provided no stats whatsoever.

You're basing your entire assumption that they're stupid Snap original TV shows, which are, I think, four minutes long or something like that. And who the hell knows what it is. They're shot vertically for your phone. You're telling us that it's working just because they're going to keep funding it. When have tech companies continued to fund something that was failing?

That's never happened. Every damn day. And we know that Snap is so, you know, trustworthy with their numbers. Yes. Yeah. See IPO filing for proof of that. Yeah. So I don't buy this at all. I don't think it's working. I mean, great that they're spending money on content creators and somebody's getting a paycheck to make four-minute vertical TV shows.

But I doubt it's working. But we do have another major competitor coming into the streaming market as a challenger to Netflix. And we know Disney's coming out with their own. Amazon's got their own right now. Well, we're now getting AT&T's bought out Time Warner.

And Warner Media is going to launch their own streaming service based heavily on HBO content. Oh, for fuck's sake. Even though HBO already has their own streaming service. Oh, for fuck's sake. You thought the 255 channels on regular cable was confusing. The streaming services are just going to get ridiculous.

You know, we talked about this in the old days of the show that we're going to have this dystopian landscape of all of these different silos now that you're going to have to pay for every single month. And it's going to turn out to be more expensive than it was when we just had to pay a cable bill. And I think that's what's coming to pass.

Of course that's what's coming. We have to pay BrewDog Network just to see Zane Lamprey's show. That's one show. CBS expects us to pay for them just to see Discovery. It's going to be insane. Well, to be honest, though, I will be paying for CBS Discovery when the Picard show comes out.

Yeah, I'll wait for that one. That one I'll throw some coin behind. But Discovery is so meh. And, like, I really want to watch reruns of the fucking Big Bang Theory. Now, this one I thought was kind of interesting. Apple is facing a class action lawsuit because it's alleged that it misrepresentation.

It misrepresented what it included in iTunes Season Passes. Okay. So what it boils down to is when you'd get a season pass, you'd have a show of, like, say, 13 episodes. Yeah. And then there was a bunch of promotional crap in there, like trailers and behind the scenes and little snippets here and there.

Yes. And they would count that in the episode count when you went to go buy the show. Seems wrong. You'd think. Because you'd think that you're paying for episodes, not their promotional crap. And, well, people are pissed. So they actually have filed a class action lawsuit about this.

This is, I don't know if this is really class action lawsuit worthy. This is refund worthy or give us everything worthy. Yeah, I don't know. It's just one of those dumb UI things that, do you really think that they were trying to, you know, bamboozle somebody?

No. I think it's just somebody did a track count that's in the, you know, in the show for that season. It was a season. There's a bunch of tracks in there. They did a track count and then they bubbled up the track count. Yep. So it's lazy programming. I don't think anybody was trying. Yeah, I don't think anybody was trying to do anything nefarious there.

But now it's got to go to the courts and clog up the damn system. And we all get two bucks. Yeah, exactly. For my season of Buffy from 10 years ago that I bought. This episode is brought to you by RX Bar.

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rxbar.com slash GOG and enter promo code GOG at checkout. Get some, they're delicioso. Security? Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast.

The Cyber Wire is a free, community-driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland. Dave is also the co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. And I've got to say, this week you had my friend Chris Hadnagy on, which was a great episode.

Well, thank you very much. Yeah, it was actually Chris's second time back with us. He was our first guest on Hacking Humans, and he just had an updated version of his book, The Science of Social Engineering. And so it was nice to talk to him. I'll have to pick that up. I read his first book, and it was fantastic. Yeah, he's really dug into some of the things that have changed since he wrote the first one.

I guess there's a lot more science that's been done backing up all these things about social engineering. And then the other thing that Chris has really focused on these days is the ethics of social engineering, which I think is an important thing to pursue. So hats off to him. He's always a good guest.

Definitely. And so I have a new phone scam this week. I was called by myself. Yes. My phone rang, and it was me. Yes. I'm like, hmm. Ooh. Okay. The phone call from the Matrix? Or a time machine. Or a time machine.

Bill and Ted. I'm Bill and Ted and myself here. So I answered it. And it was a recording of a Mexican girl saying that my AT&T account was locked, and to reactivate it, I should press one. Well, of course, I'm not going to press anything because I like my money where it's at.

And so, of course, I hung up, but it's interesting that they spoofed my number to make me call myself. Yeah, they've gotten very good at that. I mean, basically, the whole idea now is you should not answer any phone call that comes from the first three digits of your phone number. Yeah, I get those every day. They run through.

It's a social engineering thing. They run through the banks of numbers and try to match them because they make you think that it must be somebody, maybe a neighbor, because the numbers are so close. Of course, maybe that is that way in small towns, but it certainly isn't here in L.A. Yeah, or San Francisco, which is where mine come from.

I'm like, I don't know anybody in San Francisco with my area code and first three digits, so I know it's a scam. Yeah, if I ever met somebody that had the first same three digits and phone numbers, I'd be like, my God, what a coincidence. Oh, my goodness. Separated at birth. It would actually be like a reason to get a beer together or something.

The funny thing is, those calls, the ones that I get with the prefix, those are the ones with the Chinese lady. Right. So that's because it comes from, you know, San Francisco, and that's where they're trying to get the people to do the Chinese one. Yeah, it's funny. Joe and I were just talking about this today.

We were recording a Hacking Humans episode, and he was saying that they are actually getting down to the neighborhood level these days, where it's not unusual for you to get a call from, that your address book will bring up as one of your neighbors, and so you'll answer it because you think it's a neighbor, and it's not.

So they're sucking up, you know, everyone's phone number from your street, from the public database, and they're using that. But again, this is Los Angeles. I don't know any of my neighbors, so. I certainly don't have any of their phone numbers. Right, right, right.

Well, out here in Maryland, we do know our neighbors, so south of the Mason-Dixon line as we are. So interesting story came by recently. This is from Wired. This is Lily Hay-Newman, who I've had the pleasure of speaking to before over on the Cyber Wire.

It is a recent startup breach exposed billions of data points, billions with a B. This is a sales intelligence firm called Apollo, and they sent a notice out to their customers last week disclosing a data breach that they had suffered over the summer. And they say that over 200 million contacts and information from over 10 million companies are in their reservoir of data that may have been accessed.

Now, are you guys at all familiar with these sales intelligence databases? Have you ever interacted with one of these? I'm aware that they exist. I've never had any personal interactions with them, and I find them very creepy. Yeah. How about you, Jason? Yeah. It's one of those things where they scrape public data and start to just build these massive databases.

Make connections whether they're true or not. Exactly. So they're just, you know, they buy up, they buy databases, they slurp databases, kind of like the stuff we talked about with your, you know, your loyalty cards and all of that data. And they just put it all together and then give you, you can just buy a subscription to it to query their database.

Or you can just go get it for free, apparently. Well, that's right. If you know where to look, you can get it for free. I've been part of some demos of some of these systems. We'd actually, these sort of things were part of some, you know, some folks are trying to sell us here at CyberWire some systems to track your sales programs, you know, your contacts and things like that.

And so some of those systems automatically link into some of these databases. And it's one of those things where it seems like a really good idea and you say, oh, that makes perfectly good sense for business. And then you put your own name into it and you see everything that they bring up about you and you just go, wow, okay, all they did was my name and email address and they went out and they scraped my Twitter and my Facebook and just basically anything public facing.

Oh, look, there's a picture of me. And it just, it just seems to go on and on and on. And I understand this is the way things are these days, but it's kind of creepy. And I guess this is a genie we're not going to be able to put back in the bottle. I actually just signed up for one of these called Instant Checkmate a couple of days ago because I needed to research some people.

It's like 35, it's 35 bucks a month. And for that, you get unlimited person reporting. So I've basically put in everybody I know into this thing and you get everything. You get, you know, criminal records, you get loan information. House information, you get all the phone numbers, you know, all of their past addresses where they live, their current address.

It's crazy. And you can get there for 35 bucks. Yeah, that's insane. I mean, I do think that you, the three of us are obviously, and many of our listeners are aware that these things exist and kind of know what's in them. I think it's telling that even you or Dave were aghast when you actually put your own name into it.

And I do think that, I wonder, are we past the point of anybody caring anymore? Or if there was some sort of like credit card, like credit monitoring agency version of this where you would find out where for a small fee, you could find out the databases that all these different companies have about you.

Would people just lose their minds? Would they finally freak out and go, oh, this isn't the way it's supposed to be? Or would we just not care? Well, and could it be like the credit reporting agencies, like you say, where you're entitled to get a free dump of it X number of times per year?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I also wonder how something like this bumps up against GDPR because they have a right to be forgotten. So if you go to a database company like this and say, take me out of your database, what happens then?

Yeah. And there's certainly, and obviously, you know, you all have the new California legislation coming through on privacy. Maybe. Which is going to be the, well, it's going to be the first step for some sort of national, we're going to, the US is going to have some sort of version of GDPR. It probably won't be as strong, but it'll be interesting to see how these sorts of things play into that.

Yeah. I don't know. So billions of data points exposed, I guess it's easy to have breach fatigue and just say, okay, here we go again. You know, no one will probably be fired or sent to jail or anything like that.

Held responsible in any way, shape, or form. Right. Right. Well, I mean, considering that they're public records for a lot of this stuff, they're not really exposing anything that people can't already get. Well, yeah, that's a good point. I mean, they've made it easier. They've collated it.

They've collected it. They've drawn connections that you would have to go out and do yourself. So they've certainly, it may be all publicly accessible data points, but in the way of collecting them, they have created a new product. Yeah. I mean, that would have to be argued in the courts because it's something that somebody can do on their own and all they've done is made it easier.

Yes. But does that actually constitute creating a new record? And that would have to be, you know, argued in the court. And I did just look up on Instant Checkmate. There is an opt-out. And I do remember from a show like four years ago, we were talking about services like this.

Yeah. And you can go to most of these and opt-out. And we had a list of a bunch of them that we did. Unfortunately, I didn't hit this one because what they do is they just rebrand. It's like, okay, you're out of Instant Checkmate. So we're going to put your data in this other database with another brand name, but it's the same database.

So that's how they get around this. They brand hop. Yes. Wow. But yeah, this one, you know, Apollo needs to be basically taken down by GDPR for sure. Yeah. And I suppose that's where it's going to come from. It's going to have to be some sort of regulatory thing for either having access to these databases or assembling them outright.

I don't know. Something's got to happen, though. Yeah. And they can't just like say, oh, here, I'm going to sell this to another company for a dollar. And then they spin up another company and say, oh, no. You know, fire sale. We sold the data because we needed to pay back our investors. And, you know, then they just switch over to another company.

Dave, that needs to be that loophole needs to be closed. Well, what if they just made it opt-in? So. Oh, opt-in. That dream has sailed. But think about that. We spend a lot of time on this show thinking about opt-in and nobody does it anymore.

All right. Well. Would you opt-in to a service like that? Well, no. Absolutely. That's my point, though. If you if the regulation was that in order to be listed on a service like this, you had to opt-in, that would kind of fix the problem. Right. I see what you're saying. I completely agree with that.

And that would be a wonderful thing to happen. Yes. Meanwhile, back in the real world. Yeah. Yeah. So back in the real world, the China super micro scandal is far from over, apparently, even though all the tech giants have completely denied that this has happened to them at all, apparently, a security researcher, Yossi Applebone.

Are you aware of him, Dave Bittner? Mostly from this story. Yeah. Well, he's reportedly showing evidence of an unnamed major U.S. telecom finding manipulated hardware from super micro in its network. So there was some unusual communications from a server that led the telecom to find an implant hidden in the server's Ethernet jack.

Yeah. So apparently this has happened somewhere, although everybody is denying who it could be. None of the major telecom companies are admitting that it was them. Again, this whole Bloomberg story just keeps getting fishier and fishier.

There's all the unnamed sources, denials from everyone, different governments doing denials. And of course, the Bloomberg authors aren't talking to anybody. They're basically just letting their PR department do all the talking for them.

So I don't know. I think the takeaway here is that, yes, hardware problems are real. It is something to look out for. But whether this story from Bloomberg actually holds water or not, it seems like the more time goes by, the more people are scratching their heads and saying, there's just too many things about this that don't add up.

Yeah. And I think we need to see a physical, we need to see some physical evidence. Right. And what has it been, a week or so, a little more than a week, a couple weeks? And because you know, as soon as that Bloomberg story came out, the hunt was on to find one of these motherboards.

And so if someone knew about it and had one sitting on a shelf somewhere, they could have handed it over to someone or sent a picture or something. And we've seen none of that. So that even adds to more of the skepticism. Instagram's back in the news. They finally rolled out two-factor authentication that is not SMS-based.

Oh. Hmm. And it's interesting. You can use, if you have one of the Authenticator apps on your phone, it can hook up to that. So I set mine up to use Google Authenticator. It is a bit of a janky setup to get it to work. The problem, the biggest problem was it took me forever to find the damn settings in Instagram.

Hmm. It's really hard to find. And once I finally did find them, though, I went to Google Authenticator. I followed the instructions and it didn't work that well on the first setup, but I finally did get it and I disabled SMS Auth and now I am beholden to the Google Authenticator.

So I really hope I don't lose my phone. That would suck. But for the most part, yeah, it works as, you know, planned. I logged out and I logged back in and then I had to go to Google Authenticator, get my code, go back in and type it in.

And it worked. So it's not the best, smoothest setup, but it does actually work. There's that. And how persistent is it? How often does it ask you to re-authenticate? Have you had any sense of that yet? It hasn't. I think once you're logged in, you're logged in.

Right. On that device. Yeah. Yeah. It hasn't asked me for anything yet because that's why I logged out to trigger the auth to make sure that it did work. They do give you a bunch of backup codes in case you do get kicked out. So when you do set it up, they give you like six codes that you can use to get back in.

I see. So I took a screenshot of that. So I have those just in case I do lose that. But if my phone's gone and my pictures aren't backed up, well then, S-O-L. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, good. Yep. And I don't know if you guys saw this one. The CEO who sold phones with totally unbreakable encryption has taken a plea deal because apparently he was thwarting law enforcement with these phones.

He had a very specific clientele in mind. He did. He did. Yes. Phantom Secure is a high-end communication service designed for sophisticated and exclusive executives who need an effective and proven solution for their mobile concerns.

No identification is required for purchase. So, yes, executives on the street corners, you know, slinging bags of blow. That's pretty much what they did. But, yep, got this guy and he's forfeiting $80 million and tens of millions of ill-gotten gains, including a Lamborghini and his various cryptocurrency accounts.

This is basically the plot of the second season of Better Call Saul, isn't it? It kind of is. Well, and $4,000 per year per device, that's pretty good from a business revenue point of view.

I guess he was selling a lot of these things. It's interesting to me because years ago, I want to say probably a decade ago, I had a client who was doing this sort of thing at the government nation-state level.

And what they were doing was, this was back in the BlackBerry days, they were making a modified version of a BlackBerry that had end-to-end encryption. And the whole point behind it was that it looked like a regular BlackBerry. The sort of thing, say, our president should be using.

Exactly the sort of thing our president should be using. But I guess back then, if you wanted to have encryption on a mobile device, a lot of times it was something that would be grafted onto the device. Right. And in this case, it wasn't. So the point being that if you were, you know, someone who deals with secrets and you're at the airport, no one could look at you and say, oh, he's using the special secret device.

So again, this was about a decade ago. But, you know, these folks were, I suppose, doing it on the up and up and not trying to sell it to bad people selling drugs around the world, at least from what I gathered. Yeah. Right. Well, exactly. Right.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I can just see the sales guy going in there and saying, hey, I just got the Colombians. You know, I just closed the Colombian cartel account. Drinks all around. Benihata for everyone.

Right. Right. Well, it's interesting because I guess if you sell off a bunch of these, how do you know where they really end up? Obviously, this guy had a particular clientele in mind, and that's what led him to being arrested and having this plea deal.

But, you know, it seems like these are the kinds of things that you sell to a sell to an ally that could then also end up in bad hands. Of course, these days, as we've seen, you know, lots of interesting things happen, even with our allies. Right. And it's interesting.

The Department of Justice said that this was the first time that the government has targeted a company and its leaders for assisting a criminal organization by providing them with technology to go dark or evade law enforcement detection of their crimes. So this was kind of a groundbreaking case. Yep. Yeah, that is interesting.

Shape of things to come, I suppose. Yep. Now, if we can just get Facebook indicted, then we're off to the races. Well, I mean, we got word this week the FBI is investigating them. Really? I missed this story. Yeah.

I think it came today. The FBI is investigating the latest Facebook breach. So I don't know where that'll lead. Not a lot of details on that yet. And I believe Congress has demanded a hearing with Facebook to say what's going on here.

Well, as we all know, there are always consequences for these companies when these things happen. So I'm sure this will... That's right. Yeah, Zuck will be hauled away in handcuffs. I was going to say, yeah, with that picture, orange jumper. Yeah, that's going to happen. No, he's going to have it in that cornflower Facebook blue.

That'll be his jumpsuit when they haul him to the who's cow. The big old thumbs up like symbol in the back. Right. I think we have our graphics for the show. Oh, man. So it was at a company called Fitmetrics. A, what do you call it?

Why can't I? My brain's not working. This is a biometric thing. Yes, thank you very much. You're welcome. That was about as loud a brain fart as you can possibly get.

So a company called Fitmetrics, which tracks exercise and those sorts of things, your Fitbit-y kind of stuff, recently was discovered that one of their databases was found online containing 113.5 million records.

And it was on an Amazon S3 bucket with no password. If we had to give an award for most breaches coming from any particular service, it must be Amazon Web Service and the people that set it up that forget to lock it down.

Yeah. And my understanding is that Amazon has really done their part in trying to make it so that you have to mean to do that. Yeah, but why would you? It should always require a password. I just don't get it. I don't get there being an option not to.

Yeah, it really doesn't make any sense. But yeah, I mean, it's really it's really not hard to set up, you know, even if you're serving images. I understand it's like, OK, I've got, you know, a million images in these folders and I just want to serve them up. Why do I need an access token for those?

OK, that's that that one. I understand because I used to do that with JPEG magazine. That's where we hosted. It was all Amazon S3. You did not need an access token to grab an image. But if you're hosting your database there, come on. I mean, it's just crazy. Yeah.

So the servers got indexed by Shodan, which is, of course, the search engine for these sorts of things and showed up in the past month or so. So they've since shut it down. But that's one hundred and thirteen point five million records. They had name, gender, email address, phone number, profile photos, where you work out, emergency contacts, all those sorts of things.

So completely useless information for anybody who wants to socially engineer you. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yet another one. Yeah. They tie that with the Apollo breach and you might be getting some real data there. Mm hmm. OK. So we've talked about the, you know, the ladies in the tubes.

And like how we were saying before that you should have voice recognition on these so they know who you're talking to. And I kind of went down the rabbit hole a little bit and I knew that Google had like, you know, a subset of that for their voice matching. And the interesting thing about it is what they've really, you know, put their effort into is that when you when you make your voice profile, it's tied mainly to your media account because, you know, it's everything about being the DJ in the house.

So it's important that my wife can't play the cure, but I can exactly that's that's really where they're putting their that's where they're really putting their pies. And, you know, we knew that we knew that Google had this and it was still rudimentary. And Amazon Echo does have this as well.

It's, you know, not great, but it also does the same exact thing. It's all about your media. So until they have like an ACL for the stuff that can let people into my house, I really don't see why they're touting these services.

But I mean, and why don't they set that up? They've got the technology now to know who's talking to it. Right. So dad, dad can turn on the lights. You know, mom can control the remote control because she knows what channel she wants to watch and she has to watch her shows.

Dad is not allowed to touch the remote control, except on Sunday when football's on things like that. Right. Between these hours. Yes. Yeah. Dad gets dad gets remote control access. Right. Right. And I also want a secondary token, like either a key fob or your phone to let them know that you're the one that's in the house.

Because otherwise you can take a recording of somebody and then come in and play the recording. But there should be a secondary access token to say, like, when you're dealing with security, it's like, OK, I'm home. You know, just like when you have your crappy Prius and you have the key in your pocket, you can walk up to the car and it opens.

You have the key. It's not like, well, we know that you can clone the key and all that stuff. But anyway. It could be as simple as is your phone connected to the Wi-Fi network. Yes. Exactly. Therefore, then. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Are you in range of Wi-Fi? Are you in range of Bluetooth? Is there some kind of thing that says you're there?

Or with any of the cameras, can they do face recognition on you? Because every one of these, except for the new Google one, has cameras in it. There should be some way to do this. Nobody. But as we've discussed repeatedly on this show, is nobody making these ladies in the cans is thinking about security at all.

Even when they have something that so obviously needs to be done and is security related. Instead, they're just making a cool little thing about it that plays your Spotify streams. Hmm. Yeah. So to your point about having something in your possession, what I wonder is because iOS has this.

You know, my iPhone won't respond to someone else saying, hey, lady, it won't key up. Right. But so they have the voice recognition. What if it's just as simple as that? If the speaker, could you set the speaker to respond to input through your phone?

Because you need to have a phone for, in Apple's case, you need to have the phone to use the device or at least to set it up. And could that be a way around it? If you're accessing that system, the speaker, whatever it is, through your phone, then each person has their own individual phone, which is key to their voice.

They have the phone with them. So that has your location. That could be a solution. It's not a cheap one, but that could be a solution. That would work for Siri, but it would defeat the voice of these various devices that we're all putting in our houses now. Yeah. You just want to speak to God and have, you know, the cure play.

It's like, play me music. That does sound like my heaven. That's true, Jason. There you go. You know, you just want to speak to the ether and have someone talk back to you. That's that's the you know, that's the value proposition to these. And it's there that we know that it's not 100 percent perfect.

But for the most part, the voice recognition is there. It's just not tied into the main parts of the system yet. And I'm baffled by why it isn't, especially for those of us with kids. Now that my my son is getting old enough to kind of figure out he hasn't strung together the various commands in the right order yet.

But I'd like it to recognize his voice and then only do certain things for him. I don't want him to be able to open the door or things of that nature. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's what I'm complaining about. It's like, give me some ACLs for the IOT devices.

Exactly. And we're done. Yep. No, I still think that the phone could be a way to do that. I think about in my house, everybody has a phone and that phone is never far away from them. So we'll just treat our phone like a universal communicator. Yeah. Yeah. Which is where it's going.

I mean, that's what it is, right? The phone is the tricorder. Yeah. But I mean, if you have it. See, we went Star Trek, Jason, not Star Wars. But if you have the phone with you, then you should be able to just speak to the ether because that's the that's the token. I think it can tie in either way.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Just having to open an app. Yeah. Just having to open an app just seems like an extra step that you shouldn't have if you have the phone with you. OK. We've sold. But you don't have to open an app. Apple. Just do it all through Siri. Google. Pay us money now. There we go. Yeah. OK. And I do have a final story in here on speakers gone wild.

And it's just one of it's another one of those stories where people accidentally hear the word, you know, the wake word triggered and whatever is in the background starts to happen and crazy things happen. Now, I do have a side note to this story. There's one that's my favorite where a woman is crying next to her Alexa and it says, it's going to be OK, which is the creepiest one for sure.

There was a command that my Alexa would trigger to every time that I would say it in my kitchen and it's not listed anywhere. I could not find any documentation about it. But if your Alexa is playing some music and you say the word down because my dogs were jumping on the counter and I'd say down in the volume would lower for a second and then come back up.

Try, try that one at home. Play some music and then just say down. I can't get the damn thing to go down if I say it all the whole command. It hardly ever works. Oh, I got I got really, really handy with, you know, Alexa volume, whatever number it is and having that work.

And just it was basically just sort of ducking for a few seconds. Yeah. Yeah, completely. It would like knock the volume down to like volume two and then come back up. But it was every time I said down and it was annoying because I was in the kitchen cooking where my Alexa was and Bam Bam would jump on the counter and I'd say down and then the volume would go down on the music that I was listening to.

And I'm like, this is really annoying. And there's no documentation on that anywhere. So that to me thinks that there are shadow commands that are out there for this thing. Just like in and out secret menu. Yeah. Yeah. Except more annoying and less delicious. Right. That's interesting.

I wonder if someone could run a synthesized dictionary attack against these devices and try to track down what are all the undocumented commands. Yeah, but you'd have to sit there for 100,000 words and see what it did when it was done. No, that's true. That's true. A little time consuming, especially for what we get paid on this show.

Yeah. Well, interns. We got to get some of those. Yeah, we need some of those. Alexa, get me some interns. And Alexa's everywhere cried. All right. Well, I guess that's all we've got this week. It'll be interesting to see how this Bloomberg thing plays out.

I don't see it getting any better for Bloomberg. But that seems to be the one people have their eye on. And then, of course, we'll see what happens with the FBI and Facebook. But it's been a busy couple of weeks, really, because of those stories and the nonstop breach fatigue.

So time will tell. And we'll check back in next week. Right, fellas? All right. That's right. Sounds good. Slate does this segment that I just truly love, and it's perfect for us and our show. Should this thing be smart?

And they basically look at anything that is turned into a smart device and make fun of it. So I got to love that. This one's about a bike lock. It's called the Ellipse. It's smart because it boasts a Bluetooth connection and a paired smartphone app. With them, you can unlock your bike without having to fumble for a key or remember a combination.

Things that are ever so difficult. Oh, so difficult. And you can also remotely grant other people access to your light balk. Blah, balk. To your light bike. To your locked bike. Yes, there we go. The lock will ping you if it senses someone tampering with your bike and will notify your emergency contacts if it senses that you may have been in a crash.

If you've been looking for a bike lock that will give your mom a heart attack every time you come to a hard stop on a road, then the Ellipse is the one for you. So then they do two segments. They go, here's why it could be good. This is a very interesting bike lock. It solves a logistical problem faced by people who choose to lend their bikes out to others.

Not, say, one or two because you just give them your keys. But if you wanted to loan your bike to a hundred people, that would be very difficult for you to always go and give them your keys. Oh, so difficult. Why the hell would you loan your bike to a hundred friends? Exactly. You wouldn't. The reality of this is this bike lock is actually meant for shared bike situations in those big companies, but they sell it to consumers as well, and it makes no sense whatsoever.

In fact, there is ample evidence to suggest that the Ellipse actually sucks. And in July reviews, CNET criticized the lock's abnormally short shackle, found the vaunted tap-the-phone keyless entry system was inconvenient, and said that using it daily was an incredibly frustrating experience. Amateur reviews have been even harsher.

So you can look on Amazon's product page where this item is complete garbage, does not connect to the phone, no fallback, unlock, no clear directions on how to press on the key. This is probably the worst techno gizmo I've ever bought. It's unreservedly terrible. So, yay, smart world of bike locks.

My favorite line is, there is ample evidence to suggest that the Ellipse actually sucks. That is a fantastic line. Yes, it is. I am going to repurpose that in the future. Oh, and there's probably ample evidence to... God, I'm just going to cry on that one.

It's so good. There's ample evidence to suggest that Walmart, in their new net-connected trolley, will actually suck, too. They applied for a patent. Okay. This is not in the wild yet. But they applied for a patent for a smart shopping trolley that can track a shopper's heart rate, temperature, grip, and walking speed.

Yeah, system for a method for a biometric feedback cart handle. Yeah, no. Walmart said that they would be useful for alerting store associates that a customer may need assistance. Okay. No. No. No, unless...

No. No. Because if you have a heart attack, you're going to let go. Yeah. If you're going in circles, you could just be befuddled. We have cameras over the entire store already, which are being monitored. Yeah, this is some kind of psychological, let's collect all this data because then we can try to market to you better and see what's interesting to you and get all of that.

At some point, there needs to be some legal definition of what our data is and what our data rights are, and this is ridiculous. If there was any store that had this, I would stop shopping there immediately. Technology blog CB Insights commented on the patent. If biometric indicators show signs of emergency, the program may also issue a broadcast throughout the store to call associates' attention to the situation and could potentially initiate a call for emergency medical help as well.

I don't know who CB Insights is, their blog, but they... I... No. No. Sorry, guys. That's... No. Here's the deal. If somebody is in trouble, the first thing they're going to do is fall over. And, you know, they could be wearing a smartwatch already, which would tell us what's going on.

I've fallen and I can't get up, you know? Yes, the fall indicator on the Apple Watch 5 or whatever the hell version it is for will tell you if you've fallen and you can't get up. We don't need a trolley for this. All this is going to do is just give Walmart a bunch of information that they don't actually need.

Yep. I agree. Moving into a little bit of web design, I found this on Sean Bonner's newsletter, which I thought was great. It's called Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design. And it's pretty... I like it. I like it because it just goes back to the roots.

You know? It goes back to the roots of basic page design. Shit doesn't need to do what shit doesn't need to do. Everything is labeled properly. The back button still works like it should. All things like that. And I was looking for a WordPress plugin for this.

And, of course, there are none. So, if somebody wants to get on this, the link is to brutalist-web.design. And you can check it out. And it's a good thing, I think, that people could do things like this and go back to the old days and get off my lawn. It's just a fun read.

Go check it out. Brick-a-brick. Well, we were just speaking a little bit earlier about all the idiots that have been videotaping. Videotaping. Have been recording themselves and posting themselves online destroying birds and limes and other scooters and how that's quite dumb.

I've got something to beat that. Dustin W. Burns, 33, of Springfield, Missouri, who is on probation after violating a restraining order, was arrested again after he made an instructional video on how to remove an ankle monitor with a butter knife and posted a clip on Facebook. Yes, this is how you take off an ankle bracelet without breaking the circuit.

Oh, we have a winner. We have a winner. We have a winner. I probably should have saved it for more on of the week, but it tied in quite well. If you're a criminal, don't record yourself and post it publicly. Yeah, Internet of felons is what this should have been under. Yes. And I stumbled across a site that I did not know existed.

I believe somebody in my feed must have posted it at some point, but it has given me hours of mirth and enjoyment. Nameoftheyear.com. Here at Name of the Year, it's axiomatic that a truly great name has it going both ways. Just look at the Hall of Fame, Hall of Name. Assumption Boltron, Nimrod Wazelfish, Tanqueray Beavers, Princess No Candy, Vanilla Dong, Destiny Frankenstein.

These are all real names. They go through databases to find people's names. I thought these were made up. No. No. These are all real names, and they picked the winner of the year. We haven't inducted a new class in a while, so no. Barquevious Mingo, Taco BM Monster, Najee Nimson, or last year's winner, Kobe Buffalmeat.

Buffalo Meat. Buffalo Meat. Yeah. Yeah. And your 2018 Name of the Year has come through with surprising ease. Canadian hockey player Jim Bob Ghost Keeper waffle boarded away Dr. Narwhal's mating in the championship final, racking up a whopping 57% of the more than 7,500 votes cast.

And you can go through various names of the year, going all the way back to, let's see, how far did they take it? I can't see offhand, because for some reason, the side menu is not loading right now. Oh, you know what they need? This could be some brutalist design. They need some brutalist design. Ah, there it is. Going back to 1994.

These are fantastic, man. This is hilarious. Oh, man. I still think Tanqueray Beavers is my favorite. I like Assumption Boltron. I really do. I don't know why. Oh, man. Well, I don't know if you saw the Soyuz launch this week.

Or the lack of launch. Lack of launch. Well, it did launch. It just didn't quite make it to space. Right. But the cool thing about this is the astronauts survived because the Soyuz did exactly what it was supposed to, which is great. But the problem now is there's an investigation that has to happen to figure out why it happened.

Because there's all these things that are showing up with, like, you know, holes that have been, you know, possibly drilled into some of the capsules. And people are wondering if there's a saboteur. Right. And, yeah, look for Busey. I've seen contact. Look for Busey. He's the one. But the downside is here that we have people up on the space station right now.

Yep. And they have a very small window where they can take the, you know, basically take the Soyuz that's up there back home. But they only have a 200-day shelf life in space. So, you know, they're going to have to make a decision whether, you know, should I stay or should I go. Right. And I think they're probably going to end up staying.

From what I was reading, it sounds like, you know, they're dedicated to the mission. They want to stay up there as long as possible and just get the job done. Because you need maintenance crew on the ISS. Because if they just take off and have to wait for God knows when we're going to get another ship up there, then the whole thing could just fall apart, which would really suck.

Yes, it would. It would be sad. Yeah. And it's been continually manned for 18 years. Which is amazing. It's incredible. Yeah. It's an incredible piece of technology. Very cool stuff. And this kind of comes back to the brutalist design when I was trying to find, you know, a WordPress plug-in.

I found this post from Justin Jackson. It's called I'm a Fucking Webmaster. Did you get a chance to read this? I did. It was fantastic. We had this discussion on previous shows a little bit when people were talking about, are you a programmer or an engineer? No, I was a goddamn webmaster.

That's what I was. Yeah. It's like back in 1993, you weren't a designer, developer, copywriter, or in DevOps. You were a fucking webmaster and your name was at the bottom of every page. Yep. I love it. And it was. It was. Oh, it was so much fun. I recommend if you're an old school geek and we're a webmaster back in the day.

I still even have business cards that said webmaster on it. I highly recommend you go back and read this because it is fantastic. It's very nice. Closing shout outs. Until next time, I'm Brian Schellmeister.

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 289.

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