362: Naratu Run

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 a brain fart last week. Big time. I forgot the name of the Bader-Meinhof effect. Right. Because somebody bought something and was seeing it everywhere and he's like, oh, they're infiltrating my brain.

No, no. It's the Bader-Meinhof effect, which we've talked about several times on the show, which is also known as the frequency illusion. I believe we even had a show called the Bader-Meinhof. Exactly. Yes. No, we've covered it quite, quite extensively in the past, which is why I was very embarrassed about my brain fart.

But yeah, definitely. But for new listeners, it is an illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing has recently come into one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards, which generally manifests when people buy a new car. And then they see that car everywhere.

Everywhere. Yes. But it also ties into web advertising, which we've also kind of beat to death with, which your phone's not listening to you. It's not. And no, we'll talk about this in greater detail in security because I've got some fun experiments that I've been doing here at the house. I'm interested in your definition of fun.

Well, yes, they bared fruit. It's good. It's good. And got a little follow up on the Area 51 deal. Yeah. So the guy that started it has come out on TV in Nevada saying, dude, dude, dude, it was a joke. It was a joke. He's worried the FBI is going to show up at his house.

Yeah. You know what I would do if I pissed off the entire U.S. military? I'd say it was a joke, too. Yes, absolutely. Sorry, bro. Sorry, bros. Yeah. And you were confused about the Naruto run.

Yes. Whatever that is. I don't know if you've watched much anime, but it is a running style where you put your arms and your hands behind you to reduce drag. And you basically put your head down and run. And I think you have to scream a lot, too. OK, well, I'm sure that'll work against bullets and missiles.

Might work against a cartoon, but not so well against bullets. I will stab you with my bullets. OK, well, see, OK, it wasn't a typo then. It was just something I have no awareness of. Correct. All right. That's why we're that's why we're following up on it. Just to get it out there so we don't have the emails.

Although since we got no emails or tweets about it, I'm guessing nobody else knew what it was either. And it turns out Facebook is doing a big backpedal. What? On Libra. Yeah. That whole regulation thing. Yeah. Imagine that.

Yeah. Imagine that. You backpedal a bit when, again, much like the Area 51 guy, when you pissed off the entire government. One does tend to back. Oh, Libra was just a joke, you guys. If we are to run around your finances. That's kind of it.

We're going to do a Naruto run around your tax laws. Oh, regulators can't catch me. I'm going too fast. Yeah. So they're going to have to kind of reimagine what Libra is going to be because of, oh, what is that? Regulation. Yes.

Interesting. Yes. When you do threaten the entire foundation, financial foundation of the world, people do get a tad upset. Exactly. It's like, okay, guys. Yeah. You're a bulletin board. Stick to that. Leave the money to us. An unmoderated one at that. Yeah.

So, yeah. Remember, guys, we still have the bullets. So, yeah, we'll see how Facebook is going to shuck and jive on this one. But they kind of had to go home with their tail between their legs. Yep. In the news.

AI. In the news a lot this week. Still just neural networks and machine learning. But, hey, you do whatever you want to do. So an AI has solved the Rubik's Cube in one second. All right. Deep Cube A, as the algorithm was called.

But is it from Canada? Deep Cube A? A. Completed the 3D logic puzzle, which has been taxing humans since this was invented in 1974. I have never bothered to solve the Rubik's Cube. It was up there with a pet rock for me. I never got one. No, I did get one.

I got one. It was like a Christmas present from Santa Claus or something. Never bothered to solve it. Did you ever do it? I've solved it a couple times. Just when I was, you know, a kid and before I found alcohol. I bought one when I lived in Chicago just because I'm like, yeah, maybe I'll just get it and sit on the couch to play with it, you know, to fidget around with it.

And yeah, threw it away. Didn't even bother taking it to a garage sale. I'm like, this thing sucks. Threw it away. So, yeah, no time for that. Well, the report author, Professor Pierre Baldi, said it learned it on its own. And the researchers noted that its strategy was very different from the way humans would tackle the puzzle, although they don't really explain how in this article.

Because they don't understand how. I guess it's all black box. Well, if it's just a black box, it's pretty easy to solve. Oh, wait. The Rubik's Cube is colored. The AI is the blacksters. Yeah, but I mean, how do they how do they not know that it's the way the human would solve it if they don't understand how it solved the puzzle?

That makes no sense. So humans are able to typically solve the puzzle quickly. It takes them about 50 moves when people do it. The AI managed to do it in an average of 28 moves, significantly better than humans. This algorithm is not the first or the fastest non-human to solve the puzzle. However, that honor goes to a system devised at the at MIT of the Min2 phase algorithm.

They really need some PR people working. They got any marketing over there, man. Yeah, they really do. So that that solved the puzzle three times faster. But that did not use a neural network. That was just us. I don't know. It was just programmed to solve the puzzle. So, yeah, they just trained it. That's called cheating.

Well, that's just called how programming used to be. That's why this is a brave new world, Brian. Oh, right. Yes, yes, right. It's like now we just give it a Rubik's Cube and say, make all the colors on the same side. What if what if the actual here's what the AI does? It does what all the cheaters did back in the day.

It just pops all the bricks off and pops all the bricks back on and say, fixed, done. Yeah, I was so tempted to do that once, I believe. I just wanted to hit it with a hammer and cheat. Yeah, trust me. Everybody I know back in junior high did it exactly the same way. They'd come back into class. Some people would go so far as to remove the stickers and put them back on.

Why does the smell of glue? Oh, you Elmer's to that solution. Yeah. Elmer to AI. That's the that's what that's right. And in continuing AI news, a team from Carnegie Mellon and Facebook use a combination of AI techniques to outbet and outbluff human players in a game of six player, no limit Texas hold'em.

Each of the humans involved had previously won more than a million dollars at the poker table, which includes a bunch of people that I don't know. And I'm sure other people. Well, I'm sure somebody is going to yell at us and say, how do you not follow the world series of poker? Because I have alcohol and a wife. Yes. So this new AI called Pluribus played 5,000 hands against the poker players and consistently won more than its opponents.

Another test involving 13 players and 10,000 hands. The bot again emerged victorious. This is now Facebook has decided that this AI is so dangerous it could wreck the entire online poker industry. So they are not releasing its code into the wild. They're using it by themselves in the back room.

Guaranteed. I guarantee you somebody is making a lot of money on some online, you know, servers on boats in the middle of the ocean poker companies right now. Yeah, seriously. Some of these new engineers came in. He's like, that's all I get for options. Come on, you know, and this is this is how they get their revenge.

Well, if I can't get options, at least I'm going to go make some money on poker. Yeah. So it looks like the the neural networks are kind of getting there. We can now consistently computers can now consistently win at chess and they've basically destroyed poker. Right. But soon here's the here's the upside.

Elon Musk is going to put that right in your brain because they say they're ready for brain surgery on humans from their new company, Neuralink, which it only started in 2017, which seems pretty fast to go from seed round to brain surgery.

Yeah, I'm sure they poached all the main people in the field to start with. So it's a bit of a running start. Of course, of course. I mean, and they started with one hundred and fifty million dollars in the bank, which is, you know, not exactly chump change and a big fuck off flamethrower. No, that was the boring company.

Well, I'm sure they got one. I'm sure they did, too. That's that's just what that's what Musk does when he starts a new company. He goes, here's a flamethrower. Here's one hundred and fifty million dollars. Have at it. Have at it. Well, they need the flamethrower to dispose of the mice that didn't actually work right in the clinical trials.

So, yeah, so it basically, yeah, I don't I think the ready for brain surgery on a human is a bit of a hyperbole because it was kind of just announced as an off that, oh, it works in a monkey already. Well, first it started with a mouse and then they they're like, yeah, what is it?

Elon wanted to say, let's talk about the monkey in the room. And they said, yes, they have been actually testing this on primates. So that's a little scary. Yeah, he was able to control a computer with its brain using this implant. So this is our brave new world. Yes, yes. Ape has a pest killed ape is all I can think of.

I shall wait until this just just goes in a hat. I don't really want it in my brain. Yeah, there are other companies that are working on that one. So there's two different there's two different sides to this. There's the companies that are trying to put it into your brain. And there are the companies that are trying to detect brainwaves from outside of your brain.

Yeah, we're going to see how like it's a race right now. I'm guessing the ones that go inside your brain are probably going to be better than the ones that are outside your brain. One would imagine. But I'll take my chances on having a slightly inferior product at the moment. That's true. That's true.

You know, you can you can always take off the hat. Yes, exactly. So it's but it's pretty interesting technology that they're developing with these new robots and the filaments that they're putting into the brains. Wait, there's auto update on this thing.

Get it out. Ransomware. You need to send me three bitcoins so you can pee in the morning or I won't let you use your hands. Oh, oh, that's scary. That's scary. A little bit. We'll see how this goes.

But the first one is supposed to be just a couple holes, like four eight millimeter holes. Eight millimeters is still pretty big. You want them drilled in your head. But hey, man, here's the deal. If you're paralyzed and you got no other options and you want to try it, I'm all in for it.

Yeah. Seriously, if I was on the other end of this testing and I'm like, you know, stuck in a chair and I can't do anything. Sign me up. Honestly, sign me up. I will. I don't see. I don't. Yeah, I don't really see like testing this on, you know, healthy humans who have nothing to lose.

Yeah. Why not? Give it a shot. I'm down. As long as as long as everybody goes into this with eyes wide open, let's get started. Yes. Well, Congress wants to try to solve deep fakes by 2020 because the fear is that deep fakes will disrupt the 2020 presidential election.

So what's next? Banning special effects in movies because it's the same exact thing. No more golems. It kind of is. It kind of is. I understand that. I mean, the deep fakes are definitely a problem. We've talked about that at great length in our security segment, that there needs to be some sort of legislation about it.

But just banning things outright is not the answer. It's not the response. And it never works. And it doesn't. As this article talks about, it doesn't get down to the much larger problem, which is disinformation in general. This is just a form of disinformation. There was plenty enough before deep fakes existed.

Right. And we have laws on the books to actually cover a lot of these things. Some of them have lapsed and they're going to be reintroduced. But these like haphazard laws that they're trying to push through are just terrible. No sense. They are terrible. Yeah, this is just knee jerk reactionism by people who don't understand the technology.

Yep. A.K.A. Congress. Yeah, exactly. And this one makes me very, very, very amused. I got this from about 150,000 different people. Apple plans to bankroll original podcasts to fend off rivals. We're here, Apple.

Yeah, that was the question. Just waiting. Would you do this? And I'm like, hell yes. Duh. I'd do it with Spotify. I'd do it with Luminati. Hey, look. Anybody who wants to give me money to do what we do here, roll out the wheelbarrows, baby.

I'm all in. Yep. But we're not going to be part of Apple because, you know, Apple, they're squeaky clean. And we're not going to do clean shows. We could do clean shows. We could totally do clean shows for the right amount of money. We can definitely do clean shows for the right amount of money. I'll wear a goddamn Barney suit.

All right. I don't care. Yeah. Well, the interesting thing about this is, does this mean that Apple is actually going to finally start to pay attention to the podcasting library that they have and make some changes there? It seems like it with splitting out podcasts into its own app on the desktop means that, you know, it's going to be kind of like a Spotify client.

I'm hoping, figuring that whatever. I haven't seen it in the wild yet or in person. So, because I'm not about to install a beta anymore, I'm past that, you know, I'm finally post beta. I don't have to do that anymore.

Although I miss when your entire system shut down for weeks at a time. I kind of do, too. It was fun. And it gave me an excuse not to reply to people. I'm like, phone bricked. Sorry. You know, emoji shrug. That's all I can do. I do want this new iPad OS, though.

This thing is looking sexy. Yeah, it does. It looks really nice. Yeah. But back to the story. It's funny that Spotify stock dropped on this news. And it's not even news. It's just speculation from just a few rumblings behind the the white curtain of Apple.

Right. Well, you know, Spotify is investing heavily in podcasting, thinking, you know, they've discovered that the music model isn't really enough for them and they need some more growth. And to have the the big the big elephant in the room go, well, we're going to do it, too. That that does make some sense that their stock would take a hit.

Yeah, because I mean, all Apple has been doing is watching podcasts grow and watch their market share shrink. Yep. Like they ignored it for far too long, but they still don't have like that many people. There's just over. There's nobody driving the ship. That's the thing. Well, that was my point is if they're going to make this investment, does that mean they're going to start to take podcasts and their whole system more seriously and have some people run it?

Also, Apple, if you don't want to pay for our podcast in and of itself, you could hire Jason and I to run the division for you. We know what I would. Yeah. The dogs would love to move to Cupertino, you know, although Bam Bam would probably like smash through a lot of those glass walls in the donut.

But I don't think you'd be allowed to bring their dogs to work. Dude, it's San Francisco. That's part of the package. All right. I'm working from home then. Okay. Oh, man. And of course, a very interesting article came out in the New York Times yesterday called Have We Hit Peak Podcast?

And as Betteridge's Law of Headlines would say no. This article I find hilarious because, well, my, you know, one of my clients, Jordan Harbinger is in it talking about, no, don't start a new podcast. And there's a woman at the top of the article in a fine photo of her with her headphones on with the microphone.

And I would like to point out the microphone doesn't have a shock mount, so she should get her elbows off the table, you damn dirty ape, because that's not how you podcast. Anyway, and well, obviously, she doesn't know anything because her podcast lasted six episodes. They did it on an iPhone five from a library.

And the whole beginning of this article is, and I have not figured out why they led with this, a woman who didn't give a shit about podcasting tried for six episodes and threw it away. Okay. Yeah. That's almost everybody on the planet that picks up podcasting for the first time.

How does this have to do with peak podcasting? It was years ago. I don't quite understand how this article came together. This woman also doesn't care enough to update her own Twitter profile, which still says that her podcast is coming soon. Well, no, she has a new one coming.

Oh, she's trying again. She's trying again. Yes. Now, the new one will be sex advice, even though her last one was an advice column. And she said, we didn't really know anything because she's in her early 20s. I'm like, duh, you're about as smart as a stone in your early 20s. What advice do you have to give me?

Well, she's dead. To be fair to her, she's doing exactly what we did in our early 20s. We just struck out and did things. So let's not automatically crap on them. She doesn't have the shit. We didn't have the ability to give people advice about what we were doing because we were just throwing shit against the wall to see what would stick. But good on her for trying.

Yes. And that's exactly my next point was she is getting completely bashed in her Twitter comments. And I actually made a reply in her Twitter comments, which I think got me shadow banned because I got zero replies on it because I use a lot of F bombs. Very nasty language.

Shocking. Yeah, if only you were president of the United States, that would have been totally acceptable. It would have been. It would have been. So I ended up deleting it. But I'm like, what the fuck have you guys done? At least she tried. You know, she's going to try again. I'm not going to fault anybody for trying. That's honestly, I fault her for keeping her damn elbows on the table when she doesn't have a shock mount.

But if she's going to try, just keep on trying until it works. You know, look, I got it. We've all got projects that failed, but you got to start somewhere. So the crapping on it for that, I thought was really shitty from the people on Twitter. But it is Twitter. So you get and comes comes with the territory.

Yeah. Yeah. And I love some of the comments that they are pretty funny. It's like white privilege, not just for males anymore. But the problem I had with the article was just, you know, it's like, look, we're not at peak podcast. Everybody who wants to start a podcast should try it.

They might love it. And it takes a lot more work than you think it does, though. It does. It takes a lot more work. And to be honest, it does seem overwhelming. But if Apple had somebody, say, running the board over there that called all the podcasts that are longer active, you wouldn't see quite so many podcasts to scroll through.

Yeah, exactly. There's seven. There's over 700,000. They should break it into archived and live. That's one of the first things that they need to do over there. Yeah. I mean, there are some older shows that are evergreen, like the History of Rome podcast. That thing should stay up forever because it is a self-contained unit.

But anybody who does like a talk show, like if we stopped recording and posting for like three months, pull us from the damn list or put us in an archived area. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I want to be able to search through things that have been updated in the past two weeks. That's it.

That's all I want to see up there. But there's nobody home. There is no one home. Well, that's going to have that's going to change, obviously, if they invest. So once again, Apple, either way, whatever way you want to give us money, we'll take it. We'll help you run it. Or you can just take our podcast. Please. Exactly. And just to just to put a bow on the peak podcasting thing, if you're thinking of starting a podcast, by all means, give it a shot.

I'm not going to tell you not to. If you think you're going to do it and make money, think again. Think again. You got to do it because you want to do it for fun. And that in experimenting and learning and being part of the community, that's all well and good. But if you're coming into this thinking that you are going to make money in this market right now with every carpet bagger and schmo out there trying to make a buck, you are not going to make a dime.

So just get that out of your head. But if you want to do it for fun, have 20 of your friends listen to your show. I can go for it, man. More power to you. That's all we're. Why am I here? All right. Good show. Nice. Hey, come on. Come on. We have we have 10,000 close friends that listen to us.

All right. We've got some Netflix news. The court, the second quarter report has come out. And the number that jumps out is that the service group by 2.7 million subscribers. Which is a problem, apparently, because the company predicted it would be up by about 5 million. So, again, this is shareholder value and the need to continue growth at reckless paces and unsustainable paces coming to light because, you know, 2.7 million subscribers is quite a lot.

And they're making a lot of money still. Yeah. Yeah. I think what they have to do is just dial back some of that new content that they've been putting out and the numbers will balance out. Well, we will get to that because they're actually going to have to dial that up. I'll just go ahead and start melding these two stories together.

OK, roll on into the next one. Well, the one of the main reasons that their numbers will probably go up again is obviously this didn't include stranger things. And a lot of people are smart enough to unsubscribe to services if they're not going to use it for a few months, then resubscribe when they're going to use it again. Because why wouldn't you? That's what a lot of people are doing with CBS, All Access for Star Trek.

And there you go. So that's happening with Netflix right now. But Netflix is saying that, no, this is not because of the competition, which is coming because Disney Plus hasn't launched. Apple TV Plus hasn't launched. HBO Max hasn't launched. NBCU hasn't launched. And the big. So that's not why they've lost numbers again.

I think we just kind of solved that. It's because people unsubscribed because nothing big was on it at the moment. The next article I saw, which is the once again, this is exactly what we said six years ago. But now the Atlantic is writing about it. Oh, so now it's real.

Now it's real. So now it's real. Even though we covered it first. Yes. The Wild West era of streaming TV is ending. So what we're discovering is that everybody had a good for a little while between if you basically subscribe to Netflix and they say Hulu. But again, the only thing on Hulu that I well, I guess everybody likes that.

There's the one show that I can't watch. Oh, yeah. Handmaid's Tale. Handmaid's Tale. So a lot of people are getting that. So between Netflix and Hulu, subscribers could watch most fun first run movies and TV episodes on the computer for less than 20 bucks a month, throw an HBO so you get your Game of Thrones at $15 more.

And you basically had the complete package and were able to stay up with popular culture. However, as we've been saying all along, this is about to splinter greatly. Everybody's pulling their shows into their own little silos and starting their own launching media services, which will nickel and dime you to the point where it's going to cost more than it was for cable in the first place.

Yep. That's the world that we've headed towards. That's what I've been screaming about all fucking six years of this show. And we're there now. Starting next year, we are there. If you want to keep up with everything, you're going to have to scribe to five to six different services. Or you could have just kept your cable the whole time along.

I knew cord cutting wasn't going to work out. So you know what it's going to make people do again? Back to Torrance. Go back to Torrance. But also, I'm wondering, I've just been thinking about this. Is this going to is this like the herald of the end of the movie theater? Because it's almost gone.

Yeah. I mean, look at the look at look at the money coming in for theaters now. Unless I mean, it's why it's why it's why studios are only investing in superhero movies. It's the only thing that gets people in the theaters anymore. Right. But you look at like, look at what an Avengers cost to make, you know, a couple hundred million dollars.

Imagine how many bingeable series that you could put on your streaming service for that exact amount of money that would engage people much longer than that two and a half hours, you know? And it just seems like if they're going to all have their own silos, they're going to all have to be putting all of this money into that content.

And why would you work on these big tentpole movies when you can just nickel and dime everybody for 10 bucks a month? And that's a movie ticket right there for one person in your household. You know, I, I think that, you know, like maybe five, six years down the line, mark this, mark this in your calendar, because this will be in the Atlantic in five or six years, the death of the theater.

I think all of these streaming services are just going to be subsumed with series. Yeah. Well, I mean, and if they, if they do it right, I, I'd much prefer to watch Jessica Jones than another goddamn Avengers movie. Oh, absolutely. So, yeah. So there you go.

We predicted it. Now it's happening again. Again. Security. We're not back this week with Dave Bittner from the cyber wire podcast. The cyber wire is a free community driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland.

Dave is also co-host of the hacking humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. So, Dave, why are you not here this week? Okay. Now, Dave, Dave was a little busy this week and a little overwhelmed. So he has taken a, taken a bow out for this segment this time, but he will be back next week.

He has taken a personal day. Well, I have some follow up to Dave's story about his Eggos last week. Right. And his tracking app. I don't, it's not specifically about his follow up because I'm not him and I don't know what his follow up is going to be, but this is my follow up after I listened to the Eggos story.

So, you know, I'm not on Facebook anymore, right? I do know that. Yes. So I got a bunch of new domes from the lovely people at domes and I was Googling at Marpac dome at Marpac. Yes. The domes from Marpac. Yes. So I was Googling dome and Marpac to figure out what they sent me and what the different things were so we can deal with that.

But I'd given my old one to my roommate and then she started complaining. They're totally listening to us. They're following us, man. On my Facebook page, all I'm getting are ads for that damn thing. And I've never Googled it in my life. And then I'm like, okay, I got you.

And then I got a bunch of Brooklinen stuff from the sheet company. And then I showed them to her and I'm like, look, I got new Brooklinen sheets. And she's like, cool, cool. Next day on Facebook, here's our Brooklinen ads. So it's very simple.

It's very basic. We live in the same house. We have the same IP address that is outward facing. Yep. Retargeting. Just if they can't find a specific vector, they're still going to look at the IP address that it came from, even though they can't fingerprint the same browser.

Yep. If you're in the same house, you can still get ads. Same IP, same interests. Yes. So let's take this for an example. Brian, you and I are talking over dinner. We're talking about going to Guatemala. Okay. And before we had this conversation, I'd looked up Guatemala to see what the GDP is and what the climate is and blah, blah, blah.

And I forgot about it. I was just, so it's in the back of my head. And I just quickly looked at the weather. Yeah. And then you go and look at Facebook later on and lo and behold, there are ads for Guatemala. And then you suddenly think that, holy shit, my phone's listening to me.

Okay. Problem solved. Your phone's not listening to you. Moving along. Yeah. And that's exactly part of what Dave is theoretically doing. He, he's been informed. He's not allowed to Google any food whatsoever to see if it's just his app that's leaking the data. So, yes.

Yeah. Yes. He's trying to do, he's doing a semi-scientific study, except, except he's actually buying those groceries using his rewards card at the grocery store. Which is being tied in and tied into his other shadow profiles. Yes. And it all comes back together.

Also, I just want to point out that Marpack and Dome did a huge advertising push for Prime Day because they had a big sale there. So, those ads were being pushed out everywhere. Oh, interesting. Interesting. But Brooklinen probably did not. And she got Brooklinen ads too. Yeah.

All within the same 24 hours of me searching. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Multiple vectors, all which do not involve your phone listening to you. Yeah. And, you know, there's an easy way to test it. You find something random, some product that you know people advertise for on the internet. And just start talking about it. And then one computer starts talking about it that's not on a computer that has a Facebook account.

And watch what the ads show up on the other computer in the house. Very, very simple. But that doesn't mean your phone's listening to you, people. I just have to keep beating that horse. Yeah. That horse is just from Reanimator because it pops up every damn week.

Now, I particularly enjoyed this story. Police in Bulgaria announced the arrest of a 20-year-old computer programmer on Wednesday. His crime, he orchestrated a staggering hack of the entire country's national tax authority that got all kinds of data, including names, addresses, job titles, incomes, health insurance specifics, loan details, and social security information of nearly every adult citizen in the country.

Or, as the article title says, the hacker just stole the personal financial data of an entire country. Well done, sir. Yes. To make matters worse, the hack apparently had gone totally undetected until an email claiming responsibility was sent to media outlets in the country earlier this week from a Russian email address.

The state of your cybersecurity is a parody, the hacker taunted in the email. Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, enjoy that Bulgarian prison, you moron. Yes, he will. He will be in prison. Now, this data could have been worth as much as $200 million on the black market, and he might have gotten away with it.

You kids might have gotten, if it wasn't for your damn kids. He might have gotten away with it if he wouldn't have sent the taunting email. Exactly. Yes. This is what happens when you're 20 years old. You're stupid. Yes. So basically, their entire system was always, Bulgaria has been known for having a horrific cybersecurity situation.

So there was a, the president said he was a wizard, but the prime minister, sorry, said he was a wizard. But all cybersecurity experts said, eh, probably wasn't that difficult to get in. Yeah. A little SQL injection, not a big deal. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, FaceApp.

Oh, you dastardly little whippersnapper, you. I got to see that you got to pull out your favorite phrase when this was brought up during the week, the tempest in the teapot. Yes, this is a tempest in the teapot. Well, it starts off with Senator Chuck Schumer asking the FBI and the FTC to look into FaceApp.

Okay. Again, this is not new. FaceApp has been around since 2017. Yes. This has all happened before. It went viral this week. Yes. Yes. But they went viral before. This has all happened before. It will all happen again. I get to bust that one out, too. It hasn't been a long time since we used that one on the show.

But yeah. Oh, my God. This is, it's maddening. It's maddening that these people think that this is such a horrible thing that people have a terms of service that says, hey, if you upload something to us, you're giving us the rights to it in perpetuity.

Well, it's free. How do you expect them to make money? Well, here's the, it's not even that. It's, it's, this is lawyers not knowing. Well, actually, it's lawyers knowing the technical limitations of the system, because what happens is you upload it to their server.

It gets into a backup, that backup is stored somewhere within the company. The company then sells to somebody else, right? Yep. So once that data is transferred to another company, you have to have the license to the data that's even just in a backup somewhere.

Otherwise, you're open to liability. So you have to say things like this. This is the reason this type of language exists. It's the technological side of things. It's not that they're going to take your photo, which quite frankly, sucks and means nothing and monetize it.

It just doesn't happen that way. That's not the way it works. They don't care. Well, there was a, I mean, there are a couple. That's what they want your subscription. Okay, grumpy. You're turned into your photo. I have. I have. I did it just to piss people off that were like, oh my God, they're going to steal your data.

I'm like, here, this is what I think of it. Look, I think it's good that, again, any time the discussion is being had about privacy and privacy rights and what these apps are doing and what is happening, any time that hits the mainstream and that part goes viral, I'm happy because it makes people aware.

Because all of a sudden now people were, let me finish. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. All of a sudden people were all of a sudden concerned again about potential privacy and how these apps work. And then it was brought up that, you know, no, most apps don't do it in the cloud. Most apps that work on images, it stays, it uses your own phone's computing power.

It doesn't send it out to the cloud. This one does. Was it made very obvious that they do that? No. Should they? Yeah, probably. You know, the discussion was being had. And I think that's a good thing because most people just blindly ignore all this stuff. So now all of a sudden people are discussing how these things happen.

Now, are we concerned about fucking Putin taking all of our faces and doing something? No, of course not. And the crazy people that were saying, oh, they get access to your entire photo roll and they get every photo that you have on there. They grabbed everything and that's been proven to be false.

That doesn't happen. It's only the photo that you upload. It's no big deal. It is what it is. Calm the fuck down, everybody. But again, I am happy that the discussion is being had. Well, see, the discussion should have been had before it went to mainstream media because now that's not how humans work. No, but the problem is the story of them taking everything in your photo roll is out there and people will forget the other part that says, no, they don't.

And then it's just it makes dumb people dumber. And that's the only problem I have with it is it makes dumb people dumber because they hear one story. They don't follow up with it. And that's the story that they're going to remember forever. OK, I agree with you on that. But then we have a couple more links to the show notes as well.

FaceApp's response on TechCrunch, which wasn't the best. They definitely could have used some PR people that did not help issues. The Washington Post has a good breakdown of exactly what happens to your privacy if you download FaceApp. Nothing, nothing, nothing. But the one thing that I do wish that everybody would be addressing in these articles, and we'll do it here first again.

You know what's way worse than FaceApp for your privacy? Facebook, Facebook, Instagram, a thousand times worse. FaceApp all fucking day. Go ahead. Drive yourself nuts. If you're using Facebook and Instagram, you have no right to be pissed off about this.

Yeah, absolutely. There you go. That's all I'm saying. But just to blame this on the Russians, Face Dawn is coming. You know what Russians have actually used to harm us? Facebook. Exactly.

So. OK. We have that we know for a fact. We know that they did that. FaceApp? No, not so much. Moving along. OK, moving along. Researchers from Boston University detected a vulnerability in several high-profile Bluetooth devices that could allow third parties to determine your location and other sensitive information.

And other shocking news again, this falls under, wow, technology without security doesn't work so very well, does it? Yeah. Yeah. This is, you know, it is what it is. The technical aspect of it basically involves pairing and unique IP addresses and some, you know, sometimes you need a little bit of security in there.

Sometimes people don't put it in. It doesn't leak personal data, but it could be used to track Bluetooth devices and their users. I put this story in here for our, I can't remember our listener's name right now, the Android lover, because Android's got to pass here. The researchers say Android devices don't appear to be vulnerable, but Windows 10 and iOS devices can be tracked.

And Fitbits are the worst. See that I found this originally on nine to five Mac, and I was going to put it in here before I saw you already had it, because it says Bluetooth flaw allows iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watch and more to be tracked. But they started with all of the Apple stuff because they it's obviously an Apple site.

So they think, oh, my God, it's just out. And then you keep reading and it's like, oh, shit, there's a bunch of other things that are open to this. This is not a flaw in Apple. This is a flaw in the Bluetooth protocol. Yep. So why are you even calling out any actual products? I don't know. Anyway, it's yeah, it comes down to the they were trying to do the right thing, but they did it poorly.

Right. So there there are, you know, fixes in the works for it. But it's yeah, it doesn't really matter if you like leave the area because it's Bluetooth low energy. Yeah. So if you're wandering around a mall, they can track you and things like that. Or you could just basically turn it off and turn it back on again and you get a new you get a new Mac address.

Yes. One of my favorite tech solutions of all times. Have you tried turning off and turning it back on again? Yeah. Yeah. Can we do that with the world? But I'm sure they will update Bluetooth soon enough because now they're aware of it, which is a good thing. Yeah. And are there even any exploits in the wild that actually have anything that are meaningful with this?

No. I'm sure the Israelis are working on it. Oh, Jesus Christ. The fucking Israelis. Cops and doodads. Brian, I actually left the house and took a trip last week. I know. I was shocked. I went to San Diego and it's only a 24 hour trip, but I did have to stay overnight and it was pride weekend in San Diego.

So I figured, oh my God, it's going to be loud and raucous and crazy. It wasn't actually, no, where I was at wasn't that bad. I stayed at the Lafayette, which is a beautiful little hotel, a little dirty, but not bad. But I took my dome travel.

That was a slap and a kiss. Yeah, it kind of was. I took the little dome travel gadget that they sent us. Yeah, it's nice, isn't it? Dude, that thing was fantastic. Yeah, it's great. I slept like a baby. I could not hear anything. I couldn't hear the noise in the hall.

And I know there was a lot because I came out in the morning. There were bottles of vodka strewn around and beer cans. Somebody had a party, but I didn't hear a thing. Highly recommend this thing. Got to put a link in the show notes for that. It was really, really good. Excellent. I'm not big on Prime Day because, you know, I'm mad at Hallmark holidays, much less a straight up consumerism, buy our crap, made up holiday.

Prime Day. What a joke. But I couldn't help but see a bunch of articles. And I can't remember where I found it, but it was like the top tech buys for Prime Day with the best discounts. And I ended up buying a Samsung T5 portable SSD, one terabyte USB 3.1 external SSD MUPA1T0B slash AM black because it was like it was I think it's 169 right now.

It was like 50 bucks off on Prime Day. So it was super cheap. Damn. Yeah, it was really cheap. And this thing is awesome. It is tiny. I needed a new travel drive, basically, because I'm still hauling around an old Western digital that is like five times this size and five times the weight. This is great.

I installed it really quickly. It is fast. It is so fast. It is so light. And it's SSD. So, you know, no moving parts. Very nice. Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, you got the 50 bucks off, which is really key because right next to it in the comparison matrix at the bottom is the SanDisk one terabyte extreme portable external SSD, USB-C, USB 3.1, blah, blah, blah for the same price.

That's what I have. That's the one I got the other week, which is also tiny and sitting here on my desk. But mine's extreme. Well, mine was 50 bucks off. I know. I think I would rather have 50 bucks off. But probably about the same size.

Looks like it. You know, yours is actually much bigger than mine. Oh, no, maybe not. Well, it's pretty damn small. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty damn small. It's a one terabyte SSD drive. But for 169 bucks, even even at full price, I got to say, my SanDisk has been one of the best buys I've gotten in a long time.

So I'm guessing yours is as well. Yeah, I love it so far. And I'm, you know, about to travel. So I moved everything from my larger drive right into this one. And it's just it's great so far. And it is blazing fast. It's really nice. The other thing is 1.6 ounces. Mine's 1.4. So I saved.

Wow, that point two ounces. It's going to break my back. Hey, man, when I'm running a tough mudder going up a mountain and I got my SanDisk, stream in my backpack, that point two ounces might be, you know, the difference between last place and second to last place. Well, mine's a little bit bigger.

Some more bullet coverage. Oh, that's true. The other thing I picked up was one of the new Fire TV sticks with Alexa voice remote streaming media player, because the one that I've discovered. OK, so I have Apple TV up on our main TV out in the living room, but we also have a TV in our bedroom because happy life, two TVs, two bathrooms.

That's the way it works. Uh, but, uh, I didn't want to the old. I have a very old Apple TV back here, which is so slow. I don't even, I'm, it's just unusable anymore. And I didn't want to spend like two, 300 bucks for another Apple TV back here. And I picked up a Fire TV stick a long time ago.

It does everything. It does everything I needed to do. The same as Apple TV. You know, particularly like we, the kid likes to come after he takes a bath and come back in the bed and lay in the bed with, with his mom and watch some Daniel Tiger. All of which you can get, you can get Netflix, you can get all that sort of stuff. The only thing on my, on the old Fire TV stick that we couldn't do was turn the TV on or off or volume.

That was not built into the first round. These have it. It was 14 bucks on prime day. No, man. So now we have volume control and can turn things on and off back here. So it is perfect. So it was just cheap and wonderful. Yeah.

It's 34 99 now. 14 bucks. Yeah. I don't need one, but I, you know, it's one of those things where it's like, it's 14 bucks. Yeah. 14 bucks. Who cares? That's like shipping on something. It's like shipping on the Rokus that I bought. So no, not bad.

Not bad at all. Yeah. Cause I've got a Roku TV and I got a Roku stick in my roommate's bedroom. I've got an Apple TV, another Roku and an Xbox one in my bedroom. Yeah. Yeah. Too many of these things. Um, the only thing that I don't know if this thing can do is can you access like a media center?

Like I've got a Synology set up as a streaming media player on my network. Do you know if you can, if you can, you can sideload some stuff. Okay. Yeah. Cause I don't want to run like Plex or anything like that. I don't want to put that on it. Right. But, ah, interesting. Okay. Well, Hey man, good deals.

Yeah. It was a good deal. Very impressed. Yeah. Now I've, I've, this just makes me sad. In the past, I have recommended airmail for Mac and iOS and loved them, loved them to death. Well, airmail, they, they stepped on their dick this week and they switched over to subscription based pricing for, to basically get multiple accounts and, uh, notifications on your iOS device.

Well, they're saying that if you are, you can be grandfathered in for the multiple accounts, but you can't get push notifications. You still have to subscribe and pay for that because for some unknown reason, they're not using the built-in push notifications that Apple gives you on a platter for free.

They've got their own infrastructure for it and it's costing them too much money to do all these push notifications. I'm like, well, maybe why don't you fucking re-engineer and fix it instead of spending all this money? So yes, everybody's subscriptions out of people. Yeah. Well, absolutely not because everybody's just like, well, I'm going home and, uh, everybody went back to spark, which is where everybody came from to go to airmail.

And I got to say spark has grown up. It is so much better than it used to be. I installed it, got it running on all of my machines. And it's nice because you set a sync address. Like I do multiple accounts. I've got like five Gmail accounts and one address is your sync address.

So once you get your one machine set up, you figure out which address is the sync address. And then that's the one that you log into on any of your other devices, your iPads, your iPhones and all that. Once you log into that account, it pulls everything, all of the tokens. It's all there. That's all you have to do.

You have to log in once. And if you're already logged in to Gmail or Google accounts on that machine that you don't even have to like put your username and password and you just click the name and boom, you're done. And, oh yeah, no subscriptions unless you want their, their enterprise stuff, which has team collaboration in it.

I don't need team collaboration because I'm not a team player. And so. And you have Slack. Yeah. And I just got to say thank you, airmail for going tits up like this, because Spark is so much more enjoyable to use.

And even on the desktop version of Spark, their calendar integration is so good. I don't even have to use Fantastical anymore. It is that good. So I get to, I get to get rid of one app. I don't have to pay for anything. And I'm back in the saddle.

And, you know, if Spark said, hey, we're going to update in the future and it's going to cost you some money, I'd be like, well, thank you, Spark, for giving me a heads up that I don't wake up one morning and say, well, give us money now, because it feels like airmail came to me at gunpoint and said, we're taking your money or you can't use the app.

You know, it's like, OK, delete. You're not that well to me. Well, Jason, there's another much beloved program on the show. That just did the same damn thing to us. Well, to you. Well, one password. Yes, you can no longer use one password unless you go subscription, which I will not do.

So thank you, one password. It's been real. I will continue to use version six until Apple rolls out their version of this and it's baked into their OS and iOS, at which point I will say sayonara one password because I'm not paying a goddamn subscription fee for this.

I'm just not. It's being built into everything. Everybody's doing it. Apple's rolling out their own. Maybe this is just the last gasp, you know, cash grab or to try to keep people locked into their infrastructure. That's probably it more than anything else. Once you're paying that to whatever a month to keep your one password, you're probably not going to go ahead and switch over to Apple's solution.

Maybe that's the whole point behind it. Hey, you want to do a subscription model? Fine. You should have grandfathered us in that just like to purchase the thing for a paid upgrade. Would have happily paid that. Wouldn't have complained. I hate these subscription model shit. Screw you. I'm going home. So, OK, well, I'll see you later.

See you later, alligator. I'm sticking with it because I did the math on it and I used to upgrade every year and it still comes out to be a couple bucks cheaper to keep one password going with the subscription model than it was for the paid upgrades that I would pay happily every year. So when Apple rolls out there as you're going to quit. Well, we'll see.

We'll see if it's just as good. You got to, you know, the proof is in the pudding on that one. Apple doesn't really have the greatest track record for coming out with first gen software. You know, that's fair. Yeah. Look, how long has reminders been around and they can't even clear a clear an entry when I hit done.

So and I am trying to try Dashlane because I got a free coupon code for it because they're advertising on another show and it looks actually pretty nice. Problem is I signed up with the coupon code and they said, welcome to Dashlane.

Please click here to, you know, sign in. And I click there to sign in and it said, can't find your email address. And I'm like, hmm, interesting. You just sent me an email to this email address. That doesn't bode well for my passwords. No, it does not. No, I'm sticking with one password for now.

It gets a job done for me and it's not that expensive. But I can see your frustration because it just happened to me. I would be a hypocrite if I said I didn't. Yep. Brick a brick. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. We've been hearing, been hearing about a Beetlejuice 2 for years.

There's a teaser trailer. I couldn't wait for Media Candy to talk about it because I love it. I'm so happy we're getting a number two. It looks great. Everybody's involved. Everybody's back. It's going to be phenomenal. Brian, I hate bringing this up to you. That's not a real trailer.

It's a fan-made trailer. What? That is not real. That's a fan-made trailer. Really? Yeah, it is. Well, that sucks. It really does because when I watched it, I'm like, holy shit, this looks awesome. I can't wait for this.

And then I scroll down and like, yep, it's a fan-made trailer. And then you go to IMDb. It's not even in casting yet. I was wondering about that because I did a search on IMDb and I was like, oh, I guess they just haven't updated IMDb yet. This is how much I wanted it to be true. You have dashed all my hopes and dreams, Jason.

You got fan-duped. You got fan-duped. I'm sorry, man. I thought you put this in here because you knew. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. I've been busy this week. I didn't have time to look into this. I know. And generally, the thing that you never want to do is read comments on YouTube.

Oh, yeah, I don't read them. Oh, crap. Now I'm looking at them. Yeah. Yeah. My bad, everybody. My bad. Happens to the best of us. I highly recommend everybody check it out because it's a really good trailer. Yeah. I want to see this movie. Because the thing about it at the beginning, I'm like, this is kind of like really weird tone for Beetlejuice with the family at the beginning.

Yeah. And I'm like, this is interesting. I don't know where they're going with this. And then it flips over and I'm like, hmm, I don't know. This could be good. But yeah, sorry. Sorry, Brian. I'm so sad now. Much like ghosts, Beetlejuice 2 is not real. What is real, though, is these new panoramas that NASA released for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

Sure, it's real from a Burbank soundstage. Oh, God. Yeah. Nothing. Oh, God. If Beetlejuice 2 isn't real, neither is the moon landing. Damn it. Oh, deep, deep juice. Deep juice moon.

That's what we're calling this. Oh, man. Well, if you go on the presumption that they are real, they are pretty beautiful. If you look at the high res versions of them. They are wonderful. I'm actually going to make one of these with my background on my Mac. Yeah, they're really, really nice.

Highly, highly recommended you go check them out. That is a good idea, though. Maybe I'll grab them and make some backgrounds, too. And I did see a video because I was in a space kick. These Crew Dragon parachute tests from SpaceX. They're testing out the new parachutes for the capsule that's going to carry the people up to space and back.

And they're just gorgeous. They're very fun to watch, like how they're doing the parachutes and, you know, different configurations and things like that. And I tell you what, that's going to be one hell of a roller coaster being on that Crew capsule. Because you're like, you're coming down and it's like, oh, there's a parachute.

Oh, where'd that parachute go? Ah, poof. There's another parachute. Okay, we're slowing down. Boom, that parachute's gone. And finally, the big one's open. It is gorgeous. It's a very fun video to watch. Nice. Yeah, that just made me happy to see, you know, space testing stuff that didn't go boom and blow up.

And finally, this one, back to the old, you wanted to stay in the Spice Girls bus. Yes, I did. When they turned it into an Airbnb. This one I think I would love to do. They turned an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile into an Airbnb.

And it's cheaper than the Spice Girls, too. It's only $136 a night. Yeah. I go for girls. Jason goes for hot dogs. Hey, watch it there. And it's in Chicago starting July 24th. And it's pretty funny. I bet this is one of the ones that I've taken pictures of that they've transformed because there's only a few of them left.

Yeah, there's only a couple left. Yeah, I used to take pictures of parades in Chicago all the time. And I have many pictures of said Wienermobiles because they were just everywhere. And also because when they came through, you wanted to go up because you got free wiener gum. They would always throw out hot dog gum and it was really good gum.

So you'd always want to go get your your Oscar Mayer gum. But yeah, check it out. They did a pretty good job, I think, with the inside of it. There's a few phrases I've heard that there's more wrong than wiener gum. Yeah, I guess that was kind of wrong.

I got nothing. I got nothing. Closing shout outs! I have to give a closing shout out to the bastards that made the Beetlejuice 2 fan trailer. How can I not?

Son of a... I really want to see that movie. Can you do the whole thing? Yeah, seriously. Hire these guys. Tim Burton, hire these guys. Tim Burton, just outsource it. Outsource it. Just get it done. And... Oh, Brian has been duped by deep juice. Sorry.

Sorry, man. It's really well done. Maybe the Congress should get on this. This should be illegal. Until next time, I'm Brian Gilmeister. 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 362. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay juicy. Wiener gum. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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