375: Wild Wild West

This episode is brought to you by Eero. Go to Eero.com slash GOG and enter code GOG at checkout to get free overnight shipping with your order. 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 heard you went to a concert last night. What the hell is going on with you? That's two in a week. I know. I'm feeling like pre-kid me. It's kind of strange. Yeah, I went and saw Banksy's Day Job last night. Massive attack.

They're here for three days in L.A. That was their last show, so I'm sure there's some new Banksy artwork that's popped up in L.A. We should keep an eye out for that. It was phenomenal. Now, you know, the previous show I went to was The Cure, one of my favorite bands of all time. But I've seen The Cure so many times in my life that a Cure show is just a Cure show to me these days.

Massive attack. Oh, my God. I went with friend of the show, Andy Stochansky, and I have I've been in the music industry 20 plus years. Right. Like I don't stay for full shows. I stayed opening note, end of encore. Whole damn thing. I haven't done that in years. Wow.

They were they were just really, really good. They're playing all of Mezzanine, which is what they're kind of landmark album and definitely in my top 10, if not my top five albums of all time. So obviously I liked all the songs already. Anyways, Elizabeth Frazier from the Cocteau Twins is touring with them because she sings Teardrop and a couple other songs on the album.

And Cocteau Twins are probably never in a tour again, so amazing to see her sing. She's phenomenal. They did a cover of The Cure's 1015 Saturday Night. They did a cover of Bauhaus' Bela Lugosi's Dead. It was just it was stunning. Really? And I even wrote you during the show.

I wrote you during the show because of their visuals. I'm again nail in the coffin that this dude's Banksy because it was very Banksy-esque visuals the whole time. And it was just like it's so they're so about tech and the bad sides of tech and social media.

And I was like going, if we ever did a live show, if we toured Grumpy Old Geeks, we could just buy their whole setup and put it behind us and it would fit perfectly. Yeah, if we went on tour, that would be kind of fun. I would I would definitely get behind stealing their visuals if they're that good.

And they're definitely very cool. It's something I mean, I definitely you know, we don't have enough people that are interested in seeing us live. But if they ever did, I would like to spend some money on the production. Yeah, speaking of life, we've only done one live show, and that was at Fireside last year, right around this time.

And unfortunately, we can't be there this year due to scheduling conflicts. But hopefully everybody up there is having a good time. I've heard from a couple of friends that made it back up there. And I'm seeing pictures of the lake and all the bungalows and stuff. And I'm like, oh, man, that was fun. That was so much fun.

I remember the mouse turds on our towels. Oh, yeah, man, that's it's nature. It's authentic. Right. Living we were living rough in that, you know, solo cabin. Once we saw what the other people were going through. It was like we were in a five star hotel.

Seriously, we were in the Ritz Carlton of Canada at that point. Wow. So I've got a little follow up on Wired magazine about a year ago. Well, actually, a year ago, I signed up for Wired because they went, you know, they threw up the paywall and they're like, give us your money and you won't get any ads and you get a free YubiKey, which has been thrown away by now.

So I get I get piece of papers in the mail every now and again that say, you know, hey, time to renew. The first one I got was six months after I signed up. I'm like, OK, guys, a little early, a little early on that one. And they kept coming and I just kept ignoring them.

And finally, well, it did actually. My subscription actually ended at some point and I couldn't get in. And so I got a thing in the mail. It said you can re up for twenty nine ninety nine a year. I'm like, well, I originally signed up for twenty five dollars with the YubiKey.

So when I went back, I'm just like, let me go to the website and just see if I can do this through my account. Logged into my account like, yeah, your subscription's done. Would you like to renew now for ten dollars a year for digital? I'm like, OK, ten bucks a year. I'm down for that. And then right right below it, I look, it's like, OK, digital plus subscription to the print magazine.

Guess how much it was? How much? Ten dollars. So I get the print magazine and the digital version with no ads on the website for ten dollars a year. So if anybody's thinking about, you know, re upping their wired subscription, do it through the website.

Don't believe those, you know, pieces of paper they send you through the mail. Because, you know, these it's Condé Nast. They've got this thing down to a science. They know what they're doing. But the thing is, it isn't just Condé Nast, right? Like where you we just read the story and I'm chuckling at it and you're laughing like it's a joke.

And it's like, ha ha. Well, I figured it out, so I don't have to pay the extra money. The thing is, this is normal behavior now. This is the this is this didn't exist pre Internet. This is this is stuff algorithms are able to do. We know Amazon rolls out different prices at different times at different places, which is bullshit for the same thing.

We everybody is doing this now. You know, we all got used to it with a plane tickets, which is also bullshit. Why do plane tickets prices change every single day? Yeah. Why isn't we never know what the real cost of something is anymore? And that's fucked up, isn't it?

Yeah. Kind of. Yeah. Why? Why are we OK with this? A thing should have a price and you pay the price. And that's that. Now, I get prices change over time. You know, you have economics. You have cost of living increases. You have interest rates. You have all that sort of stuff.

But the fact that you and I could both load up Amazon right now and look at the exact same product and have two different prices to it. That is fucked up. It's the invisible hand of the market, Brian. Right. No, it's not. It's an algorithmic bullshit designed to screw you. In the news.

I popped open the New York Times this morning and I saw my friend is in the news. Well, your friend's been in the news for a bit. And I was I was going to I was waiting to see when you were going to bring this in to discuss. Well, once it hit the New York Times, I thought it was appropriate.

I was actually going to talk about it once I saw the article on the MIT technology review yesterday, because yesterday there was an article called MIT Media Lab founder taking Jeffrey Epstein's money was justified. And so Nicholas Negroponte walked into a room of 200 people and basically put his dick on the floor and stepped on it multiple times.

And because Joey came in to apologize and say, look, I'm sorry. You know, this is what happened. I'm I'm being upfront about it. We took Jeffrey Epstein's money. In 2014, we took five hundred and some thousand dollars from him. And I took a couple hundred thousand more to for my investment company.

Well, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to give the money back and we're going to donate it to, you know, sex trafficking charities. OK, well, I can guarantee you this money is coming straight out of his own pocket. There's no way he's just going to go out and raise more money to give to charity.

I'm sure he's just saying, OK, I'm going to write you a check. Let's move on. Sorry to check. Let's make this go away. Exactly. But he apologized and he's sincere. And of course, in in this environment, you can't just say you're sorry anymore.

They need your fucking head on a pike. Now, I've known Joey for 20 years. He is one of the most upstanding people that I've ever met. And he's been at that job since 2011 and I think has done a fantastic job. And it is a crime that people want to take that job away from him because he took someone else's money who was an asshole.

OK, I mean, asshole is on the lower spectrum. He's a fucking monster. OK, but Joey didn't take this money alone. There was review boards were review boards. If I speak the Queen's English properly and other people signed off on this.

It wasn't just Joey saying, hey, I'm going to take this guy's money and throw it into the school and Bob's your uncle. No, other people were advising on this. And this is after his 2008 confession that he, you know, tried to diddle a youngster.

Well, Joey believes in redemption. My problem. But Joey believes in redemption. I mean, hell, he even got an award for a convicted murderer that turned himself around. He's now a community activist. Joey believes in redemption. You do your time. You you you but pay your debt.

Didn't do his time. Yeah, that's that's the problem. That's the problem. And and, you know, I understand what you're saying. And I certainly agree with you about review boards and things like that. I don't think that that Joey Joey Ito is taking it on the chin for an entire organization. The organization should be taking it on the chin, not him specifically.

You know, I've been aware of this story for quite some time. I follow Zenni on Twitter and she Joey Ito is dead to her. But the question for me always comes down to is what did they know and when do they know it? And the problem I have with this story is they knew before they took the money.

They knew he was a very, very, very bad guy. So I I don't blame Joey. I think he's part of a bigger organization. And like you said, there are there are boards and things of that nature. I blame all of MIT Media Lab and they I think they fucked up big time.

And yeah. And Nicholas Negroponte is not helping matters right now. That is the exact that he never should have said a damn thing. Let Joey go up and say, here's all. Look, here's the money we got. We're sorry about it. We're taking it. We're giving it all to these charities that fight the specific thing that that Epstein was was causing.

And that should have been the end of the story. And yeah, that that would have been fine. Not great, but fine. But now Nick now that Nicholas Negroponte is out there saying that we we were completely OK taking this money. No, you weren't. You know, you knew you knew.

And you took the money anyways. So here's the deal. Joey is a I mean, he's a fucking stand up guy. He really is. And I'm sure he feels terrible about this and he's trying to do the right thing. So, yeah, I think he needs to resign. No, I don't. I think I think I think the Media Lab is a better place with him in it because I mean, I like I know I need to resign.

Well, he's not even there. He just came in to be like, you know, OK, I was there. I introduced Epstein to Joey and did all this and he was trying to, you know, take some of the blame. But he then he said that stupid shit. And even Joey in a letter to him that what they talk, which they talk about in the New York Times article said, you know, I just spent an hour and a half apologizing and you just wipe the slate clean with your stupid remarks.

It's like he certainly did. Yeah. So, I mean, it's a bunch of bullshit. And and, you know, OK, if Jenny is, you know, down on Joey. Look, man, social justice warrior bullshit.

There's a there's a point where it comes down to common sense. Sorry. Yeah. He took the money. He's apologizing for it. There was five fucking years in between when he took that money and now. So where were where was all the outrage then? That's what I want to know. So, you know, OK, it's fine now that you can say this.

But if you knew that he was that monster back then and you still were OK with it, then that like that intervening five years, where were the where the picket signs? Where are the fucking pitchforks? They were nowhere to be found. So, you know, OK, it just drives me mad.

This whole like blame everybody for everything. It's like Joey would never deal with this if he knew that that guy was still doing the things that he was doing. Period. I look, I know the guy. Well, I know, you know, the guy, but there's no doubt that we did not know they knew they knew they knew they knew they knew they didn't know did Jason.

They knew. No. Sure. He hadn't been convicted, but the rumors were everywhere. They knew that's that's my only problem with this. Look, look, they took a bunch of money from a bad dude. Is that necessarily a bad thing in and of itself?

No, they put the money to fucking good use. I get that. But they knew and you can't make excuses for that. And like I said, I think he did the right thing. He apologized and said he's going to give all the money back. That is the right response. But do not deny the fact that they knew they did. Now, I disagree with you on to the extent of what he what it came out that he was actually doing.

They knew what he did. No, not to the extent, but you think people just stop doing that, Jason? You think Epstein just kind of turned a corner and said, you know what? I'm not down with 14 year old chicks anymore. Well, nobody knew these were in a fucking ring of them. That's for damn sure. OK.

All right. Let's move on. Let's move on. Let's talk about some more children for a second. OK. OK. So Google got finally dinged by the FTC to the tune of one hundred and seventy million dollars. This is in the bucket. Oh, yeah. Like point zero one percent of the revenue for the year.

They're going to pay one hundred and thirty six million dollars to the FTC and thirty four million dollars to the state of New York. And this is the largest Copa case ever, which is interesting. I remember a long time ago I wrote software that I opened. So my first open source package in PHP was a Copa age verifier long, long ago.

So it's interesting. And they're going to actually YouTube is going to step up a little bit and they're going to spend one hundred million dollars on original children's content. OK. Which will be interesting. One hundred million dollars. Also still a drop in the bucket. It really is. Look, I have a simple solution for this.

Fuck the advertising model for kids. Yeah. End of story. Make a subscribe. As a parent, I will happily. In fact, I do happily pay YouTube. I started paying YouTube to get no ads because all of a sudden there were horror movie ads in the middle of pet of the fucking pig. Yeah.

I will pay to not have ads. Put all of your kids content in a walled garden and I will pay you. I will subscribe. Done. Problem solved. Yeah. Well, OK. So so do you think that people who don't subscribe then should get the ads?

I mean, because it's an option. You don't have to subscribe. So I know that's the problem with our Internet today. Right. It's it's it's it's not a good thing. Right. But maybe there should be there should be. OK, Joey, you know, take some of your money and put it into a fund for disadvantaged children so they can get subscription access to educational programming online.

I'm pretty sure Google has more money than Joey, so they should Google step up and do it. YouTube, do it fine. Offer subsidies. That's the way these things used to work, right? There would be programs or if you can afford it, then you pay for sliding scales. Why don't we do these sorts of things? These are problems that can be solved if we care to solve them.

Well, there's a very easy. There's a much easier solution to this. Make it all free. If it's a children's video, don't rent any ads and turn off the comments and don't put them in your recommendation algorithm. Yep. You know, you make enough money after they turn 13. You make enough money off of us for the rest of our lives that from zero to 13, you can afford to give it away and get everybody hooked.

Amen, brother. It's the drug dealer model. The first 13 years are always free. The first pep of the pigs free, bitches. Exactly. Yeah. Look, this is solvable. This is easily solvable. And you're right. YouTube and Google with their zillions of dollars could step up and just offer kids programming without ads for free.

End of story. Yep. And on a couple articles, I heard that they might be doing that. I haven't found any concrete evidence of that, but we'll see. We'll see how it goes. I think the next in the next week, we'll know a little bit more about this. So maybe on Wednesday, we'll have some follow up on it.

Yeah. I mean, I'm following this stuff really closely because I have a kid in the prime age for this sort of stuff. I am living through these things right now. That's why we paid for YouTube so we could get it without ads because it was freaking me out. Do they still have the recommendations in the paid version? God, I'd kill to be able to turn those off because, you know, once you watch a video, you want your kid to stop because I don't want unending screen time.

That's the other thing. Even when you pay, it pushes towards unending screen time because then it's like, I want to watch that one, daddy, because it'll pop up after the end of a video. No, go to black. Yeah, seriously. Fade to black. Well, speaking of something like orange is the new black, Senator Ron Wyden says that maybe we should think about sending Zuckerberg to jail.

I know. Right. Because that's going to happen. That's going to happen. Look, he's not wrong in saying maybe we could look at it because there are things that he probably did that were probably illegal. I'll settle for like a real fine, like a hundred billion dollars.

The funny bit would be Facebook gets into the the commercial prison business because we know that that's a problem in the in the U.S. already. You know, all these prisons are outsourced. What if we have the the Mark Zuckerberg penitentiary that he gets to go to after he goes to jail?

There's there's no more weight room. There's no more yard. It's just a bunch of beanbag chairs and iPads for everyone. That's right. Well, because it's it's a possibility because Facebook is now under investigation by state attorneys general for antitrust violations. Oh, let's see how this one's going to go.

So this is being led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, and it includes attorneys general from Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and the District of Columbia. So we're going to find out if they are engaging in antitrust behaviors, which, of course, we know they are.

Of course, they are. Of course, they are. Facebook's going to have a rough 2020. I got to tell you. Oh, yeah, it is going to be rough. Like if you are invested in Facebook right now and you think, oh, look, they keep they keep the stock keeps going up with all the problems.

Dump it now. Dump it now. 2020 is going to be rough. Yeah. So the statement said the investigation will focus on whether Facebook endangered consumer data. Check. Yes. Reduce the quality of consumers choices. Yes. Check. Because they keep buying everybody else or increase the price of advertising.

Yes. They did because you you bid against each other. Yes. It is an auction model, which means yes. So, yep. Pretty much hit all those points. So throw them in the who's cow. Yeah. And, you know, these things take a long time. These things take a long time.

But 2020 is going to be rough for Facebook. And Yahoo knows that these things take a long time because for 2013 to 2016, all of that data security breach stuff that happened, the litigation settlement is finally starting. There is a website for that now. Yahoo data breach settlement dot com.

Unfortunately, it is not a big old class action. Easy thing where you just put in your email address and get you two bucks. You still need to have your Yahoo accounts and you have to remember their passwords. You need to be able to log into them. And they ask for proof of any particular financial loss that you may have so you can get paid out for those.

But damn, considering I know I was like a little bummed, too, because I don't even remember. I know I had a Yahoo account. Couldn't tell you what the password was anymore. I still have mine. It's still it's still in my one password because I kept my Flickr account for years. Right. So I still have my original Yahoo account. Well, if you're out there and you had a Yahoo account, I would recommend checking out the link in the show notes and see if you can get your pound of flesh.

Mm hmm. Well, this this next one comes from across the pond. Mental health information sold to advertisers. Well, that's just great, isn't it? Yes. Privacy International investigated more than 100 mental health websites in France, Germany and the UK, and it found that many shared user data with third parties, including advertisers and large technology companies.

Yay. The way the information was being sold. Yeah, probably the way the information was being sold was neither transparent nor fair and often lacked a clear legal basis. Oh, God. Yep. So we're going to see how this one goes out, because this is some GDPR land that they're in right now.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Most definitely. This is this is not going to fly. Well, these there's some companies are going to go out of business. Hopefully. Honestly, hopefully. Hopefully. This episode is brought to you by Eero.

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That's Eero.com slash GOG, code GOG at checkout to get your Eero delivered with free overnight shipping. You must use this URL to receive this offer. Eero.com slash GOG, code GOG. 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. And thank you for the Maryland swag, Dave. We'll talk about that in a second. You're welcome. Dave is also co-host of the Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering.

Yeah. So I was so excited that I was getting all this Cyber Wire swag in the mail from you, Dave. You're like, we're going to send you some goodies. And yeah, I like my Maryland t-shirt, but I was a little shocked and awed. Maybe we'll send you some Cyber Wire stuff under separate cover, as they say.

Okay. Hey, but I did use the little NSA RFID sleeve for my Apple card. Oh, there you go. Oh, you see? There you go. Very nice. Very nice. So now when I'm at Trader Joe's and I pull out my Apple card, I have the NSA logo and people look at me like, hmm?

Then I pull it out and it goes, oh, and then I hand them the Apple card and they go, what is this magic? Yeah. Well, and it'll keep your Apple card nice and clean and pristine because there were all those instructions on how to do that, right? I know. Yes.

I do not have a- You have to buy special Apple juice to clean off the cards. Apple jeans. Sweat from Steve Jobs himself. Mm-hmm. That's right. Right. The essence of Johnny Ives' White Room. Oh, man.

Yes. And it also comes with a manly perfume from the scent of Ive. Well, I'm glad you guys enjoyed your Maryland stuff. Yes, thank you so much. We've talked about it here many times. We're very proud of our Maryland things here. And I like to believe that we have the best looking state flag of the 50 states.

So it's iconic. Being aware of basically none of them, I'm sure you do. I don't know what any of the other ones look like either, don't you? I mean, you guys have some, like, you have a bear on yours or something. Yes, we have a bear. Yeah. Somebody has a rattlesnake they don't want you to step on.

Yeah, whatever. But, yeah, I thought the bandanas that you could use for the doggies. You ever try and put a bandana on a Rottweiler? I have not, actually. Does that not work out very well?

Is that code for something? Right, right. I'll be right back. I've got to go bandana on the Rottweiler. Give me three minutes and we'll be fine. You know what I mean? I'll see what I can do. I've tried and she just won't sit still, but I'll see what I can do.

Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, next time Brian and I are together, we will take a selfie of us in our Maryland shirts. There you go. Very nice. Depends on how many beers we've had at the bar. People will wonder, who's that lovely couple in the matching Maryland shirts?

Yeah. Well, the best way to do it is to see if we can have somebody take a picture of Brian and I on our bird scooters with our Maryland swag. Yes. Looking down the street. Very nice. Very nice. A little bit of quick follow-up before we jump into new stuff.

Last week, we were talking about these websites that were discovered that were targeting iOS devices, and when we recorded last week, we weren't sure who, if anyone, they were targeting. Jason had pointed out that some sources were saying that they were targeting folks in the Middle East, perhaps.

And since then, we've learned that it is most likely, wait for it, the Chinese. And they were targeting, again, wait for it, the Uyghur minority, which is the Muslim minority in China, that the Chinese, well, they are a frequent target of the Chinese government to the point of putting them in camps.

Right. Yeah, the Chinese are dicks. Yeah, okay. Next on BBC News. Right. Right. It's like, I do the play-by-play. Christian Anamopour is all coming up next. Yeah. I do the play-by-play. The Chinese are dicks.

Jason comes in with a strafing run of color commentary. Hey, man. We've got to move on. We've got like 800 stories here. Let's just cut to the chase. Let's move on to Facebook being dicks. Yeah. So, Facebook is directly tackling complaints about its facial recognition practices for photo tagging by expanding access to its face recognition privacy setting, which was introduced in 2017 to all users.

I want to pause here for a second. How did they decide what users to give it to in 2017? Why was this already not rolled out to all users? A-B testing. They have to A-B test everything. Will people use this if we don't tell them it exists and we don't know if they have it?

It was rolled out to users whose last name began with the letter Z. Yeah. So, they're going to stop scanning faces by default. If you do not have the setting, you will have to explicitly grant permission for it. You will get a notice when the feature is available, but nothing will happen if you ignore the alert.

Shocking. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know they're still scanning. They're just not. Display is set to zero. That's all it is. They're still going to be scanning everybody's face. Come on. How naive would you have to be to believe that? Well, they're certainly doing everything in their power to make sure that nobody actually turns this off.

They're burying it. They're not going to do it automatically. And they're putting out, you know, they're basically saying, hey, there are reasons you want to keep this on. Photo review won't work anymore if you turn this off. So you won't know if a friend puts up a photo of you without your consent. So, yeah, all that sort of stuff is happening.

At least I suppose they're doing something. But it may be too little too late. They've lost a bid to block a lawsuit alleging that it captured millions of users face data for its tag permissions feature without permission, allegedly violating Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act so that they may still have to compensate up to 7 million people if it loses that case, which I'm one.

I'm one of them. And you are one of them. You're going to get your two bucks. And Slade has an article about how to go in and turn it off if you have it. It is somewhat confusing, shocking. It's a three-step process. Just turn it off. You don't care about all this other stuff.

Turn it off. Just do it. Step two is bend over. Yes. Ass recognition. Yes. So, even if you disable this, can your friends still tag you in a photo manually? Yes.

Yeah. They can manually tag. It's just turning off the automatic recognition things. All right. So, I guess it's a step in the right direction. It's funny. Whenever one of these things pops up now where Facebook has changed some setting, my first thought is, how is this going to benefit Facebook and not everyone else?

My first thought is, which lawsuit caused this to change? And then, I think, how do they figure out a way to make sure that this benefits them? Right. Right. I guess those two aren't mutually exclusive. No. No. Yeah. Not necessarily. So, and in further Facebook news, as I've been saying, I think Facebook is in for a rough 2020.

More stuff is happening. A security researcher has discovered databases containing more than 419 million records tied to Facebook accounts on, of course, a not password-protected server. Shocking. Data includes phone numbers, Facebook IDs, and in some cases, users' names, genders, and countries.

Although, if you've got a phone number and a Facebook ID, I don't think you need too much else. You can get everything from the Facebook ID. They are saying it's an old data set, of course. Right. This was done before they made changes to remove people's ability to find others using their phone numbers. The data set has been taken down, and we see no evidence that Facebook accounts were compromised, et cetera, et cetera.

How would you know? How would you know? Come on. Yes. So many data breaches, it's really hard to tell which one is the culprit anymore. And as people are pointing out, sure, it may be old data, but how often do people change their phone numbers? Never. I still have the same phone number I've had since I got my first cell phone.

We don't change our phone numbers that often. So all the phone numbers are probably not old data on these accounts, and they've noted that there are a number of celebrities that have been in there, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So yes, another big problem for Facebook. Yeah. Just a couple additional notes.

This is data from the pre-Cambridge Analytica period of time. So this was data that was scraped when third parties had the capability. When you could get away with it. Right. When Facebook permitted you to scrape data from Facebook.

So the leaky part of this is that it was all sitting on an exposed server. But in terms of the data being gathered up, that was a feature, not a bug. Yes. And they're stating it's about 133 million U.S. users, 18 million U.K. users, 50 million in Vietnam, which is interesting targeting.

Well, since they're in the U.K., GDPR, come on, guys. Get on it. Send some fines. Do you think Facebook is going to get death by a thousand cuts? It's obvious that it's never going to be one thing that takes Facebook down because it's, you know, we just keep seeing these things and our jaws hit the floor.

But it feels like they're starting to bleed a bit now. Well, maybe. Maybe. I wonder for Facebook, for Google, have we reached a point where if the targeted advertising were no longer legal, right, could they still function with good old-fashioned advertising?

Are they big enough platforms that if they were just doing the same kind of advertising that folks have done on radio and television and newspapers, you know, limited amount of targeting. Duck, duck, go. Whatever. I mean, yeah, yeah. Or they could very easily pivot to a subscription model.

And I think, sure, they'd lose a lot of people, but they'd make a lot of money. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right. Shareholder value, though. Remember, shareholder value. Mark Zuckerberg wasn't on that list of CEOs. Mark Zuckerberg is not one of those CEOs, yes. Yeah, that signed the declaration of what a corporation is.

Mm-hmm. Well, one thing they're trying to do, though, is cut off the deep fakes for the next election. And so they're going to spend $10 million, and they're going to try and get other people, of course, to build software to detect deep fakes.

Mm-hmm. And I think this is in their best interest, because they are squarely in the crosshairs here about what's coming. And one of the reasons 2020 is going to be so rough for Facebook is the election. Oh, yes. Because no matter what Facebook does, there will be gamery and trickery afoot on the book of the face during the election.

Yeah, as much tomfoolery will be afoot. So, yeah, so it's between them and Microsoft and some other organizations who are going to try and, like, they're going to make deep fakes. And what they want you to do is write some software to detect them.

And then you can win a prize or a brand new car. And we'll see how this plays out. I mean, it's a good idea, but I think $10 million is a little light compared to the scope of the problem that they're going to solve. Oh, yeah. Deep fakes are going to be a massive issue for the next foreseeable future.

It's one of the biggest issues we're going to be facing is we're already in post-fact society and this is not going to help. Yeah, they want to get the good talent in, throw another zero on that. And then we can really see some, you know, some of the smartest people getting in on it because this is an arms race.

This isn't going to be, OK, we've cracked the deep fake. No, the guys who make the deep fakes, the software, they're going to say, oh, well, it detected this. Well, let's work around that because that's what they do. It's like, oh, wait a minute. Our things don't blink. Well, let's make them blink.

You know, let's put the blink filter on. Yeah, let's let's add some blinkage and, you know, then it's going to be, OK, hair detection, edge detection. OK, let's just figure that one out next. And they're going to keep going. This isn't a one and done solution. It can't be. So I think 10 million is light.

I agree. And I wonder what other organizations are kicking in funds. But yeah, 10 million dollars strikes me as comically low amounts of money to go at something at this at this scale and this importance. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's Microsoft, the partnership on AI and academics from institutions, including MIT, UC Berkeley and Oxford.

So some pretty big names. Yeah. Yeah. Get some more money in there, guys. Let's do it. Well, this next story is actually some good news. We've heard about many cities around our nation who've been hit with ransomware.

Baltimore. Baltimore is the poster child for what bad things can happen when you get hit by ransomware. Oh, wait, do our shirts have ransomware on them? Are we going to have to pay Bitcoin to you when we put our shirts on? Wear them in good health, gentlemen. Wear them in good health.

So I think, what, at last count, Baltimore was up around, I want to say, $22 million. I know it was $18 million, but they're still ticking up the cost of what their ransomware incident hit them with. So the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, got hit with ransomware, and they handled this in just about a textbook example of how it could go well.

The ransom folks demanded $5.3 million, but the city of New Bedford had, they knew they had backups, so first thing they did was they pulled all of the affected systems off of the internet, basically disconnected their connectivity and disconnected them from each other to help stop the spread of the ransomware.

They bought time with the bad guys of trying to do a negotiation with them, and while they were in this negotiation phase, the folks behind the scenes were checking all of the backups and seeing exactly what situation they were in, and turns out they had good backups, they had good plans to restore all the data, and that's what they did.

And no critical systems were impacted, and the restoration from the backups was quick and easy. Since then, they've installed additional security software to prevent them from getting hit in the first place, which, you know, that's suboptimal. But if you're going to get hit by ransomware, here's a nice demonstration that you can recover as quickly as possible, and it looks like it didn't really cost them that much to do it.

So good for Bedford, Mass. Yeah, nice to see that this doesn't have to be a huge drain on the community or resources or anything. If you plan ahead, you can be covered for this sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, seriously, why aren't there just backup companies right now going to every city in the country going, let us help you mitigate this problem because you're eventually going to get hit?

There's got to be people out there doing it. Oh, believe me, I'm sure there are. I mean... There's got to be. If you're a guy who sells backup systems, you are pounding the pavement with the city managers trying, you know, and the city council is saying, please give us your money.

Yeah, that's an easy sale these days, I would imagine. Yeah, you'd imagine, but some people still don't get it. Well, and lots of cities just don't have the money. That's true, too. That is true. It's not like Baltimore wasn't asking for better systems, right? Yeah. You know, all we can afford is XP.

It's good enough. It was good enough in the 90s. It's good enough now. Yeah. We're pretty sure that USB drive is still backing up every day. Yeah. No problem. Joe's got it on a thumb drive. We're good to go. Has anybody seen Joe lately? Yeah.

I think he went to Romania for vacation and we haven't seen him for a while. I'm sure it's all fine. Yes, I'm sure it's fine. So I saw this and this is pretty interesting. This comes from Brave, the very secure browser that isn't quite ready for prime time.

Jason and I have both tried it and it's not quite there yet, but it's close and they're pretty, pretty good on their security stuff. They have discovered something here. The Google double click slash authorized buyers ad business, which is already under investigation by the Irish Data Protection Commission, the DPC for suspected infringement of GDPR.

They've done some deeper dives into this for them to give them some more evidence. It's installed on 8.4 plus million websites. It broadcasts personal data about visitors to these sites to 2000 plus companies, hundreds of billions of times per day. This data can include people's locations, inferred religious, sexual, political characteristics and what they are reading, watching and listening to online.

There is no control over what happens to the data once broadcast. There appears to be by far the largest leakage of personal data ever recorded. Whoa! And Google's sole means of protecting data once broadcast is a policy that asks the thousands of companies it shares data with to, wait for it, self-regulate.

Oh, this could be costly. This could be costly. This could put Google out of business in Europe. Eh, never going to happen. It won't, but it should. Never going to happen, yeah. Yeah, this is a fundamental flaw in their technology that does not appear to conform to GDPR at all.

Yeah. Well, we'll see how this plays out. There's a lot of German words in here, too. There's a lot of acronyms, too. This is a rough one. Yeah. Yeah. Netzwerkdatscheidung Expertise. So, what do you guys—I've been trying to suss through this myself, and what do you guys suppose is their intention here?

How was this supposed to work? How did—in other words, if you were Google, who are not stupid, how was this, in Google's mind, functioning in a way that would keep Google out of trouble? Or was it?

I don't believe—I believe this is a vestige of—I can't believe I'm going to use this phrase, but we were talking about the Will Smith movie earlier, the wild, wild west of the internet. That was, you know, it was get as much data as you can, sell as much data as you can, and use that data to do targeted advertising as much as you can.

That was, and still is, the business model, but now it's bucking up against people who are pissed off about it and have made rules that you can't do that anymore, and they have not gone in and fixed these things or changed them yet because this is their business model.

Yeah. Dollars to donuts, this is all about retargeting. Mm-hmm. This is all about retargeting. I go to site A, I get an ad for what I was just looking at on site A when I go to site B. Yep. Right. So— Following you around the internet. Yeah. You know what?

That's something that people should fucking start to look at and ban is retargeting. That would be fantastic because when every time I look up a joke thing on Amazon for a month, a month, I'm followed around by stupid things. I remember when I was looking for the poop emoji pillow.

I was literally up to my eyeballs in poo for a month. It had nothing to do with the dogs. Nothing to do with the dogs. No. That was from, was it Chris? I can't remember. Chris, what's his name from The Morning Dump?

Um, he's, he's now gone on to— Chris, uh, Jordan Cooper. Jordan Cooper. Jordan Cooper. That's it. I was thinking Chris Cooper, but Jordan Cooper. Yeah, he, uh, he used to have a show called The Morning Dump, which was the best tech news morning podcast ever until he got into day trading.

Fantasy sports. Fantasy sports, yeah. So, anyway, I have a, I have a poop emoji pillow here on the thing, on the, on my shelf, which you can see if you go join the club, my podcast club. I do a walkthrough of my studio in there, and you can see it there. But, anyway, just to find that pillow that he could send me, because I won a contest, a month, literally a month of poop everywhere I went.

So, yeah, let's get rid of retargeting. Yeah, you know, it's, it's just interesting. I was, I was talking to my wife about this, because she works in the music industry, and there's a lot of, um, they, they deal with a lot of different apps and different companies that are, are their entire basis.

Again, their entire business model is reliant on targeted ads and retargeting. And GDPR says no to this, and we're going to have our own stuff here at some point, hopefully, that will also say no to this. So, they need to figure out a different way to do their business.

Mm-hmm. And they need to figure it out soon. Yeah. Seriously, call the guys at DuckDuckGo. They figured it out. It works for them. And they still make money, and they don't have to retarget. Yep. But does it work at scale? Does it work at scale? Oh, my God.

Well, this is for all you Android fanboys out there who always yell at us. We're saying, oh, you guys are so, you're just so highfalutin' with your iOS, and blah, blah, blah.

Android is secure. Well, turns out you're right. So, for the first time ever, Zero Days are more expensive on Android than they are on iOS, because apparently Android has been kicking up their security game, while Apple has been asleep at the wheel.

Hmm. Do you guys cover this on the Cyber Wire yet, Dave? We have. I don't know that we came to the same conclusions that you just did. Well, please. Jason has an outlier opinion? How shocking that must be.

Well, look, if I'm wrong on this, thanks, praise be to Zeus, you know? But come on, tell me where I'm wrong on this, because it seems like that they're... No, you may be right. I'm mostly just giving you a hard time. You know, like everything, these are markets. And so, part of this could be that when the price is high on iOS Zero Days, everybody starts banging away at iOS because they want to cash in.

Mm-hmm. And now the market gets flooded with iOS Zero Days. It's the invisible hand, Jason. The price goes down. Yep. I told you. Yeah. So, it could be something as simple as that. I wonder how this thing we were talking about at the top of the show with the Chinese targeting the Uyghurs, you know, that becoming public, what effect does that have on just perceptions?

It's a market, right? Prices go up, prices go down. Also, were people shifting away? The people who are being targeted by these Zero Days, which is in general a small subset of people, are they shifting around trying to stay ahead of folks who might be after them specifically?

And so, are they shifting from iOS to Android? Who knows? But interesting stuff to think about. But, yeah, it's a market to watch. I don't know that I would come to the conclusion that Android is more secure than iOS.

Yeah. That's a stretch. That's a stretch. In general. I would always think that Android Zero Days would be more valuable just because there are more Android devices. User base. Right. Yeah. You know, to me, that seems like it's just a no-brainer. But, you know, I think, you know, the people that they're targeting demanded more money because they were on iOS.

And I think that makes sense. But, yeah, from just a user base and an install standpoint, Android seems like it would be a no-brainer at all to be more costly because of just the size and the scope of it.

If you want to hack into a bunch of different people across the world, well, let's look at Android. But if you want to hack into some specific people, then you look at iOS. And if those specific people are using iOS because of the reputation for it being more secure, now you've got a little feedback loop going on.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, we have a question. We have a question from one of our listeners. Naveed writes in, hey, geeks, not sure if you've covered this before, but on my way to Vegas from San Diego for Labor Day weekend, I was looking forward to using my gas rewards points for shopping at Vons and Ralphs, which can be applied at Shell and Chevron stations.

Looking forward to it. Wow. Dude, I game that every week. I actually bought bacon yesterday because it was a 5x point reward. All right. So he says, looks like someone used up my points by typing in my cell phone number at the pumps, swiping away my earned points.

Clearly, this is a big security issue, and I'm disappointed to see that there's no real way to handle this problem right now. What are your thoughts about this? I was thinking about making a Google number to attach to my grocery rewards accounts and just rotate that number to a new one. Whenever I get compromised, it's only happened once. I'm sure you're not going to continually have this happen to you.

Well, I actually know if they know it works, it probably will happen again. It's like, oh, I'm changing my original since changing my cell phone number often isn't a reasonable solution. Quick point. And I've done this since college, since before there was really an Internet. As soon as awards programs like this started at grocery stores, you don't have to use a real number.

Yeah, I'm not going to tell you the number that I've been using for 20 plus years is not a real phone number when maybe it is. I'm sure it's somebody's phone number, but I made one up. So it doesn't connect directly to me. Uh, eight, six, seven, five, three, oh, nine. You pick your area code. There you go. It works. There's your new one everywhere.

Works everywhere. Yeah. That's my go to in grocery stores for sure. Yeah. Works everywhere. So, so you don't need to have a real one. I would suggest you come up with a fake number that you can remember quite well and just start switching all your accounts over to that. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

You don't want to make it too easy because people might just type those things in and then you start, you lose the, you lose your earned points again. But, you know, come up with something just like you had a password. One, one, two, two, three, three, four. What's the number on my luggage? But to Naveed's point about there being a security issue here, I'm not familiar with these gas point things.

So is it only your phone number that you punch in and that's, yeah, it's your phone number that you use for your, yeah, yeah. It's a, you know, you, you set it up at Ralph's and you give him your phone number and then you scan that or whatever every time you check stuff out. And if you spend a certain amount at Ralph's, then you'll get a five cent off per gallon deal with Shell or whatever.

If you're like me, you get a buck off every time you fill up because I'm a master at my points. So there's no downside to go to the gas pump and just put in your area code, your prefix, and then four random digits and chances are. Well, you don't know if any points have been accrued on whatever number you're entering in, but yeah.

Right. But there's no downside to trying. No, there's no downside to trying and there's nothing that stops you. Yeah. Interesting. So, yeah, just use a fake number. I think this is an inside job. Somebody knows that he goes to Ralph's and Vaughn's and is a point whore, much like myself, which I've outed myself, which means Brian's going to steal all my damn gas points.

I am going to get gas right now. As soon as we get off the air, I'm going to go fill it. Well, yeah. I wonder if Naveed has any beefs with any of his neighbors. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's probably the chances of someone randomly picking your number and wiping out points that you had earned up is pretty small.

So I would look to your friends, man. Exactly. That's why I think this is an inside job. Right. As he had been bragging about the number of points because who would be stupid enough to do that? Who would be dumb enough to brag about how good they are at getting their gas points? A buck off, you say?

Talk to you guys later. God damn it. Upsec fail. Upsec fail. Damn it. Yeah. By the way, I put this out on Twitter a couple months ago. I was looking for the opportunity to use Apple Pay at a gas station, and someone pointed out that the Exxon app actually allows you to use Apple Pay and Face ID.

And I've been using that, and it works really well. Very cool. So it's a way to have a more secure way to pay for your gas. If you're worried about card scrapers at gas stations, you can bypass all that. So check it out. Yeah.

Interesting. Well, Amazon might be coming to the rescue because now they're going to try and use your hand as your ID for your reward system. They've been coming up with a way now that you can basically put your hand over a scanner.

They will scan it, and we'll say, it's you, and pay the bill, and you walk out the door. So it seems to be fairly accurate. It's accurate within one tenths, ten thousandth of one percent. They're trying to get it to one millionth of one percent before they launch it.

Go ahead and put the number of the beast on my forehead already and call it a day. I'm just imagining everybody walking up to this checkout thing and doing their best. Neil deGrasse Tyson with his hands up, you know, that picture, right?

Like, whoo? Like, doing that and getting scanned to go through. I guess I don't have a problem with this as long as the accuracy is high. And as far as, I mean, touch ID works fine. Face ID works fine. Why wouldn't it be? Well, how long until, you know, somebody starts making fake hands, and then they have to move to other body parts, and then you finally end up at scrotum pay?

You always do go there, Jason. Of course. I always do go there. Sir, I just want to remind you that it's not a thing. Ma'am, I'm afraid you can't pay. Exactly. You'll have to bring your husband in. Yeah, you have to go to goop.com and use labia pay for that.

Sorry. You're not welcome here. Yeah. Yeah. Step up to our steamer. But it's interesting that it's that accurate for a hand, but they can't make facial recognition work. Hmm. I guess there's a lot more data points with fingerprints. It's not fingerprints. You actually hold it over.

They use all of the metrics of your hand, the contours of your hand, your finger length, the digit length. They do all sorts of things, but I don't think it's actually the fingerprint that is the key. But I think with this system, much like Face ID, there's going to be a training program.

When you sign up for it, you're going to wave your hand around in front of whatever 3D scanner, same as with Face ID. So that's different than just a facial ID thing that is using you walking by a camera. Yeah. The training's going to be much more specific and accurate.

Yeah. But I mean, what if you went out to ramen last night and you're retaining water and your fingers are fat? Is that going to skip full of the scanner? Or cold weather and you want to wear gloves or you got a brand new ring or whatever. Yeah. There are a lot of issues here. It's crazy that they're going to rush it out so fast.

I mean, they're talking about having this out already next year, but I do like this eventually expand the super fast checkout tech to all U.S. locations. Have you found all three of us have been around before there was digital payment systems and things of that nature?

We would use cash or just a regular credit card. And back then, you know, checkers actually understood math. Have you found the checkout procedure with all this new tech that we have to be faster than it was 20 years ago? Because I certainly fucking haven't. The only one that I've found faster is using my watch at Trader Joe's.

Everything else is dog slow. Yep. That's it. Yeah. I would say if I can go through a self-service line and use my Apple Pay, then there's a chance that it will be faster.

Yeah. That's for us specifically. But what about the 15 people in front of you that can't quite figure it out? Oh, no, no, no. Because there's always... See, there's the problem. Yeah, no, yeah. No, you're right. You're right. You're right. It's the person who has bought a lot of produce. And they've decided to come through.

And is that a banana or a plantain? Oh, I don't know. Well, let's go look it up. And now I need help. And yeah. I just see, you know, I see myself behind the line of 20 people at Whole Foods frantically waving their hands around and like casting spells in Harry Potter. And it's just taking forever.

Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Can you have a movement that you do? You know, like jazz hands. It's like, okay, jazz hands. Everybody has their own movement. Yeah. Like the OA. It's like that. You have to do that dance at the end of the OA to really get past it. That'll be the second factor. No, we're going to get to the point where you have to remove your shoes and have your feet scanned too.

It's like, okay, I authored with this. My second factor are my toes. Yep. Stocks will be making a huge amount of money if that comes to play, you know. So we'll foot spray. I can't believe I'm sharing this here, but it is relevant.

Just last night on Twitter, I saw a security researcher who was asking people to send her dick pics because she's working on a system that automatically detects dick pics and filters them out of people's messages.

Scroat pay. She's working on scroat pay. I'm telling you. To cut down on harassment. I'm just going to point out to her that there's this thing called the internet that is full of these pictures. She does not need someone to actively send them to her. So, yeah.

The other thing that I'm wondering is, is this really just a social engineering play to see how easy is it for a female researcher to get people to send her dick pics? Do we really need to study that? Because I think we know. Yeah. I think we can all guess what the answer is.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. That's true. We should have her on the show. See how that worked out for her. Yeah. I'm pretty much on the side of social engineering. Yeah. She's making a database of nerd dicks.

That's pretty much it. Yeah. Oh, my God. Well, Zachary G sent this in and says, found this guy on Reddit and thought you guys might need a new tech furry friend. Enjoy. It is called A Cat Explains DNS. Haven't we had this on before? I don't remember this.

I don't remember this one. I have seen this video before. Well, what do you do? What do you do at your own time? It might have just been the algorithm. The algorithm might have just been it to me. Oh, yes. Blame the algorithm. Blame the algorithm. Yeah. Yeah. There's no possible way that I was searching for furry tech friends or anything like that.

But this video was familiar to me. It's very familiar to you is what you say. Yes. Yes. That is what I'm saying. And perhaps I've said too much. This is your spirit animal, I do believe. No, not this guy. Let me tell you. Oh, by the way, this is a case against 4K.

Is all I got to say. I love the first comment. Dude, seatbelt. He's not wearing a seatbelt. Right, right. But he's already got a bunch of holes in his face. So, yes. I love our new rave cat overlord.

Just didn't seem like a very nice person, really. Well. I watched just a couple minutes of it this time. And just didn't seem like a person I wanted to spend much time with. Aggressive facial piercings tend to mean something might have gone wrong in his childhood.

Maybe. I don't know. So. Well, with that, I'm going to go back to the regular world. Uh-huh. I can't wait to see all the recommendations I get on YouTube when I bring it up for my kid this afternoon. Right. Exactly. Exactly.

I'm sure our listeners will have comments and suggestions because they always do. Oh, my face hurts. Talk to you next week, Dave. All right. Bye. Meow. Apps and doodads.

Just when you were getting used to the USB 3, USB 4 devices are clear to roll out next year. Yay. The USB implementation form. I'm excited, too. USB IF announced that the organization has finalized tech specs. They will be making their way to designers, engineers, and manufacturers shortly, meaning that 2020 is probably when we'll see some of the first USB 4 products.

This is good. Highlight of the new standard is dual lane 40 GPS speed, matching Thunderbolt 3's transfer rate and doubling that of USB 3.2's. And thank you, Lord. They're going to use the same form factor as USB Type-C and will be backward compatible with USB 3.2, USB 2.0, and Thunderbolt 3.

Thank you, God. Yeah. It's finally time to make the switch. Now that I have the air, I did have to get that little hub that clicks onto the side so I can actually have ports. But it is pretty quick. But I've got Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C on my iMac, and I've been doing that.

But all my hard drives, of course, are USB 2 or USB 3. But backward compatible, so that's fine. You'll still be able to use them, and you can upgrade at your leisure. Yeah, which I definitely will, because USB-C and Thunderbolt right now are really fast. So there's a reason to upgrade.

But it's fine. It's, you know, these things take so goddamn long. And I got to say, the nice thing about USB-C and Thunderbolt that, you know, until you start using it a lot, you never realize how many times and how many hours you've wasted trying to plug in a goddamn USB 2 cable upside down.

Oh, no shit. You know? Every time I do it, it's like a law that you have to do it wrong twice. Exactly. Yep. So that is the nice part. So I'm actually looking forward to this. This will be good. And I found a new app. So hat tip to Jordan Harbinger on this one.

It's called Voice Dream Reader. Mm-hmm. And what it'll do is it'll take a PDF and it'll read it to you really well. Okay. This is like really high-end voice app. Mm-hmm. And because, you know, for my work, I generally get a lot of PDFs from publishers with new books that come out.

Mm-hmm. And I can't sit there and read a PDF. It's too damn slow. So I picked Peter, the British voice. The app costs $14.99. You can buy more voices, but you get one premium voice for free when you go for $14.99, not for free. And they come from Acapella, which is a group that does voice demos.

Yeah, they're amazing. I mean, it is, it is, it's incredible how like high quality this is. And you can change the speed and you see the text in front of you on your iPad or your phone and you can just swipe up or swipe down with a couple of fingers to make it go faster, slower. And my God, it is, it's fantastic.

Yeah. So if you have a lot of PDFs that you want to listen to, it's great. I think the only thing that I really wish I could do would be to export the entire thing instead of reading it live. I would like to give it a PDF and have it export the person reading to like an MP3 so I could put it into another player instead of having to sit there with like my iPad or whatever and have the text go by.

Right. It would just be easier and nicer, but either way, you know, it's, it's a really, really nice app. Highly recommended if you have to do a lot of PDFs and you like audio books because that's really, that's the, the weird Venn diagram intersection that I live in.

So, and a reader, my favorite RSS app has finally gone up to version four. Now I was, I was on the fence about this and I'm like, do I really, really, really want to upgrade to version four?

And turns out, yes, because there are a couple, there are a couple of key things in here that are really nice. It's still got mostly the same user interface, but it has this thing in it now called the bionic reading. Have you heard of bionic reading before?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, I have not. Okay. You can check it out at bionic-reading.com. What it does is it bolds the beginning of words. So your eyes have spots to do the saccades on, which, which ups your reading speed. So if you're reading articles in, in, um, reader, you can fly through a much faster because I, I always have a hard time reading and it's built in.

It is baked into feedly. Unfortunately, the big problem is a lot of RSS feeds nowadays give you, you know, just a blurb and then you have to go to the website and it doesn't actually follow you to the website. It's only on the text that it displays, but there are a plugin for that on a, for a browser.

There are two beta plugins, one for Firefox and one for Chrome. I haven't tried it yet. I want to see if it'll work in opera. Um, because if it works in opera, I'm putting that shit on everything. It's really nice. Yeah. It's like Frank's red hot. It is. And I mean, for you, it might not matter cause you read ridiculously stupid fast.

I don't. So it's like, but it, it is definitely up my speed and the iOS version is really good. I think that was a couple of bucks. And, uh, the new reader for the desktop was a couple of bucks. I think it's 25 bucks total for both versions, but, uh, the iOS version, I've been able to crank through so many more news articles with the new version.

Don't tell them that there's subscription model options. Don't tell them. Yes, please, please. I paid for it and I will keep it because I had reader three for, since it came out. And, uh, this came out like a couple of months ago, even, and I'm just like, yeah, no need to upgrade.

And then I finally just kind of bit the bullet. And when I saw the bionic reading thing, I'm like, Ooh, I like that. But anyway, it's pretty cool. Pretty cool. Other things that are cool. My, my latest Kickstarter project. I talked about the Lumi keyboard before.

Yes, you have. I have that, uh, bookmarked in case they ever actually release it. They actually just charged my card for the second one that I bought because I bought two of them. So I have one for each hand because they clip together and you can eventually buy a full keyboard with it. Um, but I got to buy it at the rate that I got my first version when I first backed it, which is like 50 bucks cheaper than getting a new one straight.

So when, when it they're manufacturing, they've, they show the boards, they're, they're on track to ship. This is a company that makes hardware already. This is not their first rodeo. So they've got drum pads and all sorts of crazy things. So I'm just saying with Kickstarter, I'll believe it when I see it.

Oh, definitely. Of course. So when you get it and I see it, I'll believe it. Yep. As soon as I get it, I'll bring it over and we can play with it for sure. Yeah. So, but since they charge my card, that means they're, you know, getting closer to shipping. Right. Which is good, which is good.

I'm, I'm excited about that. And over at the Washington post, I found an article that hearkens back to the days of the nineties. It's how Apple uses its app store to copy the best ideas. Well, they've been doing this long before the app store, my friends.

Yes, they have. And certainly in the last six years, we keep talking about really cool apps and companies that basically go out of business because it just gets wrapped up into the new iOS. Mm-hmm. What was that? A screen dimming software that we're using for a while? Flux. Flux.

And then what was the, uh, the, uh, the duet? Remember duet, which isn't going to be around too much longer. Yep. Because now there's going to be multi, you know, the ability to attach and expand your screen to your iPhone built into the, uh, into the operating system. Yeah. Yes. And a tale is old as time.

And apparently tile is really worried right now. The guys that make those little Bluetooth chips that you can put on things to find. Right. Because Apple has announced that they are going to be releasing something very similar to it. And tile actually went out and was sending out press releases before the September 10th event saying, don't forget about us.

We're still going to be here, please. Good luck. And, and I also found this over at, uh, uh, I forget who, who makes it, but a PDF pen plus or PDF pen scan plus they're discontinuing it because basically Apple has taken over.

Yeah. They like, you don't need to scan anything with your thing anymore. You can just use the built-in stuff inside of Mac OS and iOS. So they're like, yeah, we're not going to spend any more time on this. You know, I still recommend PDF pen pro. It is the best PDF reader and markup tool out there.

It is phenomenal. If you have to work with PDFs much better, because I know in preview now you can like add signatures and do basic editing, but PDF pen pro is just great, especially on iOS. So if you've got, you know, contracts that you always have to sign or, you know, PDFs that you get and you just want to go through it and make modifications to it, sign it, send it back, things like that.

PDF pen pro is just a, I mean, it's something that you should have in your toolbox always. So highly recommend that. But yeah, they have a, uh, oh, it's smile software that makes that. So yes, scan plus is discontinued for the following reasons. And there's a whole block of text about why I like basically Apple screwed them.

So there it is. I just saw this article and I had to read it because you can't beat this title. You can't keep your parents skulls. OK, so for the Atlantic, and this is a fascinating article written by a mortician about the various weird, strange US laws involved in being able to basically keep a family member's dearly departed skull.

Assuming your attentions are good, there are three major hurdles to clear before dad's brain pan can hold jelly beans on your coffee table, paperwork, legal control and skeletonization. In theory, people get to decide what happens to their body after death. But the reality is it's nearly impossible to get legal permission to display a relative skeleton gets into the idea that even even when you donate your body to science, say, and they take your body and make a skeleton for a medical school, technically not legal.

People just kind of look the other way. Yeah, people just kind of look the other way because it's for science. It's really fuzzy. So, you know, you have to do all these crazy things like you have to basically behead the person and you have to remove the flesh from their heads and all these other things.

So it's really a disgusting but fascinating article that I highly recommend people read. It is pretty disgusting. And I thought it was interesting that these laws were put in place to dissuade necrophiliacs.

Amongst various reasons, yes. Yeah. That was definitely part of it. Who knew that it was such a thing? Who knew? Yeah, no, it's a fascinating article. I was reading it. I was just like, what? I know. It's amazing, right? And it's written. It's very I mean, this is a very funny mortician. She it's very clever and very funny article with some jaw dropping lines in it.

So it's a good read. Yeah, I really like the bit about the bugs. Yeah, the flesh eating bugs. It's like, oh, that is so nasty, man. And I found this one. It's a deep fake of what if Will Smith had played Neo in The Matrix and they put in Will Smith's face on it.

You know, it wasn't bad. It wasn't bad at all. It wasn't bad at all. But then in following up with a little research, I found out that Will Smith was actually offered the part of Neo and he turned it down to do Wild Wild West. Yeah, yeah, that was a step on your dick moment right there.

Well, I'm glad he did it because I discovered if you watch the full video, Morpheus would have been played by Val Kilmer. No, he would have ruined The Matrix. He would have ruined The Matrix. Yeah. So, yeah, there's two links to these two videos. The why I turned down The Matrix and if Will Smith had said yes to The Matrix instead of Keanu Reeves.

They're in the show notes. Highly recommend going and watching them. It'll take you five minutes for both of them, but they're very funny. And Will Smith is just like, you're welcome. You're welcome. Wild Wild West. Wild Wild West. It's a giant spider.

You ever watch the. Yeah. But did you ever watch the Kevin Smith like his college tour where he talks about the director for Wild Wild West? Oh, man, it's worth watching. I love his like his speeches when he goes to college campuses and does stuff.

He tells a story of when he met that director for the first time. And this guy just has a bug up his ass about giant spiders and he wants a giant spider. And then he got Wild Wild West. And Kevin Smith is like, I'm watching Wild Wild West. And at the end, giant fucking spider.

It's like this guy really wanted a movie where he could put in a giant spider. And he picked Wild Wild West for it. What? Yes. Go back and watch the OGs. They're the best. I used to watch them every day when I was a kid. I love those. Closing shout outs.

My closing shout outs to Christopher Lockhead and his follow your different podcast. If you'd like to hear more of me, I don't know why you would. I'm on episode 100. I did the show with him and we had a grand old time talking about music and very little technology. So it was a good time.

I know you've done the show at least twice. So I felt like I had to get in there once. Yep. Yep. And we've got some other friends that are going on there soon, but it's yet to be finalized. But yeah, then we'll have another link there shortly. But yeah, I think I've done it two or three times. Chris is awesome. Love his show. Yeah, it was a lot of fun talking to him.

So it's a good time. Give it a listen. Link is in the show notes if you'd like. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a few bucks a month, preferably eight, and we'll love you forever. If you don't like Patreon but still want to support the show, you can give a one time a recurring donation by just going to GOG.show and click that PayPal button.

Your support really keeps us going and we really, really appreciate it. I'm not joking there. We really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 375. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

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