384: Jeff-Luc Picard

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Privacy.com. It's like a burner phone for credit cards. Go to Privacy.com slash GOG and get a $5 credit free for just signing up. 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. Fire season's back, Brian. I know. I went to take my son to drop off at school this morning and it smelled like a campfire out there. Well, I can't see halfway down the street and it's snowing here. Well, not snowing. It is ash covering everything.

Yeah, I can see the big old clouds coming over the mountain from where I'm sitting and you are. Yeah, basically I'm in between those clouds and I'm in between the fire and you. So what you see coming over is coming straight over my house. Hopefully it's going to stay that way and the fire will not be at my house.

Knock on wood. I do have my go bags ready to go, though, just in case, because it is dry as a bone and the wind's picking up again. But like we talked about on previous shows, you know, you should be ready to go at a moment's notice if you live in one of these areas. Most definitely. Yep. Yep. So I've got my I actually went out last year.

I planned ahead because the air was so bad. I went out and bought a bunch of like the high quality filter masks when they got back in stock because guess what? They're probably out of stock again. Yeah. Well, hopefully we won't lose power, as most of California is going to do, or at least northern California. And well, you already lost Internet access because, you know, we're third world country now.

Oh, yeah. I mean, the entire San Fernando Valley I woke up this morning was dead. No. If you had spectrum, no Internet, no TV. Perfect in a disaster. Well, it's always a good idea to still have a radio around your house somewhere. Unless you're in Australia, as we found out last week, because the Australians took away the radio emergency broadcast.

Well, let's talk about a fun time that I had this week. Sirius XM. Yes, I'm still a subscriber. Not entirely sure why I do find it useful now and then, especially when the sports ball is going on and I'm driving around or doing whatever I can listen to games. And there's a kid station that my kid loves and I enjoy the convenience of being able to listen to, say, you know, the new wave station from my Alexa at home.

So that was kind of a compelling reason, not strong, but slightly compelling reason to keep it around until the bill came for my renewal and it was nearly $300. And I was like, this is definitely not worth $300 to me. So I learned another neat little trick.

First off, they make it impossible, impossible, impossible to cancel. Like you cannot do it online. Does not happen. You have to call. The number that they give you to call on their website is incorrect. That's just for customer service. They have a special number for cancellation. So after you go through the hold on the customer service line to say you want to cancel and they basically try to talk you out of it five times, they say, well, that's not the number you need to call.

You need to now call this number. So screw you guys. I'm going home. I'm pissed off at this point, obviously. So I call the second line and it's, you know, somebody in India, of course, customer service on the first line, American, somewhere. Cancellation, India, phone bank somewhere.

What I've learned is the secret to going from a $300 charge to a $60 charge for the entire year is saying you want to cancel three times. It's just like clicking my heels together. By the third cancellation, they were down to 60 bucks and I went, all right, for 60 bucks, cool, sure.

Cool, sure. And I went over the whole thing again. My service will not change at all, right? You're not dropping my tier and giving me a cheaper thing for 60 bucks. Exact same service I have now. All the channels, mobile access, streaming access.

Everything stays the same, right? Everything stays the same, right? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. It sure does. Right. Whatever. Okay. Pay my 60 bucks plus some something in tax. I can stomach that. That's not 300. Fine. Great. Running out the door because this all took, you know, this took almost an hour to do all of this.

So I'm way behind in my day. I run out the door and I'm whatever. I just check it in the car. Okay. It's playing still great. Fantastic. Whatever. Two days later, I finally get around to, oh, you know, I really want to, I was listening to a bit of it on the, in the car and I got home and they were playing a song I liked on the station.

So I tried to fire it up on the Alexa, no access. Yep. Yeah. I saw that one coming. Went to the website, no access. My streaming is gone. Went down back to the car, checked the special channels that I had for the sports ball and all that, all of that's gone. So now I have to call customer service.

Yeah. I've been through that ring around with, with Sirius before. And I just said, you know what? I don't need Sirius. Screw it. Yeah. I think next year is going to be this, this last year of service that I paid for, you know, I finally got, you know, another half an hour conversation. And I got all my access back, no charges, no additional charge, blah, blah, blah.

We're so sorry this happened, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is my last time until they offer it me for 40 bucks next year. Good luck, man. I spent an hour on the phone with them and they wouldn't give me a dime. And I, you know, canceled like three times too. And I got nothing. So, so I'm like, yeah, okay. It worked for me.

If people like you more than me, that's well, yeah. Well, except for some of our Twitter users, except for the, except for that one fan who just really wants to, really wants to just give us money so I can keep doing the show solo, I guess. That should be tedious. I guess so. Yeah. So we've got a little bit of followup.

The Supreme Court has denied Domino's petition in a win for disability rights. Now this is the court case from the blind guy who said, basically, I can't order a pizza using your app or website because you have not made it disability friendly. And basically they're saying, yeah, you got to do it.

Sorry, Domino's. You got to, you got to make your stuff work. That's such bullshit. It kind of is. It's total bullshit. I'm like. It is because you can order a pizza using your, your lady in the lady in the tube or the phone. I agree. This is going to add endless expenditures to major companies now that are all going to have to build their websites.

And we're all going to kind of suffer a little bit because when people build their websites, they don't build specific ones anymore for Disabilities Act, it just means the, the entire website ends up basically looking crappier. I don't know, man. I think they should just make it all in WAP. Just bring back WAP.

Yeah. I'd be fine with that too. Yeah. No, this is because I mean the ADA, I know a lot of people with disabilities and they hate the ADA, especially those stupid things on the sidewalk with the bumps on it. You know, people who have a hard time walking like trip over those things all the time.

Hell, I trip over them all the time. I mean, even Bam Bam's tripped over them. You're a bad case study. Yeah. You trip over everything. That's true. That's true. I mean, how many times have you screwed up your legs in the course of this podcast? Well, probably a few. Probably a few. Yeah. There you go. Well, ice was involved with one of them.

Can't really, can't really beat that one. Anyway. Yeah. People fall down all the time when they live in icy places. Yes, they do. Actually. Nobody can stand. It happens to more. Trust me. If you were living there, you'd be flat on your ass a couple of times in the winter. I know it. I have spent many a winter in Toronto and Buffalo.

Anyway, moving on. Senators are pressuring Visa and MasterCard over Libra. Saw this one coming. Did we not say it? We did. In a new letter to the CEOs of Visa, MasterCard, Stripe and Stripe, a couple senators have said, you know what, guys?

I think you should probably back off this Libra thing because if you don't, we are going to actually be coming after you in your regular business and putting that flashlight a little bit farther up your bunghole than you would normally have it. Right. So this is.

Yeah. The government does not want a strong cryptocurrency that they have no control over. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, PayPal's already out. And, you know, Visa, MasterCard and Stripe, those were ones that were already kind of weird. I can see Stripe in there, but, you know, Visa and MasterCard, they're like joining a cabal of people who are just going to out there to eat their lunch.

I think it was to keep your enemies closer type of thing, but. Probably. Yeah. I think the regulators are going to win this battle because there's just, they can't, I mean, the business is already too big. You know, are you going to side with what is honestly vaporware at this point, or are you going to keep your business going the way it actually is, making you billions of dollars a year?

Exactly. And a bit more follow-up on our AirPod woes. I know you are having issues with yours. Yours barely stays charged for an hour at this point, correct? Yeah. I'm at about 50 minutes. Yeah. I'm a little bit better. I'm about an hour and a half tops, but that's when it starts to crap out now. And it's not great.

And there's a really good article over on the Washington Post about how Apple basically built these to fail and they can't be fixed. The solution is always to buy a new one. So he goes through the whole process. Much like my SiriusXM call, this guy went in deep going to multiple Apple stores, trying to contact Apple to find out what's going on because his has gotten down to just like 15 minutes of use.

And the employee said there are lots of people with $159 AirPods purchased in 2016 and 2017 that now can't hold a charge. The batteries basically are tiny and they go away. Now Apple is promising battery service, but the store has no way to actually fix them.

It doesn't even have a way to test them to see if they're bad or not. So if you just kind of want to spend some money on a new pair, here's the secret. You basically go in and say that yours aren't working and you use the magic words, which is battery service. And at that point they will sell you replacements for $49 each.

So 98 bucks. That's it. They cannot fix them. They throw them away basically, or they try to refurbish them. But you basically, the only option is to buy new ones. That's it. Or just go buy some Amazon Echo Buds. Or the Microsoft ones. Yeah.

Yeah. I actually put in my pre-order for the Echo Buds though. So, because these things are just, they're going fast. I mean, it went from an hour to 50 minutes in like two weeks. So I'm sure this is, this is like, you know, the last gasp. So it's like, I'll try something new instead of, it's like, okay, I can spend 98 bucks or I can spend 130 bucks.

The extra 30 bucks, I can at least try something new for the show. Something we can make fun of. And speaking of Amazon, this whole thing is just getting stupid. Over on Bloomberg, they have a, they have an article called, Amazon workers may be watching your cloud cam home footage.

And I would like to point out that the actual URL has the title that they originally went with before they started A-B testing. It says, is Amazon watching you cloud cam footage reviewed by humans? So they were, they were, they're playing around with some betterages law there, but Amazon workers may be watching your cloud footage.

If you tell them they can, which is the entire point of this. If you say yes, then they will. Yeah. This is the whole story is about people who opted in to have their video reviewed because something went wrong. All right. And even further on in the article, it says, and despite Amazon's insistence that all the clips are provided voluntarily, according to two of the people, the teams have picked up activity homeowners are unlikely to want shared, including rare instances of people having sex.

I'm sorry, but I know people and there are a lot of people out there who like to share videos of themselves having sex. And especially if you come home and you find maybe, I don't know, your wife and the gardener having sex, I would be sharing that far and wide just to embarrass her because she's with the gardener and not me.

But anyway, yes, people are out there. People are, you know, they like to do things like that. It is not uncommon. So it's not surprising. And it goes on to say clips containing inappropriate content are flagged as such, then discarded so they aren't accidentally used to train the AI.

This is what Amazon said. So here's, you know what? I'm sorry. Why don't you train the fucking AI on people fucking? Inappropriate content is a big part of life. You could turn off the cameras. Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I did not mean to see this.

And turn off the cameras. You know, that would actually be a feature, not a bug. And an Amazon spokeswoman said such clips are scrapped to improve the experience of the company's human reviewers. But she didn't say why unsuitable activity would appear in voluntarily submitted video clips because people are people and they like to watch, have people watch them fuck.

That's the way it goes. It's human nature. Anyway, before this all becomes a follow on episode, maybe we should get to the news. Too late. In the news. Well, since we're back in the news, we're still doing some more follow up because there's so much this week.

Tim Cook has gone back and they have re-removed the Hong Kong protest app. HK Map Live, yeah. Yeah, they killed it again. Now, Tim has come out actually defending the decision, which is interesting. He's not very happy about it, but he said that Apple has received credible information that the app is being used to target individual officers for violence.

So, how credible is it, honestly? Yeah. Yeah, he's stuck between a rock and a hard place on this one. Well, everybody is right now. You know, companies are struggling to figure out how to deal with Hong Kong and the China situation because, you know, China's a big market and nobody wants to lose that market.

But Hong Kong, you know, you got a democracy. Well, yeah. I mean, did you hear about the Blizzard story this week? No. The Blizzard news. Oh, man. This guy had won one of their tournaments for Hearthstone and he was doing an interview after the show with two, like, YouTubers.

And he started talking about, you know, he was bad mouth in China about the Hong Kong thing. And apparently the two hosts dove under the desk so they wouldn't be seen talking to him. And Blizzard actually, like, took his winnings away, banned him for a year from playing in the tournament.

For having an opinion? Yeah. Because they basically say that, you know, the rules of the game say that, you know, you can't use it as a platform for your personal opinion. You know. Then don't do interviews with people. That's the thing. It's like, they kind of overreached on that one.

But also, pretty damn big market for them. And I can see how they got strong-armed into doing it. Yeah. Well, we're seeing it with the NBA right now, too. It's pretty crazy right now. Yeah. Yeah. And what's really funny is, like, there was this whole, you know, like, boycott Blizzard thing going on.

I'm like, oh, I just installed my PC. I should make sure StarCraft's up to date. There's me for being a social justice warrior. Stick it by your guns there, Jason. Hey, man. That was my youth. Now I just want to, you know. Now I just want to play my games. Leave me alone. Yeah, my life for ire, motherfucker.

I want to kill some zerglings. But. Well, we got some more interesting news happening with Wall Street and tech now. Postmates, which is inexplicably valued at over $2 billion, considering it's just a bunch of people in cars delivering food and staples and whatever else.

It was expected to go public this year, but they recently told their IPO advisors that they are delaying their initial public offering due to market conditions. Market conditions, yes. Well, what we're starting to see is, yeah, Wall Street is starting to turn against Silicon Valley. Finally.

Maybe they're actually listening to this show. Maybe. These companies are not profitable, so why are they going public? And they're valued way too high, as we all know. Of the 32 tech companies that went public in 2019, they have only appreciated in value by an average of about 5%, according to Renaissance Capital, which tracks IPO performance.

In 2018, it was 13%. And in 2017, 94% return rate. So we're hitting the bottom of the barrel of these companies, and it's the ones that don't have good business plans, and it's the ones that aren't profitable. Shocking. We actually got some Postmates delivered yesterday.

Not by us, because I won't sign up for the service, but one of our friends knew that we were sick here. We were down with the flu. So they sent us some chicken soup and a grilled cheese and fries from Jerry's Deli. Well, Jerry's Deli is a long way away from us, because the one by us closed, and the soup was cold, the sandwich was soggy, the fries were just rubber, so I was like, so still haven't gotten a good delivery food service to get me anything I think yet.

I don't understand why people use these services all the time, because the food, there's only one food, well, two types of food that really work well for delivery, and have always worked well for delivery, Chinese and pizza. That's all we ever get here, Chinese and pizza, and that's the reason for that.

That works for delivery. Not much else does. Burgers and fries delivery, you're a moron. Yeah, seriously. And the nice thing is, we get so much Chinese and pizza that I'm friends with all the delivery guys, so when I call them, they put my stuff to the front, and I swear to God, they have to be in the car before I order with cooking, because my Chinese guy gets here in seven minutes.

Well, you know, they've got a trained AI that knows before you know that you're going to order Chinese food. Right, I forgot. That's right. They use my shadow profile. I was like, hmm, he could use some Moogle guy pan right about now. Damn, that actually does sound good. Anyway, yeah.

And here's the way, my whole point of this thing was, when the Postmates delivery showed it up, it's like, you know, here's for my roommate's name, and I didn't order Postmates, and I'd heard my ring doorbell go off that someone's at the door, so I go in the house, and she's like, did you order Postmates? I'm like, hell no.

And she's like, oh, and then she's like, oh, maybe somebody else, and she ran out, because she shoved them away, and she's like, we don't want this, we didn't order this, we don't know what it is, and eventually we found out, her friend bought it for her, but you can't give, like, a note to say, this is from so-and-so.

So, somebody just randomly shows up at your house with a bag of soggy food that you're expected to eat that you don't know, that's bad OPSEC if you're going to be eating that food. You don't know who's out to get you. Yeah, that's true, friend probably should have texted. Yeah, yeah, there's, like, present on the way.

Yeah, heads up. Or whatever. Soup coming in cold. Yeah, because he honestly thought that there was one, like, two blocks from us, so we'd have gotten it hot and ready to go, but they closed six years ago, but apparently nobody updated a website. So, anyway, you can't revive a cold grilled cheese we found.

No, no, no, you cannot. No, I put in a valiant effort, but there was, there's no coming back, man, there's no coming back. So, Waymo has sent out an email to its customers in Phoenix saying, buckle your seatbelts, baby.

Driverless cars are coming to your neck of the woods. That's right. Yep. They're going to be fully autonomous in Phoenix coming soon. They will have an employee in the car of Waymo for a while, just to, you know, check things out. But they say that that's going to go away at some point, and these things are going to be fully autonomous.

At some point. Yeah, at some point. We'll see. I think they're the closest from anybody, and, you know, Phoenix is still, you know, a pretty good spot to do it. Roads are big and wide, and, you know, just got to watch out for the random person walking their bike across the street in the middle of the night. But what are you going to do there?

What are you going to do? Well, speaking of buckling your seatbelts, I've got two really long-form articles that I found in the Atlantic that I really enjoyed this week, and the first one is called Technology Sabotaged Public Safety. And it was really interesting. It gets into, you know, the fact that, you know, we have all these innovations that are great for the public good, such as seatbelts, but then we have these technologies, Uber, Lyft, et cetera, where we just, for whatever reason societally, we think we don't need to use the safety.

Maybe it's just a short trip, maybe whatever. But there have been numerous studies that have said that people in taxis don't tend to buckle their seatbelts up. Those people are dumb. Those people are dumb, which, you know, it was always kind of a fringe case, but with the explosion of Uber and Lyft and everybody taking rides in other people's cars, there are tons and tons and tons of people now that are always riding these cars and not buckling their seatbelts.

That's just stupid. And the article goes into multiple different things, like smoking was going down and then vaping came around, new technology that said, well, you know, we don't have, it's not as bad for your lungs. So smoking is actually on the rise if you consider vaping smoking now.

So all these different technologies have kind of come along and given lazy humans back into bad habits and wiped away all this public safety stuff that we built up over the years. It's crazy. It's a really fascinating article.

Yeah. Here's the funny thing about vaping, since it's going to be banned everywhere probably fairly soon, that smoking is going to be back on the rise because what have they done? They've just gotten a bunch of kids addicted to nicotine and now they're going to take it away from them. They're going to jones and then they're going to start smoking. Yep.

Great. I think you're exactly right. I think we're going to see a rise in smoking again. Mm hmm. Yep. And the second long form article that I read was Jeff Bezos master plan, also around the Atlantic. Now, this article was so long and at points got so dry, it took me four different sittings to finish it.

I'm so glad you read it because I pulled it up and I was ready to take one for the team and I'm just like, you know what? It's probably going to say a bunch of stuff I already know. So I'm going to pass on this one. So thanks for thanks for taking the read. What did it actually say, Brian? It kind of does tell us a lot of things that we already knew, but it I've got to seriously think about my Amazon strategy, particularly as we slide into the holidays.

This article scared me so much about the amount of power and control that one person, Jeff Bezos, has right now. You know, we can be scared and worried about Google. We can be scared and worried about all these other companies.

I think the A number one thing we need to be worried about right now is Amazon. As you go through everything, like he controls nearly 40% of all e-commerce. More product searches are conducted on Amazon than Google. Amazon Web Services controls almost half of the cloud computing industry.

42% of paper book sales and a third of the market for streaming video. Amazon. It's insane, insane, and it's terrifying, and it kind of really just gets into how he got there and who is this Jeff Bezos guy. And they, you know, they interviewed like childhood friends and all this other stuff.

Basically, he wants to be in space. That's that's his go to. There are two things he wants to accomplish. He wants to get Amazon into space and he himself wants to be in space and figure that out. And the other thing he wants to do is he wants to be the conduit to basically selling the world everything and just taking percentages off.

Doesn't want to produce stuff, doesn't want to be involved in it, just the conduit. Well, I mean, not producing stuff is actually not true because Amazon Basics does produce things. Well, they do do it, but it's not really his goal. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if he wants to be in space, I suggest he go by about a case of duct tape from Amazon, hop in an Uber and head on over to SpaceX where he can get strapped to the top of a Falcon

Heavy and shot into space and then, you know, problem solved. I bet I bet Elon would even, you know, help tie him up and tuck him in for that one. And I think the really interesting thing, just kind of the funny thing about it after I got over being scared was his Star Trek fixation and how much he likes Jean-Luc Picard.

Oh, you bonded. Oh, no, no, it's kind of cool. He wanted to initially name Amazon Make It So. He actually got MakeItSo.com and then realized that he probably wouldn't be able to get away with doing that. Yeah. Trademark. You know, at this point, he could just buy CBS Viacom and do whatever he wants.

But this is true. Yeah. He's starting to look like Picard, too. Shaved his head, you know, the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. I think he's a little more buff than Jean-Luc at this point. Jean-Luc. Yeah. So, you know, it's funny. Like, even before this came out, I had started to put in for like for next week's at the library section, I started putting in links to Barnes & Noble because I want to start spreading the love around.

I've got, you know, for a lot of the gadgets we use Adorama now for some of the stuff. And I'm moving things around and not just going to it because you know why? Amazon kicked me off their affiliate program so they can go suck one as far as I'm concerned. I actually was in a Barnes & Noble just the other day and I bought a Halloween book for my kid.

Yeah. I didn't do it off Amazon. I actually went to the store. Yeah. My roommate did the same thing. She wanted the Debbie Harry book and since she couldn't get it on Kindle because it was broken, she went to Barnes & Noble up here at the Commons in Calabasas and said, hey, you guys got the Debbie Harry book?

They're like, yeah, you want it? She's like, yes. How about that? She bought a book and came home with a book. So if your Kindle ain't working, go buy a book like we used to do. Now, a little bit more Amazon AWS news. I love this one.

Ho Jun Jai, aka Matthew Ho, was charged with a 14-count indictment for allegedly mining cryptocurrency using stolen Amazon AWS and Google Cloud computing power services. So I'm looking at this.

Left the buckets open, huh? Well, a little more than that. He did use some stolen credit cards along the way and identity theft. But I'm like, 34 years for crypto mining? Well, turns out, turns out, as we know, crypto mining can take up a lot of resources, you know, CPU and GPU and things like that.

Well, he ran up a $5 million bill. Now, here's my question. At what point did Amazon have to finally say, ho, ho, ho, bro? Actually, ho, ho, ho, ho? Ho it up, ho?

Ho, ho, ho, crypto bro? Yeah. And, you know, after $1 million, they're like, yeah, he's good for it. $2 million. Eh, we'll get him on the flip side. $4 million. You know, I know his cousin.

He'll be good. It's fine. But $5 million, $5 million, they finally put the hammer down and said, oh, that's a little too much. Oh, my God. Awesome. Yeah. $5 million. So here's the fucked up thing.

Minimum sentence is 34 years in prison. Wow. Yeah. Up to 20 years per wire fraud count and 10 years each for access device fraud counts and things like that and aggravated identity theft, aggravated identity theft, not even passive identity theft.

He aggravated the identity theft to steal his credentials. But man, this guy's screwed. He's only 29. So, well, I hope he gets to go to Barnes and Noble and buy a few books before he goes to jail because he's not going to be using a computer for a long time.

Or he can just read that Jeff Bezos article in The Atlantic. That should take about five, six years. Yeah. That'll knock a bunch off his sentence. You might even get some extra time served for that one. That's right. Speaking of big money, I found a nice article, how much Facebook has to pay in fines and settlements this year.

So if Facebook agrees to pay all the fines and settlements, which, of course, is far from likely. How do you have to agree? Oh, thank you for your fine. I agree to pay your fine. It's a fine. You've got to pay it. They go to court and they'll fight it in arbitration and they try to knock it down and I'll pay you.

Oh, well, how about we make a deal and I'll pay you this instead of that, et cetera, et cetera. But if they did pay them all around out, it'd be over $5 billion, which is roughly 7% if it's $69 billion in expected earnings. So not chump change.

Right. But one of them is $5 billion already. So the extra ones are only $152,853.47. Well, there you go. Including a $47 fine from Russia. Oh, that's the $47. OK. It wasn't $47. It was $47. No, no. $47. OK.

Yeah. The numbers get so big you forget that. Oh, you know, I'm in the $152 million. Well, the thing is, yes, when one fine is $5 billion, all of a sudden the $500 million fine that's linked in there doesn't seem all that much, does it? Yeah, really. It's like, oh, man, that's chump change.

For them, it actually kind of is. Yeah. Well, it's starting to add up, though. When you get to 7% of your expected earnings, it's not nothing. It's not enough, though. No, it's not.

Privacy is the first payments product that keeps your information private and is even more convenient than using a regular credit card online. Privacy lets you generate a brand new Visa card for every purchase you make online with one click with their browser extension or mobile app.

Now, here's the nitty gritty. Privacy is your best friend whenever you use a credit card to buy anything online. Look, we all don't trust merchants to cancel subscriptions, and you just can't turn off your regular credit card or debit card. But when you make a new card number with privacy, you can totally shut it off when you want.

You don't have to spend an hour on the phone with your credit card company or bank to get a refund because the site won't give you your money back for that website or stupid software subscription. They said they canceled two years ago, but actually didn't. And then you just forgot about it until you checked your bill one day. You can make numbers one time use, maximum amount or even capped by amount on a schedule.

So let's say you don't want to spend more than $100 a month on Amazon. You just use a card number that you made specifically for Amazon and you'll cut down on that 4 a.m. drunk shopping that we've all done. Let's face it. Privacy.com is an incredibly versatile and free tool that just makes sense.

Sign up takes less than two minutes and it's completely free to use. They make their money from the interchange fees that usually go to your credit card company. So far, they've saved their customers over $115 million in unwanted and unauthorized charges. So let's recap. You can freeze cards and set spending limits.

Cards lock to merchants so they're useless to thieves and hackers. And you can delete cards anytime and kiss forgotten subscriptions goodbye. Sign up for free and get a $5 credit right now. Go to privacy.com slash GOG. That's $5 free to spend anywhere by just signing up.

Privacy.com slash GOG. Once more with feeling. Privacy.com slash GOG. We love these guys over here and we think you will too. Security?

Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast. The Cyber Wire is a free, community-driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland. Dave is also the co-host of the Hacking Humans podcast along with Joe Kerrigan. where they take on the social engineering.

What's up, Dave? Hey, how are you guys doing? Are you out of harm's way with these fires? Or how close is all this to you guys? Well, in my neck of the woods, I can see it. If you go to my Instagram, you can see the smoke. I posted a drone shot this morning.

As soon as it was legal to fly, I made sure that it was legal to fly, sent my drone up about 250 feet and got a shot of where the smoke's coming from over the hill. But it sucks here. Yeah. I'm on the other side of the mountains.

I can basically just smell Jason's house burning. I see. As opposed to when you can just smell Jason's house. Yeah. Well, I'm sorry you have to deal with that. That's an anxiety nobody needs.

Well, it's much better than being the people in the fire. Yeah, that's true. I'm grateful every time that I see this stuff that it's not my house, knock on wood. And yeah, it's terrible watching these things burn. Is this power outage thing affecting you guys or is that somewhere else? Not yet.

Probably might be. It might, but right now it's just Northern California that's dealing with that. Oh, no. We've got warnings for Southern California and there's a lot of people that lost power up in the Northern Valley already. Ah, okay. Where everything's at. But there is one big issue that fortunately it didn't come to pass.

There's this massive trunk line that goes from basically the Pacific Northwest all the way down and kind of junctions in Silmar where the big fire was last night. And I saw like one engineer who was watching the news the same time I was. He's like, nobody's really paying attention. They say, oh, there's some power lines there.

Those might go down. And he's like, that's the Northwest in junk to dude or whatever. It's like, and he put in a Wikipedia article and I'm like. If that goes down, we're all screwed. It powers like two to four million homes in Los Angeles. So, yeah, kind of. If that goes down, it's going to be bad. Well, you just get somebody out there with a few extension cords.

It'll just plug it right in. It'll be good. Yeah. Elon will bring his Tesla battery farm and then we'll just be all good. Yeah. A couple of size D batteries. It'll be good. Oh, yeah. Remember the lantern batteries that you'd put in your camping kit that would last for about seven minutes before you had to go buy new ones?

Yeah, yeah. I remember using those. We always use them for science experiments to make electromagnets. And like you said, they last about five minutes. And then you try to convince your mom to go buy you another one for they were they were not cheap. I seem to recall.

Yeah, they were not. And like every year, my grandfather, he'd be like, OK, let's let's pull out the lights because, you know, we lived in rural Pennsylvania and the lights would always go out and we'd go get get our little lamps or little plastic lamps with those batteries in it. And invariably, every year you'd open it up and there's just full of battery acid because they would leak.

They were terrible batteries. Yeah, yeah. Boy, it's everything's better today, isn't it? I guess not. Well, let's get into our segment that proves it's not. Well, I walked right into that one, didn't I? Yeah. Well, this is actually a little bit of good news.

A U.S. court has ruled that some of the FBI's electronic surveillance activities violated the constitutional privacy rights of Americans. Obviously, that's not the good news. It's a good news that we caught him. Let's define good. Whose side are you on? Yeah. Yes. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court deemed that FBI officials improperly searched an NSA intelligence database for info on Americans.

This was this ruling was actually made last year, but it's just been revealed. I don't know how that works. But the NSA database included both upstream and downstream, better known as PRISM, surveillance of electronic communications collected without a warrant under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

So no warrant, not good. Yeah. They found tens of thousands of improper searches by the FBI in 2017 and 2018, including one FBI contractor that looked himself up, other FBI personnel, and his relatives. You know, just to see. I mean, wouldn't you?

Yes. It's called God Mode. Yeah. For a reason. Well, it's very interesting that the FISA court, or actually the FISC court, went after these guys. And I, you know, it's like probably because the, you know, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is really, you know, friendly with the NSA and probably the CIA, but not so much the FBI.

The FBI are, aren't they considered generally the ugly ducklings of the surveillance world? I don't know. I don't know about that either way. I haven't heard that, but I suppose it's possible. I heard there was a rivalry going on with those guys. That would not surprise me. Yeah. Yeah. This is interesting.

You know, there was talk earlier this year that NSA might be pushing to do away with Section 702, that they just didn't find it very useful anymore. Right. Because they have other- Now we've got Section 703. It's better. Right. New and improved.

Yeah. They just, it wasn't, the things that it was supposed to do, they have other ways to do those things now. And so it's kind of a pain. I'm surprised by this only in that when I've spoken to folks at NSA, they've all made the point that when you inadvertently come across a US citizen's information, it is a royal pain in the butt because there's all this paperwork you have to do.

Now that's different than somebody, I guess, doing it intentionally, doing it improperly intentionally. That's different than inadvertently, I suppose. Yeah, so it's self-policing. If you're not self-policing, then, you know, eh, who's going to know? Right, but the impression, yeah, yeah.

But the impression I got was that, you know, it was such a pain. All the stuff that you'd have to do, you have to document if you did this accidentally, made it so that you were highly incentivized not to do this. To not ever do it, yeah. But this story would seem to not agree with that.

So I don't know. It's interesting. It's also the difference probably between actual FBI agents and FBI contractors. Yeah, that stuck out to me as well. Yeah. The C word. The dreaded C word. Mm-hmm. Oh, man. Right.

Well, it's good to see there's oversight here. And I'm all for that. Yeah. Yeah, somebody is watching the watchers. Yep, yep. I put this story in here. This is something we covered this week. D-Link has revealed that they have a bunch of routers that have some major security flaws, but they've decided they're not going to update them.

Instead, they're end-of-lifing them. It's drawing some attention because these models aren't that old. I think they're only four or five years old. I couldn't tell you the last time I had a D-Link router. I used to live by them, swear by them, had them all the time, but I haven't had one in a decade, at least.

Go to Eero.com slash GOG and use coupon code GOG at checkout to get your new Eero system with free overnight shipping. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Never miss an opportunity. Baby needs a new pair of shoes. That's right. Gosh, Jason, tell me more about those Eero routers.

That sounds really interesting. Maybe I should replace all the routers in my home with Eero routers. Unlike D-Link, they have software updates that they push automatically to your router, so you're never compromised, unlike D-Link. That sounds safe. Tell me more.

Damn, I didn't get to do my Eero Plus pitch. Oh, all right. I'm sorry. Sorry. I want to get in the way of commerce. Oh, no. When was the last time you had a D-Link, Dave? A decade as well? Oh, I, well, I know I don't have one at home.

There may be, there may still be one over at the old Pixel Workshop office. And that brings me to something I wanted to talk about with this, which is the need to occasionally go through and audit your stuff. Because I think it's, this is an out of sight, out of mind kind of thing.

If your Wi-Fi is just humming along and it's easy to go five, ten years without thinking about updating it. And I was wondering what you guys thought about an interval for going in and updating these sort of relatively inexpensive things just because it's better to have newer, updated, presumably safer stuff.

Yeah. You know, I think once again, Jason is a bit of an outlier here because he picks up the moves basically every two years, which is a really easy way to go through all your stuff and see where you're at. It's still the same stuff. It's just at a different place.

I do have, I actually do have a monthly reminder to just go through and check everything. So in things, it'll just pop up on, you know, the first Saturday of every month. It'll be just like, you know, do a sweep. So I check my TV, I check the, you know, the Apple TV, anything that has something that can be updated that I don't use that often.

I'll just turn everything on and just hit update. The one thing that I'm guilty of, unfortunately, is my cable modem because I got this thing so long ago that, because I, you know, I have my own. I didn't want to spend the money for the cable company to charge me every month.

So I went out and bought like a surfboard, something for 200 bucks. That thing is at the point where I'm afraid that if I touch it, I'm going to be immediately going to Amazon to have to buy a new one, be out of internet for two days and be on phone support with India until the wee hours of the morning because I just don't trust it.

It works. I don't want to screw with it. Yeah. You know, we recently replaced the main box in our house. We have Verizon's Fios, which is their, you know, their fiber to the house kind of thing. And so the fiber comes in the house and then there's a box that translates the fiber into coax and ethernet and then sends it all over the place.

And that box was installed when we originally got Fios installed, which I want to say was probably about 10 years ago. And we were starting to get just bad video throughout the house. Just certain stations were breaking up and getting blocky and unreliable.

Internet seemed to be working fine. But so my wife called and I did all the research ahead of time, did all the testing ahead of time, did basically every possible thing you could do before bringing the fine folks from Verizon into my home. And fortunately, we got lucky with the repair guy.

He was, he believed my wife when she told him all the things that we had done, because quite often they do not. And just replaced the box, got a new box. And boy, the box is, I don't know, a quarter the size of the one that it replaced. Not surprisingly, but everything works great now.

So that's up to date. Excellent! Wow. So there you go. It's also nice if I ever want to upgrade to 4K or anything like that, I can, I'll be able to do that with this new box. Nice. Yeah, I think my last D-Link went the way of the Dodo when Apple came out with their Extremes.

That was, that was really when, you know, I moved. Yeah, that's what I switched over to as well when, when that happened. Yeah, I still have a time machine with the two terabyte thing and it's in a closet right now because as you found out, Brian, they're kind of useless when you have to back up from them. So I just said, screw it and put it in the closet.

Well, it worked. It just was a lot more difficult than expected. Yeah, I just really wish Eero would come out. with an all-in-one that is, you know, the cable router with all of their goodness in it. Well, no, I don't even care about the backup drive.

I just use my Synology for that, but no, just the router. So you don't have to pay the, the rental fee from the cable company because that's what I care about the most is just have not having to pay that and having a good fast one that's just going to work, you know, that has enough hardware in it to update as the specs change, which would be fantastic.

It'll, it'll be coming now that they're owned by Amazon and Amazon wants to own everything. So they're going to put the cable companies out of business next. So we've been talking a lot about Amazon and their partnership with police with the ring doorbells or their attempted partnerships with the police. And, uh, a bunch of civil rights and privacy groups sent an open letter calling on U S cities to end their partnerships with ring.

And, uh, yeah, some of the big issues are that cops are actually coached on how to get surveillance footage without a warrant. Officials and partnered law enforcement agencies are instructed to promote the adoption of ring and it's connected app neighbors, which, uh, I hate neighbors. It's such a bad app.

And, uh, that's kind of the map interface for the ring cameras. Have you guys ever played with that? Have you seen it? I have the neighbors app on my phone. I don't have any ring cameras, but I have the neighbors app, um, which I think you're the one, Jason, who said it's a great way to know which of your neighbors are racist.

Um, that next door. Yeah. If you get both of those, you're set. Yeah. Right. Um, but I have to say it's, I see the utility in it. We had a thing recently where, um, I don't know, a couple towns over from mine, there was a shooting, a drug deal went bad.

And the first place I heard about it was on the neighbors app popped up. Why are the helicopters flying over our house? You know, that sort of thing. Hmm. So sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Mostly it doesn't. But, uh, yeah, I, I mean, seriously, there's some, there's some really crazy people.

Oh, look, if you, if you spend time on neighbors and next door, you will never leave your house again, or you'll, you'll actually want to put it up for sale and move. Here's the, the problem is wherever you go, there they are. It's going to be the same thing. I know. It's always worth keeping in mind that to somebody else, you're that person.

Oh, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. That's why, that's why I lurk. You know. Right. Jason's the neighborhood lurker. Yeah. Peering out from behind. What was that movie with Tom Hanks and then the burbs?

The burbs? Yeah. Oh my God, Jason, you're the house next door. The burbs. Okay. Well, anyway, at least nobody in my neighborhood thinks I'm racist. So what do you, where do you think this will go? I, I, do you think they'll get any traction with this?

I hope so. I mean, there's a, it's a pretty decent, uh, list of people who are behind this and this is just the, the civil rights and privacy groups. I mean, I think a lot of people are against ring doing this, you know, it's just, it's just the way that they went about it, I think is the problem.

Honestly, it's one of those things where if they came out and said, Hey, would you like to be part of this global neighborhood watch group? You know, well, they incentive, they incentivized it too, by dropping prices and all that sort of thing. Right. Like that's just messed up. It's the way they did it.

It's like, if you want to join the, your local neighborhood watch ring cabal, we're going to give you a coupon that you can use to go do it. But you have to word it in a way that makes people think that they are the ones in control, even though they're still getting the same cheap deal, but instead of somebody selling it to them, like, Hey, I'm a cop.

You want to, you want one of these, you know, come to the back of my squad car and I'll give you one. Uh, it's like, it's like promoted as a, as a public good instead of something that is like, you know, skeezy Joe flat foot over there is trying to sell you. That's all I'm saying. And, and, and in your usual eloquent style, you painted quite the picture.

Now, do you think, would you think any different of this, if this were not exclusive to ring? In other words, if the, if say Amazon or someone big came up with a system like this, where any type of security camera could be part of it? I think that would be better.

Yeah. I think it would be, you know, let's, let's all join together and send our video to the people in India to watch us having sex that we can then post and find the bad guys. Okay. Um, I think that this is, you know, it's part of, it's part of lock in for their, their ecosystem for them, which, you know, it kind of works.

I had, I ended up paying another a hundred bucks for another year with all the ring cameras I bought. Cause I had this, you know, I had the sunk cost of it. So why not? But if they're going to build a system where any camera can tap into it, it's also a bigger target for somebody out there to go after. Yeah.

I can just see the security implications there. Cause at least if it's under ring, they control all the security protocols. They control the encryption of who's getting to see what and how it's all working. If it's coming from different providers, then you got to deal with standards boards. Then you got to, you know, I triple E and all that crap.

Or I don't know. I don't think, I don't think that would ever even work. Yeah. I think it's all good points. Yeah. I don't, I think it's cool, but I don't know if it would work. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Well, we'll see. I, I, uh, I don't know how, I, this is the kind of thing where in response I could see them putting together a committee, you know, I could see ring putting together some sort of best practices or some sort of, you know, try to get in front of this.

Yeah. Yeah. Rather than being regulated, trying to come up with something on their own. Do something self-regulated before the need for it. Yeah. Like Libra. They should definitely do that. Yes. Like Libra. So Twitter got in a little bit of trouble this week. Twitter is only supposed to have our phone numbers for two-factor auth, but it appears to have been unintentionally used for more.

Yes. We've learned that the phone numbers and email addresses provided for safety and security might have, and this is all in air quotes, which I love, inadvertently been used for ad purposes. Ah, there was an error, Twitter said. So they maintain that they've never shared personal data with partners or other outsiders and it resolved the problem as of September 17th.

It's also taking steps to ensure this doesn't happen again. Twitter didn't know how many people might have been affected, though, and was reporting this primarily to be transparent about what happened. So they got caught and now they're being transparent. Unintentionally, inadvertently, let me get you a dictionary to go with that.

You did it on purpose. I saw someone on Twitter, and I can't recall who it was, but it was one of the security professionals I follow, cybersecurity professionals I follow on Twitter, who was, at the outset of this, was saying that their identity had been revealed by Twitter.

They were trying to figure out how Twitter somehow figured out who they were. They were getting marketed to somehow some dots had been connected, and they had been really deliberate about having their Twitter account be anonymous and not connected to anything else. And somehow the connection had been made, and it turns out it was this.

It was the phone number they'd put in for Two Factor had been commingled with other information and basically got them outed. Man, that sucks. It's one of those things where it's like you almost need a privacy.com slash GOG for $5 off after you sign up for phone numbers.

I know you can go to Google Voice and pay for it, but it'd be nice if there was a service out there like privacy.com slash GOG that would give you this kind of thing and protect you for your Two Factor. I feel like we're doing sponsored content. You know what, though?

I think that actually, does Twitter offer app-based Two Factor? Because everybody's trying to move away from SMS-based Two Factor anyway because it is so insecure. I don't think that they do, but they should. Do you know, Dave? I don't know. I don't know. Okay.

I'll look into that because I know I've got Two Factor turned on for Twitter. Yeah. And also Instagram as well. So, hmm. All these services. I have got every authenticator known to man on my phone because I forget which one I signed up with each one.

I'm like, better keep them all and never lose this phone or you're never signing in again. No more puppy pics for you. Have you guys ever listened? Just Jason's relentless pitching reminds me of, have you ever heard the Play With Pain podcast? No.

Check it out. It's, it's, it's, I would say I recommend it in small doses. It's, um. Is that Chet Waterhouse? It's, uh, Jeff Cesaro. Yeah. The comedian Jeff Cesaro. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Chet Waterhouse. That is correct. Yeah. I, in small batches, it is exceedingly funny. Yes.

Exactly. Right. So, uh, yeah, and, and it is, it is just the way Jason's been peppering this with, uh, little ads. That is one of the things about this podcast that makes it funny. You know what that ring.com camera is really good for?

It's good for making sure that your butcher box doesn't get stolen. Butcherbox.com slash GOG. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, man. So check it out. Yeah. We're not going to be able to do this anymore because soon we're going to have dynamic advertisements.

Oh, no. Oh, are you? That's right. You are, aren't you? Yeah. We're giving it a go. We just signed up with Art 19 yesterday and they're porting everything over. So next episode at the beginning, feel free to listen in for my giant mea culpa and saying that, you know, at that time when we said that if you hear ads on the show that aren't read by us, then something has gone wrong.

Well, turns out. That's your canary in the coal mine. Yeah. That you're not up to date on this podcast, sir or ma'am. Well, I'm sure it'll go fine because every time in the past that you guys have made some sort of major change with the podcast, it's all gone really well.

Oh, yeah. It's been fantastic. I'm basically not going to be taking any calls from Jason over the next week and a half. Yeah, because, of course, I get to do all the work and Brian's just going to sit back and play with his kids. That's right. I got to do artwork, man.

In fact, sitting here on my desk, I have the lovely little poster of the Grumpy Old Geeks poster with the Podcast One logo on it. There you go. That went well. That went great. Long enough to make up posters. Well, hey, I've even got the canvas printed of show art that I'm looking at right now with the Podcast One logo on it, too.

I'm glad I didn't make Blog Talk Radio logos before that. You held off on getting that tattoo. Yeah. Blog Talk Radio forever. You down with BTR? Yeah, you know me. Okay, moving on.

This one was just fun. Hacker selling user info stolen from prostitution forums. I'm guessing you guys had to have covered this one on the Cyber Wire, Dave. Covered it. I've lived it. I'm not just a journalist. I'm a victim.

Right. Yes, we have. Very, very reminiscent of the Ashley Madison incident back in 2015. Right. Seems like a smaller scale. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I don't know.

I really try. I think the thing about these stories is they attract a lot of attention because everyone likes to tut-tut other people's bad behavior and shame them and so on and so forth. It's just not bad behavior, though. It's legal. It's legal. Exactly. It's totally legal.

Right. Exactly. And I think about the thing I joke about is, you know, what happens when the great Google search database dump of 2025 happens? Oh, yeah. Every single one of us, everything we've ever searched for is released in a big searchable database.

And then who gets the last laugh, right? I think that's going to be called the freaking-ing because everybody's going to find out that everybody is just a big old freak. Right. That's why you should use private internet access. Go to GOG.show slash VPN to sign up now.

Oh, my God. But I mean, would you be signing up to hookers.nl with your actual, you know- Email address. Personal email address and personal information and not use a privacy.com card. Well, I guess maybe privacy.com doesn't work in the Netherlands, but still.

How many military addresses were in the Ashley Madison one? Remember hearing about that? Like, people are dumb. Whitehouse.gov? Yes. We're in there. Well, and the other thing here, and for those of you in the audience, this could also be a technique for plausible deniability, that who's to say if you sign up for one of these things that I wouldn't sign up as Jason or Brian or anyone else?

Oh, yeah. I just use a friend's name, and that way, if anything gets revealed, it's them, not me. And, you know, with friends like these, who needs enemies? Well, back in the early days of the internet, that was done, well, not with hooker forums or stuff like that, but, you know, you'd sign your friends up for, like, ridiculous mailing lists as a joke.

Oh, I mean, I remember getting blow cards from magazines and sending those in with, you know, all the names of my enemies. Right, right. Mailing lists like the Cyber Wire, which you can sign up for at thecyberwire.com. Free every day. All the cybersecurity news you could want.

It's thecyberwire.com, your cybersecurity news source. We have finally corrupted Dave Bittner, yes! Now, if we can just get him to say, go fucking sign up for the Cyber Wire, we're set. I haven't been drinking yet today. The advertisers do tend to frown on us cussing in their ad reads, Jason.

Yeah. Well, this is a freebie, so, hey. Oh, yes. But, yeah, I mean, it's going to happen, so, you know, protect yourself. Literally. You're using protection with the hookers that you get from hookers.nl.

Use protection at hookers.nl. You know, be proactive before you procreate. Don't be a jerk. Don't throw stones. That, too. And as a follow-up to that, love this one. Job seekers are scrubbing clean their social media accounts.

This comes from our friends at Naked Security. And people are finally getting the hint. If they'd have listened to this show seven years ago, they'd have been clean and pristine by now. But, yeah, people are finally going back and scrubbing out their social media profiles.

And some people are doing the dumb thing of just setting things to private. I mean, you delete them. Even though we know delete means set visibility to zero, you at least have plausible deniability that says, I deleted it. Come on. I don't know what's wrong with just setting it to private.

I think that's perfectly acceptable. I don't understand why everybody doesn't have their profiles set to private. That's crazy to me. Well, remember when Facebook, every time they did an update, would revert that privacy setting? Yeah, they seem to have fixed that. That's why you don't set things to private. You know, you just double check.

This update. Yeah. Yeah, back, I want to say probably 15 years ago, I had an employee. This is when Facebook was brand new. And she just sort of regularly and routinely posted pictures of herself at parties, drunk and a lot of times in her underwear, which is evidently something she liked to do at parties.

Feel free to send a link to that account. And I would say to her, I'd say, you know, this is kind of forever. And I'm not just saying that because I've saved my own copies of them. This is kind of forever, and you might want to think twice about this because someday you're going to want to work somewhere besides here, and you might want to think about that.

Now, she went off and got a job in Hollywood, so I guess it's all fine. She's legendary at the Christmas parties. Right, right. She just walks around going, Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? You've just been waiting to use that one, haven't you?

I'm just, you know, I'm sitting here in that kind of thing. How's that for a slice of fried gold? Boom! Gotcha. One more time. That's it. Putting away the Farago. I only have, you know what? They should come with credits for that, so your co-host can give you, like, if you're a good boy, you get, like, two credits per episode, so you have to spend them wisely.

I think we can just self-regulate, Jason. Oh, we're going to self-regulate. Okay. Yeah, so again, you know, maybe a good thing is, like we were talking about earlier, about auditing your devices throughout your house. Go through your social media accounts and audit them. Go through and look at all the pictures and decide, do I really need that picture of me from 1985, you know, doing a handstand on a keg of beer or not?

Yeah, you know, I just don't think I was ever, I'm sure there's, if I went back through my Facebook account, I'm sure I would find things that would be like, okay, I can probably get rid of this. But they were all so long ago, and I've been so boring on social media for so long now. I don't really care too much. Yeah.

If you're on Twitter, I recommend tweetdelete.net. No, you can't be tweetdelete. The fact that there are politicians that have never used this boggles the mind at this point. Or people on Saturday Night Live, or people like that, or anybody. Or anybody in the public. Everybody. Everybody in the public eye should be using this, yes.

Yes, you will never go back and look at your old tweets anyway, so you might as well kill them. That's why you need to hire me and Brian as your social media managers. We will keep you safe. Yep. And how can they find out more about that, Jason? Go to Grumpfield. They only get one drop on that one because they don't pay us.

All right. Well, finally, thank God. I put a video in here. We've been talking about deep fakes in the past few weeks, and this is one of the most impressive deep fake videos that I've seen.

This is the impressionist. What is this guy's name? Jim Meskiman. Jim Meskiman. Yeah, I'm sorry. That's Jim Meskiman, who is a very talented impressionist. And someone took a video of him doing a series of rapid fire impressions, and they applied deep fakes to it so that as he does each impression, the face of that celebrity, his face becomes that face.

And I have to say, the first time I saw this, I was not aware that that's what was going to happen. And the first couple ones that happened, I thought to myself, wow, this guy has amazing flexibility in his face. He looks just like – because you know how sometimes people can do that.

They can like – all of a sudden, it's like, oh, wow, that is Robert De Niro. And that's what I thought was going on. And then two – I don't know, four or five of them, and I went, wait a minute. And sure enough, it's just a string of deep fakes. But very impressive, worth checking out, and both fun, funny, and disturbing.

Kind of like this segment. Oh, God. What did you say, dickhead? Okay, you're out of credits, Jason. Don't tempt me. I'm out of credits. Oh, man. I still wanted to use – Talk me gently with the chainsaw.

Yes, I found my Heather's pink. Sorry. I do have the power to edit that out, so. Please wield it. That'll cost you extra. All right, Dave. Well, thanks for stopping by.

Yeah, I think we've run this one into the ground. Oh, yes. So I'll talk to you guys next time. Brick-a-brick. I found this one over at Bloomberg, and I loved it because I love little things like this. It says you're using an escalator wrong.

Well. What do you mean, well? Not necessarily. Some people are using it correctly. Yes, some people are using it. The lazy ones. They've got it right. Now, this goes into is it better to walk or stand on the escalator? And what it turns out is for the common good – this is kind of like a tragedy of the commons problem is what it actually is here.

If you take up one side of the escalator to walk and the other side stands, then everybody loses. But if everybody stands and then you go side by side, you can actually get more people through, which has been shown in some places to reduce rush hour congestion by 30%, which is not insignificant.

But I don't care if other people get there quicker. I want to be there quicker. Yeah, but it's only by a few seconds. That's the crazy thing. I know. I know. It's just a few seconds. The math, how it works out on it is insane. Yeah. And you don't have to like, you know, just don't sweat it.

Just don't sweat it. Just stand next to somebody and get your escalator on, you know? So I just like it. It's worth reading to see the numbers on it and how they tested it because there are some places that actually made people stand. No walking, sir. You stand.

You stand. Yeah, I don't see how you're going to ever enforce this, but it is interesting. I mean, it's just like when Mythbusters did the boarding and onboarding a plane. There is a way that is way more efficient, but nobody's ever going to do it. Right. Yeah. We'll see.

Because, yeah, this is just human nature. And I don't know. I've been through this enough times, especially in San Francisco on the Muni. Oh, my God. Everybody's just like, move aside, move aside. On the left. Coming through. Coming through. I'm like, shut the fuck up. Well, yeah. I mean, when I was living in London, this was constant going up and down into the tube stations all the time.

Yeah. London's where they tested where they found the rush hour congestion reduced by 30%. Yeah, at Holborn Station. I've been on those escalators many a time. Oh, good for you. Well, also good for Pablo Escobar's brother. He has won a $3 million website lawsuit and vows to take down Elon Musk and Apple.

Okay. Now, I thought this was pretty funny because I guess everybody else in tech journalism has taken our side now and just swears whenever they want to. The article starts out. If there's one person whose intellectual property you don't want to fuck with, other than Nintendo's, you know, it's Robert de Jesus Escobar Gaviria.

The brother of Pablo Escobar, the brother of Pablo Escobar, who is probably the executor of Escobar Inc. What do they do? I don't know. He owns the Pablo Escobar trademark. Well, that's got to be worth a nothing. Yeah.

Well, here's the funny thing. They're saying this is like a $3 million, you know, win for him. Well, it's only because some guy got Pablo Escobar dot com and he was trying to sell it for $3 million. And then when the lawsuit came, he just didn't show up and the cops, not the cops, the judge said, okay, you can have it now.

Okay. That's not real. Do you really, can you really count that as $3 million? I guess if you're looking for clickbait, sure. Sure. Well, yes. Escobar Inc. is going into many things here. Flamethrowers to start with. Yes. And they're going after Elon Musk because he had a flamethrower too.

Well, the thing about the flamethrowers is they're just, they're roofing guns that you use to put tar down on your roof. You can buy those at Amazon right now for half price. Trust me. I looked. You can. I just. But go to your mom and pop shop to get your flamethrowers. Exactly. Go to your local mom and pop shop.

So, but here's the other fun part. Yes, they're into cryptocurrency. Of course they are. Of course they are. Called Diet Bitcoin. I got a Diet Bitcoin and it made me take a diet. I went on a diet because it said diet.

Diet. Yes. Oh, man. He should have just gone with gay coin. So it had been, or, you know, a heroin coin. You got to try it. Now that you've got the Bitcoin, you've got to try it. So, yeah. And he's just saying that, you know, everybody's going to realize that the CIA is behind everything.

And I mean, this, this whole thing reads just right out of the onion. Well, I'm reading it and I almost want to play a game. Is it Escobar or is it Trump? Because here, let me, let me just read this one. And you tell me, is this Escobar or is this Trump? You can stick with your worthless coins.

Keep the Ethereum. Keep the Tron. Keep the Ripple. Keep the Bitcoin. You will see what happens. They will all go to zero. Almost zero. Not my coin. My coin is going to be my new work in life. That could be Trump. That could be Trump. Could be. Yes. And Bitcoin is currently trading at around $8,500 a piece. Where diet Bitcoin is trading at 0.000093 cents.

Well, it is on a diet. It is on a diet. That's right. Should just call it skinny coin, which is what you get after you have too much heroin coin and Coke coin and spend all your money on Bitcoin. Closing shout outs.

My closing shout out goes to all of the SoCal fire crews in the air and on the ground and the people behind the scenes. Thank you so much as usual, which is sad to say it's as usual because this is every year now. This is going to happen. It's the new normal. It is the new normal.

We are in fire season 365 days a year around here, but this time of year is when it all hits and it's not fun and it's scary and lots of people lose their homes. It's heartbreaking. And you guys are just awesome. I love these guys. I donate to them whenever I can and they've just been nothing but nice to me on the Twitters.

And back in the day when we ran Metblogs, they would always send people out and answer questions for us. They're fantastic people. So keep going, guys. Stay safe out there for sure because today is going to be a tough one. And happy 50th birthday to friend of the show, MXV.

Happy birthday, man. Old man. Yep. He's going to have his birthday party tonight, actually, when we're recording this. At a, you guessed it, arcade. And a bar, though. There is a bar there, but. And I'm assuming a record player. I don't know.

No. He brings his own. Yeah, he does. He's got his. He's got, you know, he's got he's got two people. He's got one person that carries the turntable, one person that carries the vinyl. And he's just like walks in like the king and says, spin my records. Where's my pinball? So happy birthday, my friend.

Have fun. Happy birthday. And my shout out is a non shout out to the Dodgers. You worthless bums. Well, what'd they do? Well, they lost. So they're out. They're out. Oh, who's in? So I got to go change my hat because, you know, I'm a fair weather friend. Houston, Washington.

I can't even remember. I stopped paying attention. I don't care. OK, well, I'm angry. But all will be forgiven by spring training, I'm sure. Oh, of course it will. So if it's not the Pirates or the Cubs, then I'm not going to go buy a new hat. No, it's not either of those. You're fine. OK, well, L.A. it is then. I'll just wear it in shame. Fortunately, it is all it is all black.

So it does look like I'm in mourning. It's the appropriate color. Until next time, I'm Brian Schilmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Please toss us a few bucks a month 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 or 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. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 384. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then, explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love.

From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.