388: Set Visibility to Death

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Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, a little follow-up here. Alrighty. You mentioned Movember last episode. So I went and checked out Movember.com. Right. And it turns out it's an old slew of men's health issues that they're trying to help. There you go.

It is a lot of things. And I was on the fence. And I'm thinking, maybe I should. There's a lot of things under that mustache, right? Yes, there are. And I'm thinking, maybe, maybe. But then I scrolled down and I saw a new video that they posted called Movember Facial Hair Facts. And of course, I was intrigued because the person who is front and center on the video is Stephen Fry, one of my favorite people of all time.

I love him as well. Did you get a chance to watch the video? I did not because I did not know it was there until now. Nope. Okay. Well, highly recommend you go back and watch it. It is very funny. They've got a lot of people in it talking about Movember. But yeah, it's very cool. Very cool. Definitely check it out. And if you are harily lipped inclined, you should definitely give it a shot and raise some awareness and raise some money.

Maybe I'll do it and open up a little money thing for our listeners and post some photos on the Patreon. We'll see. We'll see. You should clear that with your wife. Yeah. Is all I'm saying. You'll have to check that out first. And I did check out the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast.

The audio quality is fine. I don't know what you're talking about. Maybe it was the episode I was listening to. I don't know. The one I listened to was crap. Oh, yeah. The one I listened to was absolutely fine. I listened to the latest. So it's, you know, four per multi-person Skype call type of setup.

But for the most part, it wasn't bad. So, but the show itself was fantastic. It's one of my new favorite podcasts. Yeah, it's very, very good content. Um, they're, they're, they're very smart people. Highly enjoyed. Way smarter than you or I. That's for damn sure. Uh, and some follow-up on Devumi.

Remember those guys? Yeah, you, you paid them some monies, didn't you? I did. I paid them for, I think, 10,000 Twitter followers just as an experiment. Right. And I think I got like 8,000 before. And of course, just like my perfect timing, as soon as I paid them and got my followers, the New York Times ran that, that hack piece on them that basically said, hey, everybody's doing this.

You should beware. You know? And, uh, but I got a refund. Surprisingly. Which is a good thing. Yeah. Because, uh, they have settled with the FTC to the tune of $2.5 million. But, uh, German Calais, or Calais, the CEO, has only paid, uh, $250,000.

The rest has been deferred because apparently he's broke. Yeah, that can happen. Yeah, they do say that the, uh, it is a deferred payment because if it is discovered that his financial situation changes, they can go back and take more. Right. So, if he ever makes any money, we take it away from him.

Good. Yes. And I love this. This comes from the FTC. Dishonesty in the online marketplace harms shoppers as well as firms that play fair and square. That's right. Posting fake reviews on shopping websites or buying and selling fake followers is illegal.

Now, the fake reviews I can see, but buying or selling fake followers, that doesn't seem like it's illegal. It just seems like it's smart. The selling of them, I think, should be illegal. But, uh, the buying of them, you know, what are you going to do after the companies? Yeah, I just don't know if that is technically illegal. I mean, it breaks the terms of service, but who cares?

Nobody enforces those. Yes. They say it undermines the marketplace and the FTC will not tolerate it. Well, the annoying thing about this is they went after another company called Sunday Riley Modern Skincare LLC. And this one really pisses me off.

These guys were posting fake reviews and selling their stuff on Sephora. Right. And of course, when they got found out by Sephora by tracking the IP address, they were just told to use a VPN to mask where they're from. Right. And the FTC just gave them a slap on the wrist and no monetary fine whatsoever.

And these guys were literally posting fake reviews and selling product. Right. That seems ridiculous to me. That's the way of the world. Yeah, but still, it seems ridiculous. Well, yeah, much of the internet seems ridiculous to me. Anyway, there you have it.

The FTC is doing something sort of sometimes. Good. Signed it. You know, every now and then when it finds something basically dropped in their lap, then they go ahead and do something about it. In the news. In the news. Woke up this morning to the news that Jeff Bezos is no longer the richest person in the world.

Oh, poor Jeff. Oh, poor baby. He's only got one point. There are one hundred and three point nine billion dollars now. Jeez. Yeah. I mean, that must suck. He's going to be slumming it at Chipotle pretty soon. Wow. Who would you rather be?

Would you rather be Jeff Bezos, who, to be fair, seems to work his ass off and he has one hundred and three billion dollars? Or would you rather be that WeWork douche who basically got a billion dollars to do nothing? Well, he got a billion dollars to scheme and scam and run his companies into the ground.

So he did do something. I guess that's true. Yeah. I mean, it takes a lot of work. Have you seen Brewster's millions? Yeah. That was a lot of work for Richard Pryor to spend that million dollars in a day and have nothing to show for it. Yeah. Yeah. I think they should recast that as Brewster's billions and give it to the WeWork guy.

That would be awesome. Yeah. So Bill Gates is back on top with one hundred and five point seven billion dollars, which won't last very long because once the stock rebounds, because the stock did drop seven percent overnight because, yeah, they missed their earnings for the first time in two years. Pretty crazy.

Yeah. You know why? Because, oh, let's start giving next day shipping on things that cost seventy five cents. Yeah. That's not the brightest. Yeah. I get why they're doing it. They're doing it to lock everybody in, to take away the quick run to the store that we all used to do.

Mm hmm. Yeah. Or the quick run to Target. Now, now Amazon will take care of that for you, too. Yeah. And pretty soon those drones will be just buzzing overhead and dropping it in your lap. And I will be shooting them out of the sky. That's illegal. Don't do it. Darn. Sorry. Remember, we had a we had a story about that guy that shot his neighbor's drone with a shotgun and he got in a lot of trouble because the FAA was not very happy about that.

OK. Yeah. So we'll see if they if they snap back. The other interesting thing is AWS actually missed their target for the first time in a long time. All those open buckets. Yeah. They missed it by point two billion dollars. OK. But they still made nine billion.

Yeah. You know, it's the target thing. It's it's insane. You know, you have to just keep getting bigger and bigger when, you know, at some point they've taken over everything already. They can't get any bigger. Do you remember the episode of what was it? I think it was was it Voyager where they they found Scotty in a like a transporter loop at one point and they brought him back.

Maybe it was next gen. I can't even remember. But they resurrected Scotty for one episode. Yeah, it was next gen. It was next gen because he was telling LeVar Burton, like, you actually told the captain how long it's going to take to actually do something. You never do that, never do that, never, ever do that. Tell him it's going to take a day.

And when you do it in four hours, you're a hero. You're a hero. So these people need to stop, you know, saying, hey, this is actually what we think we might make. You know, they need to Scotty this shit. Yeah. So on Wednesday, the Zuck appeared in a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee that was supposed to just be about Facebook's Libra crypto project.

But they basically hit him up about everything and top of mind in Congress and not to mention the public right now is Facebook's policy that we keep talking about, which basically said you can lie as long as you pay for it and make it a political ad. And that's totally OK.

We're not going to police that. And so I just love this part of the of this whole thing. And you can watch the video AOC, who I am down with. Yeah, you know me, at least about this, like a fucking boss, went after Zuck and asked if she can run fake ads. And he basically said, yeah, I guess you could.

I just love it. Lying is bad. Lying is bad. Well, Congresswoman, I think lying is bad. And I think if you were to run an ad that had a lie in it, that would be bad. That's different from being waiver, waiver, waiver. In our position, the right thing to do to prevent your constituents or people in an election from seeing that you had lied.

It is just I highly recommend watching it. It's awesome. And it really just Zuckerberg. Man, I if I were him, I would resign and quietly go live on my islands. I know, man. I think he had to have like a CBD drip that whole time because he had like there's almost no expression in this guy.

And I'm convinced he's an actual robot. I'm starting to become convinced of it because he has no emotion whatsoever while everybody around him is. I mean, you can't say the walls are crumbling because Facebook is doing quite well. Thank you very much. But any idea of there ever being anything good about this company is gone.

Yeah. And what's up with his hair? I don't know. It's getting weirder every time. I don't know. Friend of the show, David Teeter, sent us a really good good clip as well that I'll try and dig up and put in the show notes where Zuck was asked if he would be willing to spend an hour a day doing content moderation that all the other people that they hired to do.

And he's just like, yeah, I don't think that's the best use of my time. I'm going to take a hard pass on that one. Yeah, I'm going to I'm going to be taking a right on no street. Yeah. But it would be cool if he did it for at least like an hour or just an hour a month or maybe like two hours a month.

He just did it for 15 minutes. Yeah, even 15 minutes. If he saw what was actually going on on his platform, that's bringing us all together. Exactly. What was that TV show that they did where the boss switched with the employees for a day? They really need to do that with some of these tech companies.

Undercover Millionaire or Undercover Boss? Undercover Boss. Yes, we need Undercover Boss for tech companies. I did see they did one Undercover Billionaire that was actually pretty good recently. So highly recommend that one. There you go. Well, in continuing Facebook news, even though the entire news organizations around the world have been getting mad at Facebook for basically taking their work and without and not paying for it.

On Friday, they are going to announce the final real coming of Facebook's news section, which we'll be able to have Facebook's algorithm pick out our stories for our show from now on.

Wait a second. You just said human curated and then algorithm curated. So which is it? Human curated with a selection of algorithmic news stories peppered in there. Algorithm is the spice. Yes, it's the pumpkin spice in the latte of our news. Yuck.

Oh, man. But Facebook has committed $1 billion and has partnered with the state of California to address housing affordability. Okay. Yeah. This is all right. It's all right. It's all right. It's not a lot compared to, I mean, that's, you know, 20% of one of their fines.

And this is over the course of 10 years. Right. So I honestly think that Facebook should just say, fuck it and buy Wyoming and move the whole company there. I'd be down with that. Absolutely. Yeah. They're putting a bunch of different chunks of cash into different programs that are coming through because they're like, yeah, yeah, we know.

Because they need the good PR. They need the good PR, but they don't have any place for anybody to live. I love this. In San Francisco, a family of four are making over $100,000 a year is considered low income. Yep. And that's- Yes, it is. It really is. At one point, my wife and I were actually debating moving up there because of job offers.

And then we just did the finances on it. And I was like, nah, I'll pass. Yeah. It's ridiculous. I mean, it is absolutely ridiculous. The place that I used to rent, I had a little house, like a two-story, three or four-bedroom house, which was a nice little place.

And it was like $1,700 a month. Thank you, rent control. As soon as I moved out, the guy remodeled it. I was about to say, that's nothing. Yeah. The guy, I moved out, the guy remodeled it, and it's like $10,000 a month now. Easy. And it was like $10,000 about four years ago. So it's got to be $20,000 a month now.

Yeah. I mean, I complain about what it's like here in Silicon Beach and Santa Monica and Venice and all that, but it ain't nothing compared to San Francisco. Oh, hell no. No. Yeah. If you're not grandfathered in on rent control, forget about it. Yep. Well, there's more algorithm news in the news.

Twitter says it's better at spotting abusive tweets than, oh, I don't know, the actual users that continue to report them and have them never do anything about it. Okay. Yes. They say they've achieved a major milestone in its attempts to improve the health of its platform. According to their most recent earning report, 50% of abusive tweets removed this past quarter were pulled before a user even flagged the content.

That's up from 38% in quarter one. They, of course, have tweaked their algorithm, which is what they're saying is doing the trick. Yet, somehow, the Twitter-in-chief never gets flagged. Oh, yeah.

Well, public personality. That's never going to happen. Yes. So we get these metrics that show promise, but the problem is they don't provide all of the metrics that we need to compare it against. For example, they have yet to detail exactly just how much abuse is actually occurring on the platform.

Be helpful to know that as well. Yeah. Why would they even bother telling you that? That's true. Yeah. I mean, it's still just Twitter. It's going to be what it's going to be. I just, somebody needs to oust Jack Dorsey. I mean, honestly. Like I said, we need all of these Twitter CEOs to just become regular employees for one day.

See how horrible their platforms are. I'm sure Jack gets the full force of what Twitter actually is. So he just doesn't actually read it. There's the problem. Or care. Or care. Now, I found this one over at the Washington Post. It is a lengthy read about HireVue.

I have never heard of this company, but it is apparently very popular with, you know, large corporations. And it is AI driven interviews for job positions. Wonderful. Yeah. This is pretty incredible.

It is pretty incredible. And you have to sit down for like 20 minutes to a half an hour and answer a bunch of questions to your smartphone. And then the AI says if you're going to be a match for the job. All right. There's no human reviews?

Well, this gets you this gets you to the the next gatekeeper. Oh, OK. So AI is the initial churning point at which you get kicked out of the system and the lucky few move on. Right. And it's a total black box. And I love this. Meredith Whitaker. She's a co-founder at the AI Now Institute.

She says it's a profoundly disturbing development that we have proprietary technology that claims to differentiate between a productive worker and a worker who isn't fit based on their facial movements, their tone of voice, their mannerisms. It's pseudoscience. It's a license to discriminate.

And the people whose lives and opportunities are literally being shaped by these systems don't have any chance to weigh in. Well, I don't know if we can actually call it discrimination in any way, shape or form, considering it's a black box. We don't know how the decisions are being made. Right. But what they're doing is they're this entire the next the rest of this story is going to be an air quotes.

Just imagine me waving my fingers around. They're training the AI on employees that they have that are deemed to be, you know, productive and good employees. And white. Yeah. Well, we don't know that. We don't know that because it's a fairly.

Some of these companies are fairly big, but, you know, you know, that's what's going to end up coming out of this. Well, it's going to know it. Yeah. And they even talk about this in the article because it's just going to homogenize the entire workforce that works for the company. So you're going to have, you know, it's just like a power log distribution curve where everything is going to creep towards, you know, vanilla ability.

It's what it's going to be. Vanilla ability. Wasn't that like an early rap group in the 80s? I don't know. I just made that one up. It was the pre Beastie Boys. You know, it was a bunch of white kids rapping vanilla ability, vanilla ability. And there's a lot of people that are going against them in this article, which is great because it is pseudoscience bullshitty.

And the people who run the company are like, no, this is real science. You cannot say that. And of course, they're not going to show you any metrics. They're not going to show you what the algorithms are doing. And the whole point of this thing is, it's like, I don't know about you, but when I go in for a job interview, I'm nervous as hell.

I'm going to look shifty and shady and, you know, look like I got a, you know, a gram of coke shoved up my butt waiting for the cops to come by because I hate interviewing. I'm terrible at it. I mean, to be fair, shifty and shady is kind of your default, whether you're doing an interview or not. Yeah, come on.

I'm not really. Not really. Maybe on the inside, but not on the outside. OK, pretty good at tamping that shit down. But it's a long article, but it is well worth reading the whole thing because it's these people are, you know, they're going to the mats trying to defend their their product higher view.

And I don't see it. I don't see how anybody should be using this product at all. But they've got massive, massive clients out there. Yeah, not good. No, not good at all. I sense a class action lawsuit in the making at some point.

Probably. Well, speaking of bias in tech, I found this article and I just thought it was interesting as an old programmer, as you are as well, Jason, which was it's been brought up that basically binary code is not accommodating this new class of people, the non-binary people.

And you and I have coded many a form where gender was basically just male or female. And that's basically what we did. There wasn't a bunch of options. Exactly. So this got really into how, like, inside computational systems and they serve as barriers to implementing truly inclusive design.

Of course, there is pretty easy fixes for all this, especially in this day and age of jQuery. You just change the field. So it's not binary. Yeah. Pretty simple. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, it's like, you know, it was just very easy to search on, you know. Okay.

You have an enum, which is an M or an F. And sometimes, in some cases, when you're very funny, you put a D because I have done dog on some because on the internet, no one knows you're a dog. If you're, you're an old school programmer, you get the joke. But yes. Yeah.

Nowadays, it's just like, you just need, it's basically just a field. It's a text field. You can't, you can't enumerate on that. So. Anyway. There you go. And as I was talking earlier about hopefully shooting down the drones that are coming from all the delivery services, well, I may not be able to use a shotgun, but I could contact my good friends over at Raytheon and perhaps get one of these first anti-drone laser weapons they've rolled out.

I know. It's a drone buggy instead of a dune buggy. It's an anti-drone buggy. Yeah. It's a high energy laser laser system mounted on a small all-terrain vehicle, which uses electro-optical and infrared sensors to detect and track drones after it identifies and tracks unwelcome flying devices.

It then neutralizes it with a laser and a process that can take a few seconds. So they draw power from a standard 220 volt outlet. So you just plug it right in and it can deliver dozens, but they don't mention exactly how many of shots on a single charge. Pretty cool. Okay. 220 is not really standard because it's, I mean, I had to have 220 installed in my car.

Yeah, because I have a hot tub and it's expensive. But anyway, I am saddened that they don't have Val Kilmer being the spokesperson for this because this is some real genius shit right here. I mean, it's reverse. It kind of is. It's reverse real genius because real genius had a laser in a plane and this is like a laser shooting down a plane.

It's a laser on a Jeep. Yeah, they really should have Val Kilmer do this. And when the drone explodes, it should like have popcorn come out of it because that would really be, that would be the best use of Raytheon's marketing budget for this drone, anti-drone buggy for sure.

That one's for free, Raytheon. Get on it. There you go. And Virgin Galactic is going to be the first public space tourism company on Monday. When I first read this, I'm like, oh, they're going to finally shoot people into space. No, no, they're not making any money. So they're going to take the company public.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, yeah. Words have different meanings. They do. They do. Depends on the interpretation. So. Yes, it does. Yeah. So a lot of people's names who I can't pronounce with a company's name I can't pronounce are actually going to take the company public on Monday.

Why are we surprised about this? We spend half the time on the show screaming about tech companies that don't do what they say that they're doing, going public and being worth billions of dollars. This is yet just another company going public that doesn't even have a product. Well, I mean, come on.

They do have a new plane. They're in trials with the new plane. No income. No income flow whatsoever because you cannot buy a ticket. You cannot go anywhere. Well, here's the deal. Yeah, you can. They got a ton of pre-orders where you had to put down a shit ton of money. I guess all of those pre-orders, they burned through all that cash and now they need another infusion.

Yes. Since Richard Branson is not anywhere near that list of top richest people in the world, I guess they got to go out of pocket. I think he has the most fun. He does. He does. So we'll see. I wish these guys would just get their shit together and get that bird in the air.

Let's go. Would be nice. I mean, it was over. They won't buy any stock until that happens. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's been over 10 years since I went out to the desert and saw Spaceship One fly for the first time. And it's like, come on, guys. Let's go. Let's go.

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

Welcome back, Dave. Thank you very much. And I have an additional podcast to add to the list. Uh-oh. Yeah, just this week we launched a new show. It's called Caveat. And it is our new law and policy show. It's a weekly show. And my co-host is Ben Yellen.

Oh, very interesting. Oh, no way. That's awesome. So this is law and policy and tech? Law and, yeah, basically cybersecurity. Short show, then. Don't tell law and policy. There isn't any. Thank you for coming. Law and policy as it applies to tech and cybersecurity. So there'll be an emphasis on privacy and surveillance and those sorts of things.

So it's a lot of fun. You know, Ben and I have been doing Cyber Wire segments for a few years now. So we've got our routine down. And Ben really knows his stuff. So I think we're going to have a good time. If you are a fan of the Hacking Humans podcast, this show will sound very familiar to you because the format is almost the same.

We figured, why not mess with something that works? So that's what we're going with that. So we hope everybody will check it out. Again, it's called Caveat. Excellent. Ben is a very smart dude. So I'm looking forward to that one. Yep. Knows his stuff. Yeah. All right, Brian, what do we got?

Well, we've got something coming from Microsoft, as we've always been stating on this show and in this particular area of the show. Microsoft is doing a relatively decent job with privacy and basically security in general. And they've got something new going on. As we've all known for a long time, hackers have been increasingly using firmware exploits to carry out their attacks, particularly as operating systems get a bit better.

There are a few reasons for this. But obviously, firmware is a code that has not been written by operating system developers. It's been written by hardware manufacturers recently. So Microsoft wants to change that. As part of a new partnership with PC manufacturers, they are launching an initiative called Secured Core PC, where they are rethinking Windows' relationship with firmware and how it handles booting up devices.

So now the processor's firmware will power up the system, but then limit how much the processor trusts its own firmware to define the code path it takes to launch the system. The processor will instead call on Microsoft's bootloader for those instructions. Pretty smart. Yeah. And a couple of things come to mind with this.

First thing I think about what Apple's done on iOS with their Secure Enclave and, you know, all that sort of firmware stuff. And I wonder how much on iOS, does Apple have an advantage using their own chips and their own devices?

Or can Microsoft simply, if they get the participation with the manufacturers, which according to this article they have, does Microsoft simply spec out? This is how it's going to work. We're going to collaborate here. And it's just as good as owning the whole thing. I don't know the answer to that. Yeah.

That's a good point. Yeah. I did ask around, I have some folks in the security side of things who deal specifically with firmware, and I asked them what they thought about this. They didn't have any real specific critiques either way about it, but one of them did send me a link to a presentation that someone from Microsoft gave.

And it's about this very thing. So if you're interested in the deep tech of what's going on under the hood, there's a link here in the show notes that you can check out. Excellent. Thanks. Sweet. I will look at that. Yeah. Have either of you guys enabled firmware passwords on your computers? No.

Okay. Well, I have not, but I have dealt with computers where it has been put on it. So then you just threw the computer away because you can't put it. That's about it. So let's see how to frame this.

Long story short, when we came over, when we got spun off as the Cyber Wire as our own company, some of us had computers that had firmware passwords in them. And basically what that meant is if you didn't have that password, that computer is bricked.

Yeah. Yeah. So that was kind of, I mean, it's secure, but... Maybe a little too secure? Well, I mean, it's, I guess that's the trade-off is that it's expensive to, it's kind of a waste to have to throw away a computer that, because you can't get into it.

On the other hand, that's the whole point. Yeah. There kind of is. It's doing what it's supposed to do. Right. Right. Exactly. Out of all the things that we've talked about, that one actually works. Yeah. It does do the job. Yeah. I used to enable it when I would travel. When I'd go on the road, I would just turn it on.

So I knew that, like, yeah, you're not getting into it. So if anybody stole my laptop at the airport, which is the one thing I cared about, it's like, okay. And I chase them down, I get the cops and the cops are like, well, boot in. You know, I'd be like, well, after you, sir thief, you get, you, you boot first.

And then I could come in and swoop in and say, see my computer, not his, take them off to the airport jail, send them to the who's cow. Never had, never had the chance to use it because my laptops have never been stolen. I have done so many security precautions for things that have never happened, most of which have not happened at an airport, which I always expected them to happen.

So, but yeah, that, once you enable the firmware password, you're, you're stuck. Don't make sure you don't put that, or if you, if you do put it somewhere, you know, put that sticky in your shoe and then some, then if somebody steals your shoes, I guess you're screwed. Why is there a sticky in this shoe?

Why is there no sticky in this shoe? All right. Moving on. Do you guys remember Retina X? I do. Yeah. That was the spyware that eventually got hacked. And it was, we talked about it a couple of times and it's, you know, the skeezy software that you can put on your kids or employees phone where you basically have to jailbreak it.

And then it just gives you all of the datas. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they have, uh, they've had a little run in with the FTC and the FTC says, uh, no bueno, no bueno. You are in violation of the, uh, child online privacy protection act and you have not kept your datas as safe as they should have been.

Hence the, the hacking that happened to them. And like other FTC settlements that we've mentioned previously in this episode, these guys got a slap on the wrist and no fine. I was going to ask about that because I, I, I was looking through the article and I couldn't find anything about any sort of money.

There is none. That's why you couldn't find it. I actually looked at the court documents looking for it as well. Nope. They just got set with a bunch of sanctions that said you have to do A, B and C if you ever want to sell this again. And a lot of it is around, well, you, you can't change the name of the app.

You can't have a secret app. It has to say what it is on the tin. If it's a kid, you have to, you know, you basically the parents have to sign off on it. If you, you know, you give it to your nephew, you give, you, you know, give them an Android for Christmas and you put it on there.

Well, then you're breaking the law. And yeah, they've got a bunch of things that are basically just going to kill this company's business, which is, I'm okay with that. I'm fine with that. You know, stalkerware, I don't see a good place for unless it's in a corporate environment where you're actually handing out devices to your employees.

What do you guys think? Well, I think, uh, I'm of two minds of this. Hopefully it will keep other companies or, or make, make other companies think twice before they come out with a product like this, seeing that this is what happens to you if you don't do it right.

Um, it seems as though things like, um, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act kind of make this sort of software hard to implement in the ways that the people who make these types of software would like to implement them. And I think that's a good thing. Um, on the other hand, I, I would, why not hit them with a fine?

I, that would be even, uh, even, an even better way to be a shot across the, the bow to the folks who might do this. Perhaps you can discuss this more on your new podcast about law and policy. We're going to do that again.

Yeah. It just, it seems silly that they're not getting hit with a pretty big fine here. I don't understand why we, we see this time and time again, again, law and policy. It's, it's applied so inconsistently. I don't, I don't understand. Yeah. It would be, it'd be interesting to ask the folks at the FTC what their thought process is for deciding what they go after.

I haven't, I haven't, I've never seen that laid out before. I mean, they're, they must have a reason to choose which tools they want to use. And, um, I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt that it's, but that's getting harder and harder to do. If we only knew a lawyer who knew things like Ben Yellen, maybe we could ask him sometime.

I know, I know. Next week on Security Ha with Ben Yellen. That's right, exactly. Who needs Dave anymore? Oh God. And so I'm, I'm assuming you guys saw the, uh, the Republican revolt this week about the impeachment?

Yeah, I think revolting is the right word. It was fairly revolting. The, the, the, the idiots have taken over the asylum. It's insane. It's insane. Like I, and what other countries are looking at us and laughing at this point. Yeah. Well, so are we, we're in this country.

Yes. So yes, a group of Republicans, uh, decided to go into a skiff, which is, you know, something that is supposed to be secure. And they took their phones with them, which is not something that you should be doing because that's the whole point of it being secure and, oh, and ended up, keep in mind that some of the Republicans that stormed in because they wanted to get access were part of the meeting.

Right. They skipped the meeting to storm into the meeting. Right. Yeah. Right. They, uh, they wanted to make an entrance. Yeah. They, they wanted to, uh, storm into the skiff where they claimed Adam Schiff is holding secret impeachment depositions.

It's the secret impeachment depositions where most of them were invited, allowed to be part of and invited and were welcome to listen in and participate. Uh, shift in the skiff with, uh, uh, I need a rhyming dictionary. I'm screwed.

Not a rapper. And yeah, just, just, just to clarify, skiff stands for sensitive compartmented information facility, which is supposed to be the one place where you don't have things like electronic devices that could be spying on things that happen in the room.

Or even more of more concern is if, uh, one of those phones have been owned by a foreign government. Yep. Right. Right. Which, you know, since those people are high value targets, the likelihood is fairly high that at least one of the people that got in there has a, uh, you know, a phone that has been compromised.

Yeah. Um, so there's, you see a lot when something like this happens, when, when a skiff is, is compromised like this by people who are not security professionals. In other words, not people who have clearances, but politicians, um, you will often see folks who have clearances, uh, rightfully complain that if they did something like this, even

accidentally, there would be consequences. They could lose their jobs. They could lose their, um, clearances. They could, at the very least, there will be a lot of paperwork and, and it just, it won't be fun.

Um, but it is my understanding that when it comes to these sorts of things, the rules are different for politicians than for cleared professionals. And that is why people, you know, by, why Trump's children have security clearances, for example, because.

Yeah. We're seeing the rules being bent for politicians on everything now, apparently from the security of the nation to Twitter. If you're a politician or, or even advertising as it were. Yes. Facebook. The rules do not apply anymore. So guys, we're running for city council. That's it.

That's it. And it's funny. I just want to ask real quick, because, you know, they say that on Facebook, you can only run political ads that have lies in them. Yes. So if I'm running for office, but I want to do an ad about how shitty Zuckerberg is, that would still be a political ad because I'm the politician, right?

Yes. They have to keep that up. Hmm. So we could do a political ad and make up completely insane lies about Zuckerberg. And they would have to keep it up. Okay. I think I found a loophole. That seems to be the case.

Yes. I hope that there are some consequences for these folks from the Sergeant at Arms. I doubt there will be. Yeah. But once again, an erosion of social norms. You know, this is political theater at its worst. Yeah.

And it's embarrassing. It is. It's embarrassing. Yeah. I'm just amazed that the Sergeant at Arms let him through. For starters, I understand why he's, you know, he tried to take their phones and they said no. But isn't that kind of his job?

It is. It is. Stand up to people who are doing things that they're not supposed to do. That's why he has a job. Otherwise, he would just be an usher. Here's your seat, sir. Yeah. Might I get you some malware with that? Yeah. And I don't know.

I mean, I'm trying to remember. I have vague recollections of, you know, throughout our history, Sergeant at Arms calling the police and having, you know, the Capitol police and having people hauled away in handcuffs. I don't know. If only. If only. If only.

Well, we've got something more here from the EFF. They have decided to go to Congress and call on support for an implementation of DNS over HTTPS with the greatest acronym of all time. Dope!

Only reason you kept that story in. Only reason I kept this story. Dope! Nice. Can you just imagine security folks walking around and saying, hey, Bob, have you enabled? Dope! Dope! Oh, it comes with free donuts.

It comes with free donuts. Oh, yeah. So, why are they going to Congress about implementing this? This seems like a, was it a internet task force issue instead of a Congressional issue. Mm-hmm.

I suppose maybe pushing to make it be a standard, just publicity. Just publicity. Yeah. Okay. That's what I was wondering. Yeah. Yeah. So, I included another link here. When I saw this story, it rang a bell with me that I had spoken with someone about this on Cyber Wire.

And it turns out, Johannes Ulrich and I talked about this almost a year ago when I think it was Firefox that was the first browser to enable this. Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. And Johannes kind of had mixed feelings about it. He says the problem for enterprise is that this takes away your visibility of what's going on with DNS.

So, if someone's going to, you know, sites that are known malicious sites, you don't have the visibility into DNS anymore that you used to have. Interesting. Yeah.

So, I included a link to, that goes directly to that segment. It's from about a year ago. So, I don't know. It's quite possible that Johannes' views have changed on it since then. But, if you want some perspective, there's a little clip there where he and I talk about this very thing.

Excellent. Excellent. We'll give that a listen for sure. And this next one I thought was very interesting. The BBC News has started to mirror their main international news site on tour. Okay. I think this is a good thing. What do you guys think?

I agree. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. Because, you know, a lot of people want the news from the BBC, which generally has good coverage. Yep. Yep. You know, it's no Al Jazeera, which I think is still, I don't know if it's still the best because they've unfortunately been pulled from my cable provider. I remember watching, I would watch Al Jazeera America all day because they had some of the best reporting for global news.

Yeah. So, now we just get, we get the BBC. But this is good for people who are in places where their networks are sniffed by the government and they're not allowed to look at other news organizations. So, I think this is actually a pretty good step for the BBC and it can't cost all that much.

Oh, can't really. No, I like it. Spin up another server, right? Yeah. Mirror your content. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see if any other news organizations follow with this and what the next volley will be if anybody, you know, any of these countries that they're targeting or trying to be able to get into how they respond.

Yeah. I mean, I know Facebook had a version of Facebook on tour for a while. I don't know if it's still up, but they were trying to, they had like a light version of Facebook on tour. So, I don't know. Interesting. It seems like a very simple thing for most news organizations to do.

But, we'll see how this goes. I like it. I'm in. I'm all in. And this last one was just some good news. Apple Watch saved a woman from sexual assault in her own apartment. So, it's a scary case from Canada. Canada, Brian.

Be careful. Be careful when you move up there. A man broke into this woman's apartment and took her phone away from her nightstand when she was taking a nap. And when she woke up, the guy was there and was going to, you know, do nefarious things to her. And she remembered that she still had her Apple Watch on.

So, she used her Apple Watch to text her boyfriend and got him to call the police. And this guy has since been arrested and is facing charges. Now, I'm not sure I believe this because I have an Apple Watch and you cannot text off these things. Other than using the pre-canned stuff, thanks, on my way, blah, blah, blah.

No way was she able to text a full message from her watch. Have you never used, you haven't done that before? I've done it. No. You basically dictate to your watch. It's not a pain in the ass. You just dictate the text to your watch and it goes. Did she dictate it then? She had to have. She must have, right?

There's no other way to do it. Right. Okay. But yeah, you can whisper into your watch and it'll Dick Tracy that shit and it'll send off a text. All right. Okay. Fair enough. Hopefully, obviously, the Siri interpretation was correct then. Otherwise, boyfriend might have gotten like, go store bag call.

Which is how a lot of the texts that people send me that way come in. No, definitely. But I mean, the guy did think that it was a joke. So, she had to send multiple texts. Right. Okay. Well, fair enough. It did work. Yeah. A couple of things caught my eye about this. The guy who broke into her apartment did so by cloning her pass key.

Yeah. I saw that too. That was great. Take it in. Yeah. Her pass key and her apartment room key. Right. Right. Criminals are becoming more and more tech savvy. Like, to even think to pull the phone away. Right? Like, and then cloning the keys. And yeah, that's pretty crazy. Well, you know.

Miss the watch though. This reminds me. I was getting a key made recently at my local Home Depot. And, you know, the new key cutting machines, they just take a picture of your key and carve it from that.

We sounded the alarm a while ago. Maybe three or four years ago on this show. Five years ago. Yeah, five years. Yeah, a company launched. I know we talked about it before. Yeah, a company that launched that basically just did that. And I was like, what? And then you pay with your credit card so they can match it to your address.

This is insane. Yeah. It was an iPhone app. You basically use your phone, take a picture of your keys, send them the pictures with your credit card information and your home address. Yeah. Oh, I see. Right. Yeah. It's insane. Like, what sane person would ever do this?

Yeah. But it made me wonder, could that be the way that this bad guy got the key to her apartment? If they're co-workers and she leaves her keys laying around somewhere, as you do, does he just walk by, take a picture, and then have a key made? Yeah. Could be.

But I think the – it sounded to me like it was like he cloned, like, an electronic key fob for apartment access. Right. To get into the building and then a key to get into the actual door. Yeah. He cloned the swipe card and then got the key.

So he probably did work with her, I'm guessing, or at least had close access to her purse. Because if he had to clone the actual swipe card, that takes a minute. The key, yeah. Now we know we can just take a picture of it and get that done in a minute or two. Or even – I don't know if you guys have these.

My local grocery store now, I can walk in there and they have a machine that I stick a key in and then I just – they make a key right there from the machine and spit it right out. So you only need like a minute or two with the physical key. Yeah. Boom. You don't have to even talk to anybody or, you know, there's no record or trail of it.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Wow. Except for your payment. I think mine has a cash slot on it. Check next time. I'm going to. I'm going to check, too. Tomorrow morning, yeah. Because I'm pretty sure – I know I walked past one when I went to the store the other day and I know it had a credit card. I just didn't see if there was a cash slide in.

Yeah. I walk past it every morning, but I actually do need to get some keys made, so maybe I'll give it a shot. Well, and it's not hard to buy a credit card gift card, so. Mm-hmm. Yeah, you can buy that at the checkout. Same store, yes. And walk over and use that to clone a key.

Well, I have to say related to this story that I am getting an Apple Watch for Christmas this year. Woo-hoo! I have decided I was resisting. In fact, a couple years ago, my wife bought me an Apple Watch and I returned it because I just wasn't interested.

And I had stopped wearing watches a few years ago and I was just comfortable not having anything on my wrists. But I have to say this new version of the watch that keeps an eye on your heart and all that stuff and falling down, I will embrace the old part of the grumpy old geeks.

I have to say that now that I am right in the middle of the heart attack zone in terms of my age, my middle-aged guy, I just feel like, hey, I can afford this. Why not have a device keeping an eye telling me, you know what?

There's something going on with your heart. You might want to just head over to the ER. And I have to say also, I don't know if you guys heard Joe Kerrigan's story about what happened with his wife. They posted a podcast episode about that over on Things Joe Hates.

It's a happy ending, but I recommend everybody listen to it because there's a lot of really good information in there about what happens when you have a cardiac event, what doesn't happen when you have a cardiac event, and why so many people don't make it through their cardiac events.

Joe and Lisa, his wife, are extraordinarily lucky. She made it through. She's fine. I actually saw both of them last night. So happy ending there. But I don't know. I just figure, why not? I've gotten used to it.

I was in the exact same space as you. My wife got it for me as a present as well, and I've gotten very used to wearing a watch again. I hadn't for a very long time. I will say, I don't know about you specifically, but my wife got me the one with the cellular access, and I do not use that.

I shut that off basically immediately because it's $10 a month or whatever extra above your phone. And I found that I almost always have my phone with me anyways, and if I don't have my phone with me, I don't need to make a phone call. Yeah, I'm thinking the same thing. I don't see a real use case for that for me either.

Yeah. Yeah. How else do you find yourself using it? What are the main things you use it for? Mostly for exercise, tracking my bike rides, tracking how many steps I take a day, all that sort of stuff. I find it very useful for that. Other than that, not too much else really.

I like it for weather. I like it for being able to check the text that I'm getting in quickly without having to pull out my phone or respond just to see what's going on. So it's really helpful for all of that sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I don't use it for any of that. What do you use it for?

Mine is basically I have notifications from my security cameras, my Ring, and my Logitech cameras. So if there's any movement for those, I get sent a notification on those. I have a nice app called Tap to Record. So if I want to do voice memos, it's just one tap and it goes and it syncs between the phone and iCloud.

So if I'm out and I need to just make a quick voice memo, it's easier than using the voice memo app. Timers, galore. Always use it for timers. And just to have my calendar. So if I know what's coming up, then it just gives me a quick alert for stuff.

The main thing, though, I got to say is now playing. So if I'm out for a walk or doing anything, I use the now playing complication to be able to adjust the volume on my headphones or skip to the next track or skip 15 or 20 seconds either way. Yeah, that's pretty useful. So that's the – actually, now playing is like 90% of the use.

Honestly, it's a remote control from my phone when I'm listening to podcasts or audiobooks. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm going to make the plunge, and so I guess we can check in sometime in January on that. That is on my – it's on my list from Santa Claus.

Excellent, yeah. We'll see. Hopefully, I don't drop dead between now and then. Well, if not, Ben Yellen on Security Hot next week. How quickly – yeah, how quickly they forget. How quickly they move on. Well, we'll do a nice memoriam section.

Don't you worry about it. I appreciate that. You know, at the very least – If only he got that watch earlier. Yeah, right, right. We could have done a Kickstarter or something. If he wouldn't have waited for that Christmas sale, he would have just been with us. Yeah, you know, I have to make it to the last Star Wars movie.

Yes. There you go. At the very least. At the very least. All right, guys. All right, gentlemen. See you next week. Maybe. Well, the Nest doorbells, the rings, whatever they're calling them these days, they're everywhere now.

And I just hate the sound of the ring. I can't stand it. And I always wondered why. Remember, ring is Amazon. Nest is Google. Oh, there you go. They're different things. Yep. Completely different products. Well, I don't have either. So what do I know? Well, Nest is doing something cool.

They're unleashing seasonal ringtones for Halloween. They came out as of yesterday, I believe, which is kind of fun. So instead of the standard ringtone, visitors will hear a rotating cast of characters that include a cackling witch, a ghost, a vampire, and a scary monster anytime they ring your doorbell.

This feature also works on Nest smart displays if you enable the visitor announcements functionality. I think that's great. You know what I think would be even better? If you could do your own. But, of course, nobody lets you do that stuff anymore. Yeah, that would be so much fun. That would definitely be so much fun. But, yeah, because the ring doorbells suck.

Yes, I hate those. Yeah, because the funny thing is, I mean, you can't hear it outside. You have to find this little thing or you have to buy this little device that goes in your house that's just a little speaker with some antennas on it. And there's, like, I'd say about a two to three second lag from when somebody presses the button to when the ring actually starts.

Right. Which is supremely annoying. They do have one, though, that when I'm really feeling cheeky and want to scare the shit out of people, there's one that has dogs barking, which in turn sets off my actual dogs. Right. Which then, you know, you get into this, you know, downward spiral of barking and scares the crap out of people that are coming by.

Because they just hear these little ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff, and then bam, bam chimes in and the windows start shaking. Right. It's great. Speaking of Google, though, and their devices, Spotify is giving premium subscribers a free Google Home Mini. Now, this isn't the new Nest Google Mini or Nest Mini, whatever it is.

They're getting rid of their old stock. Yeah, they're getting rid of old stock here, basically. Yeah, that's what it is. Because they said it's, you know, until supplies run out, which means that they're, yeah, they're just clearing warehouse space out right now. But I went and did it. It took me five minutes, and now I have a Google Home Mini on the way. So I'm like, I've got to keep it in the garage, but it'll be something to test, and it's free.

So I already pay for Spotify when I get free swag. I suppose you're right. I don't really want this because I have my infrastructures that I like already, and I'm locked into them, but it is free. I can always just give it away. Well, what I really want to try is Alexa really sucks at the basics, like, you know, trying to figure out what time the local store is open.

I'm like, what time does Petco open? And Alexa sucks at that. Siri is okay sometimes, but you still have to pick the one that it's going to tell you. It's like, I found 17 Petcos. Which one do you want to go to? The close one. The fucking closest one, you idiot. Yeah.

But I want to give this a shot. I haven't delved into the Google Home stuff. I do have a Nest thermostat, but I want to try this voice stuff, see if it's any good. Cool. Yeah, I'll sign up and get a free one, too. Why not? Better hurry. Supplies are limited.

Supplies are limited, because we have discontinued these. Speaking of the ladies in the tubes and new products, my Amazon Fire TV Cube came the other day. And? I set it up. It was very quick, very easy to set up. And it controls my TV.

It works. It works. It does what it's supposed to. It does what it says on the tin. I'm very happy about it, except for one thing. Oh, shit. Yep. Here we go. They don't have all the channel lineups in their system yet. So I was able to set myself up.

I was able to get a charter spectrum. But then it gave me the... You should get one of these. It gave me the option of the Manhattan Beach or the Woodland Hills lineups, neither of which match my channel lineup. So I cannot get my channel lineup, which means I have to tell it to change channels by the number.

I can't just say the channel that I want to watch. Oh, God. Okay. So kind of a glaring problem there that I'm hoping they're addressing. You know, there's no customer support anywhere, but I was able to see on forums that millions of people around the country are screaming, going, how come you don't have more channel lineups?

So I'm hopefully... Hopeful that they will be working on that soon, because it would be very nice to be able to just say, put on the Food Network. And it would. Everything else is working swimmingly. It is exactly... It does exactly what I wanted it to do. Okay. Yeah. I'm looking at the back of it right now, and I'm going to tell you right now, it does not do what I want it to do.

So you've only got... You've got a micro USB port, an infrared port, an HDMI port, and a power port. Yeah. That means I can't plug it into the optical connector on my soundbar, which is what I really want. I want to be able to control my soundbar. That says it controls the soundbar as well.

Okay. It asked me if I wanted to set up a soundbar. Interesting. Okay. I think it just uses the IR blaster for it. Oh, that means I got to put it in a place where I can see it. Okay. I was just hoping to get... Yeah. We'll see. Maybe. How much was this thing?

I don't know. Click on the damn link, you lazy bastard. $119. I was on the link. I thought you'd... You're staring right at it. You just bought one. You should know, you fucker. Anyway. Okay. Well... $119. Yeah. Yeah. I really... It does work. I'm pretty impressed by it so far. Finally.

The only other thing that I had to do is because I've got the show in the kitchen and the kitchen and the TV are near each other, I had to use different wake words. Otherwise, they would get confused. Okay. That's all right, though. I just control my TV by saying computer. Yeah. Okay.

And everything else uses a different one. And dying technology. This week, my Apple time capsule finally bit the dust. Yeah. I was very sad about that because it was super easy for me to do backups and everything like that. Restores weren't that easy, though, as you found out.

No. No. So, there you go. So, hello, Eero. I've got an Eero now. It works perfectly. It's great. The app is great. The ability to control everything is great. I like the fact that I can set up what I've considered to be my son's devices.

It's not useful yet. But, you know, when he's a bit older, I can basically just shut off internet access to his devices and leave it on for everybody else. Awesome. Yep. Pretty cool stuff. So, very impressed by all that. Unfortunately, the bigger bullet that I have to bite and buy is now.

Well, I'm probably going to have to get a Synology system, which is going to put me back almost a grand. Yeah, but it's worth it. I'm telling you right now. It's so expensive. This Apple time capsule dying is costing me a lot of money. Well, you could just get a, you know, a $75 USB drive and plug it in.

You could always do that. No, you cannot because there's no USB port in the back of the Eero. No, I'm not talking about the Eero. You just plug it into your computer when you want a backup. But I don't want to do that. I don't want physical. Come on. Okay. Well, then shut up. With what? With what ports on my MacBook?

That's true. Well, then shut up and shell out the cash. I'm planning on it. And I saw this one. I just thought this was funny. Adobe has released an Alexa skill called, what was it called again? Let me try it. Where's the damn name of this? The Inspiration Engine for Adobe, which is offering, you know, anybody that needs a helping hand to get their ideas going, they will give you inspirational quotes from thinkers such as Jessica Walsh, Pascal Campion, or Wei-Tang Ma.

I don't know any of those people. Plus, exercises that teach you to use your senses and take cues from your environment to kickstart your project. I wonder what would happen if I asked it, why the hell can't I just buy a damn Photoshop and I hate your subscription model? Speaking of, I had to buy the photo package this week because I upgraded to Catalina and Lightroom does not work with Catalina, even though I've been spending money on it since

since Lightroom 1, I bought every single upgrade and I was up to Lightroom 6 and yep, you know, basically install Catalina. No bueno. Big red, big red, you can't open this like logo across the icon.

I'm like, fuck. Okay. So fortunately, a friend of the show MXV has just, had just went through this thing before and he told me about the Lightroom and Photoshop bundle that they have. So you can get. That's exactly what I have as well as the cheapest option and really, I just use Photoshop at this point.

So there you go. Oh, well, I've got, you know, multiple terabytes of photography and, you know, hundreds of thousands of images. So getting rid of Lightroom is tough. There was another program that I was trying to use that I talked about a while ago, but I ended up not doing it because it's just the migration was such a pain.

The thing about it though, I was really hoping that because now Lightroom Classic is like version eight, the one thing you still can't do with Lightroom, which if you have a Synology like I do, drives you mad. You cannot load a catalog from a network drive. I'm like, why?

It's just like a mounted hard drive. Why can I, I can, I can have all my stuff on an external USB drive, which is what I do, but a network drive that looks just like a hard drive to my system. I can't load a Lightroom catalog from that. Don't fuck yourself.

So, and unfortunately it was, uh, yeah, $119.88 a year. So it was about 11 cents cheaper than your fire cube. So I'm going to have to wait for a while to get the fire cube because I just got raped by Adobe and had to shell out another 120 bucks.

It's, you know, it's still not a bad deal considering how much Photoshop used to cost. So, and Lightroom, I was spending 70 bucks a month, or I mean, 70 bucks a year, just upgrading Lightroom every time. So it comes out in the wash, I guess, or this is just reverse justification because I'm so mad at it.

Yeah. I'm just trying to make myself feel better anyway. And this one I saw, and I just had to put it in here. This will end well. Scientists train rats to drive little cars to get treats. Well, you know, we already had the rat in New York.

That's the pizza rat. Now he can drive his car to go get, get a slice. He doesn't have to wait for someone to drop it. I know. I know. And, you know, just, just wait, just wait. You know, we're going to have rat Ubers and, uh, Rubers, Rubers. And, uh, so they got, they made these little cars.

They're very cute. And, uh, they put fruit loops on one side of the course and the, the damn rats learned how to drive to go get their fruit loops. Unfortunately, all these rats are going to be out of a job once the self-driving rat cars come along. Yeah. We're going to have self-driving rats. Oh my God.

Go watch the videos. It's funny. They're very funny. I found a ton of articles for bric-a-brac this week. And these are, these are good reads for, uh, sitting on the crapper or waiting at the doctor's office or just when you have some time to kill.

I found, uh, this went over at Bloomberg. I just took the world's first 20 hour flight. Here's what it did to me by Angus Whitley. Destroyed your will to live. This is a crazy one. This is a crazy one because this is, they're testing out this Qantas run from New York to Sydney.

And I'm like, you know what? Give me the layover. I would take a layover. Even if I were sitting in first class, I would take a layover. Yeah. You had, they had to get up and do exercises because they had doctors on board. And it's basically, this was a bare bones flight with like 12 people because they're, the planes aren't ready yet.

They're not right. This is like, you know, they're, they're getting ready for this. So this, they had like nothing. They had just enough fuel to get there. No luggage, just enough food to get you through. And apparently they even had to cut back on the beverages. So I'm like, if I'm on a 20 hour flight, I need beverages.

A lot. I think you just give me the beverages and I'll actually end up drinking less because I will pass out at some point. Yeah, seriously. Okay. You get a bottle of makers. You get a bottle of makers. What do you want? Yeah. Just give everybody a bottle of whiskey. You're done. Exactly. Everybody passes out.

They don't have to get up and do their, their silly exercises. There's just, you know, you have to talk, you have to have a slow rollout. So everybody isn't peeing at the same time, but it sounds miserable. Oh God. I like when I was living in London, I was just flying back, flying back and forth between LA and London.

And that's just an 11 hour flight. And it is miserable. Yeah. I think the longest I did was, uh, LA to Hong Kong. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. That's quite a flight. I did that. Well, we stopped over in Japan when we did our Asia trip. So it wasn't quite as horrific. I wish I, I saw Japan from the plane.

They're like, look down, there's Tokyo. I'm like, can we stop? I want to pick up some of those funky Kit Kats. Reach your hand up and pull on the string for the bell. Ding, ding. I want to get off here. No doubt. And, uh, but yeah, it was fun to at least see Japan, but, uh, yeah, that flight was long, long.

Yeah. That was the first flight I've ever been on where they had cameras all over the outside of the plane. Oh yeah. That's so cool. Isn't it? Oh my God. Just watching it. It's fun. I'm the, cause the guy that was by the window wouldn't open the window. Cause he was still sleeping. He's like, I'm sleeping. I'm like, well, I want it. That is my first time in China.

And I just pulled it up and I'm like flipping through all the webcams. I'm like, okay, this is actually cool. Nevermind. Sleep on. So that was fun. So, but yeah, 20 hour flight. No, thank you. So check it out. If you want to see what the future of travel holds. And I found this one over at NPR.

We tracked down a fake news creator in the suburbs. Here's what we learned. Oh, this one made me angry because this is a guy who's saying that I wanted to show how easy it is to make fake news and then profit from it. Yeah.

You know, your Don Quixote-esque antics here, buddy, do not track one bit, one bit, multiple companies just generating fake news and crapping in the well, but it's, it's worth a read just to see how these people rationalize the bullshit that they do.

Right. So if you're in the mood to get mad, go for that one. Yeah. I skipped that one because I wasn't. Yeah. Now, if you're in the mood to get sad, here's another one. Evolution tells us we might be the only intelligent life in the universe by Nick Longrich. No, I don't believe it.

Yeah. See, this is the thing about this is it's like, you know, just saying that everything that has happened to make us us and to actually be here is so improbably improbable that it's probably not going to happen anywhere else, which I do find hard to swallow.

Me too. I, I just don't think that that math works out given how vast the universe actually is. We barely even know how big the universe is. Exactly. We just know that we are, you know, we're basically living in a Petri dish. We can't get anywhere else. So in the, in the long, you know, the long view of everything doesn't really matter.

It doesn't really matter because the reality is because the universe is so vast and we can't get anywhere, even with our warp speeds, as we heard about a couple of shows ago, if there, if there are intelligent life, life out there, we're never going to be able to talk to them anyways. Yep. So why bother? I know it's an, it's a fun thought experiment, but you know, that's why we have sci-fi.

You go there in your mind. You're not going to go there physically. So unless, you know, the people from contact to get in touch with us and then, you know, we get the little, you get the little pods that we can zip around the planets on. Somebody get on that wormhole thing. Come on. And I've got another one from Buzzfeed news.

The 2010s broke our sense of time. Much like the 20 hour flight. It more broke my will to live. See? Yeah, that too. That too. The problem with this article, I bet it's a really good article. Did you look, did you load this article, Brian?

This is like 1990s web design. This is, this is seizure inducing. There should have been a warning on it. You can't read this article. It's impossible. Some lovely gifts and animations in there, but it's horrible. Yeah. The one thing that I can't do when I'm trying to read words is have the entire page flashing at me.

I'm like, okay, welcome to my space. Thank you very much. Reader, reader view is good for this one. So check it out. If you can get past the graphics, if you have epilepsy, skip it. We don't want to be responsible for your seizure. And I finally have two articles from the next web, how to stop Google from stealing your data after you die and how to stop Facebook from stealing your data after you die.

They're just quick how to's on how to set up those different systems. So when you do kick the bucket, which who cares about your data at that point, you can, you can do whatever with it. I set them both up. I went through and did it both so that it would delete my data after you die.

And I didn't notice anything particularly fishy with Google. However, I do want to read this exact text from Facebook when I did it. Okay. And you let me know if you, if you catch the weird, weird inconsistency here, it says delete account after death.

You've requested to have your account permanently deleted after death. Once someone lets us know you've passed away, no one will be able to see your profile again. If you want friends and family to be able to visit your profile and share memories in the future, you can choose to keep your Facebook account. Okay. Did you catch the thing yet? No. Delete it after death.

And then they say, once you passed away, no one will be able to see your profile. It does not say we have deleted your data. It says we have set visibility to zero. Does it not? Set visibility to death. Yes. It does not say you're deleting your account at all in any way, shape or form.

It just says your visibility will be set to zero. That is very appropriate and very intentional wording on their part. And very deep when you want to go down that path. My soul has been set visibility zero. Yep. Okay.

Well, enjoy. I've just... I mean, I'm dead. You let me know. Once I passed away, you let me know if they actually deleted my account. I'm not sure how you're going to let me know, but we'll figure that out later. Posing shout outs!

Congrats to LAFC for beating the LA Galaxy in the postseason El Trafico last night. I am a Galaxy guy, you know, because they have the most championships of any LA team in any sport. But I guess go LAFC. I like that it's called El Trafico because that's what you're stuck in, oh, after you leave the stadium, oh, because there's too many people, oh.

That is why they called it that. Really? Yes. It's a very tongue-in-cheek. It's because you have to drive across town to get there. So, yeah. Until next time. I think somebody had a sense of humor. Nice. Yes. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

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