391: Chief Tomfoolery Officer

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, I want to announce the feed change once more times. Once mores agains. When's that going to happen again?

It's going to happen over the weekend. It'll happen by the next show. So the reason we took this week off or the Wednesday episode off was because I needed the time to get everything in order with moving things around and cleaning things up and putting the Art19 players on the website, which is an ongoing fun thing to do.

So it happens when you're on episode 391. Oh, Jesus Christ. Tell me about it. Yeah. So I've been working on the website and stuff like that and working on the back end to get everything going. But when the feed change happens, there will only be 10 episodes in the feed for a little while. So now's your chance. If you want to go back and download the whole back catalog, please be my guest right now.

Be our guest. Be our guest. Put your podcaster to the test. Yes. While we're still getting free bandwidth. We appreciate that. Yes. Now is the time to get to your full catalog, please. Exactly. And if you get it in Overcast, you can't star all 391 episodes. Anyway, so yeah, that's coming. And we appreciate everybody setting their podcast player to only download the latest few episodes.

That would be fantastic for us because chances are everything in the feed is going to look like it's new again. So we apologize for that. There's just nothing we can do. This is one of the podcasting foibles that when you change hosting providers, it just screws you. And there's nothing we can do. Sorry about it.

Yep. It is what it is. So, Brian, did you get your free Google Mini from Spotify yet? No. Okay. I have to be honest. I didn't bother. I was too busy fixing all the things that I already had that were broken to get something new to throw in. Okay. Yeah. I figured why. I mean, I was like, okay, yeah, it's completely free. But, you know, I don't need things that are completely free. And I don't need a Google Mini.

Well, I wanted to try it and mine shipped and was delivered. But since I haven't bought anything from Google in a very long time, it was, of course, delivered to my old home address in Downers Grove, Illinois. Oh. Whoever's living there has just been getting a bounty of random items.

She finally emailed me a couple months ago saying, we get stuff for you all the time because I'm on all these mailing lists from publishers that they send me books and stuff. Right. And I know she's gotten a couple of nice blue apron boxes because before I moved, I screwed up and sent those there. But yeah, my Google Mini was delivered. But a couple months ago when she wrote to me, I'm like, you know what? If anybody can't do their due diligence and change the address like I've asked them to, well then screw them.

You can keep it. You can keep it. You can give it away. You can recycle it. Do what you want to with it. Well, now she's got a free Google Mini. Shit. Well, now I wish I would have gotten it because then I could have given you mine. But oh well. That's why I was asking if you got yours because I was going to try and steal it from you.

Steal it. You could, you know, I'd give it to you in a bag. It's all yours. I have no interest in getting into the Google infrastructure in my house. Kind of like the bag of Echoes that I gave you. Yes, which is still sitting in my closet because I don't need that many Echoes. Of course you do, man. You got to have one in the shower. You got to have one next to the pot.

You got to have one in the closet. Google or a... You've been to my place. It's not, you know, I live by the beach. It's not very big. That's true. Alexa, where's my belt? You know? Yeah. Find that. So in continuing follow-up, the death spiral of Gawker Media and the ongoing kind of autopsies that are going on about it, it's big news because, you know, it's a big journalistic site that bit the dust.

There's a really good long-form article that kind of gets into what happened and why it happened, at least from the perspective of one of the journalists there named Megan Greenwald, and it's called The Adults in the Room. So she's basically stating it's not dead because it's failed. It's dead because it was murdered by a vindictive billionaire and there existed no legal infrastructure to protect it.

Now, this is a bit hyperbolic. I don't believe that this was a terrifying blow to freedom, as she does, but it wasn't good. A shocking number of other journalists said the site deserved it. They should have had more decorum, should have been less rude, should have placated the right people instead of making fun of them.

And then she points out, though, what they don't say and what they're still not saying was that Gawker made journalism better through inspiring new publications and through pushing the legacy ones to be more interesting. They don't say that Gawker unionizing made conditions better across the industry. I agree with that point 100%.

And they don't say that the company's websites were consistently profitable and beloved by readers, that the business model published stories that people wanted to read, supported by advertising, worked exactly as it was intended to. And she's also correct about that. Say what you will about Gawker Media and all the sites that they had.

They worked and they made money. Yeah, and, you know, I like the, just the little dig in here. It's like, okay, Gawker sucked, so other media outlets came online to fill the void of good journalism. You know, they pushed people into better journalism by being bad.

Right. I like that part. Yeah, I didn't shed a tear for Gawker. I'm sorry. I'm not a fan. Not a fan at all. I'm not a fan either of Gawker, but I'm not a fan of what they're replacing it with. Oh, yeah, that too. But definitely not a fan of Peter Thiel in that instance.

Yeah, there you go. And we all know by now that, of course, Google has snapped up Fitbit and who we say, to what end? And to which we know the answer, to your data, even though they claim that they won't. So they, obviously, the acquisition immediately raised concerns about data privacy.

And, you know, health and wellness data is pretty personal. And Google's been up front about this and said, well, we're not going to use any of that data for Google ads. However, they did not specify any other aspects of the giant Google empire that they would or would not use this data for.

This acquisition is also giving more fodder to regulators who are already scrutinizing Google about whether the company is too big and should be broken up. They've said in a blog post that this is basically just, we have this great, nobody knows about this awesome operating system that we have called Wear OS.

And this will bring it to the masses and everybody will rejoice. And that's really the only reason that they did this. But, you know, we don't know what Google's going to do with this data. We don't know how they're going to, what they're going to use it with. We just know right now that it's not going to be used to target your ads. Could it be used to influence your search results, to suggest restaurants in your neighborhood, to build new health products, to make calendar invite suggestions?

There are all kinds of things that Google does with data that basically they haven't said that they're not going to use it for. So it's a bit of a worry. And the idea here is, of course, the 25 million active users of Fitbit knew Fitbit was getting their data and they were kind of OK with it because Fitbit had a relatively decent track record about keeping data private and not using it in various ways.

Google does not have that track record. Well, here's the thing. I got another article over on ZDNet, which basically makes the entire point moot. Fitbit is doomed! Why everything Google buys turns to garbage! So, here's the thing.

Google might have your data from Fitbit, but it doesn't matter because in the long run, Fitbit's just going to go away. It will be Nest wearables, and then it will be Google wearables, and then it will just go away. Because Google has a horrendous track record of buying up things and killing them, either through shutting them down or just sheer incompetence.

Yeah, gross mismanagement. Yeah. So I'm not too worried about my Fitbit data going to Google because, honestly, I don't have a lot of data there except steps. That's it. I've got a dumb bit. Yes. It literally distracts me. You use as many devices as possible for every different thing approached to life.

Well, I have to because I hate wrist-based walking trackers. Fitbit is the only viable option that is decent. So I have to. I'm fine with that. I'm actually thinking about going and buying a backup. Just in case they stop selling it because now that Google's taken over.

I'm sure it's like their least popular model. And it's the last one. It's the last in line. So before they do destroy the company. And, I mean, granted, here's the deal. You know, it's a couple years. They'll kill it off. Whatever. At least I get a couple more years after the merger of Fitbit.

Because Fitbit was probably going to be dead anyway soon. Certainly on the consumer end, they were definitely looking to pivot that way, just to be B2B or healthcare. Yeah. So I look at the Google acquisition as a plus for me. It's a lifeline. Yeah, because I get to track my steps. It's fantastic.

So we'll stick with that one. I'm looking on the bright side here. And how much more does Google need for me? That's why, like, my mind is boggled here. There's not that much data that they can get that they don't already have out of the Fitbit thing. Right. They've already got your data from your phones, from your browsers.

They know where you're at. They know what you're doing. It doesn't really matter. You know, it's not like there's some magical thing in the Fitbit data that is something that's like, oh, wait. Okay, he had an elevated heart rate around noon. Oh, great. We know when he goes to sleep. Well, probably within the standard range of when most people go to sleep would be my guess.

Yeah. Yeah. So, whatever. I think this is just, I don't know. I just think this is silly. People getting caught up in that. But that's just my two cents. And a little more than two cents. I saw this over at the New York Times. I loved it. Why $4.5 billion from big tech won't end California housing crisis?

Because $405 billion isn't going to end the California housing crisis. Yeah, $4.5 trillion won't. Yeah. No. It's crazy because Apple jumped in this week with they're putting in, I think, $2.5 billion on top of Facebook's billion dollars and Microsoft's $500 million.

But Microsoft is, theirs is for Seattle, not California. Well, and it should be pointed out that Apple's isn't for all of California. It's purely for Northern California. Yeah. And I believe Facebook's is as well, isn't it? Yeah. Nothing down here. Yeah. I mean, we've got our own crap going on down here, but we like to spread out down here.

They just don't have as much land as we do. So the interesting thing about the article is it's like, okay, well, we want to build places for people to live, but the people who live in these places already don't want us to. Hey, I'm here, guys.

Don't knock down my house. Yeah. This is a very Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy proposition. It really is. We've got to build a roadway here. Sorry about your planet. Yeah. So right now, sorry about your shopping mall, because they knocked down the Valco shopping mall and they were going to put up 2,400 apartments on the site.

And of course, people in the neighborhood said, no, we don't want to get all of our stuff from Amazon. We would like to go to the mall. We would have liked to have gone to the mall, but 2,400 apartments means that's a lot more people. That's a lot more traffic. And are you going to help build the infrastructure and the roads to handle that? Everybody's just going to take birds.

It's fine. That's right. Birds everywhere. Birds of word. It doesn't snow up there. You can ride birds year round. Oh, God. So it's interesting. Yeah. I mean, this is it's a nice gesture. I like that they're doing it. It's not going to solve the problem. But you know what? Sometimes you don't need to solve the entire problem.

Sometimes you need to make a dent in it, which is fine. Jason, when we started doing this podcast six years ago, I had in no stretch of any imagination would have thought that we'd spend so much time talking about city planning and the need for it. That's kind of true, isn't it? We started off figuring out why people are making millions selling boner pills.

Yeah. And now we're going, you can't just do this to a city without planning. I know. I'm with the HOAs on this one. What? Who are you? What has happened to you? Next week on Grumpy Old Real Estate Developers. In the news.

And speaking of our new show title, let's talk about Airbnb. They've suffered a defeat in Jersey City. Uh-oh. Bum-bum-bum. Bum-bum-bum. Apparently, Jersey City had 3,000 Airbnb listings. That seems like a lot. That's quite a lot.

That's quite a lot. Yeah. How many people are going to Jersey City? I know. I didn't know it was really a hotbed of tourism out there. What's going on over there? We're going to take the wife and kids and we're going to Jersey City. Well, it's like you take the wife and kids and you come back with just the kids because that's the best place to bury your wife because we know New Jersey is just, it's just the world's largest graveyard.

Right. Yeah, I don't know where she went. She went out to go get a scone and then that's the last time I saw her. What you going to do? Me and the kids, we're going back to Florida. Bye. That's your New Jersey? Okay. That's my visiting Jersey guy, I guess. I don't know. You got to work on that one a bit.

Oh, man. Patreon.com slash GOG so I can go take voice lessons. Appreciate it. So it's good. People are standing up to these guys. Will it matter? Who knows? Probably not. I mean, the problem with taking like a show off is I don't even remember. Did we talk about the huge scam that was running on Airbnb on our last show or did that happen?

Yes, we did. In between our show. Okay, good. Okay. No, we did talk about that. Yes. At least in my brain, we did. In my brain, we definitely did because I talked about it with everybody else. Yeah, that's the thing about these things. I read them and I don't know if they go in the show notes or I just read them and they go away.

As soon as we're done with the show, we both promptly forget everything we just said. Oh, yeah. That's the way it works. My wife comes home and goes, how's your show? What did you talk about? I'm like, no idea. I can't remember. No idea. So good on Jersey City for sticking up for themselves. All right. Because it's basically what they're trying to do is just get out these, you know, people who own big buildings and trying to just sell them out on Airbnb.

Right. So Uber is entering the ads business. Oh, joy. Woo! Woo! Because, you know, every other business isn't doing so well. So they're going to start selling ads inside of their Eats app. I just kind of assumed that they already did that.

Yeah, I guess not. That people were paying for preferential placement. Apparently not. Apparently not. All right. And here's the thing. I thought Uber had consolidated all their apps into the Uber app. I guess not. I guess not. Yeah. I thought there was just an Eats section in the Uber app now, but I guess I was wrong.

No, actually, you're wrong. I used it the other day. Oh, okay. Well, there you go. Answers that question. So, yeah, they're just going to start selling ads in there, which, you know, I, is that a problem? I honestly don't see that as a problem. I, I, I, again, like I said, I assume that that's what they were already doing.

And I assume that's what's happening in all the meal delivery apps. Yeah. I say it happens on Yelp. I mean, we kind of know that this is going on. Duh. That's the only way Yelp stays in business is strong arming people to buy ads. We know that from, from the court documents. Anyway.

Yeah. I don't use Uber Eats, so I haven't checked it out yet, but yeah, I, when I first saw this, I, you know, the thing that got me was like, oh, are they going to start putting ads in Ubers or Uber Eats? That's what I thought when I saw the headline as well, I was like, so you get in an Uber now and somebody's got an ad panel, like on the back of all the taxi seats these days.

That's exactly what I thought too, but apparently not. They must not have thought of it yet because of course they should be doing that because they don't make any money. Yeah. Because of course the subtitle of this article, thank you TechCrunch for the clickbaitiness, it says a new revenue stream. It won't split with drivers.

Well, honestly, this is a revenue stream that they shouldn't split with drivers. The drivers are doing fuck all for this, this revenue stream. Yeah. So yeah, they filed that under duh. Now this one I love. We haven't talked about Bitcoin and crypto in a while. That's because I've been bit burned.

Bit burned. Oh, do you still have your account? I do. I do. How, how bad is it? Oh, it's, let's see, what did I start with 60 bucks? I'm sitting at like 20. Okay. Well, just go, go long. I am. Maybe it'll come back. I'm sitting long on Bitcoin. Well, it turns out that all of that, all of those price fluctuations may have actually been.

The Winklevii? No, no, no. There's a, there's a company called Bitfinex. They were the largest cryptocurrency exchange way back when, in like 2017, 2018. Right. And they were basically some, one account there was using Bitfinex and another cryptocurrency to manipulate the Bitcoin market.

Are you telling me that an unregulated currency can be manipulated? Brian, I believe that's exactly what I'm saying. I've got the vapors. I do declare, I do believe I said that when we were talking about crypto back in the day, because I knew people that were in cahoots with cabals of people who were, you know, putting their finger on the scale in the market.

They were like, okay, we're all going to buy this. It's Joe's turn to sell, you know, so everybody come here and they would just do cycles of people buying and selling it, pump and dump, you know, and there's nothing anybody can do about it because it's not regulated. There's nothing illegal about it.

I know. And Brian, people yell at you because you talk about regulation. I know. I wonder how many, I wonder how many of those people are Bitcoin investors. I don't know. So it's, you know, we talked about it on the show. I called them out for doing it, but now we have a little bit more proof because this comes from the Wall Street Journal.

So it must be true. It must be true. It's on paper. It must be true. Yeah. So it's a good article to read if you're thinking about getting into crypto because still unregulated. If you're listening to the show and you're still thinking about getting into crypto, you're not listening to the show. Go back and start at episode one before we change the feed so you can get all the episodes and not bankrupt us so all we have left is our Bitcoin.

Appreciate that. But yes, we talked about all of this stuff forever and it turns out we were right again. Again. And I found this article over at Vanity Fair just going on with the Bitcoin and crypto news. It's called the Big Bitcoin Heist. Have you ever heard of this? It's a it was a basically an Ocean's Eleven type of thievery robbery going on in Iceland.

Yes, I actually have heard about this. Somebody actually I heard about it in the context of somebody wanted to actually make a movie out of it. That's a little silly. Hmm. Yeah, it's not that exciting. After reading the article, I'm like, that's fun. It was a fun story. It was good for an article. Not a movie. Definitely not a movie.

Considering that one of the big break ins was because somebody left a window open in the ladder next door. They climbed the ladder, went in and stole the not as exciting as Tom Cruise coming down the ceiling with a little cable. Yeah. Yeah. Or, you know, them tunneling under Vegas to create an earthquake and things like that.

No guy found a ladder next to an open window. Not Clooney worthy. I'm definitely going to say that is a not Clooney worthy heist, but it is a great article. It's linked in the show notes. I highly recommend you checking it out. And since we were a little short, I went over and found this one at the New York Times.

Sandra Bullock and Ellen DeGeneres sue pop-up websites over misleading ads. Now, I'm happy that they're doing this because the long and the short of it is people are using their likenesses and fake quotes to sell stuff. Yeah. Here's a pro tip for all you semi-celebrities and real celebrities out there.

Never let anybody take a picture of you holding up a blank piece of paper. Yes, that's true, too. It's mind-bogglingly evil what these guys do because it's all around affiliate marketing and they're playing whack-a-mole trying to find these people because, like, you know, somebody will spin one up, get the money, move on, boom, pump, not pump and dump, but they'll just, like, spin up an affiliate account, get a couple checks, move on, do the same thing.

Look, tail is all the same thing. This has been happening in the music industry with, you know, unauthorized merchandise forever, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. It is a thing. And it's funny. I see these ads, like, every time I'm scrolling through Instagram. And there's one of Keanu Reeves holding up basically different pro animal t-shirts.

And I'm like, I don't think that's real because I know why I don't think it's real because when the first one came out, I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool because he was holding up this cartoon John Wick t-shirt that says, be kind to animals or I'll kill you. And I'm like, that's a great shirt.

I'm going to buy that shirt. Then next week I saw him holding up a different shirt, but the picture was exactly the same. And I'm like, don't, got me. And the next week he was holding up a shirt that said, buy Bitcoin. And then I saw, I, like, kept trying to find the company, but the company name changed, but the ad would remain the same and the website would change.

So I was like, hmm, crazy. So now when I see him, I mark him as fraud and they get taken down. But it's, uh, one of those things where it was one point where I was going to try and get ahold of Keanu and say, Hey man, is it, are you promoting this thing? Because you're all over Instagram with this. And then I saw another one, Wesley Snipes was, they had, they, they basically, uh, deep faked Wesley Snipes into the same pose with the same thing.

And just know that that's actually Wesley Snipes. He's got a big tax thing to pay off. He's really, he's really doing this. Yeah. By the way, he was great in that new Eddie Murphy on Netflix, man. He was good. It's nice to see him back in the screen, but yeah, I'm glad that, uh, uh, the celebs are stacked like, you know, standing up to these guys.

It's, it's an insurmountable problem and we'll never go away, but at least they're trying. At QVC fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary all in one place.

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We're joined again this week by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast. Dave is also the co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, as well as the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discussed law and policy, as well as surveillance and privacy.

How many shows am I missing there, Dave? It's almost getting to the point where I'm co-host of more shows than I'm not. I have to say, I just recently caught up with all your episodes of Caveat, and it is by far the best show of yours besides this one. Oh, well, thank you very much. I really enjoyed it.

No, I appreciate that. Joe Kerrigan. Sorry, Joe. Things Joe hates, grumpy old geeks. I enjoy Hacking Humans as well, but I just have more interest personally in the topics that you discuss on Caveat.

I see. Yeah, yeah, fair enough, fair enough. I wanted to kick off this week with some Apple Watch follow-up. My lovely bride went out and bought me an Apple Watch. All right. So I'm wearing it right now. I have to say, I like it.

It's cool. It is convenient. It is fun. Hasn't really rocked my world, I guess, as much as I hoped it would. It is not life-changing. I felt the same thing when I got it. I was wondering, would it be like when I got my iPhone, which was life-changing. Right.

Here's what it is, guys. It's neat. I think that's a good description. So I wanted to check in with you guys to see if there was any sort of killer app or function or anything that I was missing out on that you wish you'd known about when you first got yours.

Doubt it. Not really. No. Not really. I enjoy all the exercise features. I like to be able to control my audio from my wrist. It's great to set your notifications appropriately across your devices so you can leave your phone in your pocket and important things will ding you on your wrist and you're not checking your phone all the time.

Other than that, no. Yeah. All right. Fair enough. The one app that you have to get, though, that I do recommend is just press record. Okay. That one's really good because that way you can do a voice memo just real quick by one button push, talking to your watch, and then it'll get synced to your phone and your iCloud account, and you can pull it down later.

Oh, you also live in a place that actually has weather, so you might want to check out the Dark Sky app. Yeah, and you don't live, well, you're pretty close to the coast, I guess, but not right on the coast like Brian, because Brian's like, it's raining, and it doesn't say it's raining yet. I'm like, because there's nobody in front of you to tell them it's raining.

Dark Sky should put a platform out in the Pacific. What is wrong with them? Right in front of your house, because the Pacific is so small that they only have to put one by your house. Some kind of buoy out there. I did pay for the app. You'd think they'd provide support. All right, all right, well, fair enough.

I will definitely check out those apps, so. Okay, cool. We've got a little listener feedback link here from Tim Woodruff. He says, did you guys hear about this thing with the heroes at Coal Fire SIS? And he says, astonishing, and this is the Coal Fire CEO that says the Dallas County Courthouse doors were unlocked when his guys went in to go do their penetration test, but they locked the doors and then re-unlocked them with the way that a criminal would do, and then they

waited around for the guys to show up after they purposefully tripped the alarm and talked to the deputies, and they were going to go about their merry way. And then the sheriff shows up and says, put these boys into hoose cow. And that's where our story actually begins. Yeah. Actually, Joe Kerrigan, your third favorite Cyber Wire podcast host behind me and Ben Yellen, and I did a segment on this on the Cyber Wire about a week ago.

So I recommend you go check that out because, as you might imagine, Joe has some strong feelings about this. And he and I align in our feelings on this, that it seems as though the Coal Fire folks did everything right, and everything was great until the local sheriff showed up and decided to turn it into a pissing match that these two Coal Fire guys got caught in the middle of.

How funny that just earlier in the show, Jason was espousing the virtues of the local sheriff's Barney Fife. I think this guy's more Buford T. Justice than Barney Fife. Yeah, yeah, I think that's, yeah, all right, I could see that, I could see that. The whole thing is a shame, like the CEO from Coal Fire said, this is a situation where people just need to use common sense here, you know, there's no crime.

So we'll see how it plays out, but it's ridiculous, and it has certainly folks who are doing pen testing on notice to watch how this one plays out. Yeah, are these guys still in jail? I don't think so. I don't, okay, I was just wondering. The charges got dropped to a misdemeanor, so I suspect they're out, I don't know how long they were out, I don't know how long they were in at all, but I'm sure they're out there now.

Longer than they should have been. Yeah, they shouldn't have been in at all, it's absurd. So I'm interested in your thoughts on this story, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which is a federal panel that reviews foreign acquisitions of American firms on national security grounds, is looking into TikTok right now.

They're concerned about the growing influence in the US. They're speaking anonymously right now because the investigation is confidential, but one of the people said the American government had evidence that the app is sending data back to China. So TikTok was, okay, it started off as a US company called Musical.ly, which was an app popular with teenagers to make homemade karaoke videos that I actually went to the launch party for a long time ago.

They were purchased by ByteDance, which is a seven-year-old company in Beijing, and they basically at the time said, we'll keep it separate, don't you worry, we won't make this part of our family of Chinese apps. And then less than a year later, they basically did that and rebranded it as TikTok, which is one of the world's fastest-growing apps and a global cultural phenomena if you are younger than us.

Right. Yes. So US government officials are particularly alarmed by the implication of China's 2017 National Intelligence Law, which contains sweeping language that requires companies to comply with intelligence-gathering operations if asked. Basically, they're saying, well, we haven't asked, and that's only for local stuff and blah, blah, blah, and don't you worry, don't you worry.

The interesting thing about this is TikTok is basically only used in the West. It's not really used in mainland China at all because they have a different, very similar service there called Douyin that all the Chinese people actually use. So we've got an app. It's owned by a Chinese company.

It's massively popular here. There is some proof that their servers where all the data is held is not going to China at all. But is the company beholden to the 2017 China rule? And is that, do we have, do we have a reason to be worried here?

I think so. I think it's, I think it's worth, I think we have a reason to investigate this. The whole thing about the Chinese being able to make their companies conform to their rules, that is true.

That is the case. To be fair, we do that as well here. That's true. Not quite as draconian, but we do. Right. That's true. So this whole thing with China and the company saying, oh, don't worry, we'd never do that.

No, that's, that's not how it works. Right. I find this similar to the resistance that we're showing to having equipment from Huawei and ZTE used to, for our 5G build out. Yeah.

Perhaps this is a little less serious than that because that's national infrastructure. Not a bunch of videos of kids. Yeah. Right. Right. But it, you know, if kids have this app all over the place, just anybody who has kids could possibly have their data exfiltrated.

Right. This is the world we live in these days. So do we need to be worried about it? Maybe not yet. Should we be concerned? I think that's reasonable. Should we? What data are we talking about though? I mean, it's a thing where kids make videos that they post publicly online.

Which, what, what stuff are we so worried about here that might be getting exfilled? Well, you can't video anything. What if, what if a kid videos his, his father, who's a government employee in his office without his knowledge and puts it out there? Right. What if, I mean, that doesn't mean it's a, that's just a, that's an idiot problem.

That's not a, because if he's already posting it publicly, then. Well, Jason, I hate to point it out to you. The vast majority of the world is dealing with idiot problems. I know that. But that's what, but I, I'm just wondering if this is an idiot problem too, because it's like, what data are we so worried about from this app?

I know the grinder thing was a problem because that is very sensitive information, but this is an app where people are taking videos and then posting them. So I think that they're already letting the horses out of the barn before China can even care about it. But what if the app is keeping an eye on your location data and.

Which it assuredly is. Which it assuredly is. And if it sees that you wander into some interesting location and location that the Chinese might be interested in, uh, it starts recording behind the scenes and sends the recording back.

I suppose that's the kind of thing that they're worried about. And I think the other, the other thought I had in reading this story is maybe, do you, do you think there should be restrictions on companies being able to sell to foreign companies? If you're a U S company that's developed this technology or whatever, shouldn't, shouldn't we be looking into this pre-sale, not post-sale?

Well, there are global export rules. I mean, you, you can't, there's plenty of that going on. Um, so I think those, those sort of regulations exist and yeah, anybody doing these sorts of things have to operate within those regulations and, you know, they govern things like encryption and, you know, stuff like that.

So I think, yeah, people are looking at that. I think we've got bigger problems here at home because we've got two stories in the news this week. We're going to skip one of them. The, the Twitter story with the, the two employees selling data to Saudi Arabia is that one, that one, that's an idiot problem.

That's a, yeah, well that's, I don't know. That's more of a spy versus spy problem there too, but, uh, I'm waiting for that one to flush out a little bit more before we get into that. This one is trend micro employees sold criminals data that fueled targeted scams. A guy at trend microsystems basically went in and got information for about 120,000 people, which is about 1% of trend micros customers and was selling it off to, uh, people that were then going in and calling these people and doing scams on them.

Right. Yeah. And so fortunately he was, he was let go. He's gone. And the, the, in law enforcement is investigating. They, they didn't out the person and they came, came forward with this. I, you know, this kind of thing I think happens a lot.

Oh, are you kidding me? Do you, how, you know how much of this data is just out there? Like I have hard drives full, full of, of different, uh, you know, surveys and, and mailing list signups and, and, you know, just general demographics or signing up for a contest.

So you have to give us all this information from, from just music artists and I've just got them sitting on drives. It's worth, that's worth money. Who knew? I got to get me some on the not so dark web. Exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, this sort of insider threat problem is, is a big deal and it's something that a lot of companies are focused on.

The thing that I'm hearing about more and more is that companies are installing systems that basically track your behavior. Um, and they also provision your permission to have access to both areas and things within your network as needed.

And as soon as you don't need that access anymore, the access goes away because we're trying to deal with the God mode problem. Well, and a lot of times what happens is that access is granted to something for a very good reason, but then it's no longer revoked. So over time people build up more and more access to more and more things that they don't really need.

Yeah. It's kind of the Snowden problem. Yeah. It's kind of how he got there and he got access to things and nobody was paying attention and just kept getting more access and more access. But at least we know there are no aliens now. Well, but also it, the other thing that this stuff keeps an eye on is just behavior.

Like why is this person here in the middle of the night? Why are they digging around in this database? Yeah. Yeah. They're copying files to an external device or sending files out through email and you can combine a number of things that any one of them on their own might not be mysterious, but when you combine them all together, it sets off a flag that says, you know, this employee may need a conversation.

Yeah. For established companies that have been around for a while, they can afford to put these systems in place. They, I think they, they're must haves nowadays, you know, you got to treat this stuff like gold or, or what are we talking about before you got to treat it like uranium and you want to get it as far away from you as possible, but let the people that are going to have access to it, make sure they need access.

And when it's done revoke it, it's like, okay, George is coming in on Saturdays and he's, he needs to access the user database. Well, George needs a hall pass from his supervisor to do that. He just can't come into work one day and say, Hey, I'm going to keep working on this stuff. You need to have access to it granted by someone who is, you know, authorized to give you access, not just because you can, if it's like, you know, during off hours or things like that, you know, using that as an example.

And at the very least, the supervisor should be notified that, you know, even if this person has legitimate reasons to have access to that, if they're doing it in odd ways or odd times or unusual compared to what they've done in the past, that should be, that's a trigger and alert.

I think we need a new chief tomfoolery officer. Somebody who just sits there and watches the network and goes, Hmm, seems suspicious. He might be up to some tomfoolery. I am making that as a business card tonight. That's right.

Remember, nothing is foolproof to a talented fool. On this next one, our good friend Kashmir Hill is back in the New York Times and amazingly for once, not writing about Facebook. So this is an interesting one. She says, I got access to my secret consumer score.

And this is an article about these shadow companies who are basically building profiles on everybody and anyone everywhere that's been online and kind of giving you a score based on your either how nice you are or your dickitude.

And then companies can come in and say, is this person an a-hole? Are they trustworthy? Can we trust them with our, you know, our Airbnb overnight or things like that? Can we rent them a scooter? Remember when we were first discussing the Chinese social score and I said, the only difference between them and us is the government does it there and we have private companies do it here.

Exactly. So, yeah, this is this is now come to pass as being, you know, out in the public. Thanks to good old Kashmir. And the reason now, though, that this is in the news is you can go in and actually request your reports. She got her report back.

It was 400 pages long, which is insane. That is insane. Yeah. And the reason that people can do this now are thanks to our good old friends in Europe with GDPR and surprisingly, the state of California. About the only thing going right here right now.

Well, California leads the way when it comes to these sorts of things. And I can't have a plastic bag anymore. I got to pay for paper bags. Yeah. Yeah. Can't smoke in a bar. All the fun stuff. Yeah. Well, but you have a CCPA. So the thing I think about with this, too, is could this change the equation of whether these sorts of companies can operate profitably?

In other words, if they find themselves under a crush of requests for people to either remove their data or provide their data, does that change the business equation for them? And I hope it does. Yes, certainly. Because right now they just ignore them.

Right. We should find out. Everybody that's listening right now, go start requesting your data. The link will be in the show notes on how to get in touch with these people. And, yeah, get your data and maybe ask them to delete it if it's too egregious. And the thing about these companies is they're getting data from the companies that hire them, too.

So they're just any new client that comes on. It's like, oh, we got Airbnb. Oh, great. Let's get all of their data and put it into our scoring algorithms. Let's get, you know, Yelp and all these other companies. And they're just amassing these databases now that are just so massive and have stuff that goes back so far.

And it's ridiculous. It's like, oh, what if I let somebody use my computer one time and they made some really stupid comment? Now it's in my, you know, my public record forever. This is, remember in high school where they're like, this is going to be on your record forever. And you're like, screw you. I graduate in two weeks.

My record doesn't count anymore. I'm going to get a job, you asshole. Well, it turns out they were right. It's back in with a vengeance. It just never goes away. KIT. I wonder what's going to happen when one of these records gets released and it's for a national political candidate.

Yeah, you've mentioned that scenario a couple of times when we've been discussing this sort of stuff. Is that what it's going to take to get the rules changed? Right. Yeah. If suddenly we can, we know every time that, I don't know, Elizabeth Warren ordered takeout, is that going to gather people's attention?

Or will the other politicians say, oh, wait a minute. We should pay attention to this now. Or every time Bernie Sanders orders his Depends. Could be. Could be. Could be. That's what I'm saying. So, yeah. Yeah. I, you know, you're talking about are these companies going to be profitable if we keep asking for data?

I would like a world where these companies can't exist. But I don't think that's ever going to happen. Just regulate them out of existence? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these people, all they're doing is just hoovering up all this data and just reselling it, repackaging it with an algorithm on top that tells people how good you are.

Which is just, and they don't, they don't factor in. People grow over time. People are different people from day to day, week to week, year to year as they have experiences in this world. Yes. But their argument would be, we're just providing you with this information. You make the, you make the decisions you want to make from it.

I'm pretty sure that they're putting a score on your behavior. That's what these companies are getting back. It's not just, here's 800 pages of Brian and him at Finn McCool's and all that. It's like, Brian is a drunk because he goes and drinks and parties every night, you know, up until he had a kid.

We're not going to factor in the kid. He was a drunk. Once a drunk, always a drunk, you know. I wonder how these companies are liable for including things that would be in protected categories, which are, you know, from, what do you call it, HR points of view.

There are categories that you're not allowed to ask about. You're not allowed to make job decisions about protected categories. And I wonder how much does that sort of information either overtly leak into these things and is used for these decision makings or these ratings or sort of unintentionally they end up in there and become part of it as well.

Could, if someone dug in here and found that your rating was affected by that, would they be in trouble for that as well? I don't know. I know what I am going to do is I'm going to start writing into these guys and getting my data. It's complicated. I looked into it. You've got to scan driver's licenses for some of them and all sorts of stuff.

Ooh, God forbid I have to open my scanning app and reach three feet away and put my driver's license on it. My point being you're giving an even greater bit of information to a company that you don't already trust with your information. The point is they already have it. They're checking the fact that you have it.

They already know who you are. They're just, they're trying to prove that you are you. Hey, look, anytime that Jason's willing to take one for the team, I'm behind that. We will wait for the Jason report. That's right. That's right. It'd be interesting to see if we show up on his report. Oh.

For good or for bad, right? How could it be good? Well, we could bring him up. That's true. I mean, you could say, you know, despite everything he did, he hangs out with really excellent people. Well, excellent person. I don't know, Brian. I don't know if Brian will fit in that category.

I know his past. I'm sure I have an excellent score. I was quite privacy conscious even back then. Well, speaking of privacy consciousness, Ring watched your kids trick or treat and then bragged about it. This comes from Mashable. Boy, oh boy. Did the PR person screw up here? Yep.

Stepped on the proverbial dick, as it were. They're putting out all these quote unquote fun facts about which cities had more trick or treaters, how many kids came to the door and all this stuff. And that's fine, okay, how many times the doorbell was ringed on Halloween, that's fine.

What gets me is, as soon as you share your video to, say, the Neighbors app, Amazon then has carte blanche to do with it whatever they want, including using it for PR purposes, as dumb as even these are.

And I'm just like, I didn't even think about that. I'm like, okay, well, I'm giving it to the Neighbors app, not thinking that there's some Yahoo over there trying to put together a blog post. And then, oh, there's my front porch. What the hell? Does this bug you guys at all?

Yeah. Yeah, it does. This is precisely why I will never have a ring. That they don't have to ask to use my footage from my front door in their commercial. Yeah, I mean, you do have to take the step of sharing it somewhere in their ecosystem.

Once you do that share step, then it becomes fair game for them to use it however they want. I just have a problem with this whole concept, not just the sharing thing. The fact that they actually thought that showing video of trick-or-treating kids, real trick-or-treating kids, was a good PR move. Beyond creepy to me.

Yeah, if they have masks, they're technically unidentifiable, but that's, I think, a gray area. Well, not every costume involves a mask either. I think if you take this footage and you put the theme song from Halloween over it, you'll get a better idea of how it makes me feel. Yeah, well, yeah.

And what if you put, you know, creepy porn music under it? I mean, aren't there, I mean, there are particular laws dealing with minors, so there's that.

Yeah. It's all a bit odd. Yeah. It's this whole thing that we seem to be in these days where these tech companies, they feel like because they can, that they should. And they will. They will, yes. Whether or not it's the right thing to do, socially acceptable or even moral.

Yeah, when it comes to Ring, I'm about half an inch away from just pulling them all out. Back to them Chinese cameras. It just keeps getting worse. That's right. Telling you, telling you, Chinese never made a blog post of anybody near my house. That's fine.

But just to go even further, of course, Ring again, they pushed out a security fix because apparently there was a very easy way for people to get your home Wi-Fi password because they were bouncing it around internally through the system from the camera to your app in plain text over HTTP.

Cheesy, crazy. What year is this? Plain text. No encryption from the camera to the app whatsoever. No, no, no key handshakes. No, nothing. Just here you go. It's like, come on, guys. Come on. This is not that bad.

And of course, there was a company called Bitdefender that found this out and walked through the entire process of how it's done. Now they say, of course, Ring has pushed out the security fix, so everybody's fine now. Until they find the next thing. Until they find the next thing. But yeah. Also interesting that Ring can push out a security fix like this automatically.

Yeah. I don't know. I don't have one of these. Jace, actually, you have these. So is there a way to disable automatic updates or are you stuck with them? Absolutely none. I found out. Not a fan of that at all. Not a fan of that at all. I looked into it. That's why I'm telling you I'm a half an inch away from pulling these things from the house.

Yeah. There's nothing about that. Like with my Eero, I can, you know, it updates and it tells me when it's updated and it tells me what it's updated. It's very transparent about the update process. I get a notification saying, hey, your Eero system has been updated.

Here's some new stuff that we put into it. Ring? No, not really. I can't even get the thing to stay on long enough to actually capture the bad guys, let alone actually tell me. When they're, you know, pushing software updates to it, come on. Yeah. I can't help thinking what if it automatically updated itself and in doing so bricked itself and then something bad happened.

Like has happened to anybody that's ever owned a Windows PC set to auto update? Right before that important presentation. Right. Right. Right. Right. Oh, fun times. Yeah. Yeah. This is, uh, I, I'm really like getting, getting to the edge with these guys because it's not so much.

As somebody that is as security conscious as you, Jason, I feel like it's been insane that you've kept them as long as you have. Here's the thing. I, I had hope. I told you, I was trying to be more of an optimistic geek this year, not such a pessimistic geek, but these guys have proven me wrong every step of the freaking way.

And now that they're taking, you know, people's home videos, not asking permission to them and using them in their, you know, their promotion and their marketing, even the cop stuff I was okay with. Cause like in the grand scheme of things that actually can, you know, contribute to a greater good.

This does not, there's nothing about making a post about how many kids go out trick or treating and using people's footage that is good for anything. This just makes me feel fucking violated. As it should. So who do we think in the tech world?

Is there, are there any companies that we feel are doing it right these days? Apple's as close as we get. Microsoft is doing all right. But they don't make the cameras. They don't make cameras. Yeah. In a security, in a security system world, I don't know. That's why I'm just like, maybe just go back to build your own like the, like we did in the old days.

Go to GOG.com slash SimpliSafe. No, they're not a sponsor. Wait, no, no, they don't, they don't sponsor us. Screw those guys. No, I don't know. I honestly don't know. I would, I would like to find some good. I think you got to roll your own camera manufacturers. You got to get what I'm saying.

Get that, get that software we were talking about a couple of weeks back and roll your own. Yeah. Yeah. It's the hardware part. That's the hard problem. You know, finding good hardware that's just easy to check open source hardware for security cameras. I don't think it exists.

If I'm wrong, please send me an email. Jason at GrumpyOldGeeks.com. If only Radio Shack was still around. If only. Oh, I miss those guys. Did I ever tell you I worked at Radio Shack when I was in college? No, but somehow I'm not surprised.

That's a story for another day. Let's talk about the security implications of them demanding you to have your phone number every time you try to buy a damn transistor. I have so many stories. Again, that's a story for another day. But yeah, good times. Good times. All right, guys. Great talking to you.

And I will talk to you next time. Excellent. Another uplifting security hot is in the can. Yes, indeed. Apps and doodads. Adobe Photoshop has arrived on the iPad finally. Sweet. Now I can sit down at my local and do all my Keanu Reeves Instagram pages.

Exactly. That's what I'm telling you. So I, of course, went and checked it out and downloaded it. And the first thing that pops up is you can get a 30-day free trial. And after that, it's $9.99 a month. Wait, it's not part of the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription that you and I have?

Yes, it is. Thank God. I'm a little surprised. But for most people, it's not. Yeah. Well, I have two Adobe accounts. And the first time I signed in with the wrong one, the one that I didn't actually buy my subscription on. And they're like, hey, thanks for signing in. $9.99 a month.

And I'm like, well, shit, let me try the other one. And then as soon as I logged in with that one, it's like, here you go. Thanks for, you know, thanks for activating. Right. So I pulled in a couple images, started playing around with it. And it's not super intuitive, but it does have layers.

It's got a lot of the stuff that it should have. It does not really have filters yet. There's a lot that was left out in the launch. Right. I'm just like, okay, I just want to put a vignette on this. How do I put a vignette on this? And nope, could not find a vignette after clicking on everything. You know what it is really nice for, though?

I'll give it that. If you're using, like, the healing tool. Yes. I use that a lot. It's really nice to be able to just pinch and zoom in and use the Apple Pencil with the healing tool. The Band-Aid tool to just go around and find all the little pieces and get all that stuff done instead of sitting there with the mouse and keyboard and everything.

Way nicer. So I'm thinking if you're using, well, I guess it doesn't really matter. If you have Sidecar on your Mac with Catalina, you can do that anyway. So, oh, well, let's skip the Photoshop for iPad. But it's a nice first entry. I can't wait to see how it really comes along over time.

Excellent. I might be doing our artwork on that soon. Doubtful. Doubtful. That's true. So I recommend just grabbing it and giving it a shot if you have an Adobe account that already has Photoshop just to try it out. Why not? I'll see if it works on my old, creaky, just-purchased iPad.

Your brand-new, shitty iPad.

Media Candy. Netflix has renewed Another Life for a second season despite lousy reviews, including the lousy reviews from this show. Yeah, well, it was half lousy. You liked it. I didn't mind it, which is a bit different from I liked it.

I'll watch anything with Katie Sackhoff in it, basically. But if you're curious as to how a series as universally panned as Another Life gets a second season while other shows don't, such as the Everybody Seemed to Like Sense8, which I didn't like. So there you go. I didn't like, I didn't really, I couldn't get past the first episode, but I was pissed the OA got canceled.

Oh, there you go. That's the one I was- Well, the answer is it's basically just enough people watched it to justify the green light from Netflix. In 2018, Cindy Holland, the streaming giant's vice president of OC, or Original Content, basically told us that the biggest thing that they look at is are they getting enough viewership to justify the cost of the series?

They also look at other things like fan communities, how social a title is, etc. But basically, if people watch it, it gets renewed. So, just goes to show you, people like shitty stuff sometimes. Yeah, too bad. I'm, you know, maybe they've taken the criticism to heart. Maybe the second season will be better. Here's holding out hope.

I certainly hope so. But since the guy who directed it, wrote it, and is the showrunner, probably not. I don't think he's going to replace himself. Maybe they'll bring in Ronald D. Moore to give it a nice kick. Or get Sam Esmail in there to really do it. Jesus Christ. Speaking of him, I gotta say, I watched Mr. Robot's season, for episode five, the latest one last week.

Is that the silent one? No, it wasn't silent. Well, it was kind of silent, I guess. I didn't even pay attention. Parts of it were silent when they were doing this break-in. They did a really cool break-in scene. Did it involve a ladder and an open window? There was no ladder and an open window, no. They did actually have to do a lot of running and hiding and getting rid of cameras and stuff like that.

But it was beautiful. It was beautifully shot. It had some of the best cinematography in it I've seen on a TV show in a long time. And it was actually a really good episode, I have to say. Lost looked great. Battlestar Galactica looked great. Like, a lot of these people are able to do things that look really good, but they can't stick the fucking landing.

Yeah. Well, I think, you know, this one missed about two and a half pikes on the rotation on the dive. So, I don't know how, I don't know if they're going to stick the dive or not. Yeah, it doesn't really matter because they lost me two seasons ago. Once I went, oh yeah, it's Fight Club and they don't know what to do with it, I was out.

Yeah. So, I'm going to stick it to the end. And I'm going to at least stick the landing on it. But I have to say, so far, episode four was a slog to get through. I end up having to fast forward parts of it because like half of it, they were walking in the woods just talking to characters that don't exist.

I'm like, come on. But yeah, we'll see how it finishes. I will give you a final report when it's done. I have to go look at how many episodes there are because if this is number five and they're going for like 22 or 15 even, I'm like, oh, can we stick it at eight, please? Right. Speaking of shows with eight episodes, the end of the fucking world.

Season two is out. Did you ever watch season one? Couldn't get into it. Okay. It's kind of like me and whatever that slut show was that you told me to watch on Amazon. Fleabag, that one. Yeah. Yeah. Except, you know, one won all the awards and the other one didn't.

Yeah, yeah, whatever. That just shows that not everybody has taste. Right. Okay. So, yeah, it's out. I'm halfway through it. I like it so far. It's kind of the same thing. I found it too dark. I just couldn't get into it for whatever reason. I think maybe having a kid, just watching this kid be miserable was too much for me.

It's probably timing on that one. Yeah. You probably still haven't even gone back and finished Black Mirror yet, I'm guessing. No, no, no. I haven't. I'm waiting for a new administration before I go see Black Mirror again. Okay. So, 2024, Brian, we'll get back into Black Mirror. Yeah, it could be a long time. It could be a long time. Speaking of politics, Netflix has built a new tool for those of you burned out on politics and Trump.

I love this. Seth Meyers just has a new comedy special out. And in the middle of the stand-up routine, he starts talking about politics and Trump and all that, but there is now a skip politics button inside of the stand-up.

I'm like, genius. Really wish they had this on almost every stand-up routine ever for all the different topics. It's like, okay, I don't want to hear about airlines. Skip airlines, you know? Much like everybody that's listening to our podcast wishes we had that sort of button at times.

Is it really a new tool, though? This is my question, because isn't this just the exact same technology that they use for the choose-your-own-adventure, bunder, scamper-papper, snapper thing that they did? I don't even know if it's about that. I think this is more like skip intro. That's really it.

It's like, okay, this is a skip button that goes, you know, 30 seconds ahead or 4 minutes and 12 seconds ahead. It's not really high-tech. Yeah. They're not grabbing you a new clip to go down a different path. This is... Well, you know, but it's the same underlying technology. You put in a little bit here, or if you press a button, it goes to here.

It's not exactly a new tool. That's my only point. Well, okay, well, then if you're going to go down that route, then the choose-your-own-adventure thing was not a new tool either, because the skip intro button was out before that. Yes, but I didn't write a headline saying that that was a new tool. My whole point is that the headline here says that they've built a new tool. Okay.

Pedantic much. Okay, moving on. Our whole show is pedantic much. True that, true that. All right, so I took advantage of my laptop getting burnt out and having to buy a new one to get the free Apple TV Plus subscription, and I watched three episodes now of The Morning Show with Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, et cetera, et cetera.

The acting is phenomenal, and they are desperately trying to be Aaron Sorkin-esque and failing. Okay, so no story? The story's okay. They're just trying really hard, and the writing isn't just there. The writing's not good enough. It's a good show.

Don't get me wrong. I'm enjoying it. But it's just like, maybe I should just watch The Newsroom again. Yeah, you could do that. Yeah. You could easily do that. Go back and watch The West Wing for the 8,000th time. Steve Carell's pretty fantastic in it. All the acting is great, and all the sets are great, and it looks good.

But yeah, it's just you, every time we finish an episode, I look at my wife and go, they're really trying to be Sorkin. Okay. Have you watched the, I know you said you wouldn't, but have you checked out the Ron Moore show yet? Nope. Nope. Nope. Not gonna burn me thrice.

Well, you know, you do have, you got a couple more days till The Mandalorian, so once that's on, I'm sure you'll be just fine. Yes. Now, I did think, I did see somewhere that it's gonna be a slow trickle show. I'm happy about that. There was actually, it was one of the news stories that I was gonna put in here in Media Candy, but then forgot throughout the week.

But yeah, there's been a couple articles coming back that people are going away from the full on binge drops. Everybody's starting to move towards slow trickle once a week. I found a couple articles about content overload as well that I forgot to put in here because people are, I, and myself included, I, I'm at, you know, content overload.

Yeah. I sit down to watch TV at night and I'm like, I don't want to watch any shows. I want to go listen to a book or read a book or literally do nothing versus watch something new. Yeah. There's definitely that. I've been doing a lot of more reading than, than watching something new because of content overload.

But the other thing, which my wife really noticed is when she sits down to watch something, there's too many choices now. There's way too many choices. And then you have to kind of go, well, where is that show? Is that one on Netflix? Is that on an Amazon prime? Is that one on Disney?

Is that on Apple TV plus? And you're like looking around and then finally you're just like, Jesus, I got to go to bed. I didn't even watch anything. Yeah. You spend an hour and a half trying to find something that you want to watch and then it's like done. I will. I do have to say Jack Ryan season two came out on Amazon and I binged it last weekend and it was fantastic.

Not my thing, but I know a lot of people that like it. Oh, it was so good. It was so good. I love that show. I did a really good job with it. And it had Doug Stamper in it, which always makes me happy. Anytime I see. I'm sure you enjoy his commercials for, for the haircutting places. I have not seen those because I don't watch TV with commercials in them.

Oh, they're quite funny. Maybe I'll check out YouTube or is that on Vimeo or is it on TikTok or is it on? Jesus. Sometimes headlines don't get any better than this.

Apple's former insider trading watchdog indicted for insider trading. Yes. The former Apple lawyer who oversaw the company's insider trading policy. Has been indicted on insider trading charges. Prosecutors allege Gene Levoff. I'm assuming that's how it's pronounced traded shares based on his knowledge of Apple's financial results before they were made public, which is the one thing you're not supposed to do if you're doing that job.

Yeah. In fact, your entire job is not doing that. I think maybe he read the job description wrong. He's like, you're going to be in charge of insider trading. Ooh, I can do that. Excellent. Yeah. My policy is I get to do it and the rest of you don't.

Perfect. When can I start? Yep. So according to the indictment, he realized the profit of around $227,000 on some trades and avoided losses of about $377,000 on others. They all took place between 2011 and 2016. Sorry, allegedly took place between 2011 and 2016.

He faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years on each count if convicted and also carries a maximum fine of $5,000,000 in the wire fraud counts, the higher of $250,000 or double the gains made or losses caused.

So well done. Well done, sir. And if you want a fun, long-form read about something that is just as enjoyable as the Fyre Festival, and I know we've talked about this guy on Moron of the Week once a long time ago, but this is the full, like, incredibly crazy story from soup to nuts and to current date and time.

The unbelievable story of Threaten, Heavy Metal's Fyre Festival moment. I will have to check that out. Sounds good. All right. Now, we talked, it's funny, we had a mention on Security Hot not too long ago about people copywriting colors and trademarking colors.

Yes. Well, turns out Deutsche Telekom really likes magenta. They really like their magenta. Okay. So, because it's, I guess it's T-Mobile's color. So, they have gone after Lemonade. Mm-hmm.

Have you seen Lemonade yet? Lemonade is a good restaurant that is over here on Abbot Kinney, but I'm sure it's something more horrible. Oh, no, it's an AI-based, of course, AI-based insurance startup. And I've actually looked at them, and I'm probably going to buy insurance through them.

Okay. You trust the AI? Well, I trust their rates. They're pretty good. And the people that I know that have the policies and have actually tried to collect on their policies have had nothing but good things to say. It's the collection part. Signing up for a policy anybody could do. Collecting, harder. That's good. Now, call me crazy, but just as a side note here, if you have named your company Lemonade, why are you using magenta?

Why the fuck do you need magenta? Exactly. Well, you know. I mean, maybe if you called yourself really dark pink lemonade. Well, pink lemonade is a thing, yeah. So, I mean, here's the thing. You know, moron cuts both ways. So, it doesn't have to be one side or the other.

The moron's sword is sharp at both ends. Yes, it is. Now, this one actually makes me really, really mad. This comes from BuzzFeed News. It says, she stole something while struggling with heroin addiction. Cops turned her into a Facebook meme.

Oh, the irony that a story about memes being bad would come from BuzzFeed. I know. Zing. So, apparently, a lot of law enforcement agencies have figured out that the lulls actually get people to look at their pages and try and track down criminals for them.

Mm-hmm. And I do believe a lot of these people are starting to cross the line. Big time. Are you saying police departments don't have professional comedians on hand? Well, they apparently have professional social media engineers on hand. Yeah, everybody does these days.

By the way, professional social media engineer means you're in college. I don't know. I think they may have graduated by now. Remember, when we started this show, they were interns and going to college. Now, they are buying their own homes and have children. Okay. Fair enough. They've been doing this for a long time.

Don't forget. So, this one township in Pennsylvania, Wilkes Bar Township, they've got 2,000 residents, right? Okay. Their Facebook following is 90,000. A little bit over each there, right?

You think? Yeah. Now, the problem with this is, first up, they're posting people's mug shots, okay? Mm-hmm. They're using them before people even go to trial, which means that, okay, what happened to innocent until proven guilty?

Right. Problem there. And also, this is going to screw people's lives over, even if they are proven innocent down the line, or even, who cares, even if they did it? The internet is forever. And, well, Facebook might not be, but we'll see about that. It's just, it's really ridiculous that these people are able to get away with this.

And, the problem to me is, also, it just lessens the gravitas of the industry of law enforcement. I'm sorry, it does. Mm-hmm. It also puts into perspective, okay, if that's what these people are thinking, then how are they, how are they putting that mindset into their policing actions, you know?

Right. This article is worth a read. I'm not going to go through all of it here, because it's a very long article, but it makes a shit ton of great points about the fact that this is just really gross. It's filthy, and it should be- Illegal. It should be illegal, yeah.

And, here's what I want to say. To all the cops listening that are doing this, you know, I don't want you using for the lulls as a fucking excuse to not do your job and just say, we're going to put out a Facebook post and see if we catch somebody. Great. I want you to say, what would Andy Griffith do? Because Andy Griffith was a damn fine police officer.

It just seems like everybody's moved to Barney Fife instead. Timely reference. I think so, yes. And if you don't know who Andy Griffith or Barney Fife are, look it up, kids, somewhere. Get out your parents' encyclopedia. And I finally have a hero of the week.

I actually had this back before when baseball was just ending, because Freddie Freeman, who played for the Atlanta Braves, was out trick-or-treating, and he came across a young child dressed up as him. But the kid didn't recognize him, but he came over and offered to take pictures and photos with him anyways.

Hero. And the kid's like, who the hell are you? It's a cute little video. There's a video posted on the page that his wife shot. Very funny. Very heartwarming. Cute. I found this one over at Digg, because I get my Digg newsletter still, which is kind of fun.

It's called Why the Largest Commercial Plane in the World Failed, and it's about how they're shutting down the A380 program from Airbus. I followed this thing before it was built and all the way through, and I see them all the time, and I've never gotten to fly on one, which makes me really bummed.

They're still going to be in service for a long time, because they've made a ton of them, and they're still going to be producing them through next year. But it's a really interesting video on the economics and the history and the landscape of the planes and the routes and everything.

If you're into that kind of thing, you'll dig it. Wasn't part of the problem with that plane is that a number of runways, like many runways, weren't big enough to handle it? Oh, yeah, yeah. There's some airports that have spent hundreds of, I think it was JFK had to spend $175 million in upgrades just so this single plane could land there, because you have to have double-decker airways at the gate to be able to get the people on.

There's all sorts of stuff. And the thing is huge. I don't know if you've ever watched one land at LAX. No. I was, like, when they first started going, and I got to see one land. I'm driving up the 101, and I see this thing coming in out of the distance, and it's massive. And it starts to fly right over the freeway in front of me.

The thing is so big, it looks like it's hovering. It's going, you know, like 180 miles an hour, and it looks like it's not moving an inch. It was so cool to see up close. But, yeah, I've even got a photo from the old JPEG magazine offices when they flew one of the first A380s through San Francisco on a flyby.

Right. And everybody, and it still, it looked like the thing was just not moving. It's crazy how big that thing is. I always wanted to go on one, though. Even though I hate flying. Cockpit Confidential. Everybody, go get your copy of Cockpit Confidential. It'll fix you right up. And I saw this one over at Futurism.

This AI decodes your brainwaves and draws what you're looking at. And this comes out of Russia. Yes, that's right. A team from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Russian corporation Neurobotics have come up with basically a thing that you put on your head, and it just watches you while you watch stuff.

And after a couple minutes, it can actually see, like, what, if you're thinking something, it can start to redraw it on another screen. Which is cool. That is cool. As hell. Watch the video. Because I'm like, ah, it's going to be crappy, whatever. It's pretty impressive how much stuff they're getting from this cap.

Right. Now, my favorite thing about this is, like, in, like, 10, 15 years when this thing comes to market, I want to be able to hack this and just be able to interject things into my friend's feed. Max Headroom. That's going to be, yeah, what they're thinking. It's like, you know, it's like, okay, I'm looking at this, and what am I thinking about?

And, like, just show, like, you know, zebras humping or something. Or just something random. Right. I was thinking of all the videos we used to watch at the clubs we used to go to, like, Perversion. You have all the crazy stuff up on the wall. Oh, yeah. Just play those videos whenever they put it on, just to freak them out. I thought that would be fun. But it's cool tech.

Go watch the video. I will. And I found an article called Inside the BBC Disinformation Group. Now, the BBC has a group called the Disinformation Group. Right. Bad title. Yes. I have to say. Are they going against disinformation? Are they for it? Are they against or whatever?

I'm guessing against. Obviously. But, yes, it's not a good, it's not a great title. No, but it just comes back to, like, the guy who was, you know, the head of insider trading. It's like, oh, great. I get to do insider trading. These guys are like, oh, I get to make disinformation. It's a really interesting read on this group inside of the BBC.

The thing that annoys me about the article is it's like they say, hey, they have a free newsletter and all their data is public, and you can sign up for the newsletter and get all the stuff. No link to the group. Can't find it on Google. So, I think this whole article might be fake news because it does, as far as I can tell, it doesn't exist.

It got through the group. It really did. Good job, BBC. Good job. And finally, I read this one on Vanity Fair this morning. It's called, He's Fucking Destroyed This Town. How Mark Zuckerberg Became the Most Reviled Man in Tech. This puts such a smile on my face.

It's just saying, you know, when you go to San Francisco now, no one, no one has anything nice to say about Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. And you know what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about that? Screw you guys. Fuck you. I don't care. Yeah. I'm CEO, bitch. Screw you guys.

I'm going to my own private Hawaiian island. Feedback loop. We've got some new Patreon subscribers. C and Dave. Thank you very much. And over at PayPal, we've got a bunch of you guys. Woo-hoo. Yay. Thomas.

Thomas writes in, greetings. I'm listening to you grumps on my fancy AirPods Pro and just wanted to butt in. Well, I haven't tried the new Bezos pods. Just hearing the fun about some ear tip not closing the case fully and a third-party app to control them make me glad I paid that premium for these AirPods. Just like a VPN, you get what you pay for.

The transparency mode is great on these ear boys. God, the other ear boys. I, too, had the first AirPods and the batteries suck after two years. Maybe soon we can get AirPods and a subscription without phones. Grump on. Next week, we're actually going to have a friend of the show, MXV, call in with a five-minute review because he's been testing them out all week and he's kind of an audiophile.

There you go. Yep. We'll have that next time. We also have PayPal donations from Andrew, William, Jody, Simon, Mike, Breed, Daniel, David, Elizabeth, Steve, Doug, and Ben, who says, I switched from Patreon to PayPal. No particular reason, but just in case everybody else is moving over, eight bucks a month isn't too bad.

Damn right. And Jim, who said, great podcast. Thank you, everybody. Fantastico. Woo-hoo. Might be able to eat this month. Ha-ha. Over at Twitter, Brendan writes in, thanks to JPDeaf at GOG Podcast. I was well-equipped with an awesome dad joke when my friend told me Alphabet bought Fitbit.

All right. Well, see, we're doing God's work here. All right. And Moss6502 says, not sure I buy the counterfeit argument and sends us a link to The Verge. Amazon blames error for blocking Nintendo resellers from listing products. Amazon marketplace sellers who deal in new use and refurbished Nintendo products woke up to a particular notice yesterday.

Without warning, Amazon was telling third-party sellers that they could no longer list Nintendo products of any kind without seeking approval. The policy change appeared to affect both Nintendo games and Nintendo hardware. And at first blush, it looked like the two companies had struck a so-called brand-gating deal common in e-commerce and designed to restrict third-party sellers who made traffic in counterfeits.

Isn't this what Apple basically did as well? Yep. Apple's done it. They've done it a couple with other people too. But yeah, well, they flipped it back within 24 hours. So yeah, they flipped it back within 24 hours. I mean, I, you know, I actually think it's, it's a good idea.

It's just not being implemented particularly well, mainly because they're not throwing enough people at it. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, because Amazon does have a, have a counterfeit problem big time. Yep. Big time. They do. So. And, but also no notice to the, the sellers sucks because people make their living off of this.

But like I said, you can't, you can't build your, yeah, build your house in somebody else's yard. Yep. Uh, third in command rights in this one's for Brian and his Mac PC debate, stay connected only you can't because there's only two USB connections. And this is a picture of an ad for the surface pro and it's just got, yeah, there's, there's no ports, no ports, but I expect that from a surface pro, uh, if I buy a laptop, it has ports unlike Apple.

Of course, of course, of course, of course, a port, a port. Mustafa writes in, have you used your brainwave detector today? And whoever produced this infomercial is not familiar with humans. And this is a, an article school ordered to ax brainwave detecting headgear for students. Yeah, this thing is crazy.

This is, it's a, this like a thing that you wear on your head called focus edu and it's supposed to track attention from students. And if they're, if they're paying attention or not, you have to watch the video to get how crazy this is. And the, the, the fact that it's a real thing is what's mind boggling because this comes off as a bit from like a, it's like black mirror.

It really comes off as a black mirror bit. It really does. And it should be pointed out. This is of course in China, not here, but it is developed. This is, it's an American company. I do believe that they were using it in China, but this is an American company because it's, it's technology based on from NASA.

And I believe Harvard that came up with the technology. So we made it, they used it and they don't like it. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's actually the opposite of Tik TOK. Right film, sleep, repeat writes in whenever I hear people talking about one day delivery or reminds me of this video from realistic marketing.

And it's a cute video over on YouTube. We have a link to that in the show notes. It's very funny. And over at GOG.show Quibble writes in, in case you guys haven't seen this yet, the short video about scooter safety popped up on my front page and it's another kind of funny video over on the YouTubes. Yes, it is in, it's in Spanish.

So, but here's the thing. It doesn't matter what they say. Just, just watch it. Yes. I almost fell out of my chair. There is a payoff. There is a payoff, especially the credits. Doug writes in. Hi geeks. You guys are like my two weird uncles complaining and going on about the good old days.

I'm currently working through the old episodes and love hearing young Jason and Brian. In episode 17, Brian mentioned that he was sure that Facebook's passwords would never have been stored in plain text. Jason responded if they did, then they're even more evil than he gives them credit for.

It's quite ironic hearing it now, isn't it? Particularly after we've just discussed the ring and their passwords being in plain text. Some things never change. Some things never change. Also, an interesting channel on YouTube called Data is Beautiful has taken my fancy. The one on music is very eye-opening.

Cheers from Down Under. I personally was mesmerized by the biggest dot-com companies from 1998 to 2019. Ooh, that's been updated? I'm going to have to watch that again then. It's fun. Yeah, it's really fun. Excellent. Scott writes in. Concord Mills Mall in Concord, North Carolina is making it even easier for you to give up your money.

And this is a Twitter link to basically a Bitcoin ATM. Just what we need. They are making it easier to get your Bitcoin at the mall. Also, I have a Lime scooter at my apartment complex. It's been over a week since I called them to pick it up. We are about 30 miles from the closest location to use a Lime scooter.

Better they get it instead of the landfill waters. Grump on. It's amazing that you could get a scooter 30 miles outside of a zone. I guess you could throw it in your car. Well, yeah, you got to throw it in your car because maybe it was one of the Chargers, Charger guys, went out, got it, brought it home, and left it there.

Or somebody was trying to take it and refurb it and just dumped it. You know, you never know. Yeah. People are weird. Gabe writes in. Hi, Grumps. This one is in your own backyard. Illegal drones ground water-dropping helicopters at critical moment in the Maria fire battle. Yeah, again, dumb shit.

Yep, idiot problems. Yeah. And, you know, we just need more drone-busting eagles. But, unfortunately, they've canceled the program on the drone-busting eagles. Dutch police will stop using drone-hunting eagles since they weren't doing what they were told. Now listen, eagle.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Who would have thought that the trained eagles couldn't be trained? Because, you know, you always go to the zoo and see those trained eagles. Amazing. Cameron writes in. Speaking of airline tickets, I will say that the distance thing doesn't seem to matter so much since my fiancée, who was living in Myrtle Beach while I lived in Charlotte, oftentimes it was cheaper for her to fly to D.C. than it was to fly to Charlotte, despite the fact that the flight to D.C. stopped in Charlotte.

You can't book the flight to D.C. and stop in Charlotte because if you miss the second flight, they'll cancel all of your other flights. And a link to TripAdvisor discussing this conundrum. Big data and routing. Yeah. It's some complicated shiznits, isn't it? It is.

Jerome writes in. If you want to speed up Netflix, Prime Video, etc., just install the Video Speed Controller extension. I believe it is available for Opera, Firefox, and Chrome. I've used it for a couple years now to watch shows faster, and it works really well. And we have a link to that in the show notes. There you go.

David writes in. I'm reaching out to you as I found what I believe to be a very serious Facebook privacy issues. Dave, David, David. I could throw a dart at a Facebook screen and we'd find about a million serious Facebook privacy issues, but this one is pretty good.

I brought the issue to Graham Cluley recently, and he published my work this week. There's a link to how Facebook helps an abusive ex-partner find out your new identity even after you've blocked them. And it gets into basically if you block somebody and even change your name, your old name or your account ID number will remain dynamically linked to their profile.

So say Daniela blocks Jack, and that should be it. However, in Messenger, her new name is displayed in Jack's chat session with her. And also, should he request a copy of his data via your Facebook information link, it displays her new name there too. Now, Facebook has responded to this, and I'm torn on this one because they're basically saying that's not what the block functionality is for.

Which is fine. It's basically just supposed to block people from interacting further when the person applies the block. Okay. Understood. But they should have some sort of mechanism to deal with this need, and they don't. Yeah.

The block function functions exactly the way they say it does, and it's not meant to handle this kind of situation, but that doesn't excuse them from, you know, figuring out a way to do that. Yeah, they need to deal with this situation. Yeah. Yeah. Permablock. Superblock.

And speaking of Facebook privacy issues, we're going to have, we're going to talk about this on the next show, but just Google Facebook switcheroo, and you'll see a bunch of stuff that just came out that we will discuss in depth on the next show, because it's pretty funny.

It's actually really sad and depressing, but it's out there. Yeah. Facebook switcheroo. Google that. Melanie writes in, long-time listener, first-time caller. You guys are a breath of fresh air. I don't know where you're at. You must be in Beijing for fresh air. Curious about your thoughts on this new eco-friendly product to come out of the valley.

And this is from The Verge. New Gadget asks, what if Juicero squeezed bags of soap instead? And basically, that's exactly what it does. It is a basically the exact Juicero machine, except you put in bags of soap instead of bags of juice. Yeah, and of course, the people over at this company are like, cleanest, I'm sorry, they're called cleanest.

They're like, well, we know nothing of this Juicero you speak of. Mwahaha. Yes, we have a machine that puts soap into water and stirs it for you. Wow. All right. There's no juice involved. Time for us to buy up some of the used machines sitting around and make a soup machine.

We're next. What if we squeeze out bags of soup? I'm thinking beer-cero. Squeeze bags of beer. Wait, I think we've... Wait, I think, didn't they advertise with us? We had somebody that did that already. It advertised with us.

Oh, come back, Hopsy. I enjoyed your product. Yes. All right. Over at iTunes, we have a five-star rating from Banjax909 in the UK. Blunt, earthy, and very, very funny. I look forward to hearing them turn their ire on well-deserving targets every week. Highly informative as well.

But that's a side effect of a conversation between two people who know tech inside and out. I must listen. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Banjax909. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review.

And if you're listening to us in the Overcast player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really, really appreciate it. And it's really funny to watch us beat out the New York Times. I love it. My shout-out goes to Hollywood Superman Christopher Dennis, who died at age 52.

Christopher was the guy who played Superman walking around Hollywood and Highland for so many years. And I used to live right there. And I know a friend of the show, Fogarty, and I had drinks with him on at least one occasion. Very nice guy. Very nice guy. I was just surprised by the quality of his watch that he wore because who knew Superman wore a watch?

A lot of people I knew were a little bit torn up by this. I guess he was a big figure out there that a lot of people went and talked to. Not me, but, you know, there you go. And he was a really nice guy. I mean, he was a really nice guy. You could talk to him anytime. He was super friendly. So, yeah.

I mean, that's why I'm putting this in here. I mean, I haven't seen the guy in 15 years, and I still think, like, if I see him, I'd just go, hey, how's it going, man? You know, because he's just a nice guy. Millions of people have seen him there. Sad. Well, there you go. And speaking of nice guys, I am on Eric Hundley's Unstructured podcast this week.

So if you have not gotten enough of my voice in your ear holes, check out episode 180 from the music industry to Grumpy Old Geeks out this week. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash gog.

Toss us a few bucks, and we'll love you forever. If you don't like Patreon, and most people don't seem to these days, but still want to support the show, you can give a one-time or recurring donation by just going to gog.show and clicking that PayPal button. Your support really keeps us going, and we really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 391.

From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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