413: Hey, Handsome Guy!

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

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Good morning, Brian. Morning. I got some news from Lumi, my Kickstarter that I backed, oh, sometime last century. Turns out, when you back a Kickstarter and you give them most of the monies, like you buy multiple of the product, you're the last one to get it.

They're going to start shipping my batch soon, hopefully, because I bought two. Because they clipped together and all that. And they gave me the Kickstarter updates where they put in some bullshit excuse. They're like, we think we're going to ship by the end of Friday or February, but maybe not.

We don't know. Because we're sending them out to everybody else who paid less than you. Thanks, guys. How long ago did you buy into this? I think it was September. And what was the expected ship date? By the holidays. And you still haven't gotten it yet? Nope. Let me bust out this old gem.

It's been a while. Shocking. Yeah. At least you're actually going to theoretically get them. It's not like they posted an update that we've seen many, many times for many, many Kickstarters. Sorry, we folded.

Good luck getting your money back. Exactly. Thanks. We'll be in Belize. Well, I do hope you get it. It does seem like a cool product. I've been waiting a long time for you to review it so I can figure out if I would like to actually purchase them when I can actually just get them right away. Yeah.

Well, it turns out you might be able to borrow one because the app is not going to be ready yet for two keyboards at once. So. Oh. Yeah. So I might get two of them but can only use one until the app is done. And this is why I just, I mean, I have a straight up policy.

I will not do Kickstarters. I'm just not ever going to do it. They never work out. Even when they seem to have their stuff together, they do not. I know. At least, though, I did bypass one problem. They do do the Q&A on the people who got them first. So that's the karma. The people who jumped the queue and got them first, they had an issue with keys sticking.

So you had to, like, send it back and get new ones because there was a batch that had bad keys. Never forget in this new Web 2.0 world, you are quality control. Oh, yeah. The customer is quality control. Ain't that the truth. In the news.

I found a little podcast news that I thought might upset you a little bit, Jason. Spotify is still throwing cash at podcasts, just not ours. Of course. They're buying Bill Simmons, The Ringer, which is an entire, you know, basically industry in and of itself. It's a pod-centric media company run and owned by Bill Simmons, which is mostly sports.

You know, so I kind of get that. People love their sports and love their sports podcasts. So there's a lot of listening. But apparently what they're saying is Spotify really wants out of the deal is Simmons' ability to create podcasts. So they want him to expand his empire. And I thought this little bit might have caught in your attention.

Apparently there's one show devoted to just re-watching old movies. Yeah. Yeah. Saw that one. Saw that one. Chapped my dazzle a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. You know. I got one of those. Yeah. Fuck you, Spotify.

God. We just can't catch a break, can we? I'm sure when we go to this podcast conference next week, somebody is just going to throw money at us, Jason. To leave. Get out of here. Yeah. Yeah. Now, does it have legs still there? We stopped because nobody wanted to pay us.

So, yeah, whatever. Hey, man, if anybody wants to pay us, we'll revive that in a heartbeat. So I found some Twitter news. Twitter has posted their first billion dollar quarterly revenue. Okay. Despite pulling political ads.

Kind of, sort of. Turns out that there's some loopholes with the political ads because big companies can still do some. There was a kerfuffle with ExxonMobil posting, you know, climate change ads and things like that. And so that's still going on.

But here's the kicker. So they had their first billion dollar quarter, right? Well, they made less than the previous quarter. Interesting. How does that work? I don't know. I don't know because they only made 119 million down from 255 million in the previous quarter.

That's a big drop. Right. Well, I have a theory about that. And this could probably have been easily checked, but that's not how we roll on this. That's not how we do it here. I willing to bet that they have probably increased their expenses quite a big deal. Because as we've talked about on this podcast many a times, first off, their ad system was horrible.

I couldn't even place ads. So they must have put some programmers on that to fix it. Because even me as a very, very casual Twitter user, I've noticed there is a significant uptick in ads in my Twitter feed. So they must have gotten that all fixed. And my next story shows me that they're throwing some money at other things as well.

So Twitter is finally fighting back against deep fakes and other deceptive media, in theory. In theory. In a blog post, Twitter announced changes to the company's synthetic and manipulated media policy. Amazing that we have to have those these days, but we've been screaming about it for a while here.

It's a good thing for people to have, which it defines as any photo, audio, or video that's been significantly altered or fabricated. So one would assume this does not necessarily only mean deep fakes, of course. This would also include, in theory, under these rules, that Nancy Pelosi video that was just altered to slow down and speed up.

Sorta. Sorta. Yeah, they can mark it as manipulated, but they're not going to take it down. Well, under the new rules, Twitter will remove this kind of media if the company finds it likely to cause serious harm, such as content that threatens people's safety or could cause widespread civil unrest.

The rub there, of course, is who makes that decision and, you know, what kind of rules do you apply to it? So if they don't think that it's likely to cause harm, it will still label the tweets as containing manipulated media, warn users who try to share them, and deprioritize the content in users' feed.

The changes will go into effect on March 5th. So, yeah, we'll see. Yeah, so you might get shadow banned. But I'm assuming they've hired up here. No, they haven't. Because if you read farther down in the article, Twitter says it isn't coming out with any new tools to discover manipulated or synthetic media, but instead continuing its existing process, which largely relies on users to find and report tweets that may violate the company's content moderation policies.

The company said it will also partner with third parties to help identify manipulated content. So, not really throwing any engineers at it. But they're not throwing any engineers at it. And as pursuant to the previous comment I just made, not only are we the customer's quality control, we are also the police for platforms these days.

We are the internet police. We always wondered who the internet police were. It's us. It's us. Well, the interesting thing that you keep saying that, you know, they staffed up to do all this stuff. If you remember, not too long ago, Twitter became, quote unquote, profitable because they fired everybody to cut expenses. So, I guess that was a look over here for a little while.

We're going to cut expenses. We're going to look better on paper. Our stock price is going to rise. Then we're going to maybe hire them all back when nobody's looking and go back to business as usual. It sounds like it. So. Yep. Yep. Not shocking. Now, over at Google, Google has told Clearview AI, who we talked about a few times, stop taking our photos.

Yes. Yes. So, following Twitter, Google and YouTube have become the latest companies to send a cease and desist letter to Clearview AI, which, as we all recall, is the startup that has just been scraping gazillions of photos off the internet and supplying more than 600 police departments across North America use of their facial recognition software, which has horrible statistics in terms of false and positive.

Mistakes. Correct. Yes. So. So. Yeah. There it goes. So, Google has demanded that they stop doing it. And the company's CEO, Juan Ton Thot, I believe that's how you would say it, said, Clearview plans to challenge the cease and desist letters in court.

Basically, he compared Clearview's practice of scraping the internet for images to what Google does itself with its search engine, which kind of has a point. No, it doesn't. Yes, I know. Totally untrue. They do not follow the review. I know. I was setting it up, Jason. Oh, well, you never know with you.

It's early. You're generally pretty slow. I know. It is early. It's not enough coffee. So, he says, Google can pull in information from all different websites. So, if it's public, you know it's out there. It could be inside Google's search engine, and it could be inside ours as well. He then went on to argue that the company has a First Amendment right to public information.

Google, however, saw that differently. YouTube's terms of service explicitly forbid collecting data that can be used to identify a person, which facial recognition is kind of spot on for being able to identify a person. When it works. Yes. And Clearview has publicly admitted to doing exactly that, and in response, we sent them the cease and desist.

They also took issue with the comparison most websites want to be included in Google search, and we give webmasters control over what information from their site is included in our search results. Sorta. Including the option to opt out entirely. Also, sorta. Also, sorta.

Yes. Yes. And we talked, I think it was like two episodes ago or something like that, about somebody who wrote in talking about the copyright violations from Clearview. So, you know, they take your photos. Do you have the right to sue them? I'm like, yeah, maybe they're just taking the metadata and scraping it. Well, I thought about it a little more because I had some time, and we usually don't have time to think about what we say on this show.

No. I was looking at it, I'm like, oh, you know what? They do have to store all those photos, all those billions of photos they have, because when a face matches, they have to show a photo of something to the cops. Yes. It can't just be metadata. Yeah. Yeah. You can't just say, hey, it's that guy, without showing, you know, proof of work, because they're going to have to compare it to the people in the photos that they're matching against.

So, they are actually showing those photos to those 600 police departments. So, I think the entire internet has a class action lawsuit against Clearview. Let's just get on it. All right. Let's zoom out of existence. I'm sure there'll be consequences. New name and a new round of funding.

That's what it's going to be. Exactly. Now, I had a bunch of other stories in here that kind of somewhat related to this sort of discussion, but I know we have Seth Miranda, and we tend to go on and on and on. So, I cut them, and I'll end the new segment with a story that I found funny. PayPal is so strict about sanctioned countries, it won't even let you say Cubano sandwich.

What? Yes, well, this is an example of AI in action. They're using machine learning and whatnot to basically go through all the different PayPal transactions or Venmo, because they also own Venmo, and look for words, because they have financial obligations to our government to make sure that sanctioned countries aren't transferring money here and there and everywhere.

Unfortunately, they really just use a brute force keyword search, and that's it. That's what they're using. So, if you want a PayPal or Venmo, some cash to someone without any hitches, do not put the word Iran in the memo field, because on Wednesday, Jewish currents got an annoying reminder of this policy.

The magazine tweeted that nine payments to its staff and its contributors, and isn't it crazy that companies are actually using PayPal to pay their staffs these days? No, no, not really. It's a new world order. Have been held up because the transactions descriptions included the term Iran in reference to a piece that the magazine published.

So, yeah, they basically just flag keywords, and that's that. Now, I'm just going to quickly run through the list of words that are banned and the words that are not, because this is just phenomenal. I'm sorry, waiting for this to load here.

Okay, so here are things that you cannot ever put in your memos. Iran, ISIS, Persian, North Korea, Kim Jong-un, Bashir al-Assad, Kwasam, Salami, real Irish Republican Army, Cuba, inexplicably Cubano sandwich, Syria, Syrian refugee, Al-Qaeda, Los Santos, Shining Path, etc.

And words that are totally okay. You can put this, and I urge you all to do so, in your memo fields. Bomb, car bomb, weapons of mass destruction, assassination, hitmen, kidnapping, terrorists, cartel, anthrax, ricin, sarin gas, AK-47, Glock 43, dogfight, Nazi, Stormfront, Unite the Right, Proud Boys, KKK, Klansman, David Duke, prostitutes, handjob, blowjob, revenge porn, snuff film, human tracking, slave, fetus, stem cells, kidney harvest, napalm, coyote, marijuana, MDMA, ecstasy, LSD, meth, black tar heroin.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you get the point. Oh, I don't know why they put fake Yeezys in here, but, uh, and I'd also like to know what an Atomwaffen is. Yeah, I skipped that one because I wasn't sure either. Sounds, I don't know. Oh, anti-defamation, uh, oh, it's a neo-Nazi thing.

Gotcha. Ah, there you go. Yes, the Nazis. But that's totally okay, so feel free to put that in your memo field. In fact, Jason, when I pay you for the iPhone 8 that I'm buying from you on PayPal, I'm sure to include many of these terms. Cash only. Cash only. We're only doing cash only.

I can't lose my PayPal account. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love.

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

Security? Ha! We are joined again this week by our good friend 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 discuss law and policy as well as surveillance and privacy.

Hello, gentlemen. Always good to be back. Hello. Any big news about potential security things that happened this week? Oh, nah. Well, the reality is, the big news has nothing to do with security. It's just incompetence.

Yeah. That's true. That's true. Fresh talent. Of course, we are talking about the app that the Iowa caucus decided to make use of, and things did not go well for them. Yeah, you'd think they might have done a little testing, but as Jason and I were talking about a little bit earlier in the show, you know, the customers are now quality control and version one testers.

So that happened in an election. Yay. Doesn't seem like democracy should be your beta tester. But, well, I mean, I don't know. I mean, democracy technically is still kind of in beta, so why not?

They just took it to the next level. That's true. Yeah. So I guess we can get a little bit into the specifics here. I know Jason has found a couple of articles, but there were a few headlines that leapt out at me. One of them was voting issues tend to stem more from low-grade incompetence than malfeasance, which is kind of what happened here.

And I did read and saw an article that said that they actually had a perfectly good and working app that they used two years ago when they did a caucus. Hmm. But they decided to upgrade into a new app, which didn't work.

Mm-hmm. Well, let's pivot. Let's pivot. So, yeah. I mean, I've read a bunch of articles on this. And the interesting thing is that, you know, so this is going out to people who are supposed to be counting votes, but it's bring your own device day here in the elections in the United States.

And, you know, as we know, Android has such a good track record of being, you know, install once, run anywhere, because, you know, that OS is not fragmented in any way, shape, or form. And the device providers are all in line with each other.

So, if, you know, you write one app, you know it's going to run anywhere with just one test. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So, step one, let people, you know, get devices from the state, maybe, that have it all pre-installed with the same device per chance.

So, you're not trying to do device-specific and OS-specific beta testing with a new release two days before it's supposed to go live. I suppose I'm as surprised by the fact, that fact, as I was about what we learned about, like, Wi-Fi on military bases.

I am shocked that this stuff isn't controlled at some level, that people are just using personal devices and things of that nature. But I guess that's the way it is these days. States' rights and counties are in charge of their own, you know, election boards and things like that.

So, it's not one unified. We don't have, you know, the United States Department of Voting. That's one of the big problems. I suppose it's tempting to think that, you know, this is just the way that it is. But I'm sure, at least I hope, that at some point there are some very frustrated security professionals that were consulted about this that were screaming to high heaven saying, for the love of God, don't do this.

And we're just ignore it. That is, you know, that's the way that they were screaming to high heaven. And to the point about the mobile devices, it's my understanding that they did not get it to the Apple App Store in time for it to be available on Election Day.

The latest version hadn't been, hadn't gone through Apple's approval process quickly enough. Ah, so they were actually even forced to use Android. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Yeah. They could, I saw somewhere they were delivering it via test flight on Apple.

Oh. Was that, or was that just for testing? I don't, I don't know. I mean, that's possible. Imagine you're, the people in this situation at Shadow and imagine, I'm sure. Also, by the way, a name that inspires confidence in free and open elections. Oh, absolutely. Shadow Incorporated.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But I think certainly the three of us have all been through that situation where you're developing something or something's being close to launch or some, some creative or professional endeavor is getting close to the time when actual people have to use it.

Or consume it or consume it or whatever. And maybe things aren't going as well as you'd hoped. And that feeling of panic starts to set in and you start, you're going, oh crap, oh crap, oh crap. I'm just imagining the folks at Shadow, that feeling settling in over them as, as it became clearer and clearer that this was not going to end well for them.

I had that feeling every time we did a movie website and it was Friday of opening day. Yeah. That was, I know that feeling very, very well. I had it for when, you know, major concerts tickets were about to be announced and we had to make sure pre-sales were all functioning and we had to deal with third parties and God knows what they did.

And yep. Oh boy. I don't miss those pits in my stomach. No. I guess it really is that thing of, you know, battle plan survives contact with the enemy. It's that sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I, the first contact website when I built that thing in 97, I believe.

I mean, we, we, we, we made the Hollywood reporter because we got 10 million hits in our first day. And that thing was running on a, like this monster SGI. This was like a $250,000 SGI and it literally melted the hard drive. Really? Because this was before we had RAM caching and things like that.

Every page had like 30 micro graphics on it and all this crazy stuff. It had VRML. But the problem was, this is before we knew how to optimize for assets. There was no CSS. So everything was in tables. Oh man. And all of the, all of the read writes melted the hard drive. Wow. That's amazing.

Yeah. So I, I, I like to, I blame the Borg personally. I think, you know, I think our server was assimilated, but yeah, I know those pits. And when things go wrong, like somebody, I was going to say somebody got fired over this, but as we all know. Nobody gets fired.

Well, no, that's not, that's not true. I'm sure somebody probably will get fired, but it's never the higher ups in the company, is it? No. And it seems like, it's always poor like little Dex, Poindexter that's sitting in the back that was putting up the red flags or through some weekly worded emails saying, um, guys, we're not quite ready.

It seems like these folks are connected insiders with, with the democratic party. Yes. Which seems to be, I was trying to, I was talking to Jason about it a little bit earlier and it seems that they got this gig through basically grift. So yeah. Once we, we do know that there was a working app from some other company that was, you know, rolled out two years ago and went just fine.

But as we, as we pointed out on the cyber wire and I'll read part of, uh, uh, Gerard Namira's statement here. He says, as the Iowa democratic party has confirmed the underlying data and collection process via shadows, mobile caucus app was sound and accurate, but our process to transmit that caucus results data generated via the app to the IDP was not.

Importantly, this issue did not affect the underlying caucus results data. This, my friends is a distinction without a difference. I just, uh, uh, he also, I love this.

I love this. He also goes on to say the goal of the app was to ensure accuracy in a complex reporting process. We will apply the lessons learned in the future and have already corrected the underlying technology issue. We take these issues very seriously and are committed to improving and evolving to support the demic, to support, I'm laughing too hard to support the democratic party's goal of modernizing its election process.

They're saying this like they still have a job, which makes me think that they probably do. And Brian is correct. Probably do as well. I think the one thing that really came out of this was the outcry for, can't we just go back to paper and pen? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, fortunately, that's what saved it.

Everybody had to drive their results to the local workplace. Yeah. It's my understanding also that one of the things that slowed this down was some of the voting precincts, because they thought they were going to have the app working. They had dropped their paper ballots in the mail already.

Oh. Oops. And, yeah, and, you know, the Postal Service takes the integrity of the mail extremely seriously, so it's not like you can go, hey, listen, can I have that back? Yeah. Yeah. You try that at your local post office someday and see how they respond.

No. Postal inspectors carry guns, let me tell you. Yeah, they take it seriously. Well, we'll see. I think, I believe it's— There's one other quote here. Well, I was going to say— There's one other quote here. Fuck. We could do this all day.

Yeah. Who's on first? Balls. All right. You go ahead. So, I believe it's Nevada who was originally contracted with these folks, and they pulled the plug and said, yeah, we're not going to do this now. We're not going to use Shadows app.

Okay. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. In the Vice article, I love this quote from Gregory Miller, co-founder of the Open Source Election Technology Institute. And he says, in a system, in a world where we are questioning every aspect of elections and whether they can be trusted, why would you do anything to fuel a disinformation attack?

And that's exactly what the Democrats have done. They've opened a can of whoop-ass on themselves. Yeah. Unforced error. Love it. Absolutely. Well, let's transition a little bit. I read an article recently, and I could have sworn I had stumbled onto a near-future sci-fi dystopian website, but unfortunately, it's all too real.

All the invasive ways China is using drones to address the coronavirus. So, recently, pedestrians crossing a bustling intersection in Xuyang, a city in northern China, found themselves being scolded by a police-operated drone equipped with a camera and loudspeakers. Their mistake was neglecting to wear face masks, which, by the way, don't do anything against the coronavirus, but there you go, which has killed at least 427 people and infected more than 20,000 worldwide, most of them in China's mainland.

There have been increasing pictures and videos and et cetera being posted to Twitter and other social media, sometimes by the government, showing bewildered passerbys jerking their heads to the sky upon hearing a disembodied voice harassing them about their hygiene. A policewoman yelling through the drone's loudspeaker says, hey, handsome guy, speaking on your mobile, where is your mask?

And later instructs a group of pretty young ladies to wait until they get home to eat so they won't have to lower their masks. Yeah, so they're basically just flying drones around everywhere and trying to police people with it in creative ways. You know what, this reminded me, this is like a Letterman sketch, right?

Yeah. Like, this is like when David Letterman would take over the drive-thru at the local Taco Bell or something, you know, hey, handsome guy on your mobile, or when he would send someone into a store and he'd be talking on the walkie-talkie and the person would have to say whatever he said. That's what this reminds me of. I just, like, you're using a drone, first of all, you're using a drone with loudspeakers and it's just weird.

Yeah, it feels very near-future dystopian. Like I said, I kind of felt like I was doing it. Now, we know China have been using drones quite a while, some of which they've disguised as birds on a mass scale to track down fugitives, catch people making traffic infractions, monitor students taking college entrance exams with a drone.

That seems amazing to me. But the concern, of course, now is that because they are attempting to contain the coronavirus and they're going all in on drone technology to do so. As we kind of know about governments and particularly dictatorships, once something has been deployed, it doesn't tend to go away, even if the case for which you originally deployed it has been solved.

So, yeah, there's a lot of fear that this is the new world order in China. This one in particular really freaked me out. Reports from around the country further indicate that the drones are covering cities and villages with disinfectant spray. So, they're aerial bombing their own people.

Now, they're saying this is helpful, that the disinfectant is effective in preventing the spread of the coronavirus. But, man, oh, man, doesn't that freak you guys out? Unless they're spreading the coronavirus over to the Uyghurs, which is also possible.

Now, we're definitely getting into X-Files territory. Yeah, but I think they could really just kill two birds with one stone if they went full David Letterman and put the loudspeaker on it, had them talk to them, and then dropped a watermelon from the drone. That would be perfect. Just drop a watermelon on the fenders.

Get the camera. Play us out, Paul. Yeah. Yeah, this is – I'm reminded – I guess the disinfectant spray thing, I mean, is – I think about – Chemtrails?

The communities – well, I was thinking about communities that spray for mosquitoes. There are trucks that drive around and spray for mosquitoes. So, that's a thing, but not like this. And like you said – Yes. Not like this and, boy, that Uyghur community.

Yeah. I think you're right. It's an excuse to really go after – it's not that they needed an excuse because they were already going after them, but they can certainly use this to take it up a notch. Under the guise of doing something actually good for the people. Correct. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. And we got some feedback. A listener to the show Donovan sent us this article, and it kind of, you know, tells us nothing we didn't already know. But in real math, researchers find anonymized data is even less anonymous than we thought.

So, yes, these two students, Dasha – oh, boy. Metropolitansky. Wow. Well done, Brian. Well done. Thank you. Thank you. Got it. And Keon Tari, which are two students at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, recently built a tool that combs through vast troves of consumer data sets exposed from breaches for a class paper they've yet to publish.

Now, these are just the students doing this. This is great. Well, it's Harvard. Yeah. Yeah, it does. It is. So, they basically just grabbed every single huge dump that has been out there publicly and built a data set and started matching people left, right, and center.

The problem they're saying is that there are so many of these data sets out there that will contain one or two pieces of information that you're able to combine them all together into one gigantic data soup that spits out your ID and is able to, you know, basically you can cross-reference and totally identify people from theoretically anonymized data sets.

Right. And, you know, an individual leak is like a puzzle piece on its own. It's not particularly powerful, but when multiple leaks are brought together, they form a surprisingly clear picture of our identities. That's what they're saying. And we all know not a week goes by that there isn't another big leak.

And the more and more that there are out there, the worse and worse it's going to be. I think if these folks were smart, they would take this data and they would put together a dating service. Harvard Madison.

Welcome. Welcome, students. Think about all the things that it knows about people. It has everything from, like this says, from everything from MyHeritage to porn websites. So, you want to really know what people are like? You want to really know what they're interested in? I'll bet you this is a really useful bit of data to match people together if you were able to de-anonymize them.

You're both Italians and you both like Latino porn. Right. Exactly. You're made for each other. It's kismet. Kismet. So, yeah, any idea that any of these things are anonymized has basically just been completely blown out of the water. I'm really curious how they're getting around the legal issues of having this data and writing a paper on it and actually working on this data since, you know, technically it's illegal data.

Because, you know, security researchers have such a hard time right now because, you know, you have the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and things like that. Like, is there something that is going to get these guys in trouble from taking this data and actually using it and then publishing a paper on it? I certainly hope not because I want to read this paper.

But what do you think, Dave? That's a good question. I fear for these guys. I don't know. I'm thinking maybe that's a good question I'll have to ask Ben Yellen about. Yeah. What are the legal ramifications about that sort of thing? Because a lot of times there are exceptions for researchers in a lot of these things.

But I think the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act famously does not have those, right? But I'll ask Ben. It's a good question. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, because I'm just – I'm worried these guys are going to, you know, do something that just runs them afoul of the law and somebody is going to say, hey, I'm in that data set.

Let's take these guys down so they can never publish and get that data set destroyed even though the data set's out there. Well, that's the problem, right? It's whack-a-mole with these data sets. They're everywhere. Yeah. We can get rid of Hulk Hogan porn, but we can't get rid of the experience.

Well, that's what we've learned, Jason. The one thing we've been able to wipe from the internet is Hulk Hogan's porn video. But it reminds me of another funny thing with people who have clearances. I've worked with several people who have security clearances. And there's this funny no man's land where, for example, like the Snowden breach, right?

Snowden releases all of this classified information. It's out in the public. It's been published by the New York Times. But the people with clearances are still forbidden from accessing it, looking at it, even though it's in the public sphere now.

Right. Because it's categorized as classified, they're forbidden from having any contact with it. Oh, yeah. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very strange thing. So this isn't directly like that, but it just reminds me of that. Well, I wanted to finish up this week with a couple of, I guess, lighter stories.

And lighter is... Crop dusting a minority with potentially deadly viruses. By the way, your light bulbs may be hacked. Well, and that's what I mean by lighter. It's literally lights. Do you guys have any smart light bulbs in your homes?

I do. I have the Philips Hue. So I immediately checked my app to make sure that I had the most recent update. I as well have the Philips Hue. And I have a bunch of other smart devices throughout the house that keep track of doors. And I don't know whether my hot water heater has sprung a leak, things like that.

And I find them very useful. But Philips was alerted by the security researchers at Checkpoint Software that there was a vulnerability in the Hue light bulbs that would allow someone to get into your network and then pivot, move laterally and basically have access to the whole network and spread ransomware and malware and all that kind of good stuff.

When I was checking it, I was like, oh, no big deal. Somebody really wanted to hack in and turn on my light, whatever. I'll just unplug it and reset it. But then I kept reading and I was like, oh, that's not good. Right. Right. Now, if you're – what's the central unit with these things?

The hub. Thank you very much. Yes, the hub. The hub was the word I was looking for. If the hub is connected to the internet, which chances are it is. The hub is connected to the internet. The internet is connected to the Chinese. Right. Chinese connected to the Russians.

So if your hub is connected to the internet, it should automatically have updated itself. Yeah. But worth a check to make sure. Which I thought it was odd that it did not give me a notification that it had updated or anything. I had to launch the app and go into security settings and then see that the update was there and then compare it to the article to make sure I had the right update.

You'd think if something like this would have occurred, they would, like, push a little notification to you. By the way, we just updated your software for this and that reason. No, nothing. Well, it's interesting. Yeah. On my Eros, when I log in and there's been a security update, I don't get notifications that there's been an update.

But when I launch the app to look in, it says, you are now updated to this app. Here are the release notes to see what we've changed. Well, they don't even do that with Philips. So there was no notification whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah. I have noticed that there have been times when I've gone to use the Philips app and it said we need to do a firmware update or something.

But maybe there's a difference between a security issue and just a functionality issue. Yes. We'd like to tell you about the new functions we've given you, but never mind the security issue that we had. That's true. That's a good point, Brian. That is a little bit upside down. Isn't it, though? Nothing to see here.

Move along. Move along. And then finally, fun story from a security researcher working on his own. Got himself a Wacom tablet. Now, do you guys say Wacom or Wacom? I've always said Wacom.

You say Wacom? You say Wacom? All right. Well, when I used to go to the big graphics conventions here in L.A.? Yep. SIGGRAPH. Yeah. When I'd go to SIGGRAPH, I'd go to the booth and they would always chastise me and say it's called Wacom.

Really? I did not know that. That is one pronunciation I never would have guessed. I was going to say, that's the one I hadn't heard. Yeah, that's the one that is called Wacom, Wacom tablets. And they were very adamant that I used that pronunciation. These guys had T-shirts and badges.

Well, they're not quite the size company that they used to be. Well, these are the tablets that I'm sure, like you guys, have been using for decades. If you've been in the graphics world, they're probably the biggest name in these sort of tablets.

I don't know where they are these days. But at any rate, the security researcher was curious about what sort of information his tablet was gathering. He also went through and looked at the EULA when he bought himself a new tablet and all the things he agreed to.

And it turns out that the Wacom tablet is sending lots of information back to the mothership, including every app that you open. It tracks what you're opening, how long you're using it, when you've closed it, sending it back to a command and control server, telling you basically everything you're using this thing for.

I can certainly understand why that information would be of interest to Wacom. I can too. Right. Yeah, no. That's not cool. At least not without notification. Well, I suppose they let you know in the EULA. Right. Right. Yeah.

I mean, it makes sense from the point of view of what are people using our product for. Let's make sure it works well with those things. Well, I mean, as from a driver perspective, it basically can do a check to see, is the app that has been loaded compatible with our driver? And can we use the tablet with this application?

You know, just from a programming side and a usage side, you know, it's like, oh, I'm opening Chrome. Can I use my, you know, the tablet would want to ping that app and find out if it's, you know, compatible with the tablet. Maybe look at the version of the app and things like that, but that can happen in the driver.

It doesn't have to go back to home. Right. Yeah. So I don't know. It just seems creepy and excessive and not cool. I do like this one sentence in this rather long article that he's written about this.

He says, I care about this for two reasons. I'm only going to read the first because it's the good one. The first is a principled fuck you. I don't care whether anything materially bad will or won't happen as a consequence of Wacom taking this data from me. I simply resent the fact that they're doing it. Amen, brother. Right.

Right. Exactly. Yeah. I like his, you know, the thing that he came up with after it is like a little contrived example of what could possibly happen. I thought he put a lot of thought into it. It was pretty good. Well worth a read. Yeah.

I also like he led off this post with a disclaimer. He said, I haven't asked Wacom for comment about the story because I'm not a journalist and I don't know how to do that. He said, I don't believe I've gotten anything important wrong, however. I like this guy.

I like this guy a lot. And I like the fact that people who are using these, using whatever, are doing their own research into this and finding out exactly what these companies are doing. And because they're certainly not really telling us, are they? Right, right. Yeah. The more that we shine a light on these things, the better chance we have that they'll get fixed or rules will be put in place to put an end to these gatherings of our data.

Great idea for a nonprofit that we could start up about shining lights. We'll call it shadowing.

Yeah, that's perfect. Well, I think the name might be available soon. Yeah. Website should be able to pick that up pretty quick. Right. For a song. Maybe some intellectual property, an app. Yeah. It'll be fire sale prices.

No doubt. No doubt. All right, gentlemen. Always a pleasure. I will talk to you next time. Brick-a-brick. So, Brian, I went down the YouTube hole the other day just looking for interesting things on the news feed.

And I saw this. I said, a YouTuber gives his credit card to random people and the things they buy will surprise you. Does this relate to the list of PayPal terms? No, not really. I just got sucked down the click hole because I was like tired. I'm like, oh, let's see what the fuck it is.

And I watched the video. And it's a video of this guy named Mr. Beast, who is apparently I'd never heard of him. He's big on giving things away with all the money he makes on YouTube. Only some of our billionaires and politicians felt that way. Yeah. So, he had a credit card that had an unlimited limit on it.

There's no limit. And he would walk around. That is the definition of unlimited. Exactly. And he would give it to people. Except for bandwidth. Does his credit card throttle? Oh, my God. Don't get an AT&T unlimited card. You only get $2 a month and then it charges you 30 cents every minute after that.

So, he would just give it to people and say, look, you can buy whatever you want. But if it goes over the limit, then you have to give it all back. And so, it was a guessing game. Like, how much will this card go up? How much will this card go up? So, it was fun to watch. And it was a fun video. And then I just watched a bunch of his other videos where he gives away thousands and thousands of Christmas presents.

And the guy just gives away money. It's pretty cool. It's fun. It's one of those things that just kind of makes me happy. It's very funny. So, if you want just a little pick me up, go watch Mr. Beast. I like him. Okay. I'm sure it's going to turn out that he's some kind of damn child rapist and sex offender because I like him now.

And everything. It's like the good people always tend to, like, blow up in your face. But since I didn't do that much research, I'm going to get some email that says, you didn't know what Mr. Beast did when he was five. You're screwed. Now, it's a shame I did pull out that article about cancel culture.

Would have tied in nicely. Or, well, I pulled it out. You'll never hear it. Sorry, people. Most of our listeners are probably of a certain age since we do call ourselves grumpy old geeks. I know we have a lot of younger listeners, but I'm guessing a lot of people are around the same age as us. And I just loved, loved this article I found over on Medium.

Medium. But it's by Amber Frehley. And it's called Gen X Will Not Go Out Quietly. And I'm not going to go through it here. It's just if you're of our age, go read this. I love this. This is amazing. This is all about us and my favorite line. We are now at the age where we have seen most of this bullshit before.

So you're not going to fool us easily. This is why we're checked out of everything. Yeah. I liked it. I liked it. It's only a three-minute read. Yeah, it's quick. Definitely worth it. And I don't know how I found this one, but Bill and Ted's excellent phone booth. Somebody is making a recreation of the Bill and Ted phone booth because, you know, the new movie's coming.

And they had Super Bowl commercials already. And so they took a regular phone booth, retrofitted the payphone. Like, they have an authentic payphone inside, but they retrofitted it for VoIP and landline service. But they put on the umbrella antenna, of course. I'm looking at it, though, and it seems a little clean cut for me.

It's not beat up or anything. I wanted something that was a little more. Yeah, it doesn't look very cool. You know, it's like. It needs a little real world effects use. Yeah, it does. It does. It needs some practical effects on it. Because I'm looking at this thing and I'm like, you know, that just looks like they got a phone booth and stuck an antenna like an umbrella on the top.

That's all it is. It's an umbrella on the top. And they're selling it for, get this, $8,495. But you can put down a pre-order deposit for $100. That you'll never see again. You'll probably never see the phone booth either, because I bet this is like coming straight out of Kickstarter.

They seem to actually make these things for a living. They have many related products. You can get a special California edition that has the California flag on it. So I think you might actually get these. They have a catalog. I don't know who they sell these things to, but apparently they make them.

Oh, these are the people that make the Cuba call. Where you base. It's like a little, you know, meeting room thing that they probably have at all the WeWorks that you can still hear from the outside that they complained about. Because they all have glass doors. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I was cute though. You know, me, I'm a Bill and Ted fan.

I know. You love it. I like it too. Not enough to spend $9,000 on a phone booth. Exactly. Where are you going to put it? You know? Yeah. So this last one I put in here for you, because you have a kid of a certain age. And this is a recipe that I think will make him very smile quite a bit.

It's the old hot dog spaghetti trick. Have you ever seen this before? No. So you take a hot dog, you cut it up, and then you take dry spaghetti, and you push it through, and then you boil it. And then it's like you have hot dog pieces with spaghetti coming out of them. And it's just like, how did they do that?

If you didn't know how it was done, it's like, wow, that's magic. So kids love it. I've made it for kids, and they actually do enjoy it. So I put a video on how to make it in the show notes. So you should try that with your little one sometime. I bet I'll get a kick out of it. I have the weirdest little kid in the world.

He hates pasta. No interest in mac and cheese. Can you return him? It's so annoying. I bet. I don't know what to do about it. I'm hoping he'll come around eventually. I mean, he's not carbophobic. It's not from growing up in L.A.

Like, he loves his bread. He's not scared of carbs. He just doesn't like pasta. He won't eat ramen? No. Oh, my God. No noodles. Return him. Take him back. I know. He's defective.

We're back again with Seth Miranda, the host of Adorama Rewind, professional photographer from New York City, and many, many other things. Seth, welcome back. You just reminded me of that old salsa commercial with, like, New York City.

That was the idea. Oh, man. Get a rope. Oh, yeah. How's it going, man? I'm sorry it's been a minute. I can't believe how fast time flew between the last time we did this. No, I mean, you've been around the country and back again and then left and came back again. Actually, that's true.

I think we were like, oh, cool. You went to CES. We'll talk about CES when you get back. Cool. I'm already in Nashville again. I know. I'm just like, come on, dude. Yeah. It was crazy. And, you know, it's just kind of you have to roll with this industry while you can, you know, with the momentum and everything. Oh, definitely.

Definitely. How was CES? Just give me the elevator pitch version of CES. Was it fun? Was it stupid? It was ridiculous. The size of it, the sheer size of it to a point where I was just stuck in. I thought I was stuck in China at one point. It just was like a bunch of knockoffs for as far as the eye could see.

It was just crazy how many earbuds there were. But I think the craziest part was vendors bought out entire hotel suite floors because they didn't want to buy a booth at CES. So you had to make appointments with them on a floor of a hotel. That's annoying.

Yeah. It was kind of crazy. Buy the damn booth, guys. Well, some of them just don't have, they don't want to pay for signage. They don't want to pay for booth talent. They don't want to deal with dealing with unions to plug in a lamp or whatever. You know, it's like all sorts of stuff. Oh, yeah. And I get that. But man, it was just too much.

I couldn't believe how many people there were. And it was technically no civilians. It's all like media people. Technically. There was a guy scalping passes outside. I'm not even joking. Oh, do they still do CES with like the AVN stuff at the same time? No, actually, that's funny you say that because AVN just finished in Vegas, I think last week.

So it just missed itself. But what's weird is that while there's a Photo Plus convention here in New York, there is an Exotica porn convention in Jersey. So it's like, I guess the creepy guys or cameras have to make a choice right there, like Sophie's Choice. That's funny.

Yeah. The last time I went to CES, I technically went for the AVN Awards, but a buddy loaned me his pass for the day. So I got to walk the floor. But this was like 15 years ago. Yeah. Now they're on DVDs. Actually, not even on DVDs anymore, actually. Right. Nobody's on DVDs.

Everybody's been pirated and it's up on you porn. Come on. It's funny. You should talk about pirating because Lady Gaga just got in some weird heat in our industry. She's upset that her new song got leaked on the Internet and it's been circling around her fan base, which they really are fans.

They wouldn't be pirating. But let's not get into that. She takes an image off of Shutterstock, which is a stock photo agency, pretty much, where you can upload images of professional photographer after they vet you and people can buy your images based on resolution. So like top end would be 50 bucks for full resolution and it gets cheaper after that, depending on what you need it for, like a web image or whatever.

Yeah. So she found an image of a young girl wearing a ski mask, listening to music with headphones on and saying shh with her hands. And she wrote, can you all stop on Twitter? And across this photo, it says Shutterstock's watermark, which means she didn't buy it. Oh, classic.

So Shutterstock went, hey, we hear you, Lady Gaga. We like our artists to get paid for things, too, or something to that regard. And all of her fans backlashed, saying, oh, whatever, your site was irrelevant until Lady Gaga tweeted this and everyone has seen your watermark.

What they're failing to realize is two things. One, it is a $2 billion company, Shutterstock. It's not a small, irrelevant company. They're not irrelevant at all. Half the things you see on websites are from Shutterstock. Absolutely. Some of my stuff's up on Shutterstock. At least it used to be.

A billion years ago, I was on one of those, iStock or Shutterstock. But the other thing is, the photographer never got paid for it, even if it's like $2 in royalties or whatever when they get their cut of the sale. Are you kidding me to think that it's Shutterstock that was supposed to be benefiting from this?

They were going to make a $50 sale on the top end. She's doing this for Twitter. They would have made $2 off of this. The whole point is that she's going against the exact principle of what she's making fun of. Exactly. Exactly. So she gets what she deserves on this one. This is internet karma coming back to bite her in the ass.

Well, hopefully Shutterstock got some play out of this. But in the end, the photographer took the photo. No play. You know? Yeah. So there's that. But I heard a rumor that he uploaded the image somewhere without the watermark on it and just said, here, enjoy it with a wink.

Okay. Well, at least he's got a sense of humor about it. I would have called my lawyer. Over what? The few bucks? It's just like, even if it's a few dollars, it's whatever. But it's the principle. Yeah. To make a point of people pirating your music and you're upset about it with a pirated photo, like what?

One R form's worth more than another? I don't understand this. Yeah. No. I had a photo stolen that was used on a CD cover. And I sued the guy who did it, who was one of my heroes. It killed me to do it. But you have to do it. He's like, but I'm in the photo, so I own it. I'm like, guess again, buddy. Guess again.

And unfortunately, his signature on the deal, when we finally closed the deal to get me paid off, he died like two days later. So I have one of his final signatures. I feel like shit for doing it. But you know what? He kind of deserved it. You shouldn't do that shit.

Oh, that's crazy, man. In some other news, do you know about PDN Photo District News, the magazine? I've seen the site. Yeah. Yeah. The actual magazine, it's closing its doors after 40 years. I'm surprised they lasted this long.

Yeah. Well, PDN was one of these magazines you saw at every studio, every student dark room, every college. It was an industry newsletter, and it was kind of like, I guess, you know you kind of got to a professional level when you were featured in there a little bit.

And now, as far as a magazine goes, it's being shut down. They have other things like Range Finder, which I was just featured in last year with a two-page spread, and that is changing as well. It's kind of crazy. So Range Finder will shift to an all-digital content hub is what they're calling it.

This is also the company that- AKA a website. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. That's what we call a website, dude. Well, I think what they're going to do is actually create a level of content. So it's not just going to be Range Finder with articles. It's more like, hey, here's our videos under the Range Finder name.

So they're actually kind of assimilating a little bit there, which I think is smart. But this is all under the umbrella of the same company that puts together PhotoPlus and WPPI, which is what I'll be teaching at this month anyway. It just shows you how much things are changing, how many old guard have to start rolling with the punches even faster than ever before.

So, yeah, take it for what you will. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, I'm really surprised these guys haven't consolidated and done this kind of stuff by now. I mean, geez, anybody that's coming out on paper is like, why? Why are you doing that?

I mean, granted, it's great for the crapper, but, you know. Well, I think it's something to be said for print, right? I mean, it's something that exists in real space. You can't just delete it. It's there. You can hand it to someone. You can actually have it in your hands to look at it, touch it, feel it, smell those pages.

And that's romanticizing the hell out of it. I get it. Yeah, seriously. It's kind of like, I don't know. Every time you go to Barnes & Noble, there's one less magazine rack there. You know, you're just kind of like, oh, what's happening? Yeah. I mean, when we grew up, you know, when we were kids, I lived on Transworld Skateboarding and Thrasher.

I had stacks of them, like six feet tall, because I'd get every issue. Now I have one copy. I've got one copy of Transworld, which was when I took my first photograph, my first roll of film on my Pentax K1000. Grant Britton posted it, or not posted it, printed it in Transworld.

So it was my first byline, and I kept that. And, like, all the other print stuff that I've ever had, all the magazines or newspapers I've been in, that stuff's just long gone. I don't even care anymore. Yeah, I think magazines themselves will turn into these pieces that only exist quarterly.

Like, you don't need a magazine every month, because if you look at the articles, they're all just recycling old ideas and just putting, like, a new, like, model of camera in the position of where it was last year or whatever. So I think what we'll see is, like, these quarterly, I don't know how you put it, like, chronicles or anthologies.

Yeah, something like that. Because, like, the high-end magazines that are, like, $15 a magazine only come out four times a year. And they're gorgeous, and they have amazing images and pieces. And I think that's really what it's going to come down to is it'll be something you collect. Yeah, see, that's the thing.

If it's an art piece and it's really well done on really nice paper, that's something you want to have and keep on the bookshelf or keep in your waiting room and things like that. But most of the magazines I get now, because I get this Mags for Miles thing that I get. I don't know if you get these. No. I got, like, 2,000 United points, right, that I haven't ever used.

And I get these Mags for Miles emails that say, hey, or pick out, you got 2,000 points, grab some magazines. And I just pick out random crap food magazines, travel magazines. They come to the house, and they're, like, on tissue paper. And they're just, like, okay, well, that's straight to the recycle bin.

But the funny part is they've never actually once deducted any of the miles. So I've been getting free magazines for, like, seven or eight years. Oh, jeez. Every three weeks or four weeks, they send me a new thing. Would you like some more magazines? I'm, like, well, yes, I would. Thank you. Well, it's also a number of jobs, right?

Like, the printing industry, the people that make these magazines, the guy who drives the truck to get it to you, all these things are going to start changing faster than ever before. It's kind of nuts. Yeah. I mean, I worked on a photo magazine for a while, JPEG magazine. I was, well, on the C-suite for that particular magazine, and it was crowdsourced.

Photography, and it was beautiful. We spent a lot of time making that a beautiful magazine. And, yeah, we had distribution in airports and things like that, and somebody has to deliver that stuff. So what happens when all the magazines go away? Yeah, well, what happens when machines take over? Everybody drives for Uber.

Woo! Oh, my God. So I got a little follow-up on those Lumix G7s I bought the last time we had you on the show. Yes. Fantastic little cameras. Okay, yep. Turns out they are. People really love that line as far as video guys go. Yeah.

I mean, I said that they felt plasticky and cheap, but actually, it turns out that that's an upside when you've got to schlep them around. Yeah. You know, I'm like, oh, you know, I've got a Nikon F3 and an F4 here with motor drives. Those two cameras combined actually weigh more than, like, my entire remote gear bag now that I have to take with me.

I would hope so. Oh, I hope we assimilated or, you know, progressed to a lighter kit. And also the grip, too, right? You don't need crazier tripods. You can use Gorilla Pods. Yeah, I got these cheap-ish aluminum travel pods. Okay. They're like blue anodized aluminum, so, like, people know they're mine.

I wanted to have a little style with them. Okay. And, like, between all three of them, they weigh almost nothing. Yeah. So, but it's nice because they do have little hooks on it, so I got little baggies. And you can just put a can of Coke in there if you want, or a water bottle to stabilize it. And that's all you need.

Yeah. There's actually Flashpoint makes this thing that's just a canvas satchel kind of thing. It has four little pockets, and you just put water bottles in there, and you can use those anywhere on location. You just roll it up, put it in your bag, forget about it. And what I use it for is putting it on light stands.

I throw tools in all the pockets. Yeah. Oh, that's a really good idea. It's cheap. I think they were, like, eight bucks. It's crazy. Yeah. I've actually had to buy new weights to go on the end of my microphone booms in the office here. Oh, really? Because I've got these, I can't remember, like, Samson mic stands.

You know, just the ones that fold up really, really small. But when you actually have to put, like, a Shure SM7B and extend it all the way, they just fall over. They just fall over. So I found these weights that go on, like, arms of C-stands.

So I just got two three-pound weights. And I'm like, three pounds? Is that really going to be enough? Turns out it's a lot, especially when you've got to carry them around. But that really did the trick. But they're lead. They're, like, painted lead. Yeah. We used to call, I don't know if they still call them that, but we call them pumpkins. They're these, like, metal, like, rectangle squares with, like, a cut through the middle of them.

And then it has a clamp on one side into that cut. So you can put them on anything. That's exactly it. Yep. That's exactly what I got. They're orange. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I never knew the actual industry term for them because their slang term is pumpkin. And anywhere I go, I say that. And then someone goes, hey, what's that thing you're using? Oh, it's a pumpkin.

They can't ever find it on a search engine. And I get, like, a million DMs complaining about it. I'm like, I don't know, bro. It's what it's called. I mean. That's funny. I think they're, I can't remember how far back we did the last episode. I thought this was a super important issue to bring up.

If you're a Canon shooter, they are, they announced that they are done developing EF mount lenses. That means any DSLR lens, they are done with that mount developing new ones, not, not producing, but developing any new lens at all.

So they're focusing everything on the RF full frame mirrorless mount going forward. That's a big statement, especially when they just released a $6,500 camera body for the EF mount. The 1DX Mark III, their new flagship camera, which they got out just in time for the Olympics and the Super Bowl.

Wow. That's interesting timing. Yeah. It's kind of crazy. And a lot of people are going, like, wait a second. Why are their flagship cameras still mirrored? It's like, you have to realize there is no such thing as mirrorless versus DSLR.

It's whatever tool you want to use and for whatever reason you want to use it. And I think the full frame, I'm sorry. Yeah. The full frame mirrorless versus DSLR debate is exactly what marketing wanted you to have. It's this hype. It's this idea that there's a new thing that you should all switch over to trying to rejuvenate lines.

People just don't understand that. And Canon saying they're not making any more lenses for the EF mount kind of makes people even more hype thinking that this is becoming the end of DSLRs. I don't see that anytime soon. Yeah, me neither. Especially since we've just seen releases that show a hybrid style.

So, Nikon put out a D780, which is a DSLR. But once the mirror flips up, it's a Nikon Z6. Really? That's kind of cool. It has all the video, all the autofocus points, all the tracking. Years ago, when you had a DSLR and you put into live view where the mirror would flip up and you'd look through the LCD screen, not the optical viewfinder.

Yeah. It was actually less autofocus, less capability. So, it's like an afterthought. Now, it looks like they're getting better when you flip the mirror up because they're basically a mirrorless camera at that point. It is the Z6 sensor and engine inside this camera, but it's a DSLR with their F mount.

So, it's kind of crazy. Oh, that sounds great. Do you know what those bodies kind of go for? Yeah. They're looking at about $2,300. Oh, damn. Yeah. It was at CES. I picked it up and I looked at it. I'm like, all right, what exactly is this? And they said exactly that. But the other thing that it has that the Z6 doesn't, it says hybrid log for video, which video guys love.

What's that mean? I don't even know what that means. It's actually better for broadcasting. It gives you all the dynamic range out of that file, just like it was like a raw, but it's not raw and it's still log profile. So, this week, I actually got to hold in my hands a very special Ica and it was the new monochrome M10.

It is so sleek. It's a monochrome because it only shoots black and white photos. Yeah. And it still costs $9,000. I'm like, for nine grand, I want fucking color. Come on. At least give me the option. There's a reason, though. There's reasons why it is what it is. And they gave us a lens. They're like, you might want to try with this lens.

It was a 90 millimeter, I think 1.5 or something like that. It is a $12,000 to $15,000 lens. I was walking around New York with $25,000 just sitting in my hand. I'm like, oh, man. I'm going to get it raw. Yeah. You seriously need backup when you go out shooting with that thing.

Oh, man. We had a few guys with us. The video just released on Adorama TV. We gave it to an influencer guy who's familiar with Leica, and he was floored by it. But what I think people don't realize about the monochrome that's special is, one, it is geared to get all the tones it possibly can for grayscale.

And two, when you have a color sensor, it's actually inhibiting light because it has to go through so many filters to capture color correctly. So technically, a black and white sensor should be better in lower light. You shouldn't need to boost your ISO so much. Yeah, I think a friend of the show, Sean Bonner, uses one of those.

Not the new, new one, but he's got one of them because all he shoots is black and white. And I know he's a Leica guy. It's amazing. I mean, my retirement camera is a Leica monochrome. I'll self-thrust my gear, throw my phone away, and just walk the earth. It's like I am chilling, man.

That would be fantastic. I miss black and white so much. Even going back in the darkroom would be fun. I love black and white. It has a special place in my heart. And black and white darkroom is super easy to come by. I mean, it's like nothing. It's like three chemicals. You could do it with your bathtub.

You can get in a larger, fairly cheap these days. And film is becoming a resurging thing right now. They're seeing growth like every year now in film production. Huh. I didn't know that. I didn't know that was coming back because I still have a Grey Lab darkroom timer sitting here on my bookshelf right next to my microphone.

Yeah, I think everybody has one of those timers somewhere. Like, we're just like... Yeah. I went and bought one on eBay because I just wanted it for the house. Like, it's the same thing with the F3 and the F4. It's like, I just want them for nostalgia. I'm not going to... Although the F3 and the F4 both do have film in it.

And I have been shooting with it. I just don't have any place to go process it. Oh, jeez. Well, there's plenty of places. I mean, there's these independent labs that are popping up. You can mail your film in. Or black and white is super easy. A developing tank for like $25 and just like 15 minutes of your time will get you a black and white development.

The problem is then you got to scan it. And that just takes forever. I mean, I've got a super cool scan. I think $4,000 or $6,000. Wow, that's old. It works, man. The thing works. How do you have the ports that support that thing? It's USB 2. What is it? It is USB 2, yeah.

Oh, jeez. Yep. My old super cool scan. Super cool scan ED4000, I think that's it. Sitting here on the floor. Before I left Chicago, I put a couple hundred rolls through that thing just to get them done. You don't have to scan your film. You ready for this?

Okay. Nikon sells an attachment now that you can run your film through with a 60mm macro lens and shoot it onto your sensor. Wow. So there's that. And it's pretty fast because you don't cut the film. So you just run it through frame, frame, frame, frame, frame.

36 times, you're done. Wow. How much does that run? I think it's one. No, I think it's like $140. But then you still got to buy the 60mm lens. If you have a macro, I think it should work regardless. I think they just recommend the 60mm.

I'm not sure. Oh, there it is. Nikon ES-2 film digital adapter. $140. Oh, man. I think because I can run that through my D810. Holds 35mm film strips and slides. Ideal for the D850 because of the resolution, obviously.

Oh, yeah. D810 is no slouch when it comes to resolution. No, it's not. But the D850 has focus stacking. So I think they recommend you doing that just in case you don't have it lay flat, which is whatever. Here's what I'll do. I'll just send you my film and I'll send you the attachment. No, you can do it since you've got a D850.

It says, designed to be paired with the Nikon micro lenses AFS micro Nikkor 60mm f2.8. But I'm sure that might just be like a sizing thing, like where it screws onto the front of the lens, maybe. Yeah. But it's totally doable. And a lot of other companies make things like this, too.

There's these independent companies. I don't know how else to put it, but they're like Kickstarter guys. You know what I mean? Yeah. And they just have the same idea. You mount the camera to one end of this thing. It has a way to illuminate through the film and you just run it through and take pictures. And that's a film scanner. So instead of you worrying about their, if it doesn't need to go to a publication or whatever, and you don't need like a dead on scan with a glassless scanner, which is, by the way, has got to be like 10, 15 year old technology by now.

Yeah. You can just do it this way. Well, you know what I can do? I can always sell my super cool scan on eBay because they're going for over a grand. Yeah, they are. Yeah. That and the Minolta one, the Minolta Damage. I just sold mine, actually. Anyway, man. Thanks for dropping by.

Yeah. And hopefully we'll talk to you sooner than later this time. Are you off again to tour the world? What's your newest classes coming up that you've got that people can go attend? Well, my next one is going to be WPPI in Las Vegas. I think I'm there February, I think 23rd through the 27th or maybe less time than that.

But they can go to WPPI and sign up for my classes there if they're going to be at the conference. But my big thing right now is I'm really pushing my own Twitch channel. Okay. So I'm trying to make a positive community out there because YouTube turned into a bunch of elitist assholes that can't let anybody just have a video and a conversation on there that they'll attack each other.

You know you can't have a conversation on YouTube. That's nothing new. I know. Well, that's why I started Twitch. And it's been great. We do image critiques. We have a Discord channel that people can talk 24-7 to each other, ask questions, whatever they want to know. It's going pretty great. You can join me there at twitch.tv slash lastxwitness.

And you can find me on any social media, lastxwitness. Hit me up on Instagram. It's probably my biggest one. All right, man. Well, fantastic talking to you. And until next time. Thanks so much, Jay. Pausing shout out to Seth Miranda for joining us again to talk cameras and goodies and stuff of that ilk.

And, yeah, it was nice having him back. Hopefully he'll be back sooner than later. Excellent. And rest in peace, Kirk Douglas, icon of Hollywood's golden age, died at 103. Much too soon. He had a good run. He did a damn good run. What a good life. Yep.

Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to GOG.show slash donate. Toss us a few bucks and we'll love you forever. Your support keeps us going and we really, really appreciate it. And show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 413.

From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, donate to the show, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. All men lose when they die. They both lose life.

Free man dies, he loses the pleasure of life. Slave loses pain. Death is the only freedom a slave knows. That's why he's not afraid of it. That's why he's not afraid of it. That's why we'll win.

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