416: Helicopter Mode

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. We've just had a little bit of a pre-show chat and I'd just like to point out that our deletes are not set visibility to zero. We actually delete all the crap that we were just talking about. Completely delete because, yeah, that would be bad if some of that stuff got out. Oh my god.

So, I just looked outside. Brian, my neighbor's at it again. Okay. He's got three new photos of people who have put dog poop that he's caught on his camera on his tree. It's kind of quaint. He's like the old school Twitter troll. He's totally like that.

He's an analog Twitter troll. Yeah, and it's funny because, I mean, he's like 55 and he lives with his mom and his mom's really cool. He's a nutter. But the funny thing is he leaves his green garbage can on the street all the time. And I'm like, you're, you know, a hypocrite.

You're leaving your garbage can out on the street and then you get pissed off when people put stuff in it. If it's on the street, it's fair game. I'd understand if people were just letting their dogs poop on the lawn. But if it's going in the trash can and you leave the trash can out there, you have no basis. None. None whatsoever. You have no leg to stand on.

Yes. He does not have legs. He totally does not have legs. He doesn't have a very good camera either. It looks like a Kinectics Quick Cam. It's all black and white and grainy. I'm like, dude, upgrade your game, dude. I just thought it was funny because he's back in action.

I thought he gave up, but nope, nope. Somebody has pissed him off. I have something to live for, Jason. Got to have something to live for. He's one of those guys that comes out on the weekend with his bike outfit in the spandex with all of the logos of companies that aren't sponsoring him and then blocks traffic on Topanga Canyon all the way to the beach.

He's one of those guys. I know those guys very well because, as you know, I do a bike ride almost every day up the bike path here in Santa Monica up to Malibu and back, which is a long ride. And, yeah, the weekend warriors, the somewhat rotund guys that have squeezed themselves into these outfits and then don't know the rules of the road at all and always are blocking me.

It's good that a lot of them are doctors because I'm sure that there's a lot of heart attacks, especially going over Topanga, and it's very, very funny. But, yeah, I can't see you in a spandex outfit with, you know, logos on it trying to ride your bike. I wear basketball shorts and a T-shirt.

That's what I wear when I ride my bike. Yeah. Yeah. So I get a story about Green Day. Oh, boy. Well, it's a funny story. It started out because I'm sick. I'm very sick, and I've been in bed for most of the week, so I don't have a lot of news to put in the show. So I'm going to tell a story. Okay.

I found a video of Green Day being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Yes. Were you there for that one? No. The only one I went to was when Rush got inducted because that was the one in L.A. I was not going to fly and then pay $500 for a ticket. Okay. Got it.

Got it. And, you know, it just got me going down this path because, A, I'm like, we talked about who was going into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year and the people that were left out. And I'm like, they put Green Day in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame already? Yeah. What? It's ridiculous. I used to, I mean, we knew back in the day when Green Day first popped, because we had their first seven-inch.

That's all they had released. We got their first seven-inch. I think it was on the lookout. And we loved them. Everybody loved them. And it was just like a breath of fresh air, you know? Then they started to get big, and they got bigger. And then Rob Cavallo signed them to, I believe it was Reprise Records? It was probably.

Yeah, I think it was Reprise. But years later, you know, I met my roommate, and I've been friends with her for 20-some-odd years now. She was a marketing vice president at Warner Brothers Records, so she knew all of the players that were, you know, working on that.

She worked on Depeche Mode and the cool bands, but she knew the guys that were working with Green Day. And she told me about one of her friends, Steve, who was the guy who got all the college radio play for Green Day. And I just met Steve the other day because, guess what?

Guess what Steve does now? Real estate. You got it! Most of the people I know that used to be in the music industry are either doing real estate or investing. Exactly. It was just very funny. So, yeah, they're selling a house together. So, if you have $7 million and you want to move to Beverly Hills, Andre Berto's house is up for sale.

The Boxer, I can get you in pretty easy. But they're working on that together. But nice guy. Nice guy. So, you know, I listened to Green Day from when they were young-ish. I've seen Green Day probably 50 times in my lifetime. Used to go all around the Midwest.

Me too, but all in one tour. Yeah, you got to. Yeah. See, I'm jealous about that. I'm totally jealous about that. And it's funny. The last time I saw Green Day was with you at that secret show. Well, I worked with Green Day pre-American Idiot through the entire American Idiot campaign.

And then, shh, until the new album came out, at which point everybody was let go. Okay. So, I got a job at Warner Brothers Records. And I got hired about the week before American Idiot dropped.

So, I got a pre-release of it and I listened to it. And it's a fucking masterpiece. I give them that. I still think that album is fantastic. It made them the biggest band in the world for that period of time. Oh, absolutely. And it's got legs. It definitely has legs. I listened to it the other day. It's still really good. And that's when we got to finally work together.

So, I was like the head programmer at Warner Brothers Records. You were the outside consultant because you had the gig of doing Green Day's website. And everybody inside Warner Brothers Records hated you. Yes. Because you're such a pain in the ass. Yes. Everybody in Warner Brothers always hated me because I randomly ended up working with a lot of Warner Brothers bands.

I did the Goos. I did the Green Day. A couple other people. Yeah. Not big fans of me. Although, they kept coming to me. Oh, man. When I mentioned that I knew you. Man, the knives came out. They're like, you're friends with those guys? I did all. That was literally the first thing they said. But they still all came to me. I did all the Warner Brothers ECDs for that period of time.

So, they may not have liked me personally, but they respected the craft. Yeah. You did okay work, I have to say. I think Wendy did the best job. But, you know, she was a designer. She made it look pretty. Us developers never get credit for anything.

No, we never do. I gave up on that a long time ago. Exactly. And so, yeah, we went to that one show. That was, I think, three days later, I came out of hibernation. Because that was back. I'm like, I'm in the music industry now.

Let's party like I'm in the music industry. So, there was substances and lots of lost memories and lots of phone calls. Where's Jason? Why isn't he showing up to work today? Oh, he was messed up at that show. Here's the thing, though. I work for Warner Brothers Records.

And I did them a favor by getting Shenny from Boing Boing to post an article on Boing Boing because some genius, some fucking genius at the music label said, hey, why don't we sell blank CDs with Green Day's album art on it?

And those of us who had a brain cell or two said, okay, so you're actively wanting people to pirate Green Day's music and put it on a CDR and not buy the album? Yes. What are you thinking? Yes. Well, lots of great ideas always came out of Warner Brothers. Oh, my God.

I'm telling you. And so, I called in a favor. I'm like, Shenny, please, pretty please, do me this favor. Make a post about it. I'll owe you one. I'll totally owe you one. And so, she did. All right. And I owe her one. Your first mistake here is, yes, you're in the music industry.

Favors do not get you anything. Yeah. Well, they did get me something. I'll tell you about what they got me in a second because Shenny called in that favor. She needed somebody to go out with her to the desert, to the Mojave, because she was doing a piece for NPR on SpaceX.

Well, not SpaceX. I'm sorry. Better early for SpaceX. Yeah. No, the Ansari X Prize. So, this is when Spaceship One was taking off for the first run of their two-run. You know, you had to, like, do a spaceship, get it into orbit, bring it back down, and then within two weeks, get it back up there.

Right. So, this was the first launch. So, we went out to the Mojave, and I took pictures all day, and then we didn't get home until 5 o'clock because it was, you know, traffic plus the event itself. And then we went to the airline graveyard, you know, which was the best thing ever. So, I get back, and I get fired by our friend, Robin Sloan Bechtel.

I think she's the one that hated me the most over there. Oh, she is definitely the one that hated you the most. And she hated me the most by the end of it. We've talked about her before and our disdain for her. She's the one that takes all the credit for Megadeth Arizona, one of the first big, you know, music websites.

Not even a website. It was a website. It was a website. It wasn't a gopher. Yeah. It wasn't a gopher. It was a website. But I give all the credit to our friend, Fess, who was the programmer behind that, who did some amazing work. And I still have mad respect for him, wherever he may be right now. So, yeah, I got fired for basically...

Not showing up to work all day, Jason. Well, I told her. I told her what I was doing. And she's like, yeah, you don't come into the office enough, so we're going to have to let you go. But you know what the irony is? She didn't come into the office that day, and she fucking called me to fire me. She wasn't in the office.

The music industry is not quite as cool as it used to be, Jason. They do expect you to show up. This was 10 years ago, man. It wasn't that cool 10 years ago, man. That's true. That's true. This is back in... We were in the chalet. You know, the Warner Brothers chalet, which now has been bulldozed, unfortunately.

Yeah, I love that building. Oh, it was great. Actually, I've got the floor plans with the old layout, because my roommate used to work there, too. I was in the office next to hers. And one day, I'm listening... Like, this guy down the hall has all this music coming out, and he's, like, blaring it. And I'm like, who the fuck's got all this music?

He's like... One of the tech guys goes, he signed Radiohead, so he can do whatever he wants. I'm like, oh, okay. Got it. And here's the other funny thing about working at a music industry company back then. I was there for 30 days on the nose.

In that 30 days, they tried to give me a stereo every single day from my office. The one thing that they didn't give me as the head programmer for Warner Brothers Records was my own computer. I had to bring my own computer to work every day. Yeah, sounds about right.

So, that's a walk down memory lane. And it all came because I was listening to that Green Day speech, and I still hate Trey Kuhl. I really do. He's just not cool. Sorry. Yeah, you know, I've worked with those guys for a period of about two to two and a half, maybe three years total.

I really like Billy. He's a good guy. Mike is my favorite. He's the nicest of the bunch, I think. Not a fan? Okay. I'm not saying anything here. No comment on that one. Redacted. All right. Redacted. No, he's a nice guy.

I don't know if he could pass a grade five test, but nice guy. Hey, man, smart doesn't enter into it. Look, he's a great bass player. He doesn't need to. Yep, that's true. So, there you go. I have a little bit of a semi-walkdown memory lane as well.

More a cautionary tale for any young developers that might be listening. I just wrote in the notes, on being an unwilling legacy developer. Now, I know, Jason, you've done the same thing. We take on projects for friends sometimes or, you know, they're kind of acquaintances and then they become friends.

And then next thing you know, seven years later, you're still working on their projects for them because even though you don't want to, I've had two or three of those experiences just in the past month or two where people that I've, I was probably friends with seven years ago when I initially did them favors and built them for cheap because there was no money involved.

And, you know, you have to cut corners to get things done because you can't do it right. I'm itching listening to this, by the way. Yeah, and, you know, and in the past seven years, these friendships have gone away and they're not really friends anymore. They should buy rights, if anything, be clients. And I've told them over the years, look, I don't have the capacity for this anymore.

I don't have the interest anymore. I'm not really programming anymore. I don't, you need to find someone else. And their rickety old systems, because they're now seven years old now, are falling apart and stopping working and, and, you know, it used to be once a year, hey, I need to add one page.

All right, fine, I'll do it. You can, you know, send me 50 bucks so I can go buy some beer. Okay, fine. But as seven years go on, and things start to break and aren't up to date anymore, the emails and calls are increasing. I found myself doing some coding the other day, and I'm like, what am I doing this for?

Like, this whole thing needs to be torn down. It's seven years old, blah, blah, blah. And it's, you know, I'm just patching upon patching, and the patching is not working anymore. And, you know, they're not listening to me when I say, you need to find someone else. It's just not happening. So do not get stuck in this predicament, people.

That's all I'm saying. Yeah, seriously. Just cut the ties, you know? Yeah, I know. I have to. And after, this is my last one for this one person, and another person said that they're supposed to be getting back to me with their list of what they want. And when they send that back to me, I'm going to say, I just don't, I'm sorry, I don't have the time.

Yeah, not interested, not interested. You know, I did that for years with Gigi Edgley from Farscape. And I, you know, she had some other company build her websites because she didn't like the one I built. So she had somebody do it. They did it in Flash, and of course it broke, and it was a miserable fuster cluck.

And a couple years ago, I finally put her on Squarespace, and it was the best thing I ever did. Right. I'm like, here's the manual. Here you go. Off to the races with you, Lassie. And go with God. And yeah, nowadays, I'm just like, no, I won't. I will not do that. I just tell everybody, I'm like, I'm retired.

That's all you got to say is I'm retired. And I mean, I haven't written really that much code in seven and a half years now. Well, I guess you're not going to be able to help me with the fact that anchor links are no longer working in my CSS accordion. No, I'm not.

I don't know how I'm going to figure this out, and I really don't care. Yeah. Hire a fucking 20-year-old. That's how you figure it out nowadays. Yeah, I know. Now, let's get on to some actual news. Okay. How that we've filled 15 minutes of the old days.

Kickstarter employees win historic union election. All right. They finally got their union. Well, they've... The union will be delayed by eight to 15 months because of just shipping issues. Yes, you got...

We're sorry. We haven't actually built the union yet, so thank you for pre-ordering it. Yes, you pre-ordered your union. Here's a sticker. We'll wait for collective bargaining later. All right.

Good on them. Let's see when it actually starts. I mean, you know, we're making a joke because that's how Kickstarter works all the time. But I wouldn't be surprised if the union takes a little while to kick into gear. We'll see. Yeah, yeah. And it was a 46 to 37 vote, so almost half didn't want to actually unionize.

I don't understand that. Yeah, I don't get it either. Maybe they're just scared of their Kickstarter overlords. Right. Who knows? But yeah, it's interesting. And this next article comes from an ad that I saw on Instagram. And I sent you a screenshot of it because I was just gobsmacked.

And this is the United States Postal Service. They're running ads on Instagram. And it says, four ways blockchain can be used throughout the supply chain. And I replied to you, what are they trying to get funding? Apparently, they are.

Apparently, the USPS needs some more funding because I think Amazon has pulled back quite a bit now with their own fleet. And they were basically subsidizing the post office forever. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, we've talked about there are valid use cases. For blockchain. And I could see the USPS being one of them.

Yeah. I mean, their four points are smart contracts, tracking, fraud and theft prevention, and transaction processing, which are some of the ways that we said that blockchain is actually good for something. You know? I mean, it would make sense. I don't understand why they're running ads about it other than, you know, just to kind of remind people that they exist.

Yeah. I think that's about it, you know? Okay. But I mean, like, why are they spending the money? Do they have their own blockchain division? It's just like, you know, there's a link to, you know, email us for more information. And I'm like, no, I got all the information I need. I'm sure that they're using one of the blockchains as a service companies out there.

There's no way they've built out their own. I bet it's IBM. IBM is pretty much the leader in the space right now. So I'm guessing they partnered with IBM, which is good. IBM could use the money, frankly. Yeah. Well, again, like I said, this actually does make sense.

I can understand this use of the blockchain and it makes complete and utter sense for the business in which the USPS is involved. Yep. I just thought it was funny. And now I will go invest in them. In the news.

Believe it or not, Brian, Photoshop is 30 years old. I believe it's something. Yeah. Actually, when I saw this, I'm like, isn't it older than that? I started using Photoshop at version two on my Macintosh 2CI when I worked at Kinko's Copies as a desktop publisher.

And I, you know, still use it all the time. It's my favorite. It's, you know, obviously my favorite photo app next to Lightroom. Yeah. I've tried other stuff, but I seem unable to quit. Even though I'm really annoyed at the subscription model, but at least they have that cheapy student one.

So I can just use that. Yeah. I'm not on the cheapy student one. I just got the photographer bundle. So I get Lightroom, Photoshop, and all that extra crap to make viral videos. So, because I loves me some Photoshop and I just need it. They've got some new tools. They have an object selection tool, which actually looks pretty nice.

That could be very useful for me when I do our show art. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because you really suck at doing the masks. I think it's, I think you should just keep doing it the way you're doing it because it's quaint. I kind of do that on purpose. Yeah. I figured you might be a little old school. I don't want it to be perfect. When I have to do the show art, I try and make it crappy on purpose just so they match.

Excellent. Yeah. So they've got, yeah, they just added out some new features, but yeah, 30 years old, man. Wow. It's incredible. And I still use it every week. I use it every week. So congrats to Adobe for, you know, not fucking that one up like too much flash.

Adobe didn't fuck up flash. Steve Jobs killed it. That's true. That's true. Well, I hated flash. You know that. I know. I hated it. I liked it. I thought it was a great combination of visual and programming, which, which was my strength. You're just a hardcore developer. You don't want the visuals.

All right. So Susan Fowler, we remember her. She was the former Uber engineer who wrote the viral medium post in 2017 that basically directly led to Travis Kalanick's ouster. Well, she has of course cashed in on this even more. She is writing an entire book. It just came out called Whistleblower.

Well, I would say Jesus, whatever, but it gets even deeper. And Uber is even worse than we thought. Okay. So she has a whole bunch of details that show how many Uber managers were not only misogynistic, but also baffingly petty about it, including a situation where during an orientation when she first joined the company, which included formal instructions not to date Travis Kalanick, the new employees participated.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you buried the lead on that. That's not even the lead, Jason. That's not even the lead. Okay. That's why I'm kind of glad this book exists because maybe people will now start to believe me when I say Uber is a horrible company. So all the new employees had to participate in a competition to determine the most interesting person in the group.

Each table in the room nominated one person to be a contestant. She was picked as one of them. So Fowler and the other nominees got up on the stage and the software engineering director leading the exercise abruptly pointed to all of the women one by one and told them to leave, basically stating, you're a woman.

So then she wrote of another encounter with the same director later on when she tried to find out why women were winning far fewer company-wide awards for performance despite being nominated at roughly the same frequency as men.

The director, who also ran the awards committee, informed her that inequity is a result of women not knowing how to write nominations. He then suggested the company could create a separate award just for women. What the fuck? She also writes in the memoir that her managers kept changing her desk assignment in the office after she made her complaint to ensure that she would sit alone.

She also heard secondhand that this guy had been telling co-workers that she couldn't handle a man like him and he'd try to convince his team to go to strip clubs for lunch. Okay, hopefully this guy was ousted in one of the many rounds of firings. Yeah, so and I guess as I kept reading this article talking more and more about the book, the most insane aspect of this is a lot of the memoir largely has to do with how Uber's HR representatives repeatedly stonewalled and lied to her in almost every interaction she had with them.

So she literally had no recourse. The HR was worse, was as bad as, if not worse, all the employees. So what a ridiculous company. Hopefully they're turning it all around. I doubt it. I doubt it too, but I'm sure they're getting better, but probably by inches, not miles.

Yeah, I actually do think I want to read this book just because, you know, I like to be proven right and I've been screaming about how horrible Uber is since day one. So let's add a little, yeah, self-satisfaction by reading this. Okay, okay. And you know, I mean, it does not surprise me that HR was a problem for her because people just don't realize HR is not there for you.

HR is there for the company. HR is there to protect the company's ass, not yours. Yeah, it's the hit squad. It's the company hit squad. I hate HR departments. I'm sorry. I've had no fucking luck. Oh my God, especially the one at Boxstop, not Boxstop, BLT.

That's the company that just screwed me. Boxstop didn't even have an HR department from what I remember. We were too small. Oh God. Yeah, they were too small. Near the end, it got pretty big. Yeah. I was only there for four months because I got the hell out, but I went to work for Paramount who has a much better HR department.

Not getting frisked when you leave the lot every day. Thank you. I understand why they do that. Yes, yes, yes. This is even before BitTorrent existed. All right. So the FTC has been doing a lot of antitrust investigation and some companies are trying to get out ahead of this.

Apple and Google are reportedly mulling big changes. Is Amazon next? So we have some betterages there. So Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Apple is considering allowing iPhone users the ability to make third-party apps such as Chrome and Gmail the default on their phones. Finally!

A potential reversal that could alleviate one criticism from competitors and consumers alike. Yeah, why not? Just do it. Who cares? That's part of it. Here's the real issue with that, though, with Chrome and any other browser. Not even just mentioned Gmail.

They have to take away this ridiculous thing that they have where you have to use their rendering engine. Yeah. You know, that's why all the browsers are the damn same. They can't differentiate themselves with actual products and features because Apple says you have to use the Safari rendering engine if you're going to create a browser for the iPhone.

And that's bullshit. Yes, it is. So they're looking at changing that. And earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google executives were informally discussing whether they should consider spinning off their advertising technology unit as regulators examine the company's dominance in online advertising and it's dealing with publishers.

So we might get a bit of a split there, which would not be a bad thing. Now, on the Amazon side of things, the FTC have expressed interest in if and how Amazon prioritizes its products and services over those of its partners and competitors and how those practices might impact consumer choice.

We know that that does and Amazon helps themselves. So we'll see if they do anything about it because they don't seem to have mentioned any forthcoming changes yet. So at least two of the companies are stepping up and going, oh, all right, since you're investigating us, we'll play a little bit more fair.

Yeah. I mean, the FTC needs to basically put the squash on Amazon Basics out of the gate. Yeah. That right there is the most egregious antitrust violation I've ever seen. It's like, okay, we're going to buy up hundreds of companies that sell low-cost items and then we're going to rebrand them as Amazon Basics and we're going to give them priority in their search.

And that is... And not just priority in their search. Obviously, it's the cheaper price. They do same-day shipping, et cetera, et cetera. So driving everybody else out of the market. Yeah. I mean, that for me, I mean, if they can fix that, that'd be fantastic. They need to get spanked on that one. And speaking of things that need to be fixed and probably won't anytime soon, what's our continual line about self-driving cars, that they're always going to be 20 years away?

Yep. Yeah. Well, it's looking that way. McAfee researchers recently tricked a Tesla into speeding while the car's intelligent cruise control feature was engaged. This news signals yet again that completely safe, fully autonomous cars have still not arrived and it suggests that they face new types of vulnerabilities.

This is not a new type of vulnerability, but it has been directly and exhaustingly researched now. We've always said that all we have to do to destroy traffic and kill people is mess with street signs that these cars are relying on. And over the course of 18 months, these researchers, whose report was published today, explored how they could get a Tesla to misread speed limits by messing with the vehicle's ability to see.

Basically, they just took a piece of tape, put it on the middle prong of the three for a 35 mile per hour speed limit, and the Tesla reads that as 85 miles per hour. Yeah. I would like to point out, as we like to often come back and say we were right about a lot of different things.

This is one of my scenarios that I played out years ago when we were talking about self-driving cars on the show. Yep. This is one of the ones that I specifically said could happen. The other one was, I'm just going to put a stop sign on the back of my car. I'm going to build backpacks with stop signs on them.

So people who are crossing the street, you know, actually maybe won't get run over by a self-driving car. This is one of the ones that I actually gamed out, and it turns out it actually works. So, yeah, pat me on the back for that one. Well, not right now because I've got shingles and it would hurt like a motherfucker.

But otherwise, I'm happy that they have actually, they've done this and they've proven it right. Yeah. I mean, it's, I've said always it's got to be all or nothing with autonomous vehicles. And part of that process is going to be completely and drastically updating the entire traffic system.

We're just not going to be able to do it visually. You need to do it with chips. And yeah, honestly, it'd be, there has to be some other way to do it because I mean, at least even now though, like when I have Google maps on in my, in my car, it tells me if I'm speeding or not because it knows the speed limits of all the streets around here.

And it knows that systematically, not because it's reading a sign. So there are other ways to do this other than, you know, visual perception, which is just hackable beyond belief. Yeah, but it still has to be physical. We cannot rely on a 24 seven, never going down internet connection, which is what a lot of people think is going to be the way to do it.

Google maps will go down. You will lose service. We talked just the other episode about a car that they couldn't get to start or unlock unless they had cell phone service. Yeah. And there's another article I read about people who die in the Mojave all the time. They call it death by GPS because the GPS goes wrong and they get driven out into the middle of nowhere and die from dehydration.

You know, it's, uh, we got a long way to go guys. We got a long way to go. It's a 20 years away. We'll be saying that three years from now. It's 20 years away. 20 years from now when we're like in our sixties doing the show, it's 20 years away. Oh God.

In 20 years, I'm going to be almost 70. That's scary. Oh God. I hope we're not doing this podcast.

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We're joined again this week by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast. And 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. And soon to be Furry Wars. Their Star Wars show with Brian and Dave. Yeah, still in development. I've got to figure out my fluffy character, whatever they're called.

Your fursona? Your avatar. Yeah, my fursona. Your fursona. That's it. Your fursona. I think that came to front of mind a little too quickly for me. Too quickly. I wasn't going to say anything. I appreciate being corrected when I am wrong and struggling for a term, Dave. I just normally don't expect it to be so quick. Yeah.

No, it's called fursona, you idiot. Jeez. Get it right. Jiminy. I will write that down on a card so I do not forget. So I was listening to your most recent show. We all took a week off because you guys were at Podcast Movement.

So I was listening to your show about – you sort of touched on your experience at Podcast Movement, which of course caught my attention. So overall, a thumbs down from both of you, huh? Well, you know, I expect a certain amount of shuck and jive at any conference. I've been to plenty in my life, but usually there's some meat on the bone.

Yeah. There was nothing but salespeople there, and it was – I struggle with this all the time because Jason tells me as a podcast we're actually doing fairly well, and I look around and go, are you sure about that? But we were certainly by far one of the bigger podcasters there, which also was a bit unexpected.

Huh. Yeah. This is my second one, and I kind of had shucked it off since I went in 2016 at the one in Chicago, and I got zero value out of that one, and this one also disappointed because there was almost no value at this one as well.

And the thing about it is, like Brian and I touched on on the show, is that the bar wasn't open. All business is done at the bar. Going to a conference gives you a license to day drink and hang out with like-minded individuals where you can then get business done.

This is how business is done. I would not emphasize the day drinking, but I do concur on the previous. Yes, exactly. All the previous conferences that I've gone to, sure, there's a bit of walking around and seeing the various vendors and whatnot, but the real meeting and greeting and socializing and all of that sort of stuff tends to take place at the hotel lobby bar.

They did not have theirs open at all. So there was nowhere to kind of go and just sit and kind of like, oh, hey, who are you? What do you do? And all that sort of thing. So that was a very big missed opportunity for them, I think, because that is an integral part of the conference lifestyle.

How many attendees do you think were there? I don't know. What do you think? Like 250? I think there were more than that. There were quite a few people there. There were probably 100, 200 just kind of milling about in the halls with a good another 100 to 200 in the big auditoriums where these not even hidden sales packages were going on.

Yeah, so maybe 400 or 500 at that. Was this their first in L.A.? Yes, this was. And it was called Podcast Movement Evolutions. Right. So it was an evolution of what? I wonder if the Orlando one is, yeah, I wonder if, because they do one in Orlando, too.

I wonder if that's a bigger draw where stuff's really happening. I don't know. I don't know. I got a lot of friends going to that one. So if you decide to go, let me know. And we'll do some intros and all that. I think my friend Eric Hundley, whose show we've all been on at this point, I believe, he's going.

Chris Curran, who does podcast engineering school, he's going. A bunch of other podcasters are definitely going to be there because it's a podcast conference. Actually, no, no, no. I take that back. Eric's going to PodFest, not Podcast Movement. There's so many pods out there that it's really hard to tell.

PodFest is in Orlando. Podcast Movement is in Dallas. Ah, okay. That's the difference. All right. And Podcast Movement in Dallas is on my birthday. And I can think of nothing I would rather do less on my birthday than be at a podcaster convention. Yeah.

It's so hard to know what to expect. Especially with these newer ones, right? When you've got a conference that's established that's been running five, six, seven years, you know, I think like SIGGRAPH and things of that nature. They've got that stuff dialed in. They've got their audience. You know what you're going to get.

These new ones that are struggling to get a foothold. Yeah. I don't know. Podcast Movement's been around for over five years. Not in LA because they certainly didn't bother to do the setup very well. I mean, when you got the point where you have speakers that are fighting against each other because they're both in the same room with bad acoustics.

That was so bad. And then you've got another speaker that you have to wear headphones to hear because it's in the middle of them. And that was stupid. And they ran out of headphones from the amount of people that wanted to listen to whoever was selling whatever at that point in time. It was just – I don't feel it was run very well at all.

Well, it's not like it was a show focused on audio or anything. I mean, yeah. I know. And we didn't actually even cover this, Brian. And the talk that we went to that required headphones of everybody in the big room – I don't know why they just didn't speak – that was the AI and podcasting talk.

And you actually seemed to enjoy that one. I thought some of the automated processes that they did were really interesting. It could all be done manually. The fact that they provide a service for doing things like transcripts and doing quick social media byte edits that they use their AI to find the interesting topics for you to kind of pick and pull out.

And it's all done manually or automatically for you was kind of a cool thing. Then you look at the price tags and you go, are you kidding me? Yeah. I can pay somebody in the Philippines pennies and get the same, same thing. And we didn't even try the product, so we don't even know if it actually even works.

Yeah. Well, there's that. Yeah. Interesting. All right. Well, it's good information. It'll keep me – I'll certainly think twice before heading halfway across the country to attend. Well, hey, man, if your company is paying for it, it's always a free vacation. So jump on in.

And I got to say, I love Dallas. So if you can get to go to Podcast Movement, some of the best barbecue you're ever going to find. True. True. Yep. So I want to do a little check-in on your social media, Dave, because you have left Facebook. Yes. And Brian is on the cusp of maybe, possibly – who am I kidding?

He's never going to leave. But I wanted to see how it's going for you. Overall, it's going very well. There are a few things that I feel like I'm missing out on. A few local organizations who post most of their information about what they're up to and so on and so forth.

I'm missing out on that kind of stuff. A few friends I feel as though I'm not in as good a touch with. But overall, I don't really miss it. I definitely don't miss the anxiety it was causing me. So I feel like I made the right decision.

And I don't really feel a strong pull back, which is interesting. Yeah, okay. Good to know. I'm on Twitter a lot. I mean there's no doubt that I definitely made a shift. I'm on Twitter a lot more than I was, I think. But again, as we've talked about here, Twitter allows me to dial in what I want to and don't want to see much more effectively than Facebook ever did.

That's right. That's right. Do you still have it on your phone? Because I did an experiment. I took everything off my phone. I took Instagram off my phone. I took Twitter off my phone. I never had Facebook on my phone because I just, I don't need it on there. But once I took off Twitter and Instagram from my phone, I read two novels this week.

You know, it's like that little bit of extra time that gets sucked out of you like a little vampire comes back to you. And you have time to actually do more deep thinking and more enjoyable stuff I've found. Well, that's funny. I have a very different approach than you guys do with social media.

I've cut back a lot. In fact, I've made, I've renamed the folder on my phone time sucks to remind myself that the things in there are time sucks, which keeps me away from it less. I am on Facebook, I am on Facebook a lot less than I used to just out of, I don't know, force of will or just not getting the value proposition I once did.

I'm not leaving it because I have dialed in my Facebook the way that you guys have potentially dialed in your Twitters. I see using plugins on my desktop, I see just my friends updates, which is what I want. And my friends aren't on Twitter. So it's not an option for me to transform over there.

In fact, I feel probably the anxiety that you feel with Facebook, Dave, that's how I feel launching Twitter. Every time I launch Twitter, that puts me in a bad mood and I get depressed and I get angry probably because I follow a lot of news sources, which is primarily what I've used Twitter for over the years.

So I, my personal and I wouldn't say professional, but my personal life on Facebook is fine and I use it a lot less and don't miss it when I'm not using it, but still use it enough to have the connections with my friends. And I only launch Twitter if I, you know, want to be in a really bad mood.

It's interesting because our friend, our mutual friend of the show, David Teeter, who was on long, long ago, who I'd like to have back at some point, he actually deleted his Twitter account, his Facebook account, his Flickr account even, and just said no more. And I had a really long conversation with him about it and he's just like, yeah, it's kind of run its course.

I don't get value out of it anymore. So why stay on it? And I'm really coming to that conclusion as well. You know, I wish I could sell my Instagram account and make some money off of it, but I don't think that's ever going to happen. But once I took everything off the phone, I just realized that, yeah, I've got other things that I want to do.

And those things that I want to do are much more rewarding than just seeing what other people post day in, day out. Honestly, it's, it, it really is just kind of calming. I get a lot of feedback from listeners on Twitter. So that's valuable.

And I'd always set up, I'd always segregated Twitter to be more professional and Facebook to be more personal friends and family kind of stuff. So particularly since we're publishing every day, you know, listeners will let me know, hey, there's a, there's an editing error in this episode.

Did you know about or things like that? So there's, there's definitely value there. People send us tips on stories and so forth. So, um, it has value for me professionally there. Um, and I, there's a few friends over there who I, I only see on Twitter now who, who it's funny.

Actually, a few of my friends from Facebook followed me over to Twitter. People who were not on Twitter before, um, just because they wanted to keep in touch. So that's kind of nice. Yeah. Yeah. I just found that taking, taking the apps off the phone is really the key.

It's like, I can, I can log in on my desktop whenever I, you know, I'm editing audio and I have to process a bunch of stuff. I'm like, I'll pop in, see what's going on, say hi, do whatever. But yeah, the always, always at your fingertips aspect of it has just been, you know, and I mean, we've talked about this ad nauseum, but it just really is kind of, it's bad for you.

Yeah. Again, that's why I shoved everything in a folder and I tried to stay away from it, but there are, I still do get value from Facebook and not just with the friends, but I have a three-year-old, which is a transitional period for a kid. So there are a lot of things that I'm trying to sell that he is no longer interested in and Facebook Marketplace beats the crap out of Craigslist these days.

There's just no doubt about it. That is an amazing tool for selling, you know, strollers and all sorts of baby stuff that, you know, I've, I've, for a long time I was putting them up on both and I've stopped putting things up on Craigslist because Facebook Marketplace is so effective. That's interesting.

That's really interesting. I feel Craigslist is on its last leg. Yeah. I mean, there's something to the aspect that you have a verified person and their Facebook presence that, you know, you're going to their house to buy something from that, you know, you don't quite have the stranger danger that you do from Craigslist.

Now, obviously, you know, I'm sure as you could tell from any of the security segments we've ever done, it can still be a dangerous proposition, but it is in theory tied to a real person's account and you can look at their account and see who they are and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, so I think that, you know, they've done great strides with that.

It really works very well and I've stopped using any other source to sell things. Mm hmm. Yeah, we have here as well. We've been doing the same. Yeah. We've been doing the same. We've sold a bunch of furniture and it just, it, on, on Facebook, it went fast. Yep. On Craigslist, it was, you know, 50 replies with nobody serious.

Mm hmm. And anything that we've sold probably in the past six months, I think, everything has gone from, gone through Facebook. I'd imagine that there's some aspect of social pressure about that because they, they, they do know that you know who they are. It's not just an anonymous email back and forth.

It's, it's a person's account with their face and, and everything. So you don't, uh, you don't want to dick around with people and piss them off as long as you would if you were somewhat more anonymous. Right? Yeah. Right. Right. Oh my God. Zuckerberg was right. Shit. Well, about selling shit.

All right. Let's get to some news. What do we got? All right. Well, let's start with the Iowa caucus. We talked about the, uh, failed app, the not ready for primetime app, uh, created by shadow ink that, uh, basically destroyed the caucus and made it into a, into a circus.

Uh, Nevada has an upcoming caucus of their own. And, uh, understandably they decided not to use the shadow ink app because you know, it didn't work. So they had to come up with a last minute replacement just in time for the early voting that, uh, began on February 15th.

And the replacement is a tool. They are using this term purposefully. So it does not say app and it's basically an iPad with a Google form on it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, they, they, they vetted this. They consulted with the DNC, the department of Homeland security and Google to ensure security from potential hackers.

It's, it's a no brainer solution. It is something that you and I, Jason would have come up with back in the day when we were told we have three days to put something together. All right, well let's find tools that we know work and that are easy. Yeah. Google, Google forms does work.

And that's exactly what they did. And they included a, you know, a huge set of a training guides and instructions on how to operate the iPad. Yes. The instructions include things such as open iPad case, but you don't know who you're getting to run these things and they may not be familiar with technology.

So simple case solution with simple instructions. Ah, technology. I mean, they can say that they're working with one of the biggest security companies in the world, which is Google, right? And Apple, two, two really big, well-known secure companies.

Right, right, right. So there's no other third parties. Yeah. There's a definitely a way to spin that saying that this is a very secure solution. Sure. It's off the rack, but whatever. This reminds me, we had a story today on the cyber wire about how the folks who are tracking these sorts of things are saying that the Russians this time around, it seems as though they're not creating so much of their own stuff as they are curating our stuff.

Like we're doing a good enough job on our own publishing divisive things that they don't need to. They don't start the fire. They just feed it and fan it. They just stoke it. They're just pouring a little bit of gasoline on it and spreading it around. Yep.

Yep. And this, the Iowa caucus app was a big part of that. Yes, it was. Yes, it was. Russia did such a good job last time that we just took the flame and kept on going. That's it. Yay.

Now the torchbearers. History will not look kindly on this, this part of our history. No, no. And speaking of, I saw this over at the daily beast, which is generally not a new source that you go run to, but Trump offered Assange pardon.

If he covered up Russian hack, WikiLeaks founders lawyers claim. Well, did you guys cover this over on the cyber wire, Dave? Yeah. What do you think about this? Cause I, I am of two minds on this one. Uh, I think you take it for what it's worth, which is anybody can say anything.

I mean, it's interesting. I will. I mean, it comes from the lawyer. So you'd think that they would at least have some backup to prove the case. Let me put it to you guys this way. Um, after about, oh, I don't know, two to three years of investigation and millions of dollars poured at it.

Would we be shocked to find out this is true? No. And would it matter? No, no. Okay. There you go. Okay. Moving on. I mean, that's the sad reality, right? We, this would not be surprising. We, we have had similar things happen that have been proven that have happened.

And, uh, nobody seems to give a shit. No, we're in that mode now where everything is plausible. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That, that little teapot with all the tempests in it is getting very full. Mm-hmm. Maybe someday it'll overflow and somebody will take notice.

But yeah, at this point it's like, and? I mean, I read this and I'm just like, and? That, well, there's, you know, and that, that's the kind of thing that I see when I open up Twitter and that's why I then go cry in my bed for a few hours. Mm-hmm.

See, that's what, that's what mute filters are for. Yeah. Well, you know, it is what it is. Um, so we've got a new problem with stalkerware app. Now we've talked about spywares and stalkerware stuff before and the somewhat iffy premises that they're based on to begin with, um, having a kid.

I can see the potential desire to have some sort of thing that would monitor my kid's activity on his phone as he gets older, but I'm also aware of the dubious moral ground that that would put me under, um, as are many people. Uh, but this one, uh, KidsGuard claims it can access all the information on a target device, including real-time location, text messages, browser history, access to photos, videos, app activity, and recordings of phone calls.

It is of course marketed as a, that exactly a way to, for parents to monitor their child's activities. Um, it of course is used for a lot more than that. It is used to spy on spouses, friends, et cetera. In fact, I would argue one of the, uh, plus points on their, their app is that they, you can view dating activity on places like Tinder, which I would ask, why would a child have Tinder?

Why would you build that in if this was only intended to be worked on for kids? Um, so. Yeah, they grow up so quickly. They do. They grow up so fast these days. Uh, so there's a little bit of bullshittery there on, on what the, this company is actually making this app for.

Yeah. You're worried for some kickball or random sex. I don't know. Either one works for me. Yeah. Does it allow you to check their portfolio as well to see how their stocks are doing? Yes, exactly. So here's the real problem. Um, well, not that there aren't problems enough already.

All this data is siphoned off and, and stored was put in a bucket that didn't have a password on it. Go figure. It has now been leaked out to everywhere. Now people are quick to point out this is relatively anonymized, but we know what that means.

I can't see how, uh, a bucket full of, uh, personal data, including all your photos and app activity is any way, shape or form anonymized because I'm sure if you looked at the data for five minutes, you could probably figure out, uh, who they are. Well, yeah.

If there's a photo, then you just put it in tin eye and you're done. That's it. Yes. Right. So, uh, you know, we have a couple of things here that are iffy, the app itself, the way the app markets itself and, uh, the fact that they couldn't put a password on the fucking bucket. Mm hmm.

Yeah. This reminds me, uh, just, uh, I was talking to someone earlier this week and running through some of these stats when it came to cloud storage and, and so on. And, uh, one of the noteworthy, uh, things that they, um, found was that actually Amazon S3 buckets have gotten much more secure over the past year.

In other words, the things that Amazon. The things that Amazon. You wouldn't know it by listening to our show. Well, this one wasn't Amazon. This was. Right. But that's. But compared to some of the other. Right. Exactly. Compared to some of the other providers, Amazon has made some adjustments on their end as as to what is the default, how they.

Yes. You about things. And it, it seems to be working. Jason, I think you and I talked about that, uh, maybe even two years ago, uh, about how the UI for the Amazon bucket was almost built to design you to fail. And obviously they've tweaked that out that a bit.

So it's a more obvious, uh, put password on this. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. I think I, you know, I, I, I'm pretty sure we both have AWS accounts, so we should just go. We should just go spin up a bucket and see what they do nowadays. It'll take five minutes and we'll figure it out, you know, because I just thought that was interesting that, uh, they, they, the, what they were tracking was they saw a significant change in the number of Amazon buckets specifically that were showing up as being exposed compared

to the other providers. Right. So interesting. Yeah. Cause I mean, in the, in the old days when you basically spin up a bucket and if you wanted to use it for like assets for a website, you had to set everything to global. That was the easy way to do it, you know? And when you're, when you were setting up like, you know, like a, my SQL bucket to, to run the case, they were, it was difficult to get the right password in there or make it like a, you know, a tough password to get.

Um, cause they were like just weird character recognition things that they had in there. That's like, no, you can't use that one. Like I remember TILD was, uh, one of those like protected characters that they wouldn't let you use. It was, it was very strange, but, um, yeah. Uh, just, but if you're using a bucket, like if you set up a bucket and you want it to be for assets for your website, it, you have to set it to global so everybody can see it.

The problem is it's like, oh, do you have an S3 bucket? You have some new developer comes in fresh talent as we always like to call them. Uh, they're like, oh yeah, here's our, here's our company bucket. Just use this. And then everything that's in that bucket already is then set to global because somebody's using it for a different purpose.

You know, they're not setting up their own buckets to do specific tasks. And I've seen that time and time again, you know, I still have clients that have buckets that are wide open to the world that have all their financial data in there. But guys, guys, I've sent this email seven times. This is the last time I'm going to send it.

So if you get hacked, it's on you. I don't care anymore. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, part of that is that with some organizations, uh, if they acknowledge your email, then a clock starts ticking and they have to actually do something about it.

So that's a thing as well. So it's interesting too, when it comes to the stalker where I'm, I actually just texted my friend. I'm waiting to hear back on the, the actual app she uses. She pays like, um, I think it's over a hundred dollars a year for this app for her daughter who is 16 years old.

And so she has like the monitoring app on her phone and the daughter has, you know, the, the other app on her phone. Does the daughter know? Yes, absolutely. She knows that's, that's much better. Absolutely. She knows. And like, you know, my friend will get an alert if she's speeding or if, you know, any, any different, it's got a ton of different metrics.

You mean that she's being a kid? Exactly. This is the problem I have with this. But I mean, the daughter's used to it. I mean, I asked her about it. I'm like, doesn't this freak you out? She's like, I'm used to it. You know, totally, totally fine with that. And, but it also helps, you know, if they're trying to coordinate on where they're going to be and things like that.

So it's not, it's, it's like a way more powerful find to my friends type of thing. But I mean, kids are different than us. Find and control my friends. Exactly. Yes. Mark on my friends. Again, like I said, I, I, as a parent, I can kind of understand the impulse, but I do find it creepy and somewhat draconian.

It's helicopter mode. It's helicopter mode. It's helicopter mode. Like I, I would much rather set up a system using Eero or whatever. You know, I don't know if they're still advertising with us, so I'm not going to pitch it right now. But that can, that can kind of block things and control access at a, at a higher level without, without doing something that is betraying my son's trust or, or putting something on his phone that is tracking him.

And what he does in the wild, he does in the wild because he's a kid and he should have that freedom. Should he though? Should he? Yes. Yes. Yes. Unfortunately, yes. Yes. This is, this is actually something where my, my wife and I don't entirely align.

I am much more on Brian's side here of saying that we need to limit the amount of, of, uh, insights we have into, yeah. And what our children are doing and, um, especially as they get older.

Uh, and she tends to be more on the side of, no, I want to know everything you're doing all the time. That, uh, I think that is a pretty straight down the, down the line, uh, gender split from most of the parents I've been talking to. Not entirely. There's always exceptions to the rule, but in general, I would not classify her as being generally an overprotective kind of person.

It's that, it's the mom gene. Yeah. It's the mom gene. I suppose you're right. I suppose you're right. I suppose you're right. Yeah. Well, I, uh, I, I, are you guys familiar with this, uh, Wiggle, uh, website, the wireless network mapping? Rob Wiggles.

Great. It's very funny. Uh, no, I wasn't until you put it in the show notes. And now I'm fascinated by it. Yes. Yes. Oh my God. Am I fascinated by this? Yes. So this was actually brought to my attention by, uh, Caleb Barlow, who's one of our, uh, Cyber Wire partners.

Uh, he works for, he's actually the CEO at a company called Synergist Tech. So he's a regular over on the Cyber Wire, um, used to be with IBM. Um, and, uh, he pointed this out to me. Basically, this is a kind of a front end for a lot of open source publicly gathered information about Wi-Fi networks.

Yeah. Just mapping out the Wi-Fi networks. Uh, and boy, is there a lot of information in here. Holy Jiminy Jeebus. They really missed out on a marketing opportunity, at least to us oldies from the internet, because their tagline should be, it is all the networks found by everyone.

It should be all, all the networks belong to us. Yeah, it should be. That's right. I think I, what I'm really enjoying is just going around and seeing how everybody names their networks. Oh, that's great. So I'm at Flower Lady and Flower Lady 5G right now.

There's one called Happiness. Um, a lot of squid nets on the one that I'm at right now, but, uh, yeah, this is fantastic. Mm-hmm. Well, Caleb made the point that, uh. Extremely online.

Yes, you are, sir. You are very extremely online. Dude. Gin and juice. Oh, yeah. We know what you do at night. Mm-hmm. Oh, my God. It is entertaining. Uh, but, uh, Caleb made the point that, uh, if you have a unique Wi-Fi name, that it is yet another piece of information that they can use to, uh, to track you.

So, because one of the things that your device does, that your phone does when it's out there looking for Wi-Fi networks. It looks for your default networks. Yep. It looks for your default network. So it's going out and saying, hey, are you, are you this network? Are you this network?

So it's broadcasting the name of your default networks. I think we covered this five years ago when you first started with the show, Dave. I remember that. I wonder if that information could be used to break anonymization of data. Yeah. Do you think? He had an interesting suggestion, which was to name your Wi-Fi network after a vehicle.

In other words, all of these cars are coming. Oh, genius. Yeah. All these cars are coming with Wi-Fi networks built in. So name your network after a car. That way it is, first of all, likely to be filtered out because it, it's a mobile network, right?

It's, it's a car. It's not right. And also there's going to be so many networks with that default name. It's harder to, to track you down. Well, I think my, like on, on my Explorer, it's like four dash, you know, series of random characters.

Yeah. Mine's like 725 BMW 953 WXYZ or something crazy like that. So here's what we got to do. You just walk out with the scanner app, the Wi-Fi scanner app that we talked about a couple episodes ago and figure out your neighbor's car and then name your network after your neighbor's car.

Right, right. You know, Jason, I, we were talking, we're talking about doing next week a bit of a security special where we kind of cover all the basics and what we do. And this falls solidly under the, yeah, this would probably be a really good idea, but I'm way too lazy.

Okay. Well, yeah. Good thing you're not going to be on that episode for very long. We'll do it without you. Right. So rather than security by obscurity, it's vulnerability by laziness. Yes, pretty much. Yeah. Or what I would call a reasonable amount of security, but I'm not wearing a tin foil hat.

Right. Okay. Good enough. Yeah. Can't be bothered. No, I love this site though, man. This, I could just sit here and read, read networks all day. It's great. There are some crazy ones right by my house. I'll tell you that. Yeah. Yeah.

And next door to across the pond is pond scum. Love it. Right. So you can sort of, you can find all of the, the, the neighbors who hate each other. Oh, I have used my wifi networks as, as just, you know, just to piss off the neighbors.

I'm like, Jesus sucks 2017 or anything to, cause I know they're out there just putting pamphlets on my door or whatever. It's funny. Cause you look around and then you see like a, you see like base station. Now I'm almost willing to bet that that person probably does not have a password on that.

Cause you were, they weren't even bothered to rename it. Hmm. Yeah. It could be all the Xfinity ones I've seen. I'm sure they, cause they all have, you know, pretty long default passwords and things like that. But if you see a network like your dogs suck and you know that you have bad neighbors.

Right. Right. We hear you having sex. Yeah. Right by Santa Monica city hall. Somebody named their, their wifi network, Santa Monica city sucks. This is good stuff. This is hours of enjoyment here right now.

This is really good. Oh my God. I have. Okay. I got to close that. We got to finish the show here. Oh, I think this is the show. We're just going to do this every week. We're just going to figure out the great wifi networks we found.

And on this last story I found over at ours technica this morning, I thought it was great. A weed dealers, $59 million lesson. Don't hide the Bitcoin keys with a fishing rod. This is a guy in Ireland who was basically a weed dealer.

And it bought a bunch of Bitcoin way back in the day. And he spread out his Bitcoin over a bunch of wallets. And then he wrote down the encryption keys and put them in his tackle box in his garage. Well, he got robbed at one point and they stole his tackle box.

And also, he thinks they stole the tackle box because there are a couple different stories here. The, he got busted for carrying weed and got a jail sentence. And then the Irish government came and took everything in his house, sent it to the, you know, basically the dump and the dump then sent it on to Germany and China to be incinerated.

So the Irish government would like their $59 million in Bitcoin, but they can't get to it because the keys are gone. And he can't get to it because he was in jail and somebody burned all this stuff. So, yeah, here's the thing.

Have a backup for your Bitcoin, you know, decryption keys at some point. Well, you know, weed dealer not really expecting super high IT IQ. We live in California where there are lots of weed dealers who are very professional. Well, that's because it's legal here now.

It's different. Yes. It's not illegal anymore. Right. Now, 59 million bucks though. That's a lot of weed. That's not chump tech. Exactly. That's a lot of weed. Well, I mean, 6,000 Bitcoin in 2011. So he probably paid like $12 for it, you know?

That's right. Right. I still love that story about the guy who ended up spending $10 million on a pizza. If he would have kept the Bitcoin, but he bought a Bitcoin way back or he uses Bitcoin to buy a pizza way back in the day. The first guy. Yeah. That was the first pizza delivery through Bitcoin. Yep.

I wonder what ultimately happens with money in Bitcoin that is lost forever. Does it just simply stay there forever? It's just lost forever. Yeah. It's just lost forever. It's lost forever. There's no expiration. It's just in there and just stays forever.

Yeah. Pretty much. Interesting. It's, you know, it's like if you, if you have $59 million and you bury it in your backyard and then forget where you put it. Kind of the same thing. It's kind of, it's literally ghost in the machine, right? It's just there and nobody can ever get to it.

Yeah. Unless they do a rollback on the blockchain, which they've been known to do because I know they did that with Ethereum at one point. And, you know, there are ways around it where they could release the funds, but then you have to get a bunch of people doing it. And we've talked about that several times on how that could be because a lot of people can just, you know, have blockchain nodes and then brute force the system.

I could go on for hours. Please don't. Yeah, for now, for now, for now, for now, the $59 million is, yeah, ghost in the machine. Yeah. All right, gentlemen. Well, have fun surfing around all of your various neighbors, Wi-Fi networks.

I know I did when I first got access to that website. So glad to have infected your day and wasted your time with it as well. And all of our listeners, because we're just generous that way. Yes, we are. I'm going to go change my network to I slept with your wife. I love that we've all gotten off social media to save us our time.

And then we spend 18 hours doing this. The human brain finds a way to waste time. All right, gents. I'll see you next time. Caps and doodads. Caps and doodads. Caps and doodads. Didn't really find much this week and Jason's been sick and this is usually his section.

But I do remember we had a listener looking for software to do a fairly folksy recipe book a while back. This is not that, but it did make me think of that listener and it's pretty cool. This is an Etsy shop called laser focus crafts and they will engage your favorite family recipe. Maybe a keepsake from your grandmother or something like that onto a bamboo cherry or maple cutting board.

Prices range from $30 for an eight inch by six inch board to 75 for a 14 inch by 11 inch board. And they look really nice and cool. It's a, it's a good little gift idea perhaps for your mother. No, it's neat. I like it. It's a good idea. I always like getting a neat out of Jason.

Yeah. Neat. It's neat. Brick a brick. Oh, mental floss always is a good browse for when you've got 15 minutes and you're bored out of your mind and just need something to brighten your day. And I found something great.

I found 15 charming old fashioned compliments. Uh, we talked about some, um, unsavory characters from our past in this episode. And, uh, so I found some terms that, uh, do not apply to anyone in the music industry. True penny and straight fingered.

During the 16th century, honesty became a characteristic of newfound acclaim in the English language. And if you happen upon someone whose trustworthiness cannot go without commendation, try true penny or straight fingered. Middle fingered is more of the music industry. And while we had a lot of cocks, what we didn't have was a bar cock.

What's a bar cock? While the medieval and early Elizabethan periods boasted plenty of colorful collicalisms, you'll no doubt want to advance to the height of William Shakespeare's career to get some of the really good stuff. This is a term for a gentleman of character and integrity, Jason. Ah, sir, you are a bar cock.

He's a real bar cock. Yes. Yes. And just because we like our booze, licorice rolling eyes, which is, uh, just means you're, you're very pleasant looking. Okay. Closing shout outs.

We made the mistake of mentioning mash the other week. Oh, it's not our fault. And rest in peace. Kelly Nakahara, mash actress best known for her portrayal of the nurse Kelly on the iconic television series mash. She died at 72, lost her battle with cancer and passed away peacefully at her family's Pasadena, California home.

I actually loved that character. She was great. Yeah, she was great. She went from just like a background character, but she was just so great. And everybody liked her so much. She became not a major character, but certainly had tons and tons of episodes with speaking roles. Uh, we also lost, uh, Larry Tesler, who basically invented cut, copy and paste hero to all hack programmers everywhere.

Yes. Yeah. Eric Hundley sent me this one and he's like, I think it's fitting that I actually copied and pasted the link to you. So. As did we. Yes. Yes. Rest in peace, my friend. Yes. And on a personal note, a mainstay of my childhood here in Southern California is going away.

Sadly Alpine village, the Bavarian themed shopping center near Torrance that also served as a hub of Southern California's expatriate German community, which of which I grew up in has announced a mid April closure of its restaurant and bar. It is sad to see it go. I've been there for in later years, many times for Oktoberfest.

Uh, I was there. We hosted my grandmother's 90th birthday there. It was a lot of fun and I'm going to miss that place. So sad to see it going, but, uh, all good things must end. Yes, they must. Yes, they must. 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/donate. And hey, you guys keep giving us some money. Maybe we can buy our own Tesla that we can test out sometime. That would be fun. And some electrical tape. And some electrical tape.

Yes. I think, I think we're, we're pretty closer to getting the electrical tape than the Tesla, but you gotta start somewhere. That's true. Toss us a few bucks and we'll love you forever. Your support keeps us going and we really do appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show/416.

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. Last episode, 415 was the area code for San Francisco, 416 Toronto.

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