420: Bad Video! Bad Video!

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. Brian, I finally made my officially debut on The Neighbor's Wall of Crazy. Did you throw poop in his can? Yes, I did. Well, there you go. When it was on the street. When it was on the street. Because, yeah, his can hadn't gotten picked up yet.

So, you know, I dropped a little doody in the booty there. And I came by yesterday to go do the same thing because it was garbage day and my side of the street had gotten picked up and his hadn't. And I look up on the wall and there are now seven pictures up on his fence and trees.

And three of them are me and Bam Bam and Dino. And I just had to chuckle. Go take a photo of that. We'll put it up on the socials. Okay, okay. I came home and told my roommate and she's like, just stop doing that. The guy's fucking crazy. It's going to be a problem. It's like, do you really want to get in a feud with this guy?

I'm like, no, but it was funny. I'm famous. I'm crazy neighbor famous. You're crazy wall of fame famous. So, if I mysteriously get shot one day, you'll know exactly why. I died for dog poop. You should have your drone out there with the camera and you should take a photo of him when he puts up a new photo on his wall and then put that up on your wall.

You need to start escalating this. Well, I do have cameras pointed right at that spot so I can actually go back through the footage and probably find it. Oh, my God. So, I got this one over at Cal Newport's blog and I love Cal Newport. You know, great guy.

And he says, top economist study what happens when you stop using Facebook. Shockingly, deactivating Facebook freed up 60 minutes per day for the average person in the treatment group. Much of this time was reinvested in offline activities, including notably socializing with friends and family.

Are we surprised by this? No, of course not. And the sample size was 2,743. So, they went and found people who would be willing to be paid to leave Facebook for a month. That's a bit of a self-selecting sample, unfortunately. But they did a control group from the same people.

And deactivation caused small but significant improvements in well-being and, in particular, in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety. The researchers report this effect to be around 25% to 40% of the effect typically attributed to participating in therapy. Not bad.

The treatment group was less likely to say they follow news about politics or the president and less able to correctly answer factual questions about recent news events. I would have to say that they should have tested that beforehand because I'm guessing if they're reading fake news, they would still be less able to correctly answer factual questions about recent news and events.

Look, I'm 100% on board with all these surveys, but I don't like the focus on Facebook. I don't think it makes much difference if you ditch Facebook and then spend all your time on Twitter. It's just as damaging. So, it's all social media that I'm down with. And I'm happier and I spend considerably less time on social media since we've started talking about all this.

I would say my Facebook usage, unless something is going on and I'm, like, involved in some discussions with friends, my Facebook usage is easily down to 10 minutes a day. Oh, that's not bad. Mine is about 15 minutes a week, I think. Right. Just going back and replying to people saying, no, no, no, no, no.

Yeah. So, there you go. Not anything particularly surprising here. Just another study in the quiver of arrows against social media, but focusing on Facebook. And speaking of social media and Facebook, if you want no better case study of how useless digital ads can be, may I present to you Mr. Mike Bloomberg, who spent half a billion dollars on media, a lot of it on digital, which we've discussed in previous shows, and basically got two delegates from American Samoa.

I know. So, if you think Facebook... He's a king in Samoa. That's not to say that Facebook ads don't necessarily work for certain use cases. I certainly know, particularly in the music industry, if you have a low-selling tour in a particular location, you are able to geo-target and target, you know, people that have liked your band and are in, say, Nashville, if your show isn't selling well.

And that does work. But in general, blanketing the entire world with ads on Facebook does fuck all. Yeah, yeah. I mean, his whole thing... And you know what? Like I said, he hired the guys from the Fyre Festival, so I guess they just got fired. No sandwiches, no tents. No tents, no delegates either.

I found this one pretty funny. We got this from a user feedback from the website, and I forgot to put the attribution in. So, if you sent this in, thank you very much. Australian paper prints blank pages to help tackle toilet paper shortage. That better be a nice, soft paper.

Hey, man. Any port in a storm is what you're about to say. Any port in a storm, I'm telling you. Yes, and a bid to tackle the shortage. The NT News provided a practical, if unconventional, solution. Australians living in the Northern Territories would have noticed on Thursday that eight pages in the paper had been left bare, except for watermarks and a cutout guide edition.

So, yeah. So, you know. I love it. Run out of paper? The NT News cares. The newspaper reads. You know. Have you noticed that the toilet paper is flying off the shelves? No. I've noticed a gazillion stories about it, but I went to a number of stores this week.

Granted, I didn't go to, like, a Target or something like that, but I went to Whole Foods. I went to a Trader Joe's, and I went to a Ralph's, and paper, at least here in Santa Monica, is in stock. Been fine. No big deal. Here in the Valley, there's almost no toilet paper left in the Ralph's, and hand sanitizer is gone.

Gone, Daddy, gone. You can't get any of it. They should have read the articles that say hand sanitizer does fuck all. Well, this will lead in nicely to your next story, because I've read numerous articles saying that hand sanitizer does indeed kill the coronavirus.

So, who the hell knows? Yeah. Well. And, yeah. And also, this puts a nice button in the Facebook story that we just read about the study there. And in the, Jesus, fuck, again, news, an egg a day may be fine for you after all, a new study says. So, yeah, I'm not going to read, I'm not going to read, I'm not going to read the article, but I'm going to read the, the, the introduction to the article.

It's health's longest ping pong game. Eggs are bad, then good, then bad for your heart. Look, we're all going to die, and a life without French omelets is one that I don't want to live. So, go die in a fire and stop wasting my time. Yeah, someday we'll get the definitive word. But we'll be dead already.

That's true. Probably from eggs or not. And because this is everywhere and we just can't wait for media candy, and I'm surprised that you did not know this, Jason. I surprised you before we went on the air with this. The kids in the hall have reunited and we'll have a new show on Amazon.

How fucking awesome is that? How much does my head weigh? Boot to the Head was one of the, a staple from, from, God, what was the name of that guy that did the radio show that broke Weird Al? Dr. Demento. Oh, Dr. Demento. Dr. Demento. A staple from my childhood, Boot to the Head.

Boot to the Head, but kids in the hall didn't do Boot to the Head. Yes, they did. They did? Yes. You've got to be kidding me. Google it right now. I'm 100% sure. I'm 99% sure. Let me edge my bets. Because I know that song backwards and forwards. It's Kids in the Hall.

Phoenix Wright, the Frantics. Let's see here. Boot to the Head, Wikipedia. Comedy Troop. Nope. It's from the Frantics. Sorry. Well, my entire childhood is a lie. I'm telling you, fake boots is what you've got.

Well, fake boots. All right. Fair enough. I always thought that was Kids in the Hall. So I'm glad I had 99% hedged my bets. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But here, you know, you get, you get extra credit because they are actually from Canada. Okay. Close enough. They're all the same, right? Pretty much.

And just because I also can't wait, my God, what heaven was on TV last night? Oh, I think you might be talking about Picard. It was beautiful. Troy, Picard, and Riker together again. A bit of a sad story for what's happened with Troy and Riker, but they seem to be weathering the storm rather well and are in love.

Wow, wonderful. Totally retconning the whole Worf thing, I suppose. Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. I gotta say, though, that the actress that they had to play her daughter was phenomenal. Oh, I know. That was really, really well done. The whole episode was just beautiful, and I'm so glad that they put that in there for us.

I wouldn't say it's fan service because it really did service the story, but it did both. It was wonderful. And I loved, I loved how number one just kicked him in the balls, like, backwards and forwards. He's just like, and he did the whole Sherlock Holmes thing when he was making the pizza.

Well, that was great. I loved it. That was absolutely fantastic. Yeah, Picard really did get his ass handed to him by number one. Oh, it was so good. So I don't think we put any spoilers in there. But yeah, man, if you haven't seen it yet, go watch it. It was phenomenal. Yes.

And just a quick note. Thank God. It appears we get seven of nine back in next episode, too. Okay, well, I had this in here that Microsoft has shut down their campus until March 25th, and it turns out basically everybody has at this point, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and

a slew of others, because, you know, the coronavirus apparently is a thing. The news is actually coming out way too fast for this for us to keep up. I know I've got a story coming up that's out of date now, but yeah. So it's on. I got the official email from a friend of the show who did not send this to me.

So you know who you are. Thanks. Thanks very much. But yeah, and Google has canceled its IO developer conference, which we had here and here. And now I go and look at ZDNet, and we've got Adobe Summit has been moved, Aruba Networks, Atlassian, Black Hat, Asia, Cisco Live, Cisco Live, Melbourne, Delaware.

The list goes on and on and on. Facebook F8. Everybody is basically saying, oh, the Game Developers Conference. Yeah. Everybody's shutting down, you know, and James Bond shut down. Did you hear that? Well, yeah, of course. They want their box office and they're not going to get their box office if they release right at the period of time when nobody wants to leave their house.

Exactly. So they're not going to do that. The weird thing is South by Southwest has not announced that they're going to cancel yet. So I've seen numerous people, including Tim Ferriss, who said that he's decided to cancel his appearance. But as far as I know, South by Southwest is still a go.

My wife was scheduled to go to that for work, but she's decided not to. Not that she's worried about getting the coronavirus. The real fear is somebody else does and you get stuck in quarantine for two weeks. Yeah, definitely. Oh, that's really smart. Yeah. Well, that's why my wife decided not to go. She's like, I can't be stuck there for two weeks.

We've got a kid. Like, that's not going to work. So she decided not to go. And actually, her company has basically said, we're not telling you not to go, but we're telling you it'd be a good idea not to go. Yeah, that's good. That's good. Yeah. I mean, what was the...

I saw a thing over on Business Insider yesterday where some Australian group came out saying that 15 million people are probably going to die from this and it'll be like $2.4 trillion to the global economy as a fallout. But as we've talked about so far, how many studies have come true that we talk...

It's like, can you believe a goddamn thing anymore? But look, I mean, this thing could go pear-shaped. It could get really bad. I'm not terribly heartened by our government's response thus far. We seem to be repeating a lot of the same mistakes that China did. But if everybody is out there is smart about this and, you know, weather the storm, wash your hands.

The only people really at risk are people with issues with their immune systems and the elderly right now. And of course, young, young kids. But there's a little bit too much panic going on for my taste, considering what it actually is. There is a lot of panic going on. But I got to tell you, here in the state of California, they are like locking down all of the senior care centers.

My neighbor works at a senior care center. He's like an orderly there. And the state visited his place. And he's only got eight patients at his care facility. And the state came out and was just like gave him marching orders for everything they have to do. And they followed up the next day.

They are taking this very seriously in California for elder care because those are, you know, good, which is what they should. Yeah. So that's really, at least that's a good thing to see is that they really kind of care about the seniors. Don't give a shit about us. Well, you know, we're going to, for the most part, even if we get the virus and there are some people out there, some that have done studies to say we probably already have it.

This thing has been kicking around for a while. It's a flu for the most case. Like, that's it. You know, so we'll see. Anyways, how much is it really going to change our lives? I'm skipping ahead a story here because this is the one that should be next because of what we're talking about.

I read this awesome article over at The Atlantic called, You Already Live in Quarantine. Well, me especially. Especially you. So, yes. What would people do if stuck inside all day? The answer is far more familiar than the fearful conjecture forebodes. Many Americans would do the same thing they do now, mostly.

Netflix has already fused us to our couches for years. Contemporary society has been bracing and even longing for quarantine. See, I'm ahead of the curve. I'm telling you, I'm always ahead of the curve. Yes. So this article came out a little bit before Microsoft announced their news, but Twitter had banned non-critical business travel for its workers and strongly encouraged all its employees to work from home if they could.

Amazon introduced restrictions on company visitors after two employees in Europe contracted the virus. Large trade shows and conferences, as we've been discussing, have started pulling the plug, among them Facebook's annual event for its platform developers. In a way, this article states, quarantine is just a raw, surprising name for the condition that computer technologies have brought about over the last two decades, making almost everything possible from the quiet isolation of a desk or chair illuminated by an internet-connected laptop or tablet, aka Jason's life.

Yeah. By design. By absolute design. And as I was reading this, I was thinking of you. So, a laptop and an internet connection are sufficient. Then when it's time for a break, DoorDash or Grubhub hastens lunch to the work desk, helping you avoid the coughs and foreign doorknobs of eating out.

Later, Instacart or Amazon Prime now drops groceries at your door. TaskRabbit lets you schedule assistance with errands, and Washio will pick up and deliver your laundry. Nowadays, doing something for real with your own body sometimes feels stranger than summoning it by a smartphone. Well, I don't do 90% of that stuff.

I'm not going to go to Washio or TaskRabbit for things like that. Because, you know, if an infected person brings your food and coughs all over it, you still got the virus. Yes, I was thinking that as well. You know, that's a big flaw in everybody's thinking. It's just like, oh, I'll just have it delivered. Oh, you're just going to who's delivering it?

People. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Come on. Remember, AI is people. And who's cooking the food? People. Yes. So I stock up on ingredients and make sure everything's clean. Come on. Don't be an idiot. But yeah, here's the here's the real issue. If the repairman can't go out and fix the lines when the Internet goes down, then we're going to have Armageddon.

If we don't if we lose the Internet, then it's really going to be a shit storm. You're going to see panic in the streets. And then we are really at the purge. Yeah. Yeah. And it says at the very end of the article, never before in human history has it been so easy to do so much without going anywhere. Cinema box office receipts fell sharply in 2019.

Take that, James Bond. As streaming entertainment becomes more plentiful and high quality, apps and games and podcasts and digitally delivered matter of all kinds have followed suit. Absolutely drowning in it. Now, the last thing anyone might worry about is getting bored at home. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I consider it.

Well, here's the thing. If I don't have all I need is water for like two months and I'm fine. I can live off my own body for at least two months. I have prepped. These aren't man boobs. They're prep boobs. Got fat for the purge. Exactly.

I'll be last man standing, damn it. That's why I always laugh at these fuckers who go on Survivor and they show up skinny with a six pack. I'm like, you're not going to make it to the guy who shows up chubby and is just hanging out. He's like, I prepared for this. Yes. Like, look at Boston Rob in the new in season 40 of Survivor.

He showed up chubby. Uh huh. He's smart. He's played this before. It's one twice. I love Survivor. I'm sorry. Never watched an episode. I'm a super fan. I've seen every season since from the day it started. I've seen every season. I am a Survivor super fan and I am not ashamed to say that, damn it.

Well, on the flip side of this ode to joy to staying at home and having all your needs met by never leaving the house, the Wall Street Journal also had an article this week that I thought was very disturbing. The Lonely Burden of Today's Teenage Girls. Young Americans have become unwitting guinea pigs in today's huge unplanned experiment with social media and teenage girls are bearing much of the brunt.

In conversation after conversation, adolescent girls describe themselves as particularly vulnerable to the banes of our increasingly digital culture, with many of them struggling to manage the constant connectedness of social media, their rising levels of anxiety, and the intense emotions that have always been central to adolescence.

So they did a, the Wall Street Journal did a big article about this and over the past 18 months they conducted interviews and focus groups with around 100 American girls aged 12 to 19 and their mothers, most of them from Midwestern and the middle class. They also interviewed teachers and therapists around the country.

And there's some disturbing results as far as I'm concerned. Girls today aren't as self-sufficient as their counterparts in earlier decades. They are less likely to possess driver's licenses, work outside the home, or date. They are also more solitary. So since the dawn of the smartphone era, girls have dramatically decreased the amount of time they spend shopping, seeing friends, or going to movies.

Just like we were talking about earlier, they spend their Saturday nights at home alone watching Netflix and surfing social media. 95% of American teenagers have access to smartphones. Contemporary teens spend six to nine hours a day online. Jesus.

And that's 72% of teens felt manipulated by tech companies into remaining constantly connected, but were unable to do anything about it. Wow. So, um, let's see, because of the omnipresent smartphones, girls can call or text their parents to ask for what's for dinner or request a ride home.

Many girls are rarely out in the world alone, solving problems by themselves when they do eventually. Okay. So here's what, here's what I'm taking away from this. When the coronavirus hits, all we're going to have left are nerds who know how to live inside and a bunch of teenage girls who have no idea how to actually get shit done.

Exactly. That's pretty much it. Yeah. So, and it goes on, when girls do eventually leave home, they often find themselves ill-prepared to navigate real life. Uh, the American College Health Association reported that 31% of female freshmen said they experienced overwhelming anxiety or panic attacks.

By 2016, that had shot up to 62%. Jesus. Uh, the American Association of Pediatrics now warns that too much social media use can lead to depression and anxiety. No shit. Social media works against basic developmental goals, physical, cognitive, relational, sexual, and maturational.

How lucky are we to be the last generation that grew up without this stuff, Jason? It really screws you up when you're a kid. This is what we're really starting to learn. Girls are sleeping with their phones and react to every notification. As they create more interesting, supposedly happier virtual personas for themselves, their real selves diminish.

Girls collect likes instead of making friends. They can be devastated by a cruel text or a tepid reaction to a selfie. Long before they hold hands with a date, they are exposed to online pornography and misogynist messages. So, yeah. This is not, um, not a good survey here.

No. Talk about the law of unintended consequences. Well, the really disturbing thing about this is the girls are aware of it. Many of the girls they interviewed articulated many of social media's drawbacks, even as they declared that they can't live without it. So, they know it's bad.

They can't stop. After an evening online, I go to bed feeling unhappy. Izzy, who is 13, told us, I wonder what did I do all day long? Then I wake up and do the same things the next day. Man, that's, that's depressing. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Uh, I, that's, I mean, this is really striking. I mean, I don't have a girl. I have a boy, but I, I, you know, when I read these articles, I, I've really got to start planning and thinking about how I'm going to, how I'm going to manage my kids' digital life moving forward. Um, because this does not seem good.

No, that's, that's really, that's, it's sad. I mean, it's really fucking sad. Yeah. So, uh, my next story was kind of a good thing about YouTube, but I almost feel like not doing it now. Come on, do it. Might as well. Okay. So, moving away from that, something, uh, apparently good is happening over at YouTube.

Their tweaks to recommend fewer conspiracy videos do seem to be working. So, the recommendation engine, which we've worried about, and I, I see an action on a day-to-day basis now. My kid, I, I let him watch a little bit of YouTube now as, as basically a reward for doing other things. Your kid's first word is chemtrails.

It's not quite that bad, but, you know, cause he's still, in general, he finds things that, that we like him to watch. And, and I do, one of the things that I'm already doing now is every night before I go to bed, I fire up, uh, the YouTube history and I start deleting things that he watched that I don't want him to see. So, it doesn't show up in his recommendations anymore.

Um, you know, but I do see, I know this is the world we're living in now, Jason. That's fucked up, man. Like, I'll let him, he'll, he'll start with stuff that I want him to watch, like Blippi or Peppa Pig or whatever. But then the recommendation engine will throw up these, and who the fuck are these people that are making these videos?

They're, they're usually Russian. Uh, you know, where instead of it being an actual Peppa Pig video, it's, it's a human moving around a Peppa Pig character and, and making the voices and they're weird and they're disturbing. And as soon as I see them pop up, I always, I always tell Lucas, bad video, bad video.

And he goes and finds another one. Um, but that's what the recommendations throw up. So, and they were doing that. Obviously he's, I've got a kid's account that he's using. So he doesn't get a lot of this weird, um, conspiracy stuff, but that's more for the adults. So after facing public backlash, YouTube promised to curb the amount of conspiracy videos it pushes to users.

And there was a study by the university of California, Berkeley that states that these efforts do seem to be working and their analysis show a 40% reduction in the likelihood of YouTube suggesting conspiracy based content. Now, however, the study did not use an actual user account during the analysis.

So it was not, nobody was signed in. It was all viewed as a logged out state. And this may have a major impact on results as watch history is an important factor. And how YouTube determines which video suggested to a logged in user. So if you're logged in could be different because you might look at the stuff or have inadvertently clicked on it a million times.

Like my son does with disturbing videos. So how about YouTube just stops letting fucking conspiracy theorists? Well, there's that. But the problem is, uh, the judgment over what constitutes a harmful conspiracy. Well, exactly. Because things such as MK ultra and project sunshine, which started as basically conspiracy theories online turned out to be true.

Yeah, I guess. There is stuff like that. And then there's also, you know, there's, there's the whole fair use and there's the whole parody aspect of things. But I mean, you know, 9-11 was an inside job is not a, not a parody. No, of course it's not. It's just fucking cuckoo-ness. So there you go.

So they're, they're doing something. It seems to be working. Maybe. Okay. Well, there's that. Yay.

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

Dave, welcome back. And how was RSA? Thank you. It's good to be back. I will tell you, gentlemen, I am in a really good mood today. Okay. Just, I just, that's all I can say. I'm in a good mood today. We're going to work to ruin that. Don't you worry. I feel great. I feel energized.

I feel, I don't know why. I shouldn't feel this way because all the stuff that's going on in the world around us. But every now and then you wake up and you just feel like, you feel great. And that's how I feel today. So go ahead and ruin it for me. Jason, remind me to send him that Wall Street Journal article we discussed in the news.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Is euphoria a precursor of coronavirus? Because, you know, you're around a bunch of people. Could be. That's true. That's true. Could be. No, just feeling good. Good, good. Yeah. First thing first, before you tell me about RSA, what was the microphone you were using?

Because you guys sounded great. Oh, thank you. That was a headset mic from Audio-Technica. I have a link here in the show notes for you. It is, it's a broadcast microphone. So it's more set up for folks who are doing sports, that kind of thing.

Mm-hmm. So there's a link there if you want to check out some of the details on it. But yeah, it's a nice quality mic. Really good rejection of stuff around you while still getting a little bit of that environmental sound. So you sound like you are where you are. But I was really pleased. It's just took that directly into the Zoom H6 and then sent that back to the mothership.

And Elliot did his magic to the files and made it sound good. Yeah. And for the people who love to hear our Amazon titles, it's the Audio-Technica BP-HS-1 broadcast stereo headset with dynamic cardioid boom mic. And those run about 200 bucks a pop, which is not bad for what you got out of that.

That is really good. Oh, thanks. Yeah. I've had those for a few years now, and they have not let me down. I've been really happy with them. Cool. Cool. So tell us about RSA. RSA was great this year. I have to say we all agreed from our CyberWire team that we had our best RSA ever.

And it was a combination of things. We had our own booth in Broadcast Alley. And Broadcast Alley is over in Moscone West. It's right next to one of the big keynote halls. And we were at the end of the road there. So it just gave us a home base where people could come to us.

I spent most of my time there. I was impossibly overscheduled, but that was fine. That's what RSA is. So people could come to us. We did interviews there. I recorded all of our regular daily CyberWire stuff there. It was nice because in years past, I would run back to my hotel room and record my scripts from there.

I would run back to my hotel room and do editing there. And now I'm not doing editing anymore since Elliot, our editor, takes care of that. So I would just record the files and I'd upload them to a Google Drive and he'd grab them and do the edits. It was a lot of fun.

My kingdom for an editor. My kingdom for an editor. It is so decadent. Let me tell you. It is so decadent. Except that's how I make my living. So I guess you are the editor. That's right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But I had a great time, met a lot of really interesting people, met Penn and Teller.

That was fun. I got to say, I was listening to your interview with Penn and Teller and Teller didn't speak. So for all I can tell, you just met Penn. Well, if you listen to the extended version on Hacking Humans, Teller does say a few words.

But I would say the ratio of Penn to Teller is about what you would expect from Penn and Teller, which is that when you ask a question, Penn jumps in and pretty much dominates the conversation. But Teller did have a few interesting things to say. But it was really nice.

They were there. It was pretty much a corporate gig for them, coming and being hired by RSA to come in, do a special customized version of their shtick. But we knew they were coming, so we asked if they'd be willing to do an interview, and their folks said yes. And so we met them backstage right before they went on.

They gave us about 20 minutes. Wow. Nice. And they were, yeah, I mean, they were delightful. It took a little, a couple minutes to warm up because I think they were walking into a situation they didn't know who I was. And, you know, they had no idea what to expect from me. But once we got going and it really turned into a conversation, I felt good about it.

And they were very gracious with their time. So that was a really neat experience. Been a bit fan of theirs for a long time. Yeah, I've done interviews with Penn before, and he is a really nice guy. He's definitely gracious. And I have to say, when he had the slammer, we had him on video doing an interview one time.

He had a urinal in his office. And I'm like, that, my friend, is how you are a baller. You don't have to leave your office to take a whiz. Yeah, yeah. I remember seeing a tour of the slammer once and they were up in his bedroom and he goes into the side room and there's like a swing in there and he says, this room is for sex.

And then they just, they just moved on from there. Okay, great. Who else did I meet? I met Admiral James Stavridis. He is the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. Delightful gentleman. Delightful gentleman.

Yeah. You wouldn't think so. Being a Supreme Allied Commander, you'd think that he would be kind of stern. But he's a super nice guy. He's a super nice guy and told him about my father having been in the Navy. And so we had a nice chat about that.

Who else did I meet? I met a gentleman named Elvis Chan, which is just a great name. And it turns out he's the top election security guy at the FBI. And, of course, when I spoke to him, it was a few days before Super Tuesday. So they were really, you know, had their fingers crossed that all the hard work they'd been putting in to prep everything for Super Tuesday was going to go well.

And it did. So that was interesting. What else? There was hand sanitizer every few feet. People were bumping elbows and fist bumping instead of shaking hands. Howie Mandeling it. Yeah. I did hear folks say it was a lighter crowd than usual.

And there were a few vendors who didn't show up, some big ones. But overall, I think it went very well. I had a good time. Again, just impossibly overscheduled. But you go in knowing that and just sort of roll with it that it's going to be that kind of a week. But I felt really good about coming out of it.

Felt like I got a lot of really interesting interviews, met a lot of really nice people who I've been looking forward to meeting. So, yeah, this was a good week. Cool. And we've talked about RSA in the past with you. And, you know, a couple of years ago, maybe two years ago, I think everything was AI. And that was going to be the future of cybersecurity.

How has that panned out? Well, AI is still part of everything. It's still – I would say AI has shifted to be a feature checkbox. Right. In fact, someone that I was speaking with, I think it was David DeFore from Webroot, was saying they had done some research where folks who are shopping around still – they want to know that your product has AI.

They don't really care what it does or how it's used. They just want to know that you have it. And that's important to them. I would like some AI with a sprinkle of blockchain, please. Yes. Exactly. Right. Exactly. Blockchain. Blockchain. So, this year, the theme of the conference was the human element, which was ironic given that there's a virus going around and people were actually not wanting to be around other humans.

But I think that's a big shift to where we are these days where the technical tools have gotten so good that the bad guys have shifted to coming at the humans through phishing and those sorts of things. So, there was a big focus on that.

Cybersecurity is people. Mm-hmm. Yep. All the way down. All the way down. Yeah. I would have had more questions about this, but I misread RSA as RZA, so I kind of studied up on the Wu-Tang Clan. Fair enough.

I have to say, my favorite interview you did this week, though, was with the woman from the State Department. Yeah. Liesl Franz. Yep. She was awesome. Wasn't she? Yeah. She was really great. Yeah. Yeah. Makes me wish there were more people at the State Department.

Be nice. Well, you know, I did not bring that up with her because I didn't want to bring up a sore subject, and she was just such a great guest, and I learned so much from her. But for what I've heard from other people I know at the State Department, what a ghost town that place is, how hollowed out many parts of the State Department have become.

But it really seems like the cyber team there are still in there fighting the good fight and doing the things they do. But, yeah, to hear the law and policy side of it from her, that was a real treat to get to talk to her, for sure. It's interesting. I was listening to Ronan Farrow on a podcast the other day, and I did not know.

He actually wrote a book on the gutting of the State Department that I'm planning on picking up. Huh. Interesting. This was his first book before he got into Weinstein-verse. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I definitely want to check this out. This guy – I was really kind of on the fence about him until I listened to this interview.

I'll try and track it down and put it in the show notes. But, yeah, his first book is basically about the State Department and how it just got screwed. I think it's called – which one is this one? I think it's not – War on Peace, The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence.

I think that might be it. I may have read an excerpt from that. I remember reading a story about folks at the State Department were just hanging out in the lunchroom killing time because nobody had anything to do. It was in shambles.

There was no chain of command anymore. And so the regular – the career employees weren't sure what they were supposed to be doing with their time. And the political appointees didn't really know what to do because they were not people who were appointed for any reason other than favoritism, I suppose.

Yeah, you mentioned that on the show before. I specifically remember you mentioning them hanging out in the lunchroom. Yeah, yeah. The other fun – or fun, I don't know, interesting thing that happened to me for the first time was someone recognized me in the men's room. Fancy pants.

Were you in or out of your furry suit at the time? Well, I guess you would be partially out. Standing – yeah, exactly. My eyes are up here, pal. My eyes are up here. No, I was in the men's room doing my business, standing in line, standing in line in a line with people on either side of me.

And when I heard someone say, hey, are you Dave from the Cyber Wire? And I said, yes, I am. I said, do you mind if we step outside of my office and continue this conversation? So that was fun. Very cool. Well, we're glad to have you back.

We're glad to have you back. I'm glad. It's good to be back. Good to be back. So before we jump into our stories this week, I wanted to just sort of add on to – I know you guys mentioned this story about Facebook earlier in the show. I saw that in the show notes and I just wanted to echo basically everything in that article about anxiety and stress and all those sorts of things echo my own experience.

In fact, within the past couple of days, I was chatting with someone and they asked, are you planning on going back to Facebook? And I said, no, probably not. I really don't miss it. And I do feel better off for not being on it. I feel like I'm happier. Excellent. I mean, I get it.

I just – my argument with that entire article is it shouldn't be focused on just Facebook. I think it's any social media. But I know you guys feel differently about the Twitter. Well, you know, I don't even know if it – maybe it's just cutting down on it.

Yeah. I mean, any – removing yourself from one is obviously going to cut you down because you were doing all of them. So it is less time – less gross time, as it were. Right, right. Yeah. I mean, I spend five minutes on Twitter a day. I scroll through. I see what links people post and I check them out if they look good and then I add them to the show notes.

That is my main crux of Twitter at this point. Right. Yeah. I'd find for whatever reason I don't get as revved up as I do with things on Twitter as I did with things on Facebook. I don't know if it's just the different variety of people or the way the conversations are threaded, but I tend to – I just don't get as – I don't know.

I don't suffer righteous indignation the way that I did on Facebook. They have curation tools. That's why. That's probably a big part of it. Yeah. I think you're right. I also think a big part of it is you don't see full call conversations as readily and easily as you do on Facebook. So if you see something that potentially upsets you, that 140 characters has gone pretty quickly and you're on to the next one as opposed to on Facebook where if you see something that upsets you, you're seeing top comments which will probably incite you even more and then you get psyched in.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's plausible. Absolutely. Yeah. All right, guys. Let's talk about some news. I saw this one over at Motherboard. This small company is turning Utah into a surveillance panopticon, and this is a company called Banjo, which I remember from the social media world, speaking of social media, not too long ago.

And they have basically pivoted to being just this entire – what's the Evil Geniuses Company? It begins with a P. I can't believe I'm dropping the name.

I can't remember right now. I can't remember which Evil Geniuses. Oh, so many Evil Geniuses. I'm talking about Palantir. I'm talking about Palantir. Ah, okay. So they're basically trying to do a live version of Palantir. And there are some things in this article and what the company says that kind of got my dander up a bit.

So they're tracking literally thousands of cameras, 911 calls, just all this real-time data coming from the state itself. And the state has given them access, free access to all of this stuff, all the CCTV, all the traffic cameras, audio sensors for gunshots and things like that.

So Banjo is getting $20 million from the state of Utah to basically monitor everything from all these different audio signals and cameras and CCTV cameras, traffic cameras, and 911 calls.

And they are basically building the minority report of the future. And what really got me about this story is, of course, the CEO and his ZZ Top beard. But that's easy pickings.

I'm not even going to go there. Well, it's your ability to instantaneously judge anyone by how they look, right, Jason? I mean, that's proved flawless to you throughout your life. Of course. But I have to say, in the picture, in the top of the Motherboard article, the jacket that he's wearing, I want today.

He's got a digital camouflage suit coat on, and I want that jacket. That thing is badass. All right. Fair enough. I guess if I had $20 million in the bank from the state of Utah, I could probably afford one. I'm guessing that's bespoke. But what do you guys think about this, that the entire state has handed over all of this control to a private company who says that, of course, everything is anonymized, and they're not actually picking out specific people.

They're picking out specific event horizons in the data stream, of course, using AI.

Well, you remember, we have talked on this show in the past couple of years about someone had a technology that was able to look at the security cameras from multiple convenience stores simultaneously, and it would use some type of automation to flag when it thought something bad was happening in a convenience store and then put that in front of a human being.

Right, gun recognition was what it was. Right, right. Or even just aggressive, you know, someone moving really quickly or something like that. So that was taking that first level of filtering out of the hands of people, but then saying, hey, person, we think there's something here you might require your attention.

This reminded me of that on steroids. Yeah, it's kind of exactly the same thing. It really is. It's just with way more data points. Way more data points. I'm curious, why do they need access to the 9-11 callers?

If you call 9-11, you're already in touch with the police. Where are they trying to get – what do they get out of that? Probably to prevent false positives, maybe. Or maybe looking for patterns. Like if they hear gunshots in an area, so you can take the audio signals from the gunshots, marry that to a 9-11 call in that area, and then, you know, increase the probability of this possibly being a criminal event, maybe?

Mm-hmm. You know, I'm just guessing on that one. Yeah. But I think that, you know, the more signal that you have, I guess the better the algorithms will be is what everybody says, but – Yeah, I suppose. More data points. Yeah. How's that working out for SETI at home? Oh, wait.

It's not. Anyway. Well, what's the oversight here, right? Who's watching the Watchmen? No one. No. They're just – they're giving them, you know, things that should be of interest to them, giving law enforcement points of interest that they should look at.

Now, my obvious complaint is what if they're giving them false positives and the law enforcement is taking their time going after the ghosts in the machine and not responding to calls that really need to be acted upon? That's what worries me. Mm-hmm.

You know, somebody gets a domestic violence 9-1-1 call, but they say, oh, there's a shooting over here. You should go to the shooting first and get to the domestic violence later, but there was no shooting, and then in the meantime, this guy kills his wife. Yeah. And who is verifying that the algorithms that Banjo is using aren't horribly biased in one direction or another?

As so many of them are already, as we know. Right. Yep. Yep. It's just weird because we've seen so many cities and states try to shut this stuff down, but Utah is just saying, hold my beer. Hold my beer. Hold my 3.2% alcohol most beer.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of this. I would not be thrilled if California adopted this. You know, I don't want the world to go this way, but it seems to be heading that way. Well, hopefully, the thing is that they'll maybe fail because they've said that, you know, this has actually worked in the field, but, you know, the state of Utah has not come back with any actual cases that it's been used on, even though they say, yeah, yeah, we used it.

But we don't know which cases has been used on because I bet I bet that the defense lawyers would have a field day if they found out that this system was used in arresting their client. An untested system by a third party that hasn't been vetted properly by anyone else?

Oh, man. Better call Saul. Unfortunately, that's probably the way that it's going to have to play out. We're not going to see these kind of programs being shut down or ignored until we have a big lawsuit, right? I mean, that's the way our world seems to work.

There are some basic things that I could see this being very good for. For example, a car going the wrong way down a highway. If a computer can detect that and flag that and bring that to someone's attention, it's hard for me to see the downside in that.

Amber alert tracking? Amber alert tracking, perhaps, yeah, yeah. Because here in California, we just get a sign on the freeway that says, look out for license plate, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, we do too, yep. We actually had a really good one last week.

I don't know if you saw this one, Brian. You might have been in Arizona. But someone stole a hearse from a funeral home with a body in the back. As you do. And it got on the news and they flashed the license plate. Like, L.A. County Sheriff is like, do the right thing and return the body, you know?

And the citizenry jumped in and they got the guy and they tracked him down. And he got in, unfortunately, a head-on collision with another car on the freeway. I think the other people were okay, but don't quote me on that one. But they ended up getting him and the body back because they did a basically, hey, this guy stole a dead person.

Imagine how you would feel if your dead mom was in the back of that hearse. Like, this is the L.A. County Sheriff's coming out and saying this on every channel in Los Angeles. And boom, somebody reported him. It's like, yep, he's over there. The guy made a run for it. It was great. Right. He says our national sport in Los Angeles is watching high-speed chases on TV.

Mm-hmm. I understand. He's quite popular. Yeah. I guess we'll see how this one plays out. I think we're all correct in feeling uneasy about it. I guess I'm happy that it's over there and not here. Yeah.

You know, let another state be the test bed for this rather than my own. Yeah. As long as it's not me. Yep. Well, I hate to feel that way, but. Yeah. Well, I ran across an article this week that I think I wish I had handed to you when you were talking to Elvis Chan, because I'd like to have heard his thoughts on this.

This is the lack of oversight of the private companies that are basically in charge of all of our voting technologies. So this is one of those things that I knew in my heart was true, but didn't really want to believe it until I read it in the plain black and white. Um, so yeah, basically all of our election stuff, all of our machines, all of the infrastructure, all of the databases are basically all third party private companies.

None of this is, is really done by the government. It's all outsourced. It's all purchased. It's all leased and rented and all of that. And there's no oversight over all your votes are belong to Putin. Well, basically, uh, their practices leave our elections vulnerable to break down an attack because it's all coming from private vendors.

They, these companies build and maintain the registration databases. They create the websites that explain how to register and where to vote. They manufacture and configure the voting machines. But unlike, unlike vendors and sectors that the federal government has designated as critical infrastructure like defense and energy, uh, companies in the election technology space operate under very little federal regulation.

Some of which is somewhat insane. Um, the, the article goes on the list. Vendors don't have to disclose whether or not they're controlled by foreign nationals. That seems pretty key to me. Uh, share information about the supply chain for parts they use or reveal their employee screening and cybersecurity practices.

Vendors aren't even required under federal law to report if they've been hacked. What? I'm sorry. Your, your Huawei controlled electronic voting device has been hacked and you don't have to tell anybody? Yeah. Uh, uh, Mr. Ellis Chan.

Okay. So, uh, in conversations I had with Mr. Chan and also, um, other people who know about these sorts of things, uh, both on and off the record. Um, my, the impression that I'm left with is that there have been great improvements since 2016 to our election security.

Um, many, many states are doing way, way better than they were then. Uh, a big part of that is, is from the effort and partnership of organizations like the FBI who have taken an active role with the states to just make sure everything is as it should be.

Um, it's also my understanding that the troubles come not surprisingly where you would think they may. And that is, there is a lot of money available from the federal government for assistance with election security there.

But that assistance comes with strings attached and those strings look like paper ballots or at least paper trails. And there are a handful of states in this great union of ours who respond to any strings attached from the federal government and say, you Washington elites aren't going to tell me how to run my election.

So they were, they refuse the money and they do their own thing. Right. And the impression I get is that that's where, uh, the folks who are in this business, that's where they see that that's where they have the most concerns is people who have not taken the feds up on their offers to make these things safer in obvious ways.

So now it's also my understanding that, um, none of the swing states are this way that all the big swing states are all, uh, you know, getting those, the, I don't know, seal of approval probably isn't the right way to say it. But, um, the folks in the FBI, for example, are feeling good about those states.

Well, that's good to hear a little positive news there. Yeah. It was actually surprising for me to hear. That was one of the nice takeaways from RSA. I left feeling a little better about all that stuff than I had when, when I went in. Excellent. Yeah. Well, we have some more Clearview AI news.

I love this story. It's, uh, it's exactly what you think would happen, of course. But, uh, in response to the recent criticism, Clearview published a code of conduct. You can imagine where this is going. Emphasizing in a blog post that its technology was available only for law enforcement agencies and select security professionals to use as an investigative tool.

The post also added, we recognize that powerful tools always have the potential to be abused regardless of who is using them. And we take the threat very seriously. Accordingly, the Clearview app has built-in safeguards to ensure these trained professionals only use it for its intended purpose to help identify the perpetrators and victims of crimes.

Now, the New York Times, of course, went out and found a lot of people with active access to Clearview's technology who are not law enforcement officials and were using it for things such as finding out who their daughters were dating.

Those with Clearview logins use facial recognition at parties, on dates, at business gatherings, giving demonstrations of its power for fun, or using it to identify people whose names they didn't know or couldn't recall. Uh, Mr. Scalzo, the founder of the investment firm Kernega Partners, said in the interview that his two school-aged daughters enjoyed playing with the app.

They'd like to use it on themselves and their friends to see who they look like in the world. It's kind of fun for people. Um, and of course, in September, Ashton Kutcher, the actor-turned-venture-capitalist, described an app, much like Clearview, during a YouTube series called Hot Ones. That's the fun show where guests are interviewed while eating spicy chicken wings.

And he said, I have an app in my phone in my pocket right now. It's like a beta app. It's a facial recognition app. I can hold it up to anybody's face here and, like, find out exactly who you are, what internet accounts you're on, and what they look like. It's terrifying. So, basically, people with money and people that invested have been running around with their own version of the Clearview AI app, not using it for its intended purposes, not anything.

So, just fun game for the rich. I have a couple of things this reminds me of. One is that buddy of mine who, in college, worked at the photo mat in the middle of the parking lot of the grocery store where you'd go and drop off your film and have photo developed.

Yes, and make two copies of all the nudies. Yep, yep, yep. In the little booth, they had a little binder that they called the Who's Your Daddy binder. And it was all the, it was all, he said it was full of all the photos from bachelor parties. They'd make two copies and put together a little binder there.

And I think this is an updated version of that. People who have access can't help playing with the toys and using them for themselves, even if that's not the right thing to do. Yeah. Well, Clearview AI is clearly not following their own rules or enforcing them.

So, if you're rich, it's good to be rich. I'm really sad we already have a title because Who's Your Daddy binder would be a great one. That would be a good one. Yeah. And the last story that I've got for this segment is, this is a company that Jason and I have talked about a couple times on the show, Do Not Pay.

They have automated avenging services, like appealing parking tickets. We'd heard about that one. Worst Marvel movie ever. The Automated Avengers. I don't know. It might have been better than some of them. That's true. That's true.

They've got another app that claims compensation for poor in-flight Wi-Fi. So, that would be all of them. And then they have the RoboRevenge, which we had just talked about recently, which sues robocallers in kind of a very bizarre system that I didn't really understand. But they've got a new one because of the California Consumer Privacy Act.

Customers who want to exercise the CCPA rights, we've talked about that as well, basically have to jump through thousands of hoops to get any information. And they make it as difficult as possible. But Do Not Pay has unveiled a new service it calls Digital Health, and it automates the data deletion process.

For just $3 a month, the service will contact more than 100 data brokers on your behalf and demand they delete you and your family's personal information. It will also show you the types of data the brokers have collected, such as phone numbers or location info, and even initiate legal proceedings if the firms fail to comply.

I, that to me sounds like it's worth $3 a month if it actually works. Seriously, $36 a year. I'm in. Count me in for that. Yeah, I'm willing to check this one out. I'm a little, the automated legal proceeding things is, you know, I'm married to a lawyer and she just rolls her eyes when she hears about these things.

She's like, good luck with that. But, but if, you know, if they just respond and delete the data, that's, that to me is worth $3 a month. Or they said visibility to zero, that's still worth $3 a month. Right. This reminds me, a few years ago, I had an acquaintance, he was a friend of a friend.

I actually hated the guy. And for me to say I hate someone means a lot. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. Dave Sunshine and Furr Bittner. Come on. He's in an elite, an elite list of people for whom if I hear he's coming to a party, I have to consider if I actually want to go or not.

I said, I can't make it tonight. I have coronavirus. Yeah. And this guy was a lawyer, is a lawyer, and he had a little notebook next to his phone. And when people would call who are telemarketers, he would say, who are you calling from? He'd write down and he'd say, please take me off your list.

Don't call me again. And if they called again, he would say, who are you from? And he'd write it down. And then he'd send that company a letter and he'd say, I asked you to take me off your list. You called me back. The fee for this is $600. That's what the law says. You're obligated to pay me.

Here's my bill. And he would do several of these a month. He was making more than beer money just writing to these companies and getting his money. Now, I'm not quite sure why you dislike this guy because right now I want to buy him beer. Well, I think right now I'm really enjoying him.

He's a lawyer, you said, right? So let's think about the kind of person who chooses to spend their time doing this instead of other good things. Instead of practicing law properly? Well, instead of just, I don't know, anything, contributing anything to society.

In other words, he lived to catch other people and be right about everything. And this was just another. This is a way for him to exert his power over the world. Let's just say he wasn't doing this for the greater good. He was doing this for himself.

Well, if he were doing this as a hobby just on the side, I would applaud him as a Robin hood. But if this was more the overall of his person, then I can see where he's coming from. Yeah, he was inadvertently doing good while not.

Despite himself. Yeah, exactly. Right. The good was a side effect of his greed. Right. That was the law of unintentional consequences because I'm sure he didn't wake up the morning and say, what good can I do for society? Well, I can make some money. No.

Exactly. Exactly. Yep. Now, this next one I heard over on the Darknet Diaries. I don't know if you guys listen to that show, but we've talked about it a bit here and there. And there was a great episode, I thought, with Doggy G, who was a kind of a black hat hacker, went to prison for several years, had his life pretty much ruined by the government, deservedly so in some cases, some might say, and maybe overreaching in other cases, some might also say.

But he turned around and became a white hat hacker when bug bounties came out. And he's like one of the most prolific bug bounty hunters of all time. And he makes, I mean, he makes close to a million dollars a year doing bug bounties. I think he's number six on the biggest bug bounty site, just being himself, not even a team.

But he mentioned a site that I wanted to throw out here because we get questions all the time, like, where do I start in cybersecurity? What am I going to do? He threw out hacker101.com. And it's a place where you can go and kind of learn the basics of, basics, I have to add to that again, of just doing hacking and trying to find vulnerabilities and things like that.

So I just wanted to throw this out there so people who are asking about this can put this in their quiver on when they're trying to go learn cybersecurity. Because if this guy says it's good, I kind of believe it because he makes a lot of money doing this. Yeah, it's great to have a resource like that to get those basics down.

Because I think what happens with a lot of people is if you start listening to even this show, but something like the Cyber Wire, which is a bit more, you know, B2B, we're throwing lingo around. Yeah, well, I mean, we're throwing lingo around that there's an assumption that you know certain things.

And so the great thing about a site like this is that you can get that basic knowledge and then go into the more advanced stuff, you know, with that information under your hat. Yeah, I thought it was a really good, really good resource. And also it's a really good episode. I like this guy.

He's not your typical hacker guy. He's kind of like Eminem meets the Fast and Furious meets, you know, Zero Cool. Yeah, this is where you can get your burp suite with your XML entry entities and some null termination bugs with unchecked redirects.

There you go. And some click checking. Yeah, easy for you to say. No, I kind of screwed it up, I think. Okay, you want to try it again? No, it's good. It's good. We'll leave it that way. Okay. I'm sure nobody will write in. You know, most of our correspondence these days involves you being a furry.

So that's true. It's everybody's favorite bit. Actually, did you see the picture I posted from RSA with me with the Zero Fox Fox? How could I not have? It was very popular. That's our show art for today. Yeah.

Yeah. That's one of the highlights of the show for me, I must admit. Did you guys trade for Sonas? God, here we go again. Let's just say that that guy has to take a lunch hour at some point and somebody has to fill in for him. So who knows who was in that costume?

All right, gentlemen. Well, it's great to be back and I'll see you next week. Excellent. Caps and doodads. So I'm going to file this one under doodads because I got my replacement for the hoodie that I lost at podcast movement.

It's some fucking cock sniffer stole because we know it was turned in and somebody stole it. It could not be found anywhere. I'm guessing because there was a hundred dollar microphone in the damn pocket. But well, before we say we know it was turned in, we heard from a guy that was basically charged with setting up the tables who was wandering around outside that said that was turned in.

No, but he was talking to a guy that was a conference member who was the guy that took it inside and he said where it was. That's why I checked everybody in that hall. Trust no one, Jason. I trust no one. Yeah, he was a little shifty little fucker. So I went to Adventure, which is now the company that Zane Lamprey runs because my hoodie that was pilfered was the original Adventure hoodie from 2016.

I wore it every day. It was black camo and it was the most comfortable hoodie I ever owned. I loved that thing. But I ended up getting the Voyagers 2 hoodie from Adventure. And I have to say, I traded up. Who knew that there were so many improvements left in the hoodie world?

This thing is amazing. And it turns into a pillow, which is pretty cool. So you can fold it into a pillow if you want. And it has, oh, here's the biggest upgrade. On all the old hoodies, they had a bottle opener on the zipper. Well, those are heavy.

And when you're walking, it always knocked my knuckle and sometimes would cut my hand. Now they have an emergency ripcord, kind of like when you look under your seat on an airplane and you pull out the life vest and it has this pull in case of emergency tab. Now, if you open the top left pocket, it has something that looks very similar to that, but it's a bottle opener.

You know what I need in my hoodies, Jason? Warmth? A hood. That's about it. It does have a hood. Yes, it does have a hood. That's really all I look for. A zipper, maybe a pocket. Well, okay. And here's the pro tip.

If you check out Zane's new show, Crafts and Crafts, at the end of every episode, they give you a 50% off in the store coupon to use. So I went and grabbed the coupon. So I got this thing, which is normally like $120, I think, which is pretty pricey for a hoodie.

Oh, $109. Sorry, it's $109. I got it for like 50 bucks. All right. So well worth it. I mean, for 50 bucks for a hoodie of this quality, dude, you should check this out, man. These things are amazing. I just got to say, I know you're laughing, but trust me, you're a hoodie man.

I'm good with hoodies. I've got plenty. Okay. Okay. Don't need one with an emergency ripcord. Brian, as much as you drink, I think you might. Oh, wait. You go to the bar where you have people do it for you. But you know what? I'm a prepper. I have to be able to open my own bottles.

So I got the Magewell XI100D USB 1-channel HDMI Gen 2 USB 3.0 capture dongle. Woo! This is the device that I talked about last show that I have to take back to Whole Foods to return. I got the wrong one last time.

They didn't send me the USB version. So there's a link in the show notes for this. It's not cheap. It's 300 bucks. But I've been using the Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle for bringing video cameras into my computer. It's got like every kind of input in the world.

The problem with the Blackmagic is that you can't use it as a webcam. So I needed something that was just going to simply take an HDMI input, transcode it to the computer, and let me use it as a webcam. And this thing works great. It's got two holes in it.

One for the USB, one for the HDMI. You plug it in, you pick your source, and you're done. So, I mean, like I said, it's not cheap. It's 300 bucks. But it does exactly what it says on the tin. There you go. And I discussed that I recently just did a big road trip with the kid, and he watched all of the toy stories while I was driving.

But I picked up the before the trip for this case. The TFY universal car headrest mount holder with angle adjustable holding clamp for tablets compatible with iPad 2 slash 3 slash 4 slash iPad mini slash iPad Air slash iPad Pro slash Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 slash Tab A and more.

And it was great. It was 25 bucks prime, you know, same-day shipping, which is wonderful. It's adjustable, which is nice because my kid is small now, but will be bigger. He's a shorty. Yes, he's a little short right now, but he will get taller. So, I will be able to adjust it forward and back as he grows.

No need to update it. And it fits everything. It's great. So, I highly recommend it if you've got a kid and you want to let them watch some Paw Patrol or whatever while you're driving somewhere. Well, Paw Patrol? Hey, man, I can put one in the backseat for Bam and Dino. I'm in. You never know.

And I'm afraid, Jason, that the curse of grumpy old geeks has struck again. Oh, Jesus. What did we kill this time? Well, we randomly mentioned SETI at home a couple episodes ago, and I saw in the news that it has stopped the project. It's dead.

See, we have all the power, people. We really do. We're like Death Note, you know? We're like the Death Note of podcasts. Yes. So, fear our power, people. Fear our power. It is true. We mentioned SETI at home, and after 21 years, UC Berkeley has announced that the project will stop on March 31st.

It was born at UC Berkeley and released to the world on May 17th, 1999, using the university's distributed computing platform, Boink. Boink. Whenever people left their machines on, but they weren't using it, the program would take over and crunch data sent from UC Berkeley, and that way the system created a giant internet-connected supercomputer to grind through all the info.

In a statement, project leaders said that the reason for the hibernation is that they're at the point of diminishing returns. Ultimately, so much information has already been processed that it's now time to sift through it and look for any sort of conclusion, which will be, nope, no aliens. Nope. Dark forest, people.

Dark forest. So, if you're looking for another good cause to support and have actually still been doing SETI at home, you could always support Folding at home, which is still in operation. It's a platform that offers distributed computing for disease research, drug design, and other medical research, which recently began tackling COVID-19 as well.

So, if you have a Bitcoin mining rig that you have in the garage that you're not using anymore, send it over to Folding at home, and then you can, you know. Help humanity. Help humanity with your giant electric bill. Yes. God. And this came out as a little bit surprising to me because Twitter has been the one social media platform that has so far resisted self-deleting tweets or things of that nature, even though we all both use programs that go through and delete things.

But they are testing a new feature in Brazil that auto-deletes tweets after just one day, and a move it says will be, is intended to make users feel less pressure and give them more control over tweets. So, politicians, listen up. Twitter is calling the feature for now, at least, fleets.

Fleets, Twitter says in a blog post about the new feature rolling out, is tweets that expire after 24 hours and cannot be publicly liked, commented on, or retweeted. Again, I've always been worried about this. Basically, it's like Instagram and Snapchat equivalent of stories, or even Facebook, which has them as well.

What is the point of posting on social media in which there can be no interactions? Okay. I don't understand that. I do. I do. And I fucking called this the first month that Twitter was in business.

I had a conversation with Evan Williams, who was the then CEO and a friend of mine. And I said, you need to make these things go away. And he said, no, we're never going to do that. Well, apparently, I was what? How fucking old is Twitter?

Ten years or change? Well, here, I'm so goddamn right again. It's pissing me off. And I said that tweets lose context over time because other people can delete them and you have no idea what somebody is talking about.

If you have a timeline of people talking about things that has no context, they can come off looking like morons or, worse yet, everything that we've seen happen because of Twitter. So, I'm very glad that they're going to do this, but I would just like to say that if they would have hired me as a product consultant at the fucking get-go, then we'd have been better off as a human species because, goddammit, this pisses me off.

Well, the other thing that you probably would have done if you'd been hired on as a product developer is you probably would have Googled the term fleets before using those because... Aren't those enemas? Well, yeah, that's the problem. At least here in the U.S.

Yes, as you have probably gathered by now, the name is catching a whole lot of shit on Twitter for sharing its name with the company that manufactures at-home enema products. No pun intended. Yes. Have you seen all the news about Jack Dorsey? No, I don't really. I was going to put this in the news, but I saw this in here, so I had to pop it in here.

Jack Dorsey is under fire right now because an investor who bought a ton of Twitter stock is trying to get him ousted as CEO. Oh, I did see a headline about that, yeah. Yes, yes. They're going after him hard because part of the thing when he took the job was, this has to be a full-time job.

Well, no, sorry. Jack is the CEO also of Square. And Jack has now said to everybody that he's going to do his job remotely for six months out of the year from Africa. And you're not really doing your job then, Jack.

Nobody wants Jack in the spot. So they're really trying to get more board seats and they're trying to really get him the hell out. Hey, he's just following Twitter's own self-professed rules right now about working from home. Yeah, he is.

You know what? You know what Jack's CEO contract needs to have? A fleet clause. So he's deleted after 24 hours. I cannot wait for Jack to get the hell out of there. I have not liked this guy for a long time and he needs to go. All righty.

Let's put you in charge of Twitter. Dude, I'll go back and find all my emails that I sent to Ev and get my notes. And then we can actually make a decent social network for once. Okay. All right. And a quick hat tip to a friend of the show, Hannah, who sent me this link this morning.

This cool online radio station lets you listen to popular songs from any decade and country from 1900 to now. And I just got the link in there and I tooled around on it a bit today. It's pretty cool. One little disturbing thing I saw, though, is like, they're like, help us fill out our music library.

Upload your favorite tracks here. Hmm. That's a problem. That might be problematic. You think? Yeah. Holy shit. So I didn't look too into it, but I'm assuming they probably don't have the rights for any of this music. So, you know, go enjoy it while you can.

Enjoy it while you can. You can click on any country on the map, select a decade beginning with 1900, and it will start playing music from that country and decade. I've avoided saying the name of it so far, Jason, because it seems like a new one for you. Radio! Yes, it's radio with a bunch of O's.

Radio! God. Radio, bye! Because you're not going to last that long. Hello, copyright enforcement. You... I didn't look into it. Maybe, maybe they're paying, but somehow I doubt it, especially...

It's usually a bad sign when you're looking for user-generated music content. Yeah, exactly. I'm sorry. Thanks to Disney, copyright goes back to 1742 now. So... Yes. Pretty much screwed on that one. Now, I saw this one over at Wired, and it's an article titled, A Deft Robotic Hand That Would Make Luke Skywalker Proud.

And what it is, is they figured out now that when you're, you know, you're amputated, the nerves try and keep growing, and they create this little ball at the end. That's why people get that, like, phantom... Phantom limb syndrome, yeah. Phantom limb syndrome, yeah. Yeah, phantom menace limb syndrome, maybe.

Call it Darth Maul syndrome. So, what they've done now is they've found a way to, like, actually take, like, actual biomaterial, put it into a robotic hand, and let the nerves try and connect to it, which is just...

I mean, it's amazingly cool. That is awesome. It is amazingly cool. And when you watch this guy use this thing in the videos, it's insane. Right. It's absolutely insane. But the problem with this is a deft robotic hand that would make Luke Skywalker proud is really kind of not really happening because there is another robotic arm that really actually made Luke Skywalker proud.

And it's this young woman who had a crowdfunding campaign to get an R2-D2 bionic arm. And she got it. It was sent to her, and it's a pretty cool-looking little arm that she can, you know, it's articulating, and she can pick things up with it. And the makers of the arm actually did a video call with her to say, congratulations on your new arm.

We have a special surprise for you. And Mark Hamill jumped on the fucking line and congratulated her for getting her new arm. And I got to say, it got a little dusty in the room. You know who came onto that call after Mark Hamill? Who? Disney's lawyers suing for copyright infringement.

No, they have the rights to do the Star Wars branded bionic arms. They do. You know, it's interesting she didn't get a C-3PO arm because that would be a little bit more appropriate. But, yeah. No, they do have the rights to do that. But it was really cool of Mark Hamill to come out and talk to her.

Very cool. It was a very touching video. Mark Hamill is just one of those wonderful people online. Like, he's just great. He really is. He's learned how to use social media, and it just projects what a great guy he is. Well, we can't stop talking about the coronavirus because it's everywhere.

But this is one of the best things I've seen about it, and I just had to put it in here. Of course, obviously, this is parody. It's from thebeaverton.com, a site I was unaware of, but will now be checking on a regular basis. Public health officials in Toronto have confirmed its first 50,000 cases of being a misinformed fuckwit, as xenophobic conspiracy theories and tales of false cures continue to spread across social media.

Being a complete moron during an infectious disease outbreak is far more viral than we first thought, said Dr. Jeannie Smith of Toronto Public Health. Fact resistance is abnormally high, especially among the dullard population and the bottom 5% of your graduating high school class. Fact resistance. Patients are usually asymptotic until they open their mouths or start tweeting.

Meanwhile, health officials are dreading teaching the population a complicated prevention technique. Washing your hands. Closing shout outs. I don't believe this one was our fault because we never mentioned him, even though we have talked about Trader Joe's a few times. But sad news from the Trader Joe's, Trader Joe's?

Trader Joe's. Okay, you got to cut that one, please. No, we're keeping that one. I don't think, I don't think there is a Trader Joe's, but somebody should open one. Lots of dreidels, man. Super high quality, locally sourced.

Locally sourced matzah. Okay. Sad news from the Trader Joe's world. Trader Joe's founder, Joe Columbe, has passed away at 89. So, yeah, he started, he envisioned a new generation of young grocery shoppers emerging in the 1960s. Ones that wanted healthy, tasty, high quality foods that they couldn't find in most supermarkets and couldn't afford to buy in the few high-end gourmet outlets at the time.

So, awesome. I friggin' love Trader Joe's. I shop there at least once a week. They've got great stuff. So sad to hear that he passed away. I shop at Trader Joe's probably four times a week because they've got, they got really smart. I, the Trader Joe's next to my house has the largest wine department of any Trader Joe's in California.

So that's a, that's a nice thing here. But they, their booze prices are below everybody in the neighborhood, but they have great prices on eggs and cheese and chips. Their produce sucks, though, I gotta say. But here's the thing. I bet at his funeral, the parking also sucked because it sucks at every damn Trader Joe's.

Well, I beg to differ because they just opened up a brand new one in Marina del Rey and it's got a huge parking lot. I know it's against their company policies. I don't know how it happened, but it did. It's going to be full. You're going to be screwed. No matter what. Yeah. You know why they always had those parking lots so small is because, you know, it was a hippie thing and they wanted everybody to walk there.

You know, it's like, well, that's the story. Why are you driving a car, you capitalist pig dog, you know? The reality is they wanted the smallest parcel of land that they could because it was cheaper. Yeah. And helped them keep their costs down. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeVillippo.

Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to GOG.showslashdonate and give us all your monies. Toss us a few bucks and we'll love you forever. Your support really keeps us going and we really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.showslash420.

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. And since it's episode 420, I want to try to find out what area that would be. Nothing, man.

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