447: My God, It’s Full of Karens!

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. What a week. Aren't they all? Apologies to everyone for the lateness of the last episode. I had some migraine issues and did not...

Well, actually, it's not that I didn't want to sit here and finish the show. I couldn't. I couldn't see. But all better. All better. So, back in the saddle. Glad to hear. Yay! Yay! Yay! Back at it. Woo-hoo. Here we go.

I'd say, why are we doing this? But the sheer amount of feedback we're getting recently, I guess that's why we're doing this. Yeah. Yeah, and good job on getting the mugs in the store. People are digging them and they're buying them. I noticed. We're getting quite a lot of orders. The margin that we actually make on them is very low, but, eh, cool.

It's fun. It's nice to know that people want stuff. I was going to say, I wonder why you price them so low, but hey. I don't price them. They do it. Ah, that's the auto pricing. You can actually tweak that. Well, still. We can have really expensive mugs for the rich people. We don't want to gouge people. No, we don't.

That $1.40 per mug really does come in handy. So thank you very much, everybody. And so that's over at GOG.show slash shop. I didn't check our race, but I think we're still kind of neck and neck in terms of the Team Brian, Team Jason masks. The Team Brian. I saw a couple come through for me and a couple come through for you.

It's just one of those things where their setup on the back end doesn't make it easy to go see how many of each product you've bought or people have bought over a certain amount of time. It kind of makes no sense. No, it's not the best back end. It's funny because you don't know these things until you've gotten in bed with them, right? That's the internet in general for you, right?

You sign up and then you find out all the flaws later. Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of it. But I got to say the product's nice. I got my masks finally and have been wearing them out, even though now I'm on total lockdown because everything is spiking around here again and it's not looking good.

Yeah. Well, let's wait. We can get into that later. We got some of that in the news. Okay. We'll keep that for the news. I just have some follow up here on OpenAI. Yeah, my favorite people. Remember when they first started, like it was a couple of years ago back in 2015, and they said that they made an AI bot so dangerous that they couldn't release it to the world?

Yes. Yeah. Well, you can now get it as an API for your company and they'll start charging you for it. Wait. Is it now 50% less dangerous like the old product stickers that you would get when you go to the grocery store? 50% less trans fat. Yeah.

There's no more trans fat in the API. Or do they just need money? Which is it? I'm guessing they just want the money. Okay. There you go. Yeah. You know, you build something long enough, you still got to pay the rent and you got to pay the salaries. So you can sign up right now if you want to try it out.

There's a wait list, of course. But this will be the GPT-3 text generator. And they're going to do a two-month free trial in a private beta. It doesn't say how much it's going to cost after that. But they're saying it provides a general purpose text-in, text-out interface for almost any English language task, including content generation, translation, and sentiment analysis.

So what I'm hoping here is, oh, but it's text-in. I was going to say, we can throw our transcripts in there and get them done for free. But no, no look there. But you can use it on chatbots. And I love this. Automated news reporting. Great. That's just what we need. Yeah.

And well, here's the funny one. Reddit is one of their first customers because they want to use it to help support content moderation. Didn't we just say hire people for that? Yes, we did. Yes, we did. And I think I just answered my own question about whether they needed money or if it was less dangerous.

I just saw this in this little article here. OpenAI was founded in 2015 with a mission to advance digital intelligence in a way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. However, it shifted stance last year, adding a for-profit arm that it said was essential to cover the cost of its research.

Well, so much for being unconstrained. Yes. Oh, God. What are you going to do? I'd love to be unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Wouldn't that be nice? Yeah. And we talked about Twitch last week and how they were having copyright problems. So they've decided to just say, hey, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to partner with this company called Audible Magic. And if they find any copyrighted works in your videos, I was going to delete them. That's it. There's our process. We're just going to delete them. You know, we're making fun of that.

But isn't that exactly what we want Jack to do over at Twitter? Kind of. That's true. Or, you know, Facebook or anything like that. If it goes against the terms of service, how about we just delete them? Yeah. Here's the other thing I'm wondering, though. Since they have this technology to go through all these videos and hear the music, can't they just mute the music and take it out of the video and leave the video as it was?

Well, the problem is you would also be, especially with Twitch, you've got people talking over things, right? So you'd also be losing the audio of the actual Twitch hosts. Right. But here's what I'm thinking, though. I mean, because they have the audio for the song and the audio for the song. It's like, you know, kind of like a exclusion filter in Photoshop.

It just takes out the audio for the actual song and the people's voices still remain and the sounds of the game still remain. I'm wondering if there's got to be some technology to do that. I don't know if that's really quite there yet. It's still very difficult to tease out things like vocals on top of music.

But yeah, I mean, I'm sure maybe. Hey, here's an idea. Maybe they sign up for OpenAI's API. OpenAI goes through and transcribes the Twitch person's actual voices, and then they pull out the music pad underneath. Yeah. That would cost money. Then they run like, you know, a generated voiceover on it, and then everybody just sounds like Siri.

There you go. Perfect. Yeah, they take out the music, keep the voices, put the audio back in, and everybody sounds like a robot. We've solved the internet again, Brian. We always do. In the news. So we do have a bit of coronavirus news.

The science is actually coming in. Not that this company gives a collective who gives a fuck, apparently, about science or stuff or anything. So they've been analyzing the virus, and it does look like it's a combination of two different species of viruses that have gotten together.

So it's a hybrid virus. Lovely. So it's a pangolins as well as bats and something like that. But the good news about this, which is still one of the rattling fears that was in the back of my mind, is that this is seeming to put the nail in the coffin on the idea that this escaped from a research lab or is a misplaced bioweapon, which would have kind of been like, oh, I guess we're done.

So it doesn't appear to be that. It does appear to have just evolved. So it's a bit of a good news, bad news situation, because that means there's probably a lot of these out there that we just haven't stumbled into yet because it happens out in the wild. Yeah, yeah. And I haven't heard any more news on the different strains because there was a lot of talk about how we got hit by different strains.

The East Coast got hit by the strain that came from Europe, and the West Coast got hit by the strain that came from Asia. So that's why the mortality rates were different. Did they cover that at all? Or is it the same thing? I've seen a few articles about it, but it all appears to be mostly still speculation at this point because there's so much speculation out there.

I'm trying to just stick with things that we kind of know seem to be true at the moment. So I didn't put any of that in there. But there is a theory that there's multiple strains running around right now. Unlike the Italians, we haven't had anybody stand up and say these are less dangerous. We don't know yet.

Okay. Yeah. Now, you know, we could go off on. I could yell for hours right now about look. So Florida had their grand reopening cases in Florida have skyrocketed.

Yes. Or is that Arizona had their opening cases in Arizona are skyrocketing. Arizona is very close to having full capacity at hospitals again. Los Angeles, California cases are skyrocketing. LA is two weeks out from having full capacity if things continue the way that they're going right now.

And I know there's no chance in hell we're going down to lockdown again because America. But if we were following any kind of rules that we followed the first time around, we're two weeks away from going into complete lockdown again here. This this you can't just get bored with the pandemic.

The pandemic doesn't get bored of us. Brian we're Americans Americans we we can beat anything don't forget we're number one. So, you know, there's yeah, there's my thoughts in a nutshell on that I'm not going to talk about it anymore except for one particular story because we have to because this is one of the first ones that really made headlines good old Elon Musk who decided that he was going to open up his factory before anybody said you could open up any factories and in fact they

said you can specifically not open up your factory and Elon Musk said I am opening up my factory and if you want to fire someone I will be standing on the lines myself come and come and come and arrest me not anybody else. Well, guess what happened. Yeah, well, that's beverage itself.

We don't need it. We don't need an AI to tell us what happened there. Yes. Let me bring back an oldie but a goodie. Shocking. Yeah, several workers at Tesla factory have the coronavirus the Alameda County Public Health Department where the Fremont California plant is based confirmed that Tesla reported some of its employees there tested positive for the virus for piracy privacy reasons the number

of employees and when they tested positive would not be disclosed we have started to get some more reports that at least four if not eight people now have the virus from that one factory alone so there you go and in the other recurring theme of grumpy old geeks what are the consequences Tesla just hit over 1k per share this week.

Oh man. A new high. So if you were paying attention to me about buying stock a long time ago you're both dismayed and happy about this news. Oh man. The happiness giveth and the happiness taketh away.

You just never know. I was watching the news this morning and you know because everybody's all excited because it's Friday here in Southern California and we're going to phase three and they were they were reporting from gyms and yesterday I was watching the reporting and they said we had 1,800 new cases which is the highest we've ever had a single day.

Yep. We've we've we're number one we've hit a new high we're doing great let's go climb a rock let's go into a small building with other sweaty people yeah and breathe the same air when we've no this is the way it gets passed so yeah I just I mean I you can't you can't make the shit up anymore and I'm just staying home fuck it I'm not doing anything we've nothing we've

hit full idiot mode yeah yeah I am on full delivery mode I even had a date planned for today and I canceled that so I'm you know stay in the fuck home go on your date mask up mask blow yeah grumpy old geeks condoms at gog.show slash show oh god well you know the other thing that's happened in the world is uh you know all of the the stuff that's going

on with the George Floyd protests and the fact that everything else is burning down it's like oh you know we forgot about the pandemic for about three weeks because everything else was happening and uh now we've just have you can't even make it up anymore uh Apple's racial equality and justice initiative has launched yesterday Tim Cook came out and they are going to be donating a hundred million dollars to their racial equality and justice initiative ten dollars from every black

iPhone sold dude I know I just can't help myself sometimes I know right there I mean I'm just I'm sick of white people talking about race you don't know anything shut up don't be an asshole that's why we don't talk about it on that's why we don't that's why we don't but I'm glad Tim did this because I think Tim's a good guy but and you know that hundred million dollars I think it's going to help repatriate some of the money they have stored in those tax havens offshore so maybe we can maybe this

will be a good thing we can get some money back in the U.S. from where is it uh it's not the Isle of Man is it or wherever they have it all Cayman Islands usually is a big one oh there's one off the coast of Ireland I thought was oh yeah another big one yes that's where they hide all their monies uh I don't know if that actually will work because generally these these funds tend to be it depends on how you set it up but if it's like a charitable cause we can't tax the money there either so I don't know we'll see it would be nice to get some of Apple's money back into

you know the good old USA where they make most of their money yeah put it back into the economy it is the one thing that really sticks in my craw about Apple still yeah I know I mean they do everything else right except for that yeah so but well we have some other big fallout from uh from all the demonstrations that have been going on and the great reawakening or late awakening or whatever people are calling it at this point a bunch of tech companies that have been developing facial recognition and selling it to the police have said we're not going to do that anymore

mm-hmm because we know it doesn't work right uh IBM says it will stop developing facial recognition tech due to racial bias because as we know and talked about multiple times on the show uh in 2019 the National Institute of Standards and Technologies demonstrated that there is racial bias with a study on AI systems used by police departments to identify alleged criminals the study found that these algorithms falsely identified Asian and black faces 10 to 100 times more often than

Caucasian faces they misidentified Native Americans at an even higher rate so that's why a lot of us have been saying you should not be using these in the real world yet not that that stopped anyone yep so here's the thing with IBM though here this is why this is a genius move on IBM's part IBM wasn't really working on this very much no they were way way behind in the game uh they were not devoting a lot of money or resources to it they just they had they had a toe in the pool that was about

it this is almost like us coming out with a press release saying that we are not going to sell our AI technology to police departments that is a genius idea we should you've been listening to Lockhead a lot recently I can tell I have been here's a marketing idea a lot we should release a joint statement from all of us saying we will no longer develop our AI systems oh man yes our podcasting AI technology will

not be sold to police departments okay okay Chris when you hear this get on that I need you I need your copywriting people on this one right away this is a joint statement from all of us yes IBM CEO Arvind Krishna announced in a letter to Congress the company will no longer develop research or sell facial recognition technology as you pointed out it's genius move because they were kind of wasting their money because they were so far behind in the game however when these things happen we do tend

to have a ripple effect because next up Microsoft did not want to look bad we also generally like Microsoft they try to do the right thing uh the Microsoft Corp president Brad Smith says the company will not sell facial recognition software to u.s. police departments until there are laws in place governing the use of such technology making the pledge a day after rival amazon.com inc paused similar usage for a year so everybody is jumping in on this now all the big players because Microsoft and Amazon are

very big players in this area so so Microsoft is saying we're not going to do it until there are laws in place and specifically uh they did make a statement very different from Amazon's because Microsoft said that the laws in place have to include human rights Amazon not so much no Amazon just took a year off Amazon statement is only 102 words in length so the bar is low lockhead and your marketing team uh he did not say what they did not say why it was putting the moratorium in place but noted that

congress appears ready to work on stronger regulations governing the use of facial recognition again without providing any details so Amazon basically just patched together something saying all right we're not going to do anything for a year so we seem good too yeah and they don't talk if they're going to stop selling it to ice or the doj yes they're just saying police departments yeah like i said look over here here's here's the happy hand as the other hand comes around and bitch slaps

you perfect uh and here's here's one i thought you would like facebook's chief diversity officer will now report directly to cheryl sandberg your favorite person brian she's so useless i don't understand the cult of sandberg that still follows her around yes she wrote a she wrote a really inspiring book yes she's had a tragic story you can still be shitty at your job yep you sure can so hopefully maxine williams will not be shitty at her job because she is the chief diversity officer for facebook

and in the old days the diversity officers well which i don't think they've even been around that long i'm sure that came out of ariana huffington's uh you know grand entrance into uber oh yeah what do they call those things that they had in their kitchens oh didn't they have like the heaven room or something like something to go have a nap hey by the way ariana how did that work out did you solve all the problems over at uber yeah we never heard about that again i'm sure she got a big fat paycheck

for that oh i'm sure she did she came in to solve diversity at uber and the the problems there with naps that's what she did right okay so uh and it's interesting here because it later on in this article from tech crunch they said the this juneteenth facebook will commemorate the ending of slavery in america with a day of learning we are canceling all meetings and engaging in conversation about the history experiences and issues that black americans still face we all have a responsibility to help

give voice to underrepresented communities around the world our goal is to learn more so that we can do more so they're co-opting the blackout tuesday thing the music industry did it's it's not so much that but what they're doing is just like on the the facial recognition thing they're tagging on because the day before twitter and square ceo jack dorsey our favorite person in the world at least did something

right and declared juneteenth a company-wide holiday facebook nope still got to show up and then you got to go you got to go to class you know who doesn't get that break though content moderators nope content moderators do not so you know if facebook really wanted to do something they'd let their people take the day off and if they wanted to go you know and go to the protests or go to the rallies let them and

then you know maybe learn something else but they're not right they're gonna have to sit there on zoom or facebook whatever it is and and and basically watch old films from junior high school right now another thing we talk about a lot on this show is we talk about when you're surfing the web or you're on the social medias and all that sort of stuff you need to be cute be wearing your thinking cap you need to look at everything closely you need to actually think about what you're reading you need

to wonder what why did the person post this where did this come from etc etc etc and i think we often forget jason that you and i grew up in this a lot of people our age did not we were right we were internet adopters early on we have had a skeptical one might say grumpy view on the internet and and social fabric online for a quite a long time and we have a certain set of skills much like

liam neeson that we have developed over time that make us very good at being able to call the bullshit from the real stuff a lot of people don't have that and this article really gets into how we kind of need almost a new job out there now we've been worried for a long time about automation and what people are going to do and there might be a new a new job path for people like us jason if this podcasting thing doesn't work out like it's not okay so i have to get another job i gotta go learn

something else well this is good this is this is a really good concept about basically being digital navigators real people who can guide us through media landscape we need librarians educators and local communications experts who know how to help students parents and members of the public gain a deeper understanding of how media is made who is behind media messages and what their motivations may be and how to become more selective and discerning as we click and share because it's getting crazier and crazier out there we don't know if photos have been manipulated we don't know if things have been faked

a lot of people just share things because they think they're correct they don't fact check and god knows social media isn't going to do it for us so this this guy is making a point that we need these kind of mentors out there uh and you know as this is america the government's not going to do it so it comes down to private enterprise and i think it's a really interesting concept and i thought this is a really interesting article and i i do see this being potentially a future job isn't that what we do on

this show every week though yeah but only you know we're not reaching a lot of people yeah that's there's our problem yeah no we got we just have our we have a marketing problem we don't have a content problem yeah so interesting i'll definitely look at it it's a really interesting article about how there is a growing need for this and and there always will be because even even digital natives that are growing up right now the problem with them like we were in kind of a sweet spot jason because we

straddled like we knew what good journalism was supposed to be because we grew up with that and then we went immediately into the digital stuff which is a free-for-all uh the the digital natives now don't remember what good journalism was and and actual like fact checking and things like that they just grew up immediately into the mail storm so they tend to not have the same set of skills that we do so they don't know what the dewey decimal system is i barely do at this point to be fair oh come on but

at least we spent a lot of time at libraries doing research it just wasn't like okay google yeah you know or wikipedia with the this page just got updated four minutes ago hmm i wonder if that information's accurate yep exactly and in keeping with that thread i saw an interesting article over on vox the most urgent threat of deep fakes isn't politics it's porn and we've talked a lot about deep fakes and how you know basically it's game on now because this technology is there and you we're not going to

know what videos are real and what aren't and you and i have tended to focus on the politics because we're in a raging mail storm of politics right now but this article makes the argument and i think rather successfully that actually sure politics is an issue deep fakes in general are an issue but the sheer number of deep fake porn out there right now makes it the number one problem right now and uh this is uh kristin bell does a video about this because obviously attractive woman quite a

lot of uh of those out there which her husband found for her which is quite interesting i'd like to have some view into i'm going to look up my wife and see if there's porn about her but you found it and uh you know obviously it's disturbing and it's happening not it's not only happening to celebrities just basically anybody with access to these programs that do it can take a photo of somebody in their class and make a deep fake porn about them now and uh the research group deep trace found that 96

percent of deep fakes found online are pornographic that's a lot so there's a lot and it's all done obviously without consent yeah no i know i mean it's look all new technology it comes back to porn it's always porn with new technology we always know that uh well some people don't i guess because they weren't around for the vhs revolution back in the day or the internet revolution or the webcam revolution yes or the webcam revolution uh so yeah everything starts with porn and then people get

on but uh yeah there's there's an issue with this for sure but uh how do you fix it we mean we've we've talked about this on the call in the internet police jason oh wait we don't even have real police anymore because everybody's getting defunded we don't even have real police how we're going to get internet police good point mm-hmm speaking of things that should be policed on the internet next door i've joked about next door on this show for years saying that next door is the site that you want to

sign up with when you want to find out which of your neighbors are racists it should actually be called the racist next door not next yeah yeah so uh they've been having issues of course now since black lives matter discussions have been everywhere and people have been getting booted off there and i haven't read this one yet but i can just tell you from the the title of the article from the verge inside next door's karen problem that's all you need to know pretty much if you've ever if you've ever

opened up next door you already know what this article is going to be about yes so next door has said that they are going to step up and say that you know you can have discussions about black lives matter and racial equality on the platform and you shouldn't be kicking people off and they are going to get new community leads in and give them better direction i'm sure those discussions are all measured

and thoughtful i'm sure they are too and uh like uh what took you so long i mean the reason i don't go on next door is because everybody's damn racist like oh my god somebody brown drove through the neighborhood who called the cops and it's like dude that's my friend joe he was coming over to hang out what are you talking about it's just like it's ridiculous it is a wider platform yeah it's just

it's not a good not a good place to go i think i you know i'm not a i guess i can't and kind of a big cancel culture guy for certain things uh i just don't think next door solves anybody's problems ever have you gotten any goodness out of next door ever i sold a set of weights once okay to somebody local that was about it all right uh craigslist for that now you can use that since they don't

have porn on craigslist anymore go there so we have a little news from the fcc sort of uh this is just this is everything that's wrong with the world right now the object pi era fcc likes to make a big show of punishing robocallers and that's truer than ever in 2020 they have proposed a record setting 225 million dollar fine against texas-based health insurance telemarketers jacob mears and john spiller for roughly 1 billion spoofed robocalls made between january and may 2019 so they made

millions of these calls per day falsely posing as big name insurance providers only to steer victims to call centers pitching clients for other people obviously that's how these things work so pi and the four fcc commissioners all approved this measure and here's where everything goes wrong although commissioner jessica rosenworcel pointed out that these fines appear increasingly hollow she noted in her commentary that the fcc hadn't collected more than six thousand seven hundred and ninety dollars in fines as of 2019

despite asking for hundreds of millions of dollars and the department of justice was absent in enforcing fines so you can say here's the fine but if you don't collect it it means nothing yep somebody has to enforce that somebody has to enforce that and uh there there's another thing here though too it's like you know when people are fined by the fcc they there is an appeals process as well so a lot of

these might be stuck in appeals because when google gets fined i'm sure they file appeals and don't just write a check yeah yeah exactly and i saw this article and i thought of you jason yeah i thought if there was one person in your neighborhood that could be causing this problem it was probably you uh cable company cox communications has slowed down an entire neighborhood's internet after one person's excessive use okay so yeah they have confirmed that they did this they they enacted a neighborhood

wide slowdown to discourage what it calls excessive use but it didn't specify how many users it would take for this to happen uh one florida customer said he was warned about his data usage before cox responded by slowing upload speeds on his gigabyte internet plan with unlimited data from 35 mbps i'm so slow this morning to 10 for the customers and all of his neighbors this customer identified only as mike by ars technica pays 100 per month for gigabit service plus 50 for unlimited data so he can exceed

the company's one terabyte data cap he uses 8 to 12 terabytes each month on device backups and data sharing via various encrypted information sharing protocols sweden which takes place between 1 a.m. and 8 a.m. he says he's been a customer for four years and that his data use has been relatively consistent during that time but it wasn't until mid-may that the company contacted him about it so yeah just because he's using a ton of data they slowed down the entire area that's ridiculous oh my god talk

about using a bazooka when you need a fly swatter yep yeah i don't even come close to that man i think i do like maybe a terabyte and a half a month that's it yeah but if i had to guess i'd say you're probably the guy in the neighborhood he uses the most i don't think so anymore man really yeah not really although you know maybe during lockdown there's been a lot of pornhut streaming yeah not in my house my house i have direct tv so most of our stuff comes in over the satellites and uh i transfer mp3s

now i'm not doing you know the big stuff that i used to do and i barely ever go to sweden only when i have to if i can buy it i buy it yep so yeah in my old day in the old days hell yeah i would have been that guy yeah call me 10 years ago i was totally that guy nowadays i'm just an old guy who just you know wants to watch judge judy in the afternoon and my final story for the news and i just love this one because anybody we always we always get people yelling at us going why do you like apple so much

why iphone iphone iphone what's wrong with android here's uh here's what's wrong with android in a nutshell during a trip to glacier national park in montana last year scientist and amateur photographer gaurav agrawal simply wanted to capture a beautiful sunset unfortunately after sharing his pick on flicker people discovered that the lovely work was crashing certain android 10 phones this is so good this is so good unbeknownst to agrawal even though his gorgeous photo appeared just fine on his computer and on the web

while editing the photo in lightroom he exported the pic using an extra wide hdr color space normally this wouldn't be a big issue however because android 10's built-in color rendering engine couldn't display the photo's larger color space and obviously didn't uh didn't do any conversions on it when you brought it in uh setting the photo as a wallpaper on some android phones primarily google pixels and samsung phones could cause the phone to boot loop and repeatedly restart out until a factory data reset

is performed isn't that awesome yes you can kill an android phone with a color profile with a photo yes wow he in a recent interview with the bbc whose his uh work has appeared in national geographic and other places as well he said he had no idea the exporting format would cause this much havoc i'd hope my photography would have gone viral for a good reason but maybe that's for another time and when asked about his personal phone i have an iphone and my wallpaper is always a photo of my wife he told the outlet so

it's never been an issue for him oh that's so good that is so good you can kill an android phone with a at qvc shopping is more than just checking out it's discovering something new every day start with today's

special value then explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love from beauty and fashion to home culinary and outdoor living shop now at qvc.com security

we're joined again this week by dave bittner dave is the host of the cyberwire 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 and i'm sure there's about six other shows that you've started last week so you have to let me know how to put those in the notes pretty much yeah cosplay corner with dave bittner yeah speaking of cosplay a fan wrote into the show

about the humble bundle cosplay package and i looked it up and i'm like he's like you should get this for dave it's it'll be a funny gift and i started going through everything in the humble bundle and i'm like well shit half of that stuff i want so i ended up i ended up buying it for myself yeah there's a lot of interesting stuff in there too useful in many many uh aspects of your life well i was thinking a lot of craft work not not the band craft work

oh that got me interested for a second yeah i know yeah i know i'm just like hey let me put a button on that brian not that not that craft work but like you know cool foam stuff and sewing stuff i was thinking for the holidays to make you know it like if baby yoda doesn't make it to market i could make my own you know it doesn't have to be cosplay for me i could be making i you know i need a tree topper what could i make for a good tree topper i could have a jar jar binks tree topper if i wanted but said no one ever

i think we're going to see an upsurgence in coronavirus tree toppers this year personally it makes the perfect shape i'm just saying there's a million dollar idea for somebody out there oh yeah that's true i'm on it i'm on it i'm gonna order me one of them 3d printer cutter things get some foam i am on that boy and let's uh let's use that to transition here oh go ahead dave well i say you remember when letterman used to put the meatball on the top of the christmas tree

yes i do i was a huge letterman fan yeah so let's uh let's do our covid corner transition here this will be because everybody else is reopening uh we're going to put a button on our covid corner and we're going to be back to normal business next week just like everybody else but since this is our last covid corner let me tell you guys how this all makes me feel this reopening and uh reopening and spiking of everything everywhere i've been struggling to come to terms with some sort of metaphor for how

i'm feeling this week and i finally stumbled across it quite it's relatively obvious as you will now hear i i feel as if i am on the bridge of the titanic right now um with some very smart folk who are looking out the window and see the iceberg right ahead of us and we say look we have to bank hard right now it's going to be painful this banking we're going to break some fine china a couple people

might get thrown overboard but if we don't make the bank we're going to hit the motherfucker and everybody else on the bridge is like nah we're going straight hmm i don't know how i feel about that since i worked on titanic i you have to find every method to work that in jason i do i do hey i was listening to i was listening to a podcast last night that i forgot to work in because i was listening to dax shepard's podcast with alanis morissette last night

and i'm like oh i should i should put this in so this one i should mention that i used to work with alanis morissette see i don't know exactly that's how that's how it works that clunking sound is the sound of everyone dropping names left and right that's right yeah did i mention i was childhood chums with edward norton it's true i didn't know that briefly the hulk anyways yes tyler durden

screw the hulk not important not important wow uh how do i feel about things opening up well i think that's an interesting comparison there brian and i don't think you're wrong um i guess for me i'm wondering similarly we're opening up but where's the data like well we've decided to ignore it that's that's the other thing at least a very california specific thing that has me driven just driving me

nuts right now gavin governor newsom who was apparently doing everything right made this big speech about how we're going to be driven by science we had goalposts that we were supposed to hit before we moved through every single phase we never hit a single one of those goalposts and somehow we're at phase three reopening already i figured it out somebody put the paper on gavin newsom's desk upside down because the line is going the wrong way and he's just like oh it looks like it's going

down nope going the other way so yeah i believe we're basically full reopening except for you know concerts and but again not driven by any of the science or the goalposts that we had said flat out we are not doing any we're not moving to phase one until this happens never happened move to phase one we're not moving to phase two until this happens that never happened we're moved to phase two i don't understand it at all i get that you know we need to not be locked down but stay in

place mandatory face masks etc etc it's all out the fucking window now i was watching a video on facebook in between uh when we were doing our recordings and it was all of these people yelling it like a city council about how it's their right to not wear masks and how they need they have the right to breathe the department of uh the head of the department of health for arizona resigned

because people protested i'm just like okay i give up that's why i'm not leaving i i mean this is this is how this is why i hate people and why i've lived my life the way i have this is just proof that i was right all along you were prescient about this is you spent this is covid vindication 48 years of your life living this way for this moment right co-vindication 19 that's what this is well behalf on behalf of people everywhere jason i can say the feeling is mutual

did i mention i was on the titanic no but i didn't get to sit in one of the lifeboats oh boy here's what i wonder is is this a uniquely american thing this ability to stick our fingers in our ears and cover our eyes and say na na na na and move on to the next thing

because the reason i say that is this strikes me as a similar response that we had after the whole gun violence thing when a bunch of our children were slaughtered that there was some hubbub for a little while but then nothing really changed i wouldn't say it's uniquely american but i would say we're number one

you know this is a very strange moment and point in time in this country's history in the world's history uh would you say unprecedented unprecedented even and now more than ever we could actually use an adult in charge and we don't have that uh many other nations do they have right they have learned

people that listen to sorts of things and science and whatnot and in charge of things and it's a check and hold on the mass populace we we have smart people in charge that's a father figure or a mother figure as in the case of new zealand and my personal hero their president so uh that that kind of say well yes we understand that you would like to get your hair cut but at this particular moment in time

how about a floby i i i do have to say that some of the mayors and governors are coming out and being pretty funny with the go back to your bunker and stoop tweeting mr trump yeah be nice if they spent less time doing that and maybe more time you know yeah not letting us open up everything because i know i'm just saying okay i'm saying so what do you suppose happens next we're opening up do you think we're going to see a big spike now yes we already are we're we're seeing it happening here from the states

that opened up earlier they're they're all spiking every single one uh california had its largest numbers ever since this started yesterday um yep and that's you know memorial day you know everybody went out for memorial day and we said why are you going up for memorial day they're like oh it's warm and we're going to be outside well how's that working out well like shit now what what i don't think will happen is i don't see us having another lockdown there that america won't put up with it and it would be political suicide for anybody to try to put us back in lockdown again so how this plays

out is now in my opinion the worst case scenario that we were talking about in march uh this thing ravages through the populace and we all just pretend like it's not happening yep i think that's it it's it's basically roll the dice yep that's where we're at where it's roll the dice it's like i need to go out and sell some hamburgers and make a living which i understand i understand that too yeah and let's roll the dice i mean the best tweet i think i saw about it and i i'm sorry i don't remember who did

it but it was uh america just got bored with the pandemic unfortunately pandemics don't get bored with us oh i saw that one too yeah that was a good one yeah all right all right how about you it's kind of a it's sort of the sense of foreboding of of yeah like you said you you it's you have in from or you you believe you have information that other people don't have or you're interpreting it

the right way it's it's that um what do they call them uh cassandras the ones who uh are are crying out and saying everybody look look look and no one listens to them but it turns out they're right yes which is a role that jason and i are used to show a show title jason and i used to refer to the reason that we so often got fired from companies or as contractors or whatever is that we were always the devil's advocate in the room and nobody likes to hear that mm-hmm yeah yeah that's true that's true

especially when the devil is usually right yeah that was in the details so there we go fun times um well uh yeah let me turn on a dime here and say i have good news all right i have stormtrooper news wait you have stormtrooper news cue the music

yes what the hell was that that was eight floppy disks playing the empire theme

the imperial march jason imperial march yeah all right kicking it old school very good very good well we are grumpy old geeks come on you gotta you gotta stick with the theme here dude so where to begin uh earlier this week i'm sitting here at my desk minding my own business when a message pops up on twitter from someone who i have crossed paths with before someone who is a uh i would

say friend of the show of the cyber wire and some of our other shows um a security researcher whose work we have highlighted before uh someone who has done quite well for himself i'm not going to say his name because i don't know what degree of privacy he would like to have with this whole thing um but uh basically he sent me a note that said hey man can i just buy you a stormtrooper outfit say what yeah

he said i hope he listens to grumpy old geese because i would like a lamborghini i would like a stormtrooper outfit too that's what well it's funny i was thinking to myself i should have asked for a car but um no but uh so i replied and said yes yes you can and uh he said he said i was just going to buy it for you without your permission but i realize i don't know your size uh would you like to pick one out and i covid size or regular size right exactly do i

need the the fat one um and i said uh well thank you but you do realize that these are quite expensive uh and uh he responded and and basically said uh you know it's the least i could do i get a lot of value out of the cyberwire and the work you do and you've highlighted some of my research which otherwise wouldn't have gotten the attention it got and my wife has recently gotten into the business and the stuff you do has helped her and she's doing very well and and we're both doing very well and we

you know we we have a couple of companies and some charities and i'd just like to do this for you and and give back nice um yeah so needless to say i i'm it set me back on on my heels and uh just made me feel wonderful i mean it's a it's a what would a better thing to have your work be appreciated by someone

like that to to make such a generous offer um so at the same time uh i was not entirely comfortable uh just taking a gift like that from someone um because first of all it's not just me here at the cyberwire who does all this stuff it's we have a whole team of people and so also now you're making him buy a whole legion well

it's the 500 seconds starts now yeah that's not the direction i went with it so um what we're what we settled on is we're going to go with my original plan which was that i don't need to own a storm trooper outfit but i want to wear a storm trooper outfit so we're going to reach out to our local 501st which is the old line garrison here in maryland and we're going to say that we have someone who is

a benefactor who is willing to make a donation to a charity of their choice in exchange for a trooper coming up and visiting and me being able to run around the block a couple times get it good and sweaty get it good and sweaty you know pay for the dry cleaning yeah exactly to run my tongue around the inside of the helmet a few times

um and uh just uh get some pictures taken and so on and so forth but but you know uh do some good so to me this is the way where everybody wins so i get the thing that i wanted which was to be able to play in a real storm trooper outfit we get to give some money to a local charity uh highlight the good work that the 501st does um get some silly pictures of me dressed up like a storm trooper so everybody wins so that's where we are right now yeah that's a win away i think we've got a win

so i mean assuming they get back to you yeah i i don't even know i don't even know how to respond to this because it's like the first good news i've heard in so long i'm like i forgot how that works that is fantastic yeah i was so excited the endorphins are released jason and then you smile yeah i was so stunned and excited that i actually had to go take a walk around the block you know because

i just i like you i mean things have been so dark and uh uh anxiety ridden and all that kind of stuff just that um this sort of generosity for someone uh just kind of blew me away and um so i really appreciate it so happy that we're going to be able to to make something even better out of it but uh i really appreciate this person reaching out and uh just making my day excellent that's that's amazing news i can't wait for the photos personally

me neither i want to match them up to my photoshop job i did we'll see how how close yeah i was gonna say the funny the funny part about the whole thing is dave could have just photoshopped the whole thing it's like here's me right voila exactly exactly now i think the problem is now i think i may have to go on a crash diet to fit inside of it because you know i don't know i don't know how forgiving

stormtrooper outfits are but uh that covid 15 really hitting home oh yeah oh yeah yeah absolutely absolutely i've got a doctor's appointment coming up next week that i think may be a bit of a reckoning when i have to step on that scale and get that at least how they look down their nose at you like doctor's not gonna like this you know so somebody's been enjoying the pudding pops a little too much yeah yeah and we had a bit of follow-up to our discussion about wherefore art thou

our contact tracing apps discussion from last week craig wrote in and said hey guys thanks for keeping the show going you were talking about contact tracing apps recently with dave and i recently found one by accident during the last couple of weeks here in minneapolis i've been using the citizen app to get safety alerts when i installed it i was prompted to turn on contact tracing which i did not do but thought you or dave might want to know about it since they seem to have a big user base and he gave us some links to citizen.com and citizen.com slash safe trace and he says stay safe

and grumpy uh i had not heard of this particular one before so i went and download i downloaded the citizen app after looking at their videos because it seems pretty interesting it it it's kind of like uh i get i get i get heebie-jeebies when i see these things because it reminded me of next door of course out of the gate which i'm like oh well we just talked about that and that's not working so well so um yeah i i don't know would you guys turn this on i'm tempted to i probably would yeah i think i

would do enough though i read through most of the their info and you know i'm sure it's only a matter of a week or so until we find out who they're selling all their data to but um it seems like they're not at this point so who knows uh i would give it a go i mean if if there was one here for california that i could trust like this i would probably give it a shot yeah i think i would err on the side of uh non-caution being a good citizen yeah well yeah i think i'm going to do about at

least more than 35 seconds research on these guys just to make sure and if they if they look if they look decent i'll enable it and report back next week but uh uh but i'm going to tell you right now there's not going to be any data because i ain't leaving the house right someone comes and knocks on your door to just check on you to make sure that you're okay right because yeah you haven't moved i'll know if the amazon guy is on my porch and he if he has it or not or the ups guy or the every plate

guy but beyond that i'm not going anywhere so but i'll i'll check it out i want to do some research on on the team behind this and figure it out it's a good looking app they did a good looking job on the website but you know good graphic design does not mean that you're a good human being so i have to double check yeah definitely look into it a bit more so certainly i'll definitely i'm going to add these guys to my google alerts and see if anything pops up in the next couple weeks so um one quick

thing just to button this up to the stormtrooper discussion and tracing specifically ad tracing since we've started discussing you dave and your desire to have a stormtrooper outfit i have to say the uptick in star wars related news popping up in my feed has has been gigantic now i am partially at fault because i am as much of sucker for star wars as you are and i often click click on all the links to read the stories but it has gone through the roof well that's not a bad thing and i'm not

disappointed by it no think about all the other things that it's pushing out all the other i might yes that's the dream right that's the dream for the next four months i might curate a star wars only feed yeah yeah all right so there's more good news yes that's funny friend of the show uh well actually i've talked to a lot of people on the phone recently and they a lot of them have asked hey did dave get a stormtrooper suit yet and i'm like no not yet and they're like damn it what's going on with these

people but i was talking to a friend of the show chris lockhead this morning it was the first thing he asked he's like hey did dave get his suit yet and he's like why didn't he go buy one i'm like i think he's got kids in college that's probably a good reason not to i have to i have to admit i also after after well let's be honest a bottle of wine one night i did google um old school cylon outfits because i was going to send you one as a joke oh my god oh you ruined christmas brian that would

have been perfect for christmas freaking expensive oh yeah i'll bet we're gonna have to sell a lot more mugs and masks to be able to get dave that well i'll send you the i'll send you a link to the humble bundle you can build your own but i thought it would have been a great joke if that would have arrived oh well oh yeah that would have been hilarious i'm trying to think what else would be on my list i mean i i expose uh let's see kit from knight rider uh okay back to the future

delorean uh to give like you're trying to up your game now that now that you know that this works you're up in your game somebody's listening who provides so let's let's up the game exactly you know i've always wanted a 16 inch macbook pro it's just uh it's been a lifelong dream of mine since i was a little wee boy i had a poster above my bed in college yes yes

so for a period of time i had a url tracking stripper uh that pulled all the crap off links for show notes and things like that and it seriously just went away at some point and finally i got off my ass to do something about it and found a new one so i present to you the url tracking stripper and redirect skipper uh link in the show notes and it does exactly what it says on the

tin except obviously i made the link above in our show notes prior to installing it because it still got some crap on it okay because yeah the usual url tracker snipper and redirect skipper is me taking your links out putting them in a text editor killing them and putting them back uh so i'm glad you got this uh the last one that we had i could never get it to work it never did anything for me there was always query strings and tracking yeah see that's the problem i had one that worked for a while it mysteriously disappeared i tried to install a couple other ones they did not

work i finally just said to hell with it and gave up and just let you deal with it but now i found a new one and this one works jason awesome so install it as well and we will all be happier in our show notes okay good good yeah uh because uh well i'll let you know next uh next episode because i know there's like 10 10 links in here that i went through and already manually cleaned up yeah but good stuff good stuff well i i found it halfway through doing uh show notes so got it there you go and photoshop

has released a new camera app that is amazingly even free and according to this article at gizmodo it makes instagram's filters look hopelessly outdated it's funny i was gonna put this in here and you beat me to it because i was like maybe brian's why would he care about this so i'm curious why do you care about this well you know i have a kid now i'm taking a lot of photos so it's nice to have i mean i don't want to do like instagram i don't i have no desire to put bunny ears on my damn kid but i do like some of the filters and things like that uh what got me was like just the instant cleaning sort of thing

it's not so much the filters but they have some pretty powerful stuff on there that just make your photos look better right yeah they do so yeah and they this seems to work pretty well i mean i only downloaded it what two days ago and i haven't had that much time to play around with it but like the portrait mode on it is phenomenal it does really make pictures of my kid look pretty nice so awesome i got it for that i played around a bit with the filters uh you know the problem with free software is there's so much sponsored crap in there billy ellish and all this other stuff horrible

filters so you need to put in the time to like go through and delete out the crap and find ones you want also it appears to be a little bit slow loading a lot of these filters up i don't know if you've played with it for a while but uh it's you know you can punch on a filter and like one mississippi two mississippi three mississippi and then finally it'll pop up so that's a little bit annoying but overall for something that's free it's pretty powerful cool i'll let you know how it goes on the speed next episode because uh yeah i mean i've got an iphone 11 pro you've got a

8 plus so there's a definitely a speed difference there in the generation so and the hardware so i'll see how it see how it works on mine but yeah the cleaning is all i care about i don't want i don't want bunny ears i get what do i have to do put bunny ears on my dog no give him glasses that might be funny who knows we'll see what you're totally gonna do that now i am i have to instagram instagram.com slash jpd that's where you can find all of those

kind of just need the headline on this one because it's uh it is what it is it's not surprising the winklevoss twins are making a movie about the winklevoss twins yeah what's what's up with these guys i didn't know they were still a thing i mean i know they they went into crypto pretty big right that's their thing now and that's of course what this is going to be about it's a film about their

own adventures in cryptocurrency yes it's an adaptation of ben mesrick's bitcoin billionaires the film will detail how the twins invested in bitcoin payment processor bit instant and eventually became the first people to make 1 billion from the cryptocurrency by basically fucking around with the market because it's unregulated yeah did they actually pull any of the money out or did it all crash and they've got like one using some of that money to fund this stupid movie that nobody's gonna watch that's true that's true we haven't talked about crypto in a long time nobody seems to

give a shit about it i saw bitcoin was gonna fork and people freaked out about that but then it did or it didn't or i don't know and basically nobody's talking about it because nobody's making money off it anymore it's dead do you yeah i mean there was a halving that was happening not too long ago so you now you had to double the computing power so we're ruining the environment at twice the speed we were before well and we already saw the reports that basically it costs more to attempt to mine than you're

actually going to make from anything that you mind and so what's the point and blah blah so it's basically just gone back to be only being used by criminals right okay i mean that's basically and the winklevoss actually the winklevai and so on some people that listen to our show that want to buy pot like our friend in paris like i love bitcoin i can buy pot in paris perfect well yeah you just go to a store here central service because 7-eleven here pretty much uh and as i've mentioned i've

been very into space recently because my kid is all about it and uh here's some here's something i didn't know until basically yesterday did you know that our moons are all leaving us no many moons including our own gradually creep further and further out into space they must be watching the news i don't blame him yeah can i hitch a ride dude yes so basically these celestial escapes are occurring at

nearly imperceptibly slow paces basically uh our moon is moving 1.5 inches away from the earth every year probably speeding up now if he's watching cnn exactly uh so but uh titan is moving much faster away from saturn than they thought it was a hundred times the pace they had previously thought which is a discovery that could force astronomers to make a sharp adjustment to their understanding of our our solar system even with that 100 fold increase however nasa has calculated that titan is drifting

away from saturn at about four inches per year okay so this doesn't really matter well it does if you want to understand how everything works out there jason i don't anymore i give up oh my kid's all about this and i've had to relearn a lot because boy have things changed since i was in school yeah well there was pluto when you were in school oh well there are five dwarf planets now jason and there are a bunch of candidates for new ones okay i know all of them ask me i dare

you no trivia guy man i know when it comes to trivia i i i i can't compete i'm done all right and as a compliment to uh your little intro on our security segment this year or this uh this episode i found something that goes very well with it it's kind of an update as it were enjoy toto's africa played entirely on tesla coils oh god okay it's actually quite wonderful link in the show notes yes it is

it's really good i'll definitely watch it then closing shout outs my shout out today goes to my very good friend christopher lockhead friend of the show and uh sometimes co-host on the show he made a post on his podcast uh follow your different recently which is i think it was june 8th and i'm gonna play it for you at the end of this episode so once we're done here just stick around

it's only five minutes long and chris has gone through some incredible stuff in the past nine months and it's it's just terrible but he talks to you about what he believes with defunding the police and uh race relations and also just he opens up and i gotta say this is one of the most powerful

things i've ever heard i just re-listened to it before i did this and i needed some tissues but uh i love you chris and thank you for being a friend and thank you for listening to grumpy old geeks i just want to give a shout out again to uh everybody that's listening and everybody that's supporting uh so much paypal so much patreon and obviously so many of you guys are going out there and gals going out there and uh buying our stuff at our shop crazily who knew i guess we'll have to

make more swag yeah i think the seven seven and a half years of people saying hey why don't you make some stuff i think you know that's our fault that's on us it is on us yes and since the podcast at head market is tanked we really appreciate it we were leaving pennies on the table jason might be a little more than that we gotta get them shirts out there man gotta get them shirts oh yeah i'll try to do a shirt this weekend until next time we should both do a shirt you should do a shocking

shirt maybe i'll do a neat shirt i do deliveroo but man i don't want to get sued yeah until next time i'm brian schulmeister and i'm jason de philippo thanks for listening to grumpy old geeks to support the show and keep us on the air go to gog.show slash donate toss us a few bucks and we will love you forever and ever and ever until the moons fly away your support really keeps us going and we really appreciate it show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 447 from there you can find

links to old episodes leave feedback ask questions donate to the show and get links to stuff we like and go buy stuff in our store stay grumpy and stay home hi this is christopher thanks for pressing play and um i would like to uh i'd like to read something to you it's monday june 8th 2020 yesterday in santa cruz

i cried at the vigil for sergeant damon gertzwiller of the santa cruz county sheriff's department he was shot to death on saturday yesterday in santa cruz i paddled out for george floyd with over 500 other people a paddle out is how surfers mourn there have been paddle outs for george floyd all over the world yesterday in the ocean of santa cruz

people of many races screamed black lives matter together yesterday the people of santa cruz showed that you can stand against evil racism and stand for good cops at the same time because both are the same thing both are a stand against violence both are a stand against evil yesterday in santa cruz

i cried for these two men and so did countless others of virtually every race of all the tears that were cried yesterday in santa cruz every single last one of them was colorless now i'd like to share a deeply personal story with you a story i've never shared before last year one of my best friends was brutally murdered in santa cruz

it will always be unbelievable and unbearable a walk through fire i wish on no one and if you're ever in this situation you'll discover how badly you need the cops in the moments after i learned what happened i was overcome by a maverick-sized wave of horrible emotions a profound sense of helplessness which is not a feeling i'm used to

sometimes life gives you no choice you have to grapple with a soul-crushing reality you have to accept an absoluteness that you cannot change as this washed over me i realized something i desperately need the cops because police have the authority and ability to solve heinous crimes in a way that no one else does in our case the agency in charge

was the santa cruz county sheriff's department after 231 days over 3 000 hours of work by countless professionals across multiple peacekeeping agencies in multiple states the santa cruz county sheriff's department caught them the four evil men who took my brother's life now you should know he was a brown guy

his words the four men who killed him are white over the past months i've had a front row seat to a massive complex murder investigation and here's what i've learned there are legendary cops a lot of them the dedicated public servants at the santa cruz county sheriff's department led by sheriff jim hart worked tirelessly to bring this evil to justice

we saw the sleepless nights the investigators endured they fought as hard as i've ever seen anyone fight and we are forever grateful for the santa cruz county sheriff's department if i were to name all of the amazing people who worked this case you'd stop listening what i'd like you to know is they cried with us they comforted us they exhibited extraordinary kindness

above all we got to see peacekeepers with an unending commitment to justice i share this with you because i have experienced the positive power of policing i have seen men and women of every race get up every day put on a bulletproof vest and a badge to risk their lives to serve and protect us so now the time has come for all of us to demand justice for george floyd

to demand equality for african americans and all people of color and to demand real police reform it is critical that we remember that it is possible to demand justice for george floyd and demand reform and equality and support the good cops at the same time there are some in our country who would divide us

let us remember there is no us and them there is no difference between black white brown or blue because evil comes in all colors and tears are colorless bless you at qvc fall shopping is more than just checking out

it's discovering the brands you love across beauty fashion home and culinary all in one place whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings cozy nights or everyday moments qvc has what you need for the season ahead with brands like laura geller philosophy ninja and so many more shop now at qvc.com you