449: Tip of the Tunaberg

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

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Starting a little late today, aren't we, Brian? Oh, by about five hours. You'd think we'd know better, but firmware upgrades. Firmware upgrades. Yeah. Yeah.

And I needed that five hours because I was sick as a dog and I'm still sick as a dog, but I'm powering through. God damn it. All righty. Well, let's get to it. Try to get some sails back in the wind here, but I doubt that's going to happen. We do have a tad bit of good news on the coronavirus front, which kind of maybe somewhat combats all the continued horrific news here, which is mostly human caused in the USA.

It's not like we don't know what will work. We have our lovely governor, Gavin Newsom, who was off to such a good start three to four months ago and it all went to crap. But he's finally decided that we will require by law that everyone wear face masks when out in public now, which, of course, will not really be policed at all.

But, you know, it's something because we know that that's going to help. Nice. Finally. But in the other bit of good news here, we've got a scientist at the University of Oxford who said on Tuesday that an inexpensive and commonly available drug is reducing deaths in patients with severe COVID-19.

So if this findings are continued to be borne out, the drug, which is a steroid called dexamethasone, would be the first treatment to show to shown to reduce mortality in severely injured patients. They're saying if they had been using this at the beginning in Britain from they would have saved up to 5000 deaths already by this point.

It reduces inflammation caused by the immune system, protecting the tissues and reduce deaths of patients on ventilators by one third and deaths of patients on oxygen by one fifth. So that's pretty good news. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And speak to that. I've heard this from you today.

I know. This is about as far as we've gotten on every recording so far. I like the fact that you were still somewhat able to feign some sort of enthusiasm. I'm trying, man. I'm trying. Well, and then I moved up this story from where it was earlier. And the point is not to crap on Trump, although this entire article craps on Trump.

This article is coronavirus is back and spreading, but let's blame Trump instead of each other. And it gets kind of into we do need to stop blaming each other and we should focus our ire on Trump and all that. And the Republicans who have definitely botched this entire everything about this process.

They knew about it ahead of time, blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever, whatever. I read the article. I didn't put it in here for that. The reason I put it in here is to remind ourselves what we were doing lockdowns for in the first place, which ties into finding this drug that is helping people with, you know, on death's door, basically on the ventilators in the hospital space.

This was supposed to be a temporary emergency measure put in place so that the federal government could draft a long-term plan to ramp up testing and tracing as well as medical response and to try to keep the numbers down in the health care system so that we didn't run out of beds. We didn't run out of ventilators.

We didn't run out of anything, et cetera. That's all this was supposed to be for. But because federal and state governments could not come up with a plan, could not institute plans. We're just stuck in this period of indefinite. What the fuck are we doing?

It's like they hired Ronald D. Moore to write that. Yes. We have a plan. There's no fucking plan. And we're all stuck here in this endless battle with the Cylons. Yes, we are. So, yeah, I just, you know, it's funny because you go along with it for so long and what do they say?

It takes 21 days to create a habit. We're well beyond 21 days into these habits of lockdowns. And I've even been talking to people who, you know, are terrified to go out and will continue to be terrified to go out and are so used to this new way of living and this fear that we're stuck in.

Even when we get a vaccine, they're going to be scared to go out. They're going to permanently change their ways of lives. And it's important to remember what this lockdown was for in the first place. And it is important to hold our governments, regardless of their party, responsible for the fact that they never fucking did anything with that time that they had.

We didn't get the ramped up tracing or testing until way later. We still don't have contact tracing. We still don't have plans. Yep. It's only going to be about 675 more days until November. You mean when our first wave will finally end and the second wave will hit it, butt up right against it?

Yeah. Right up against everybody having to go out to the polls. It would be great. It's going to be good times. Since we're all going to be stuck at home for a while, I wanted to do a little follow-up on the Apple TV Plus movie, The Banker. They have now made it available to everyone for free. So if you are the one in a bazillion person who doesn't have Apple TV Plus because you didn't buy anything from Apple, I guess, you know, Android people can now watch it.

But you can't watch it on your Android phone. You can't watch it on Android. That's out there. So go watch a good movie. I really enjoyed it. In the news. Well.

Interesting. Interesting news this week. Well, we finally found out what line Zuckerberg wasn't going to let anybody cross. And it's going full Nazi. Not a quarter Nazi. Not a half a Nazi. Not three-fourths of a Nazi. All that was fine, but going full Nazi, not cool.

Not cool. Not cool at all. And I just love the response. It's just an emoji. It's just an emoji? Somebody said that? Yes. Yes. Yes. Somebody said it was just an emoji that they used, which is – do I even need to explain it? No, I don't.

This has been all over the news. Everybody knows what happened. And, you know, at this point, if you still believe that they're just idiots and they don't know what they're doing, well, first off, why would you vote for them anyways if they're just idiots and they don't know what they're doing? It's even worse now.

They fucking goddamn well know exactly what they're doing. Yep. They do. They proved it to all of us. Thank you very much. Yeah. Well, and they, of course, are crying censorship, which – Oh, of course they are. Of course they are. Of course they are. And speaking of things that have pissed them off and have them crying censorship right now,

as NBC News reported, Google determined that both the Federalist and right-wing website ZeroHedge have violated its policy against monetizing content that promotes hatred, intolerance, violence, or discrimination based on race. And then they went on to say, though, however, to be clear, the Federalist is not currently demonetized.

We do have strict publisher policies that govern the content ads can run on, which includes comments on the site. This is a longstanding policy. So they're getting smacked down because of dangerous and derogatory content, but they haven't been demonetized yet, or at least the Federalist has not. I believe ZeroHedge has been, so.

Okay. Well, give it another week until they go full Nazi. And continuing on with that, there's some more push to get advertisers to dump Facebook because of the ongoing protests against police. I guess doing it later on in the day doesn't matter that much in terms of my tiredness.

That's true. Ongoing protests against police brutality and racism. A new campaign from organizers, including the NAACP and the Anti-Defamination League, are urging advertisers to pull their spending on Facebook ads for July, emphasizing the platform's repeated failure to curb hateful and false content, at least until they went full Nazi.

Yeah, it's funny. I went back to Facebook the other day just to peek around for a second, and that new interface, man, it's pretty unusable, I gotta say. Okay, so it's nice to pop in, not see anything that I was trying to maybe see, and just jump right out.

Saves a lot of time. Yeah, yeah, it does. Now, this one, this is a head-scratcher. Twitter is going to start rolling out audio tweets on iOS. Yay. So we can get voice messages? Who wants that? Anybody? You know, it's gotta be an attempt to, you know, TikTok, Snapchat, Marco Polo, you know, those kind of apps where you can do video.

But just audio in and of itself? What's the point in that? That's what I'm saying. It's a very strange feature. I just don't quite understand it. I mean, maybe they're just beta testing this to see if anybody wants it, but, you know, I got a podcast. I don't need audio tweets.

People are sick of hearing from me already. So keep an eye out for it, and write in if you find it useful, because I'm curious if any of our listeners are trying it out. Yeah, I just can't see the use case scenario for that. Were they trying to replace our old answering machines? Yeah, really?

I don't know. I don't really get that. Although I think the great angle is going to be for drunk audio tweets. I think people who are just going to get hammered and shit-faced and start spewing whatever they spew might be amusing. It could be.

All right. A little bit more of Facebook news here, and this kind of ties in, in my opinion, to the redesign that we've gotten, which is completely unusable. So while they still won't take down politicians' misleading posts unless they go full Nazi, it's trying to register 4 million new voters.

So this is their big, hey, we're going to let people say whatever they want on our platform, but we are definitely doing our civic duty. We're going to make sure everybody knows constantly to register to vote by destroying their feet even more, by sticking a useless banner up there that will never go away, because there's not an option to say, yes, I know that already.

Go away. It's just going to keep being there forever and ever and ever, and that's even less of your timeline you'll ever get to see. What's funny is they probably know, you know, who's already registered to vote because they know everything about you. And who you're going to vote for. And who you're going to vote for. And if you don't know who you're going to vote for, they're going to tell you, by golly.

So it seems kind of silly that they can't take down the banner or at least say, I've registered button. But if we did that, if we did that, if they had the ability for you to remove the button or they take it away, then they would get less hit counts and they wouldn't look as good. Because right now they're just going to go, we put this in front of 20 gazillion people and it was viewed over 7,000 gazillion times.

This has just been one of those head-scratching weeks for everybody, you know. I mean, granted, every week is one of those weeks nowadays. Yeah, but this one was particularly insane, was it not? Yeah, this one was kind of particularly insane. I think it just comes down to everybody's, you know, still working from home and just they don't have meetings like they used to.

And somebody, you know, the people with the brain aren't in on some of the good meetings, I guess. I guess so. They've checked out. They've got Zoom fatigue and can't be bothered anymore. Yep. So I usually go back to my happy space, which is bad news for scooter companies. That always does make me smile.

And we've got some more of that going on. If you've tried to rent a jump bike or scooter in London, Paris, Brussels, or Rome over the past few days, they're all gone. They're gone? They're gone because Lime has closed the acquisition of Uber's micromobility subsidiary Jump in Europe a few weeks after the transaction was closed here in the U.S.

So a whole bunch of jump bikes and scooters are sitting in warehouses waiting for Lime to do something with them. Yeah, this is a bad time to be a scooter company. I mean, never was a good time to be a scooter company, but particularly right now, not the best time to be a scooter company.

If they could figure out how to make scooter condoms so you could, like, just be covered all the time, maybe that would work. Well, yeah. Gloves. Masks. Masks. But let's be honest, we couldn't get people to wear helmets. That's true. Back when you didn't matter. That's right.

Yeah. And there's something new out there. You know, if you're an Elon Musk fan still at this point, and if you're a SpaceX fan, although I do kind of have problems with their Starlink. Yeah. It's ruining the night sky. It really is. Not sure how I feel about it, but we've got over 500 Starlink broadband beaming satellites in orbit, and they are looking to try to roll out their internet service.

So you can go to their website now to become an early adopter. You can get updates on Starlink news and service availability in your area. They are looking for public beta testing pretty soon, starting with higher latitudes. So if any of our Denver listeners want to get in on this and see how it works, go sign up.

I think it would be interesting, nay, dare I say, neat, to give this a beta test to see what it's like to get your internet from satellites. Toronto would be a good place for this, too. It's pretty high up there. Is it really? I never noticed. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, one of our favorite people, said he had serious doubts about SpaceX delivering enough broadband service to rural areas in the U.S.

to meet requirements of a federal subsidy program, but they're giving it a go anyways, and they think that latency won't be a problem. Musk claimed during a conference earlier this year that we're targeting latency below 20 milliseconds, but as we all know, Musk says a lot of stuff. Yeah, good luck.

I'm here on Earth and hardwired in, and I can't get latency below 20 milliseconds, so I don't think it's going to come from space. Be nice if it did, though. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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We just got cut off, so I guess Elon was listening to us. All right. Good news for you gamers out there. For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a prescription video game. That's right. You can now go pick up your Adderall and a game at GameStop.

All right. I don't think it's going to work quite that way. No, it's not. Physicians may prescribe Acolye Interactive's Endeavor RX, formerly known as Project Evo, to children between the ages of 8 and 12 who struggle with ADHD. So these games challenge users to dodge obstacles and collect targets as they navigate icy winter wonderlands and lava rivers.

Sounds like my kid right now would love this game. Yeah. Guided by aliens who zip around on flying saucers. The developers say the game stimulates neural systems that are intrinsic to attention function. It also features adaptive algorithms that monitor each patient's progress as they play, allowing for personalized ADHD treatment.

They've done seven years of clinical trials on this, which is pretty impressive. Over five separate studies, researchers examined more than 600 kids to determine whether the game would actually affect their ADHD symptoms. One such study found that 30% of the children no longer had a measurable attention deficit on at least one measure of objective attention after playing Endeavor RX for 25 minutes a day, five days a week for four weeks.

Not bad. It's pretty good. I've talked to a couple people who have been working on this over the past seven years, and it really does seem to seem to like it's going to work. They've got, you know, because they've got different programs, and they've got the AI that learns from each patient, and, you know, the game changes as the kids play more, and it does seem to work, which is pretty cool.

I mean, hopefully this will not be like, what was that thing that I signed up for a long time ago that promised that it would increase your brain's ability, and then they got sued out of existence because, you know, they couldn't promise that, and it didn't work? Well, yeah, I can't even remember. It was so long ago. There were a couple of those. Yeah. Yeah, but there is one caveat here that I think is pretty important because we do like to take a look at our studies.

It's important to note that it was conducted by doctors who work for Acolyne Interactive, the game's developer. So it would be nice to have some third-party research into this. Yeah, I mean, once the game gets out there more, but, I mean, it's an internal beta. You can't really bring in, you know, got to hire somebody, and it's going to have to work there.

Yeah. We'll see how that changes in the future as more of these things come out. Now, because, you know, Snapchat is an app, and this is a story we have told for the ages. I feel like this is a bit of a throwback almost because we haven't had a good Snapchat really stepping on their own dick for a holiday thing for quite some time.

Yeah, and as soon as I saw this morning that Snapchat has created a Juneteenth filter that prompted users to smile to break the chains, I'm like, What could possibly go wrong? I give it an hour. I give it an hour. Well, I put this in here, not just because it's funny, because, yeah, they had to pull it down by 11 a.m. Eastern time, so pretty shortly after I saw it.

This comes back to having developers in your, you know, your local civilization. I can't even figure out words today. Jesus. Oh, God. I need that brain game.

We really should have taken this episode off. I know. It's just not going well at all. It is not going well today. So, they hired a team in the Ukraine to build all their lenses, and it didn't quite get corporate approval. So, there was a Black Snap employee who was involved in the creation but did not see the final version, including the action shot that would break the chains if the user smiled.

Maybe they were just big Erasure fans. Break the chains of love. Come on, man. We don't know. Brick-a-brick. On the heels of my watching of the 808 documentary about the very influential drum machine, I saw a great story about a band I actually really like quite a lot, Soul Wax, also known as Too Many DJs, which is Stephen and David Diwali.

And they're really great electronic artists. I like their albums quite a lot. So, they have been looking for this one synth, the EMS Synthi 100, for years and years and years. Like, almost 20 years they've been trying to find one of these. There are only 31 ever made.

So, that's pretty crazy. In the four decades since its creation, several simply disappeared off the face of the earth. Others fell into disrepair, and the few that remained in working order were locked up in private collections. And fortunately, I won't ruin it because it's a really interesting story, and it'll kill some time.

And we all need to kill some time these days. So, I'd encourage people to go to the show notes and read this entire story about it. But a twist of fate happened, and it meant that they got one that took residence in their studio long enough to make an album. And they were basically loaned one, and they did an entire new album entirely on this ancient old synth.

So, I'm very excited to go listen to this. And it was a really cool story about trying to find this synth and track it down and the history behind it and all that. So, a fun read. If you enjoyed 808, you'll like this. I will have to give that a read, for sure. And TikTok has come out.

They're trying to be more transparent because maybe they listen to us. No, they don't listen to us. We always talk about how the algorithms are the problem. Well, they're trying to be more transparent and give you a peek into how the hashtag for you algorithm works.

And they kind of lay it out. You know, it's almost everything that you probably know if you've ever paid any attention to how these things work. What's been promoted, what you've clicked on, what your friends have clicked on, blah, blah, blah. And not enough to give you enough secret sauce to game it.

You know, that's always the transparency fallback. It's like, we're going to show you as much as we can. But there's a little man behind the curtain over there that actually does the real thing. So, we can't let you know about that because then you just might game it and ruin it for everybody else.

Right. But it's a good read. You can check it out if you're a TikTok user and actually care about that kind of thing. What my roommate does because she's new on TikTok. So, that's how I found it. She's not new anymore. You've been talking about this for months. She's a seasoned user at this point. That's true.

That's true. Not new on TikTok. And by the way. She's got more followers than we have listeners, by the way. Well, you and your roommate have single-handedly, like, ruined TikTok for the young kids because the olds are definitely on it now. Yeah. Well, she is. I am not. I just wrangle the dogs for the dog videos.

And this one, if we had more on of the week this week, this would have been in there. There was a, Ford was going to release the new Bronco on July 9th. Yep. Well, you know, July 9th turns out to be O.J. Simpson's birthday, which I thought was hilarious.

It is very funny. But to me, that's such a nothing burger. It really is. Like, why would anybody at the Ford Motor Company know and be aware of O.J. Simpson's birthday? It's the Bronco. Come on. It would have been a lot more if they would have released it on, like, say, the day that the chase happened.

Now, that, that would have been moron of the week. Well, I think the moron of the week is that they changed it to July 13th. They should have kept it. Totally. Do you know how much press they would have got? Well, actually, they would have gotten half the press that they already got because now everybody's talking about this.

That's a good point. It's a win-win for them. They got double dipped. Yeah, they double dipped. It looks nice, though. I always liked the Bronco. I always wanted one. Security? Ha! We're joined again this week by Dave Bittner.

Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast. Dave is also 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. You know, I've always felt a little bad for roping Dave into this circus that we call a show, given his laureates and his very, very learned and interesting and above-board other podcasts that he does.

But today has hit a new low. I feel particularly bad that you're going to be associated with this particular program, which will now be called This Is Not Our Finest Hour. This show probably should not ever be released. What happened?

What didn't, Dave? What didn't? Okay. We started recording five hours later than we should have because firmware updates and various technological mishaps that had to be tracked down. And by the time that we got there, whatever wind was actually in our sails had left the building.

I see. So we have muddled through as best we could, but neither of our hearts was particularly in it, nor were our mouths or our brains. So here we are. Right. When we started this morning at eight o'clock, Brian, I had no wind already. And then five hours of figuring out how to work a MixPre-6 was, I now know everything there is to know about the MixPre-6, though.

Yes. We did eventually overcome our technological problems, but I believe that that sapped anything that was left within us. So unfortunately, at this point, people have listened to about 25 minutes of mush, and you've got another about 15 to go after this segment. All right.

Well, good times. Welcome to Security Ha. You should be the meat in our shit sandwich, Dave. All right. Well, it's a part I'm proud to play. Although I don't think I'll be putting it on my resume anytime soon. No, we're not submitting this to the Podcast Hall of Fame.

Yes. We will not be getting a Podcast Oscar for this episode. However, we do have something pretty interesting. I saw this, and it's always the Israelis. I think that's safe to say. Researchers from Israelis, Ben-Gurion University and the Wiseman Institute of Science.

Did you talk about this on any of your podcasts, Dave? Because this is quite interesting. No, but I did see the story come by. And like you, my initial reaction – actually, before I saw who it was, I thought to myself, it's got to be Ben-Gurion. Because whenever some weird way of getting information out of a room that is assumed to be secure, it's generally the gang from Ben-Gurion who are behind it.

They are clever, clever lads. And ladies, I suppose, as well. There is something to add to your list of secure room requirements, and that would be completely opaque shades. Or total darkness. Or total darkness, because they have come up with a way to hear what you are saying via the light bulbs in your room.

They're saying anyone with a laptop and less than $1,000 of equipment, a telescope and a $400 electro-optical sensor can basically – you can now read the minuscule vibrations sounds create on the glass surface of a light bulb inside and recreate the speech going on in the room.

Hmm. See, I've seen stories about this done with windows and a laser. Yeah, those are like old-school ones, you know? Right, right. So the notion of picking up vibrations off a piece of glass, that goes far back.

But this sounds like they're taking it to the next level and doing it a lot cheaper. Yes. I think that's the big thing from this story is actually how easy and cheap – relatively cheap it is to do it. You don't – we don't need no freaking lasers. Yeah, seriously. So there are some caveats to this, of course.

They don't know – they used a hanging bulb. It's not clear if a bulb mounted in a fixed lamp would provide enough vibrations or a ceiling fixture. They were also – the music and voice used were louder than average human conversation, what speakers turn to their maximum volume.

But it's a proof of concept. And, of course, once these things are discovered, people figure out a way to make them more refined and better. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The other thing this reminds me of is years ago, someone came up with a clever bit of software where you could put a vinyl record on a flatbed scanner and take a high-res scan of it.

And this software would look at that and make the audio from the ridges in the record. Yeah, extrapolate it just from that. I remember that story as well. I think the thing is as our technology improves, we're finding out that physics is a real thing.

And we can use it to our advantage at astounding levels that we never would have thought possible. Yeah. Science exists. Yes. So rarely for good. Well, this week, the FBI did some good old police work to track down an arsonist in Philadelphia.

Did you guys get a chance to go through this story? Yeah. Actually, Ben and I discussed this on Caveat. It's probably the Caveat that's coming out a couple days after this episode comes out. And this is really kind of fascinating, isn't it? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, this just seems to be good old-fashioned police work.

They didn't even use the tattoo database or anything like that. They just, you know, shoe leather. Yeah, yeah. So the story here is that there's a woman who was alleged to have set a couple of police cars on fire in Philadelphia.

As one does. Well, yeah. I think as Ben and I said on Caveat, you know, the right to peacefully assemble is enshrined in our First Amendment, but that does not extend to arson. Yes, agreed. So they had some photos of this woman and they were able to collect a variety of photos and using the T-shirt she was wearing, they found the T-shirt on an Etsy marketplace.

They used that to find her on LinkedIn. They used that to find out that she was a massage therapist. They used a tattoo on her arm to match with a video of the massage therapy place. They had some PR videos and they were sure enough, there was a matching tattoo there and they tracked this woman down.

And the comments she left on Etsy, which helped, you know, cross-reference her. Well, look, even at a young age, I don't know if you're aware of this, Dave, but I am rather heavily tattooed. I mean, I'm no Seth Miranda by any stretch of the imagination, but I have quite a few tattoos and I got my first one when I was 18 and at that point I knew I will be always fairly instantly recognizable from now on.

So I don't know, I mean, I guess caught up in the moment, important thing again, but like you said, doesn't stretch to arson. But if you are fairly tattooed or even have one very, you know, stylized and specific tattoo, the idea that somebody will not be able to recognize you unless you cover said tattoos is a bit ridiculous.

Yeah. On America's Most Wanted, they'd always show the guy's tattoos. He's like, he's got these pictures of salamanders on his forearm going at it. And, you know, it was always some kind of very stylized, definitely recognizable tattoo. And next week they're like, we got the guy, we got salamander guy.

So, so I'm going to do something rare for me and I'm going to adopt Jason's persona for a second because he always likes to come up with the evil plans. And I'm just telling you youngsters out right there right now, if you're planning on a life of crime, do not tattoo yourself. Jason, do you have any tattoos?

Oh yes, I got plenty. Do you? Mm-hmm. I have none. I have, I have. So who's the smart criminal amongst us? Exactly. Dave Everyman Bittner. I just, you know. You know, he always seemed like a nice guy.

No tattoos. He was a quiet, quiet man. He was a quiet man. Kept to himself. I always thought, to me, someone described tattoos as a long-term reminder of a short-term feeling. And that resonated with me.

And I don't think there's ever been anything that I've been sure enough about that I've thought to myself, you know what? I want to put that on my body forever. You know, I understand that theory and it's one reason I've avoided things like names and things of that nature. But the way I look at them now is my tattoos remind me of very specific periods of my life and I quite like that.

Yeah, me too. I, I, I, I have almost all fond memories of all my tattoos. Almost. Yeah. Getting, getting my company logo tattooed on my arm with a giant banner that says, free the media might not have been the best one, but very of the times.

It is, it is, it is the Metblogs logo, but I was smart enough to tattoo it behind me. So I never have to look at it. And tonight's therapy session will revolve around your ankle. I was thinking actually this morning when I was driving in here, for some reason, it crossed my mind that if someone actually went and got the CyberWire logo tattooed on them, we should really give them a free CyberWire Pro for life, you know, like, and a better help and a better help subscription for life too.

Cause yeah, she's probably not writing it. I think a number of companies have run, um, pro, uh, promotions like that before. I seem to remember Domino's used to do it. And I know K-Rock here in the nineties probably did something like that. I don't know what you'd get, you know, as a bonus from K-Rock, a free radio station, but they did something.

I've seen a lot of, uh, the old rainbow Apple logo. That was a pretty common one. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A friend of mine had an Apple talk port tattooed on the back of his neck back in the day. Oh. Has he upgraded it to USB-C? I was, I hope so.

I think he covered it over with like a SCSI port for a while. And now, yeah, yeah. Well, all right. Well, I mean, good for you guys. I don't, I don't begrudge anybody who has them. It's just never been something that's been all that interesting to me. So, yeah, well, I, I never begrudge anybody that doesn't have them.

It's a, it's a personal choice. And I think, you know, Jason and I both got heavily into music and music is a tattooy rock and roll lifestyle kind of thing. So it made sense for us to do that. And, you know, I will say the one, uh, you know, I, for a long time, I, I kept my tattoos where they could be covered up by, uh, shorts or a t-shirt.

And I remember the first time I got a tattoo that could not be covered up by even long sleeve t-shirt, uh, or anything like that. I, I was like, I am crossing, I'm crossing a Rubicon here right now. Right. Right. Although these days everybody is so tattooed, like it doesn't really seem to make too much of a difference.

I mean, I've seen bank tellers with face tattoos now. Really? Wow. Yeah. Not that a bank teller is a particularly what it used to be, but they were actually in the process of robbing the bank. You just had to, right. Oddly, it was the only other, it was the only person in the building.

Uh, yeah. No, if I, at my age, I, I think it might be silly to get more, but I would actually love to get more. It's a, it's a, it is a interesting process getting tattooed. I, I, I haven't felt the urge for quite some time, but I, I do know I will get at least one more tattoo in my life and I will be breaking my rule and getting a name, but it will be my son's name.

So that is not something I expect to go away anytime soon. So. Yeah. Yeah. That seems reasonable. Yeah. Well, back to our stories. Uh, we had a interesting one come by, uh, from, um, this is the Bitdefender blog actually written by our pal, uh, Graham Cooley, and this is about a woman who on her way out of a company, actually a company she was no longer with, but she still had the, uh, the credentials

for, she, well, that was a mistake there, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, this is over in the UK and she deleted the contents of this company's Dropbox account the complete way so that it could not be, uh, restored and, uh, the company wasn't able to recover from it.

They went out of business, uh, said it cost them almost a hundred thousand pounds. Um, and, uh, yeah, and she got, she's in trouble. She got busted for it. So she's facing legal repercussions. I have, uh, two thoughts here immediately.

Um, first off, if your business is so dependent on a Dropbox, and that is, if you lose that Dropbox, that is it. Um, well, I, okay. Three, three thoughts. Um, where's your copy? Uh, we all know if it doesn't exist in three different places, it doesn't exist at all.

Um, two, if it is that important and you know somebody is getting canned or being furloughed or being whatever, uh, change credentials before you tell the person. And, uh, three, uh, who amongst us have, has not had that power and seriously considered doing something like this?

Hmm. Mm-hmm. I know I still have access to ex-clients things. I have never done anything, but I, I do check in periodically just to see if they've changed credentials so I can shake my head and laugh, you know, evilly for a few seconds before returning to normal.

Yeah. I require everybody to change my credentials when I leave a job now because I don't want them to come back after me saying that, uh, you'd popped in and did something you shouldn't have done. Yeah. But also this company was using their Dropbox for business and there is Dropbox for business that has one year backups and completely recoverable files.

So somebody was trying to do Dropbox on the cheap, I believe. Oh, right. Yeah. So a bunch of different layers to this. The company could have very much protected themselves a lot better and should have. So they are at some point somewhat culpable for this, but, uh, still not a cool move.

Yeah. Uh, and I would also add that you open yourself up to violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act just by logging into something that you are not supposed to have access to. I have a colleague who, uh, got in trouble for trying to just help someone out and take a look at an email account with a company that they had done previous work with.

They weren't doing work with right now. And someone said, Hey, could you just take a look at this? And one thing led to another and, and someone in the company noticed the unauthorized login and started coming after them as a violation of, of that. Um, so you, you need to be careful just because you can, uh, doesn't mean you should, of course, but, and, but they can come after you for it.

Yes, they can. And that, and something to keep in mind for anybody out there that's actually considering this, that may have a login to somebody, uh, you may think that the company is stupid and they may very well be very stupid, but if something goes wrong, they will hire smart people who will figure it out and find it. They will find the people with a certain set of skills to come after you.

Yeah, that is the truth. Uh, the big news this week, the, the real important news was again, coming out of Israel, um, a set of vulnerabilities that are being called Ripple 20, uh, and it's a collection of vulnerabilities. Um, and it's from researchers at an organization called JSOF, which is a cybersecurity company out of Israel and they've been looking at a set of libraries, which were developed by a company called Trek.

And this is a library that's been in use for 20 years, uh, and is in all sorts of devices over the course of 20 years. And it has to do, uh, with some basic TCP IP stuff. And they're saying this is a, this is a serious one, um, in no small part because these libraries would be used in a lot of embedded devices, things like industrial control systems, stuff where people may not even know that these vulnerabilities are in there.

Yeah. Yeah. We covered this briefly on the last episode. We actually named the episode after it, but we didn't talk too much about it. We didn't talk too much about it, but I do want to take a moment to give credit where credit is due. Uh, Jason, uh, came up with a phrase that was genius and was pointed out multiple times on Twitter. And it was very good.

So I think we should repeat it here again, Jason, you said, uh, that's why the S and IOT sounds for security. Right. I stole that one actually. I can't remember who I stole it from. It might've been Bruce Schneier or, uh, one of the twit, the, the twit security, um, podcast.

I think you didn't get it from reply all Jason. Yeah. I definitely did not get it from reply all. Um, but yeah, no, unfortunately I can't claim ownership of that one, but it is genius. Yes. Yeah. But this, uh, we, we definitely just glossed over it as an IOT thing. And I guess I suppose technically it kind of is, but the, the impact and reach on this is actually quite astounding.

Yeah, it is. And these are things that are, are not likely to be patched. No. So yeah. So you see, you see commercial air craft devices and you go, please, for the love of God, please patch that. Yeah. Well then it's like, everybody's stuck at home now.

You can't go out in the field and change all the, change all the smart bulbs or whatever the hell you got here. What are you talking about, Jason? Everything's open. Everything's fine. Everything is fine. There's no pandemic anymore because we don't want there to be one.

Yeah. Oh God. I heard an interview with a woman this morning. Again, I was on my way in listening to the radio and I think they were talking about, they were, they were talking about the, the Trump campaign event that's coming up and they were interviewing a woman who's waiting in line. And the, her comment, she said, I just don't feel like I'm going to get sick.

Like, well, okay, great. Good for you. Good on you. Good for you. You don't feel like you're going to get sick. That's great. That's great. Science at its best. Yeah. We're number one. Finally, this week, this has nothing to do with cybersecurity, but I put it in there because it's a running theme here.

And that is, uh, that nobody ever goes to jail. And here we have the former CEO of Bumblebee, Bumblebee Tuna has been sentenced to 40 months in prison for his role in a conspiracy to fix the price of canned tuna.

Big tuna. So you can cause a financial meltdown, you can crater the world economy, but don't you dare mess with the price of canned tuna. It's amazing what we decide is important.

What about the rest of the CEOs? Are they all going down? This was a, this was a, you know, a multi-conglomerate conspiracy, I thought. I remember when everybody's tuna went up. Oh, but he was the, he was the tip of the tuna bird, Jason. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah.

He was the head of the school, as it were. I did. It's funny. Oh, good one. It's funny that you put this in here because I did see this story throughout the week and I was thinking of the same sort of thing. It was like, finally, we see some accountability, somebody being brought to justice, and I can't believe it's for this.

Right, exactly. Of all things, of all things, cans of, cans of tuna. I mean, I suppose that's a staple food. It's important, but. It is. It is. Yeah. But of all the things we've talked about. Choices, decisions, right.

Priorities. Priorities. Priorities. Don't fuck with our tuna. I wish I could make that the show title. Amazing. Amazing. All right, gentlemen. Well, that's what I have this week. I hope things go better with the rest of the show for you.

I'm glad we're able to. They don't. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. They don't. Thanks for saving what you could. Yeah. Make sure that he'll marry. We've got one good segment now. I think we might just run this and say, fuck it. Just run it twice in a row, you know. Yeah, we'll just run it twice so we can put the ad in the middle.

Stick it in between the two runnings of it and call it a day. Perfect. And you know it's going to be an ad for Bumblebee Tuna. There you go. All right. Well, it's a reminder that sometimes, always in the past, horrible things have happened too.

So regardless of all the big, horrible headlines that we're getting this week, every week, every day, 35 years ago, there was a horrible headline as well for me, even though I was too young to even know it because I didn't even know about the band then because I was too damn young. But the first iteration, version 1.0 of the Sisters of Mercy, broke up 35 years ago today.

Aww. And I have a link in the show notes for their last and final show of that version of the Sisters of Mercy. Although, to be fair, I preferred Floodland Era Sisters of Mercy or Sisters of Mercy 2.0 more anyways, but still, it was a good band. I'm sorry for your loss. I know.

You should be. Until next time, maybe. I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to GOG.show slash donate. Toss us a few bucks and we'll love you forever. And your support keeps us going and we really appreciate it.

And if you want to help us out, also go to GOG.show slash shop and pick up your masks and mugs and get some masks and mugs. Mandatory in California now. There you go. Not the mugs, but, you know, you should have a mug anyways.

You should have a good mug. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 449. 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.

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