460: Pedestrians in the Sky

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. Ready for your trip? No. Not yet. Did the first Whole Foods order. So all that food has shown up. And I will, because there is no delivery for the Trader Joe's, I'm going to Trader Joe's tomorrow in the morning to stock up on that sort of stuff. So we have food. And there's a lot of beer in the car. But I still have to pack up clothes and shit like that.

Yeah, who needs clothes? You got beer. Provisions. Provisions. Well, we are going with another family. So I think clothes might be a plus. Depends on the family. That's true. This is Los Angeles. Right. Yeah. No, I'm looking forward to staring at four other walls for a while. So that'll be nice.

Okay. Well, there's got to be some kind of view. Well, yes. We have a pool and all that sort of thing. So it's a nice, lovely Oceanside, California. So the weather should be fine. And it'd be nice to go out and be able to enjoy things. But whatever. Take what you get. Speaking of that, I've just noticed, man, what a mess everything is. I don't know about you.

But in my walks and bike rides and my zipping about town as little as I do. I have definitely noticed a decrease in masks for a brief period of time. People were wearing them again. And now they're not. I just got back from a walk with my lady friend. This is our COVID cockblocked Thursday morning perambulation around the park. And yeah, the kids were having baseball practice. People were playing basketball. Very few masks to be seen.

Yeah, it's kind of a joke. And the numbers, of course, are still rising here in Los Angeles. I am getting closer and closer to just saying, all right, let's get the gas masks. Let's board the plane. Let's get out of here. Toronto is moving to stage three in their recovery. Here, Mayor Villaree Useless has just been doing nothing but tweeting. I almost lost my mind last night.

I've decided that I really do this five days or whatever that I'm going to be gone. I am off social media because it's doing my head in. Yeah, I saw last night that, you know, the mayor of L.A. account is basically just tweeting out something along the lines of, this is make it or break it week in Los Angeles. We really need to bear down and take care of this.

And I just tweeted back. I'm like, what week hasn't been? Why aren't you shutting it down? Why do you keep threatening to shut things down? The numbers keep going up and you just shut it down. Not going to happen. Anyways, not going to happen. It's not going to happen. And I mean, basically, everybody that was responding to his tweet was saying the same thing. It's like, obviously, doing nothing is not working. Our numbers are going up every day. Every day I get an alert.

Asking politely is not a viable solution to this problem. No, and a friend of the show, Mike, made this point, you know, three months ago when we were still already two months into it. He's like, you can't make things optional. People don't do optional. No, they don't because they got freedoms because we're America. Yeah, America. So, yeah, things are just getting worse and worse here. And it is what it is. And whatever. I'm going to have to board a plane.

Well, the good part here is that test times have turned around. So if you need to get a test in Los Angeles, you can get your results back in as little as 24 to 48 hours now. Yeah. Then it's actually useful. That's actually useful. That is the big part of the problem with the testing has been the test results don't come back until you've been out and about for two weeks.

I mean, again, people should treat it. If they think they've been exposed and want to go take a test, you should be treating it as if you have it. And you should be staying home until you get your test back. Anyways, but yeah, it's useless unless you do the rapid testing. So thank God we're at least have that here in L.A. I know they do not have that up in San Francisco because a friend of the show is dealing with this right now.

David Teeter and Chen think that they have it. And Chen finally got her test back. And apparently, yes, they do. And he's still waiting for his test results to come back. And it's been over a week. Oh, that reminds me. He called me yesterday. I should call him back. Yeah, you might want to talk to him. He's dealing with some news.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. No, my lady friend went and got hers tested. And within I think it was like 26 hours came back negative. So all good there. Yep. Yep. So that's a one plus that L.A.'s got going for it right now. All right. That's enough COVID Corner. Let's move on to some news.

Okie dokie. Well, all of big tech is currently sitting around and being grilled by senators and house people. And I was going to talk about it, but then I figured, why?

Nothing's going to come out of this. Nothing is going to come out of this. They're grilling Zuckerberg over acquisitions and feature cloning. They're grilling Bezos over how he's destroyed. Every other company known to man and taking everything over as if they're going to do something about it. What are they going to do? Are they going to break up Facebook? No, they're not. Are they going to break up Amazon? No, they're not.

And should they be even dealing with this right now while our country slides into an apocalypse? No, they probably shouldn't. But that's what they're wasting their time doing right now. Speaking of Bezos, though, I saw some pretty interesting stats on Shopify this week. Turns out a lot of third-party merchants are leaving Amazon and moving to Shopify because, you know, Amazon is kind of – they're a little too draconian sometimes.

And they basically – they're violent. Not violent, but – what's the word I'm looking for here? I need a thesaurus is what I need. I should get one from Amazon. God damn it. They're pretty draconian in what they're trying to lay down for third-party vendors. It's typical, though. This is what we kind of knew was going to happen.

Come to our platform, everyone. Come. We will give you deals like you have never seen before. You're spending – you will sell more products than you've ever sold before. Huge deals. Huge deals. Huge deals. And as soon as we get you locked into our infrastructure, we will screw you. Yeah, so Shopify is definitely getting a big boost from that. So that's kind of good. So, you know, there might be competition out there for them.

That'd be nice, but you just can't get away from the ease of going to Amazon.com, finding anything that you want, and finding it same-day delivery, practically. That's kind of it. But the other thing that Shopify probably doesn't have the infrastructure to deal with, and let's be honest, Amazon barely does as well, are counterfeits.

That's kind of one of the big problems with third-party sellers on Amazon is you get a lot of junk. Yeah. So enough of that random tangent. Sorry about that. I just thought that was interesting to see how Shopify has grown since Apple has turned the thumbscrews on them. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see what happens with that. But again, it's hard to beat the convenience of Amazon, and people kind of just go there.

So, yeah. So I think we've got, what, two or three more days of congressional hearings with big tech, and, you know, we all know nothing is going to come out of it at all. Well, yeah. The only thing that should come out of it is that they have to change the antitrust laws in some way, shape, or form. But can we deal with the problem that we have right now? We've got bigger problems, bigger fish to fry.

We do. We do. And Twitter is still attempting to deal with it. And I love this headline. Of course, Twitter had to suspend Donald Trump Jr. Yeah. So Monday and Tuesday of this week, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter tried to put out what they called a misinformation wildfire, a viral video, which touted the discredited coronavirus remedy hydroxychloroquine. Am I pronouncing that correctly?

Hydroxychloroquine. Yes. There's no need to learn how to pronounce it because, hey, guess what, people? It doesn't work. In fact, it can actually kill you. But that isn't stopping a bunch of people from claiming that it's actually solved and cured the coronavirus. And this video also claimed people don't need to wear masks, et cetera, et cetera.

And, of course, a whole bunch of people in the GOP have retweeted it, including Donald Trump Jr., who said, This is a much watch, because he couldn't even spell it correctly. So different from the narrative that everyone is running with. Yes, the reason it is different from the narrative that everyone is running with is because it is bullshit.

Total bullshit. And as we discovered, this group that put out this video, America's Frontline Doctors, it was a group that was formed within the past two weeks. They have not been around for a long time. The viral clips from the video focus on a speech at the event from someone named Stella Emanuel, who is a Houston pediatrician, and fringe Pentecostal pastor, who has made medical claims about alien DNA and demon sperm.

Demon sperm. Yes. My favorite Slayer album. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, she's basically said that some of the various lady issues that are out there are caused by succubi fucking you in your sleep. This is a real claim of hers.

I would prefer to be awake if I'm getting fucked by a succubi. Seems kind of a waste otherwise. Yeah. So, yeah, obviously there's nothing to this video, but everybody, it was the second most engaged post on Facebook on Monday. It was incredibly retweeted. The president, of course, himself has shared various different versions of the video on Twitter.

Now, what I love about this is they did take down Donald Trump Jr.'s account, you know, put him in Twitter jail for a while because he did it. When asked why Trump's account, the Papa Trump, had not been restricted like Jr.'s had, a Twitter spokesperson told Slate, the president did not tweet the video.

He retweeted it. Can we get a, can we get a clarification over here on what the fucking difference is? So apparently you could do whatever the fuck you want as long as you're just retweeting and not tweeting. So don't copy that video and tweet it yourself.

Just retweet it and you can do anything. Interesting. That seems to be the rules. I thought it was really funny. And I know put your tinfoil hat on for this one. But now that Kodak is back in the game, I don't know where they resurrected the corpse of Kodak from.

But they're going to get a hundred, like over $700 million loan from the government to start building, you know, pieces of drugs, like the core components of drugs. Okay. But one of the things that they are going to make in whole, hydroxychloroquine. Now you tell me there's not some backroom shenanigans going on there.

No, no. There are actual valid uses for the drug. It's just not COVID-19. Yes, my roommate's actually taking it for rheumatoid arthritis. But by the way, terrible side effects. It's a terrible drug. If you don't have to take it, don't. But yeah, it's just funny that they just happen to be doing that because last I heard, we didn't have a shortage because she just went down to Rite Aid and picked hers up when she needed it the other day.

So there you go. So all of this has actually led to possibly what I think is the most 2020 headline ever. I'm not going to tell you anything from this article. I'm just going to read the headline because nothing says 2020 better than this. Caught lying about baseball invite, president calls Twitter criticism illegal and endorses demon sperm doctor.

All right. That is a real headline. 2020 in a nutshell. Oh, God. You can't make this shit up. Actually, on this one, no, you can't. Because who the fuck would have come up with demon sperm? We've had murder hornets. We've had bunny Ebola.

Now we've got demon sperm. It just doesn't get. It's not any more insane. All right. If Jon Stewart were alive. Oh, God. He is alive, Jason. He's not alive. The Jon Stewart we knew is dead and gone. Now he's got a beard. Jon Stewart's on a farm.

Jon Stewart is alive. He's just abandoned us. Yeah. He's left us to our own devices. All right. Getting back to tech for the most part. To beat TikTok, Facebook is allegedly throwing money at creators. Now, I kind of applaud this because it's about damn time creators are getting paid for something.

But it's a shame it's just for stupid viral videos. But it is what it is. So if you're launching a new social media platform, it isn't enough to have unique features that empower folks to be creative. You also need a bundle of cash, not just to advertise, but to poach high-profile stars from your soon-to-be-rival platforms.

Yes, this is all happening because we're going to be getting Reels soon, the new Instagram feature that basically rips off TikTok. And Facebook is now going after some of TikTok's biggest stars, offering them lucrative offers to get them to switch over to Reels and one would assume be exclusive.

Now, it used to be you needed to be on all social networks. But I suppose if Facebook, if Zuck is dropping a big old check off at your house, you will just put your stuff on his platform. Yeah. Drop me a million bucks, Zuck. I'll be on Reels any day now. Yes, we will. We will become the first podcast to move exclusively to Reels if you give us a couple mil.

Seriously. I'm fine with that. Yeah. So that's happening. Well, speaking of TikTok, they have decided to open up their algorithm and they're challenging competitors to do the same. So they're going to let experts look at their, basically look at their algorithms in real time and see how the matching works and things like that.

What, they're not putting it up on GitHub? They're not putting it up on GitHub as far as I can tell. So, but this is all just preemptive, you know, a preemptive strike from them because of all the China shit that's going on with them. And Zuckerberg going up in front of, you know, the Senate and saying, hey, man, you know, TikTok is from China.

They're like, you know, they're non-patriotic and shit like that. So I just, I love the fact that one of the, one of the TikTok guys, the CEO, Kevin Mayer, the guy from Disney. Yep. He said, without TikTok, American advertisers would again be left with few choices.

Competition would dry up and so too will an outlet for America's creative energy. Gotcha there. We are willing to take all necessary steps to ensure the long-term availability and success of TikTok. Well, you know what I would like to see TikTok? I actually don't give two shits about your algorithm.

I'd like to see how often your app is phoning home and where home is. Exactly. And stop raiding our clipboards. Yeah. Things like that, you know? That's what we'd like. Yeah, and maybe move your headquarters to someplace that's not China. If you want to, if you want to distance yourself from China, then get the fuck out of China.

Yeah. Or, you know, just spin off an American version of the company. It's easy enough. The Chinese company can still own a percentage of the company. You just spin up a new one. You started here. You use your Amazon web services. You forget to put a password on it. You store everything there like everybody else does.

Just give us, just tell us where the database is. We'll just suck it locally. No problem. Yeah. So, you know, easily solved, people. Easily solved. We got some Spotify news. There's a report that came out. The second quarter earnings report has come out, which is not only telling us how people are using the service and how much money it lost.

We've discovered that basically listener habits are almost back to pre-pandemic levels, which makes sense to me because everybody's acting like we're no longer in a pandemic. Yeah. And? That's about it. So, according to the streaming company, it's in-car listening stats have rebounded to just 10% less than what it was before lockdowns began.

Obviously, they've gotten very close to getting the 300 million user mark, which is what everybody's kind of rushing towards, and Spotify is well ahead of that rush. It's got $299 million right now, with business still booming as people get back to work and businesses start buying ads again.

Of that figure, $138 million are paying for premium. That's actually a little surprising for me. That's pretty good. That's some solid business right there. That really is. And they say 21% of its users are now listening to podcasts on the platform. Our stats personally disagree with that.

We have, like, one. Yeah, seriously. One guy out there is listening to us on Spotify. So, yeah, they seem to be doing well. However, their losses have deepened. Have we not heard this tale before, Jason? This is a regular tale as old as time in the tech industry, where they tell us how great they're doing and how business is booming, but their losses keep getting bigger.

It's called wait for the other shoe. Yes. So, as usual, it blames its employees in Sweden for adding to its tax burden, which must make them feel real swell, according to the article. Very funny. And more importantly, however, and this brings an interesting caveat to that point about there being 138 million people paying for the platform.

More families and students are signing up to group or discount plans, which means average revenue per user falls. All right. Well, I've got a little bit of follow-up on why they lost money this quarter. And you can blame Joe Rogan. Yes. It's the Howard Stern SiriusXM effect.

All of a sudden, you pay somebody a couple gazillion dollars. You don't have much money left. No. Actually, it's the other way around. This is the funny part. So, they give Joe Rogan $100 million. Then the stock goes up. It goes up pretty well. You know, everybody's happy about that. The bad news is that the company is now on the hook for more share-based compensation to the employees to the tune of $126 million.

Whoops. So, they had to pay Joe $100 million and they had to pay the employees $126 million, which is why the company's quarter losses are greater than normal. So, the Joe Rogan effect is, give me all your money and then give the rest to everybody else.

That's funny. All right. Well, that's interesting. Now, I have something I'm kind of curious about how you feel about, Jason. We've been dealing with this pandemic and we're living in it way too long, which means that probably a lot of the habits that we're picking up may stick. Things like worrying from home, et cetera.

We talked about how, you know, Google is- Worrying from home. Well, worrying from home is the standard, but working from home. I mean, we talked just the last episode about how Google has extended it basically until over, you know, June of next year, which means like you're spending over a year working at home. You're not going back into an office unless you have to.

You have to because of like family or things like that situation. Do you think you could see your- Are you in a rush or hoping to go see a movie in a theater again? I wasn't in a rush before this happened. I know. And you're a huge movie guy. Like, you're the movie guy.

I'm the music guy. I don't really care about movies that much. But I was curious about how you felt about it. See, the thing is, when I lived in Chicago, a friend of mine and me, we had a weekly date at the movie theater. Whatever was planned, we'd go every Wednesday morning before we had to work and we'd catch a matinee. And it was fun, especially because they served beer.

So we'd go watch a movie, get a giant Stella, kick back and watch the movie. And it was a fun thing to do. And once I moved to LA, I'm like, no, like the movie theaters out here are okay. I don't have a movie buddy anymore. So I haven't seen a movie in a theater for two years and I'm okay with that.

I got a big-ass TV with a nice sound bar and a bathroom and a pause button. Yeah, my wife and I were never really big moviegoers either, kind of basically just saving it for like Star Wars or something like, you know, something that you kind of want to see on a big screen and around other people. Yeah, event movies.

So yeah, event movies. That's about it, really. So I think you and I will both be happy with how the pandemic is kind of forcing the transition of the moviegoing experience. And Universal has just made a deal with AMC to shorten theatrical exclusivity to just 17 days.

That's fantastic. And the reason AMC is down with this as they need to be right now is, well, first off, they've recognized they're going to have to pivot or else they're not going to be in business. Because I don't think too many people are in a rush to go back to a movie theater and may not ever again, especially since we're all investing in our household theaters these days.

So they're going to get a cut of the video on demand from Universal. So all Universal movies, after they finish their 17-day window in AMC theaters, will go video on demand and AMC will get a cut of all those costs, which is great.

Until the contract runs out and Universal says, we don't care about AMC anymore. We don't care about any movie theaters anymore. We're just going to do, you know, VOD for everything now. Well, that won't officially finally happen until the Oscars remove that stupid requirement that you have to be in a theater. Yeah, I can see that coming, though.

Yeah, me too. I think it's coming. Now, here's a step-on-your-dick moment for you. A new service that lets AI identify gender based on names. And, shockingly enough, it seems to be incredibly biased. You think?

Yeah. So it's called Genderify. And this is like, you know, it's a new company. It just popped on Product Hunt, which means, who cares? You know, it's like, honestly, who cares? So they ran the name Megan Smith.

And the service offered the assessment, male, 39.6%, female, 60.4%. Which, you know, Megan is typically a female name. Yeah, usually. Yeah, usually. But when they changed the name to Dr. Megan Smith, it changes it to male, 75.9%, and female, 24.10%.

Other names prefixed with doctor produce similar results, while inputs seem to generally skew male. Test at test.com is said to be 96.9% male, for example, while Mrs. Joan Smith is 94.1% male when you put doctor in front of it.

Well, that is a big oopsie. That's for sure. Now, let me backtrack a little bit and ask something that maybe this is a stupid question, but it's a question I often have whenever I look at and see things on Product Hunt. Who needs this service?

I was going to say, I can distill that down to one word. Why? Why does this exist? Who is signing up for this? Who needs this? Don't most forms have gender next to it? And aren't we going to kind of a non-binary, gender-fluid drop-down form at this point anyways?

Exactly. You can be a Wookiee if you want. Who the fuck needs this thing? Well, kids that post their new sites on Product Hunt obviously need something to do in the pandemic. And I love this. This paragraph is perfect. Although these sorts of biases appear regularly in machine learning systems, the thoughtlessness of genderify seems to have surprised many experts in the field.

The response from Meredith Whitaker, co-founder of the AI Now Institute, which studies the impact of AI on society, was somewhat typical. Are we being trolled? Is this a psy-op meant to distract the tech and justice world? Is it cringey tech April Fool's Day already?

Okay. I'm glad I'm not alone. No. It's great. It was just absolutely great. So, genderify. GFY.

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This next one I give a hat tip to Dr. David Teeter for, and it is awesome. This is just a Google Doc with the Google Advanced Search Operators on it. So, if you want to be a power Googler... I'm going to have to ask you to edit this out.

I do not want this information shared. This is my secret sauce to being a master Googler, and half of my career has been based on my ability to take care of Google searches extremely well. Please delete this from the record. I do not need everybody knowing this.

Brian, we've been doing this show for seven years. This is episode 460. How often do you think people actually do anything that we say on this show? That's true. The secret is safe with us. Exactly. The only things that we're really good at is killing celebrities and making people not do something.

I cannot stress how important these things are, how these Google Advanced Search Operators will change your life. There are only two things in this modern age that I think that you need to have. One is critical thinking skills, and the second is these Advanced Search Operators.

If you've got those two things, you can do anything. Really? It's fantastic. There's a ton of stuff in here that I'd never heard of, and Teeter was even like, I thought I was a master Googler, but there's some stuff in here that I've never even heard of. Yeah, it's good. It's real good. Real good. And we've got another one from Teeter.

This is ADS-B Exchange, world's largest co-op of unfiltered flight data. Now, this came about because for a couple days, we were having overflights of my house by lots of military aircraft. We're sitting out walking the dogs or letting the dogs play in the yard, and we were overflown at about, I don't know, 200 feet by two Cobra attack helicopters.

And then the next day, we were overflown by six Blackhawks in formation, and they were all going the same direction. And I'm like, oh, man, what the hell's going on here now? I'm thinking, in the old days, I'd go, oh, it's, you know, they're going to Dodger Stadium. They're going to do a flyover. And then I'm like, oh, wait, no baseball.

Even if there is a baseball, they're not going to do a flyover because there's nobody there. Yes, the more likely thing now would be they're dropping off the unidentifiable soldiers to throw us in vans. Yeah, they're on their way to enterprise car rental. We laugh, but it's real.

I don't know. We joke, but hey. We joke, but. So as he sent it to me, I opened it up, and there's a little tab that you can click for just show military aircraft. And it just, it was the, I mean, it was absolutely perfect timing. This thing was about a minute out from my house on the same trajectory.

So I went outside and it went over. It was dark and they weren't like in full Blackhawk mode, but sure as shit, Blackhawk overflew my house on the same trajectory. So I sat there, I grabbed a beer, popped it and watched it go. And then I figured out, and then I went in over to like flight tracker 24 or whatever the other site is that gave me the full history of the flight because I got, I got the, the designation from ABS exchange.

And then I went, ADS exchange. And then I went over and grabbed it on flight 24 and put it in and it gave me the whole flight track of it. And what they're doing is it turns out not nefarious at all. There is a, an army reserve camp up in NorCal called Camp Roberts, but there's also the joint forces training base here in SoCal.

So what they do is they basically fly straight down. And when they get to us, they hang a left and shuck and jive through LA because they have to go around LAX and all the air traffic to get to the, the joint forces training base. That's all it was. So it was just a fun, fun night of trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

But if you want to see, there are a hell of a lot more planes in the air than I thought. Go to this ADS tracker and just, you can see every flight that's out there. Just kind of like flight 24, the, the other ones, the flight tracker 24. Right. There's a lot of planes still out there. Don't know if there's any people on them, but Hey, who knows?

So I just thought that was cool. Yeah. Yeah. You have an interesting idea of how to spend a fun evening. Yeah. Well, I'm COVID cock blocked. It's all I got, man. It's all I got. And this is another one that came in hat tip to Ken for this one. The Airbus self-flying plane just completed successful taxi takeoff and landing tests, which is pretty cool.

Now the landing stuff has been happening for years, but the trick with the landing, they're using GPS and they're using radio signals from the ground to triangulate position to get them in line for these tests. They're not using that data. They're probably still using GPS, but they're not using the ground data.

Right. To, to actually land the plane. The taxi test is the really interesting one because it's really difficult to, you know, looking at ground traffic and the markings for taxiways aren't as pronounced as runways because runways are pretty easy to see from the sky. But it's using like all the new cameras on the, they're using their flagship, uh, A350-1000 XWB.

Right. Because it's extreme. Extreme. Extreme. And this is one of the ones that have cameras everywhere. So it's, it's a pretty cool flight test. I would, I would get on this before I got in a fucking Waymo self-driving car any day, any day.

Well, say, you know, flying is safer than driving. Yes. And there's no pedestrians in the sky. Drunk pedestrians in the sky. You would not get me on this without there actually being a pilot on board as well. There will be pilots on board. They're not going to do that. Enjoy your flight.

See ya. Yes. See ya. Maybe. Maybe. All right. So I saw something, a new system that's been developed by MIT researchers, which is kind of cool. They're calling it Mosaic with the AI capitalized in it. Isn't that cute and clever? Isn't that sweet?

But what it's doing is it's searching through, uh, artwork and finding hard to spot similarities between pieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Amsterdam's Rijksch Museum. I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. I have no idea. Uh, they scan the images. They use deep networks to find similarities in pieces that span cultures, artists, and media that may not have otherwise been noticed.

So that's kind of cool. Uh, it's an algorithm that is finding similarities in color or style, but also meaning and themes. So they've fed a whole bunch of things into this deep learning network, activators, they're calling them for each image. And they're looking, they're basically finding out like, oh, look, this artist must have influenced this artist in some way, shape, or form and finding all that sort of stuff out and teasing it out.

That's pretty cool. This is what I can, uh, I, I like deep learning for now, Brian, we've talked in the past about the right to repair and all of the legislation around it and how Apple is the possibly the single worst company when it comes to right to repair. Yep. Because they have all of these proprietary parts and it's really hard to get.

And they finally started opening up their program to third party repair shops, mom and pop shops that can come do their thing. Well, the one thing about these, uh, these new hearings that they're having is there's a lot of emails that are coming out that we're getting access to. And it turns out, turns out that inside of Apple, even they don't know what the hell's going on.

Like, you know, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing. They're conflicted. They don't know which, who, what stance are they taking? What are they going to do? Right. And it's even frustrating for the people inside. Some of the emails are pretty funny, but, uh, hopefully now that these emails are out, they can finally come together on a strategy.

And here's the, here's the strategy, Apple. I know you're listening. I know Tim, Tim Cook. I know you're listening to the show. It's your favorite show. Part of his every Sunday. He sits down and listens to both episodes. Because we do, we generally don't talk about Apple on the show. So he's like, I need a break from Apple. Let's just listen to grumpy old geeks.

Well, we're breaking, we're breaking the code here right now, Tim. And I'm going to tell you right now, go with making it as easy to repair your shit as possible. We need it. We want it. We don't want the toaster that Steve Jobs promised us back in the eighties. We want computers that we can fix or have fixed from the mom and pop shop down the street.

Pretty grease with sugar on top. Agreed. And look, it's not like you aren't going to get your money anyways, because God knows these things will be useless in two years. So for those two years that we have your devices before we need to upgrade, because it's just not even working anymore. Let us be able to repair those for two years.

And then we'll buy a new one. Promise. Exactly. Or we can do what Seth Miranda's doing and build his own tower, PC, because he's switched back to the shit. Hey, I've threatened that a couple of times. I'm thinking about switching back to PC next time. Yeah, me too. Except for like my audio editing stuff.

But for the audio recording and live streaming stuff and video stuff. Fuck it, man. PCs are just so much better. And cheaper. And on this last one, since we were talking about Apple, I thought this was pretty fun. It's a new app that lets you run classic Mac OS straight in your browser.

It's based on Macintosh JS, which is kind of an Electron app. I've never heard of Electron before. But it lets you experience Mac OS 8.1 like you were running it on a 1991 Quadra. Does it run Shockwave is all I want to know?

Why would you want this? For fun. Nostalgia. Okay. All right. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that you can't run any of the good stuff. You know? Like I'd want to run Shockwave. I'd want to run... Debabalizer. Debabalizer. Oh, jeez.

I miss Debabalizer so much. Oh, God. Resedit. I want to run Resedit. So many things that were so much fun back then. And like I said, Shockwave. I want to be able to look at all the old websites like they were meant to be and get a copy of Netscape 4.0 and run with that.

But, yeah. I don't know. Check it out if you want to just dick around for a little bit. If you've got nothing else to do and you love the old Mac 8. And I love how they call it Mac OS 8.1. No, it was System 8. Mac OS didn't come around until, you know, 10.

Right. Anyway, try it out. Let us know because I don't think either one of us are going to do it. No, I'm not going to do it. Security? Ha! We are joined again this week by Dave Bittner.

Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast. Dave is also the co-host of the social engineering podcast Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan. As well as the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen where they discuss law and policy as well as surveillance and privacy. Dave is also co-hosting with me on the new Leo's Rules.

It's a cool podcast because Dave. Happy birthday. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, Dave. Thank you very much. Yes.

From one fellow Leo to another. What is your birth date? Wednesday. It will be this Wednesday, August 5th. Oh, okay. All right. Very good. Yeah. Mine was back on the 28th of July. Sort of, you know, a low-key birthday this year because what could you really do?

Exactly. You know, it had me thinking about for my 40th birthday, which for those of you keeping score, this year was my 51st birthday. So, 40 would have been a while ago. But for my 40th birthday, I had a big, big party.

And I had this party at a friend of mine's house who had a big, big house and a big, big yard and a big, big barbecue. And there were probably, I don't know, 75 people there. It was this big, Dave's turning 40. It was a big blowout. And this was my, you know, my friend who basically bought this house so he could have big parties, you know.

But that was, so he was in his element and just loved it. And, you know, there was, there was the guy there who wanted nothing more than to just be the guy who minds the grill, you know, who's like, I got this. So he was, everybody was happy. It was lots of fun. And so I was just thinking of, I mean, that is by far the biggest birthday party I've ever had.

And I was just contrasting that with a decade later, oh my, how things have changed. In fact, the person who hosted that party for me has passed away since then. Yeah, it's very sad. He partied himself out.

Well, yeah, I mean, you know, it's just time, time, time moves on. And that's the circle of life and all that sort of stuff. But, you know, you think about 10 years, lots can happen. And if you'd asked me 10 years ago at that big birthday party, you know, a decade from now, to imagine the inability for folks to even consider getting together like that.

Although I suppose there are some communities who are not being stopped. Yeah, no doubt. Why a little thing like a pandemic put the kibosh on a good party? Right, right. Right. But it's a good reminder that, you know, you never, you never know what's going to happen.

So anyway, it was a low key birthday, but I'm happy to still be here. Yeah, yeah, this one's 49 for me. So one more till the big 5-0. And it turns out that every birthday after 40 is just garbage.

There's really nothing to celebrate in the decade between 40 and 50. And 50, I can see, is a good turning point because it's like, well, didn't think I was going to make it this long. And then, and everything after that, it's just like, oh, okay. Right. For me, 50 was, you can no longer pretend like you're young, you know, like, like, you're not old yet.

You're not an old man, but you can no longer sort of cling to the idea. Well, I'm not that far from 35, you know, no, you're 50. And so, you know, and that's around, you know, your mid 40s is when, when you start going to the doctor and complaining about things.

And the doctor goes, well, yeah, I mean, you're, you're 45. I mean, that's, this is totally age appropriate for you. And you're like, what, what do you mean? Yeah, you can't, I'm 18, man. It's like, you can't fix this, these aches and pains. Well, no, I mean, you could take something, but this is all, this is, this is natural.

You should be here, you know. So I, oh God, I went for a walk this morning and pulled my neck out while I was walking. I don't know how I did that. I'm walking in a straight line. Right, right. I get home, got to put the ice on it, got the salon paws on it.

And I'm like, I can't even walk in a straight line without things falling apart now. Yeah. What happened? I don't know. I took a deep breath and now I can't get up, you know. Friend of mine, friend of mine had one unfortunate fart and blew out his back one time. Really?

Yeah. Oh, wow. That's something. It is. Explain that one to the EMTs. Exactly. First story. Yeah. Which rolls right into my first story. It's, it's, this is going to be a grab bag since Brian and I recorded yesterday because he's off on his vacation.

So some stuff came through that I thought was pretty, pretty interesting because it is your birthday week. And, uh, I saw this over at the Brookings Institute. Now more than half of Americans are millennials or younger. Dave, we're outnumbered. We are. We're outnumbered.

We are. This is interesting to me because I think there was this perception that the baby boomers were just going to loom large over everything for so long. Uh, and I guess they're not, I mean, I guess they still have control over the economy over well.

I was going to say they have control over the house and the Senate and everything else. Right, right, right. So I guess that, yeah, that's true. They, they can, they possess all of the wealth. Yes. That, that, that little bit right there. Yeah. You know, I, I was thinking about that, uh, earlier this week, I saw someone posting about having come up through college in the late nineties and, and I finished up college in the early nineties.

I graduated college in 91 and I was thinking about in the, I have a brother who's, um, six years younger than me. And in the time in between when I graduated from college and when he graduated from college, we both went to the same school.

We both went to a state school, university of Maryland, nothing fancy, nothing super expensive. But in that amount of time, we went from my parents being able to just pay for my college. So I came out of college with no college debt, which I think a lot of Gen Xers experienced, right?

College was still inexpensive enough. Our parents were riding a wave of success, uh, and, and, and doing well. And so a lot of us came out certainly with not a lot of college debt, but then when my brother, by the time my brother got out of college, he had some college debt, not a whole lot, but he had some where I had none.

And my parents weren't doing any differently than they were when I was coming through college. They were still doing well. I just think things had shifted and college was a little more expensive and life was a little more expensive. And, and so I, what my point is that I think those of us who are in that, we were teenagers in the eighties cohort of Gen Xers were really the trailing edge of the, that group who had

all those advantages of very little debt, very little college debt, um, the advantages of the success that our parents may have had throughout the seventies and eighties. Uh, and then it seems like after that is when a lot of the stuff that's really bringing down, um, the, or, or putting the millennials at a disadvantage in Gen Z or trying to get a leg up, a home ownership and all those kinds of things seems to me like those were the years when that transition happened.

Is that your sense as well? Well, I didn't go to college cause we really couldn't afford it. And by the time I got out of high school, I was just like, ah, screw this stuff. And I went to community college for photography for, you know, three years. And, uh, basically I, I got, I figured it out early that I want to be a photographer.

So I'm going to take the entire photography curriculum. And then I, I got it straight through 4.0 all the way through and, uh, went back and took the whole thing again because. Oh, wow. I didn't want to go into the real world. So I was just, yeah.

A delaying strategy? Pretty much. Pretty much. Uh, so yeah, I aced the entire, I went to the second best photography school in Illinois. So it was, it was pretty good. It was, I mean, it was a great photography education. I got out into the real world and found out that I like taking pictures for me, but I don't like going to parades and taking pictures of Santa Claus.

Cause that's how you have to start and work your way up and do all this crap. Cause I wanted to be a photojournalist. That was my bag. Okay. And, uh, and then also I was, uh, I, I became violently allergic to all the chemistry we had to use back then to develop black and white film and things like that. Oh, right.

So I got into computers and then, you know, the rest is history from there. But my brother, on the other hand, my brother is 20 years, almost to the day younger than me. And, uh, he went to college. He went to the, uh, university of Wisconsin and became a medical or assistant medical physicist.

His, uh, like his major is physics, uh, with a bent to medical physics. And now he's, you know, going for his master's and makes more money than anybody in the family combined. Bastard. Right. But he came out with a pretty sizable college debt, even though they paid a lot of it as they went, they saved up a lot and they paid a lot.

But yeah, he, yeah, he's still working that stuff down. He's going to be working it down for quite some time. So, yeah, I think, I think that that's, which is a, you know, your timing is about right on that for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Yep. So I got another thing to ask you about, Dave. Yes.

Why are people on Instagram making all these fake accounts for you? I've been getting, I've been getting notifications from friends and saying, Hey, somebody spoofing the old Bittner over there on Instagram. What the hell's going on? Well, I don't know. It's happening on Instagram and Facebook and the past couple of days I've been getting lots of messages from all of my well-meaning friends who are saying, Hey, this isn't you, right?

And I'm saying, no, this is not me. There've been several accounts that have been spun up and they all seem to be coming from the same place. They're using the same, you know, imagery and all that kind of stuff. Fortunately, I think, I guess enough people are reporting them and that's what I'm asking everyone to do.

If you see one of these, please report it because it's not me. And, uh, so I guess whatever, for whatever reason, these bad guys are playing whack-a-mole. I don't know that they're specifically coming after me. I don't know that I'm that, all that interesting. It might just be my turn.

I don't know. Could be, could be. Um, cause yeah, it's like, you know, I would think that that using social media accounts for you personally would be a thing that they could actually leverage, you know, email address, maybe something like that, because, you know, you have a foot in the cybersecurity community.

So they could use you as like kind of a getting in point for like a phishing scam of some sorts, you know, Hey, I, um, would you like to come on the show? I would really love to have you on the cyber wire or my 17,000 other podcasts. Here's a link to our show prep.

And that link could go to like, you know, a malicious download, something like that. That's the only thing that I could think of. But, you know, why would you, Instagram has no, you know, there's no, there's nothing you can really do there. You can barely even link to anything. So. Yeah. It seems that over on Facebook, they are trying to get people to go look at something.

They're saying, Hey, how are you? Like they're, they're, they're initiating chats with people and trying to, so it's basically a phishing kind of thing. They're trying to get people to go to a particular site, um, you know, and, and check out some, something scammy.

But it doesn't seem to be fairly sophisticated, which is why I think it might just be my turn. I'm not sure. Got it. Well, fortunately you can tell people on your 17,000 podcasts that, Hey, that's not me. Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So if you, if you want to shoot me some links, we'll put them in the show notes. I've got links to the, at least two Instagram accounts that will be in the show notes. So if anybody wants to go and report those, that would be much appreciated. I've seen the two I've seen so far are Dave Bittner, capital letter I at the end and Dave Bittner underscore at the end.

Those are the two I got too. Yeah. Yep. So that's what I've seen. So if you've gotten anything from them, please report them. Hopefully we'll get them to move on to someone more interesting than me. Yes. And shout out to supple seven or D supple from, from France who pointed it out to me and told me to pass it along to you.

So, and he, and he showed it to me and he's like, he must be doing something, right? He's being spoofed. Yeah. Yeah. Lucky me. Yeah. Yeah. I guess, you know, I, uh, I do think about that sometimes how big a target do I have on my back just, you know, for, for what I, for being in cybersecurity and being out in front of people talking about cybersecurity, does that automatically put a target on my back?

But it doesn't seem like it has so far any, in any sort of serious way. I guess I shouldn't tempt fate by talking about it. I was going to say, knock on wood, knock on wood. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's really all about the company you keep and the people you have access to. So. Right. Right.

Yeah. So far, so good. All right. Well, let's hope it stays that way. And speaking of phishing attacks, uh, I, did you guys cover this yet? That, uh, apparently the hackers that stole the Twitter employee credentials did it by phone phishing. Yeah. Yeah. We covered that on today's cyber wire.

Um, and, uh, also included a little bit of, uh, speculation from Graham clearly, uh, from smashing security, who was saying that he suspects that it was, uh, probably a tech support kind of scam, you know, a tech support, uh, services kind of scam, but who knows?

Uh, I mean, that's bold, you know, person to person, but we also know it's effective. Super effective. Yep. No, it's, it's, it's one of the ways because nobody expects it. Nobody expects the Twitter inquisition. Yeah. Yeah.

And, uh, so, you know, the, uh, the criticism continues toward Twitter for having these tools available to so many people. Um, but, uh, it seems as though maybe there was some lateral movement done within the organization.

So, which, which again, right on brand for these types of people. They try to hit somebody in the organization, uh, who's, uh, just gives them access and then they pivot from there or move laterally within the organization and, and until they get what they want.

Um, yeah, just basically, uh, you know, picking up information along the way on who's in the organization, what they're doing in the organization and blah, blah, blah, things like that. You know, once you get the company Rolodex, you can at least have some kind of idea of who you need to talk to and who's in what department and things like that.

So, yeah, it's, it's, I, and anybody who's not read any of Chris Hadnagy's work yet, go, go get all of Chris Hadnagy's books. Apparently not his first one. He's not too happy about that one anymore. It seems to be about outdated, but, um, but he's, he's literally written, you know, the books on social engineering and, uh, he's the guy to go to for sure.

And, um, check out his podcast as well. The social engineering podcast. Yeah. Yeah. I would say also on Twitter, uh, if you follow Rachel Toback, um, she is a champion, uh, social engineer, uh, in the, the competition in black hat.

I think she's won, she's won at least two years in a row, maybe three. I can't remember off the top of my head, but, uh, she's been following this Twitter thing in particular, very closely. So if you want to follow the details of this and get her expert take on it, and she is an expert on it. Uh, Rachel Toback is a good follow over on Twitter as well.

Awesome. Yeah. Last time I saw Chris Hadnag, he was at Derby Con and we got absolutely blotto in the green room for crystal method. Oh man. They, I tell you, Dave Kennedy knows how to buy the right whiskey for his bands and we drank all of it.

I don't know that I've met Chris in person. I've interviewed him a few times. We've talked about his books, but I can't recall if we've actually met face to face. It's hard to remember. Sometimes you'd remember. He's a big dude. He's like six, three and a giant of a guy.

And I tell you, and I tell you what, we went out to dinner and I have not laughed that hard in years. You know, he comes off as pretty straight laced when he's talking social engineering and all that stuff. But he is one of the funniest people you'll ever meet. Okay. Well, I'll have to make a point of that when we're all able to get together again.

Yeah. If RSA ever meets it in person again, I'll have to try to make that happen. Yeah. Hanging out with Chris was one of the highlights of Derby Con. There were many, many highlights at Derby Con, but yeah, just hanging out with Chris and hearing some of his stories. I mean, the guy's just funny as can be.

Yeah. I'll bet. I'll bet. So a little bit more news. I'm sure you guys covered this one as well. Rite Aid deployed facial recognition systems in hundreds of U.S. stores. Now, this one, it doesn't surprise me on this one. So they had it in more than 200 stores across the United States and they were using it for theft prevention, basically.

So if you came into the store at one point, you were a jerk or you stole some Skittles, they flagged you in the database. So when you came back in, if the facial recognition software grabbed you and said, hey, is this this guy, then the people behind the counter could match it with the previous photos, see if it's you, and then give you the boot.

I don't know if I feel too bad about this because I know I'm on camera at all these different stores and it's not like they're profiling you for any specific thing unless you've done something nefarious already and you're already in the database, then they use humans to match it.

What do you think about this? Well, have you ever worked retail? Yes, I have. I have too. And I remember back in the, again, when I was in college, so let's say, you know, late eighties to early nineties, I worked at, wait for it, Radio Shack at the mall in Columbia.

You got your geek card for that one. I did. I did. I actually, it was, I enjoyed the job very much. In fact, it was a job that I had coveted throughout my childhood because, you know, Radio Shack was where the computers were when I was a little boy. My first computer was a TRS-80. So when the opportunity came to work at this Radio Shack, I took it and I enjoyed it very much.

I liked helping people. I must have written up thousands of little diagrams to help people hook up their VCRs and, you know, be able to watch one channel and record another and get them all those kinds of things. But it was a very busy store in a very busy upscale mall.

And we knew who some of the bad guys were. You know, there were folks who came and all the mall merchants knew who some of the bad guys were. There were people who, when they came into your store, you, everybody was put on alert. You know, we couldn't kick them out necessarily, but it was basically keep an eye on that guy or that group of guy.

Cause they usually traveled in groups. Yep. Packs to like distract one person and then the other one pockets. Exactly. Someone would come up to the counter and keep you busy by asking to see this, that, and the other. And meanwhile, uh, the partners were making their way around the store, stuffing things in their jackets or who, you know, whatever.

Um, but one of the things that we did was when we saw those guys come in the store, somebody started rolling one of the camcorders that was behind the counter because we didn't have, this was before video surveillance was pervasive the way it is and cheap and all that kind of stuff.

So we didn't have video cameras all over the store, but someone would do that. Uh, and sometimes they'd make a big show out of it so that the, the folks coming in the store would see that they were rolling the video camera. Yep. Um, so I, I guess it's a long way to say that to me, this seems kind of like that.

Uh, if you're using it to flag known troublemakers and you're putting known troublemakers into a database just to alert the humans to, to keep an eye on someone, I guess I don't have so much of a problem with that.

The problem I would have where it would be if a system like this were automated and it said, uh, you know, Hey, anytime someone who's black or Latino comes in the store, a big siren goes off or something, you know, like, yeah, which obviously, you know, yeah, obviously, but no, no, no, but I'm, I'm, I'm exaggerating, but we know that these systems have biases against, you know, groups of people.

They, they don't do well with people of color as well as they do with white folks. So, um, I don't know. What do you think? I'm, I'm okay with it for theft prevention. That's right. Yeah. You know, and, and to protect the staff. So if you know that somebody has been violent in the past, then you can get them the hell out of the store.

Like you are not allowed to shop here. People can be put on a permanent ban list for a store. Right. And they get the boot. I am fine with that. What if you get a false positive? Well, the, the point is, is that that's why there's the human interaction between, you know, you see the previous photo, you see the next photo.

Somebody has to look at it before you act on it. It's not like whoop, whoop, whoop. Let's call in RoboCop. You know, it's like, okay, a manager looks at it and says, looks like that guy. Let's, let's go talk to him. You know? Right. Are you so-and-so? Yeah.

Um, yeah. You know, I can see where there can still be, you know, human level false positives, but and even then it's, even if you're just, if it's for theft prevention, then you just watch them, you know, it just gives you another, it gives you another target to look at and say, Hey, look, this person might be stealing some stuff.

Let's keep an eye on them. Cause I worked in an art gallery and I wish we'd had this because every year at Christmas, there was this group of people that would come in and they would always, and they always got away with it too, because we were so packed, they would steal an air taste statue, usually a, you know, 15 to $20,000 statue.

Wow. And the art gallery was self-insured. So basically we had to eat it every year. How, what are we talking, I'm not familiar with this. How big a statue are we talking about? It's about 18 inches tall, made of bronze. Okay. And, uh, they're, they're heavy as hell. They're like, you know, 40 or 50 pounds, but you know, you can easily put one, this is in Chicago.

So everybody's wearing trench coats. So it's easy to grab one, put it in your trench coat and walk out the store, you know, cause you know, the people in the front are looking out the store. We're not looking behind us. And then people like all the gallery personnel are dealing with people. So we can't watch everything all the time.

So if we'd have been able to like get them on video one year, tag them and know who they were, then, you know, for five years, we probably wouldn't have lost five statues. And it was like clockwork. And I mean, the first, the second time it happened, my, my dad was the, the director of the gallery and he came out and goes, son of a bitch in the whole store turns and looks at him.

And we're like, what? My dad, my dad has an anger management swearing problem. He likes to swear a lot because he followed up the son of a bitch with a lot of MRFs and things like that. And, uh, there was, there was lots of yelling, um, but once they're out the door, you can't do anything.

Oh, and here's the funny part. My dad used to sell security systems for West tech and Westinghouse back in the day. And the most important thing back then that you could do is take two little white columns and put them on either side of the door. Didn't have to be hooked up to anything. And your, your loss rate would go down 80% because they thought that the tags were on things, but the people who stole the air taste didn't care.

So they figured out that, that, that, that was security theater, but, uh, all the little stuff that used to get stolen, it stopped. It was pretty cool. Huh? Yeah. That's interesting for us. We, it would be, um, but besides the little, little things, you know, cables and headphones and things like that, the, the big stuff people wanted to grab at the time were VCRs.

Hmm. Not the remote controlled cars. No, uh, no, not so much. I mean, we only had those out around Christmas time. I suspect we probably did lose, but Christmas time was so busy that no one would miss a remote control car being gone, but it was more of the slow time during the week or something when somebody would come in and a VCR was just small enough that someone could tuck it under their, you know, inside their jacket under their arm and try to get out the store with it.

So, you know, we wouldn't play these. Assuming it's VHS, not Betamax. Yeah. Right. Exactly. You're right. Right. Really a quad machine out of the corner. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, that was the big thing. Like you said, you weren't allowed to chase them down or anything like that.

So, but if somebody did that, you know, everybody who was on duty got a nice talking to about not, you know, following, not being more vigilant. And we were all like, well, what are we supposed to do? We're doing the best we can.

So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Well, I got a quick shout out here to, uh, Rajiv, AKA Awara from our Clash Royale clan, because, uh, we've already recorded our closing shout outs for the week. So I had to, had to slide that one in there.

Welcome to the clan. And, uh, he's kicking ass for us. So I just, we had to give a shout out. Well, before we go, I know, uh, you guys, uh, are touching on this, uh, Macintosh, uh, emulator that's been making the rounds. Yes.

Uh, and I have to say it caught my attention and I've been having fun with it as well. Uh, as someone, I, you know, the Macintosh, the Quadra 700 may very well be my favorite Macintosh. Really?

I got two. I got two. I got the Quadra 650 and the Quadra 840 AV. The 840 AV I loved, except when you had to change the RAM on it and then you got just bloody knuckles because the way they put the logic board. But the 840 AV, I loved that machine.

Yeah, that was a good machine. I think the, the Quadra 700 was just, I did a lot with that machine. I had it for a long time. I think it was the first machine I ever bought to do professional work on it. I played a ton of Marathon on it. Oh yeah, Marathon. And, uh, I, I clock chipped that machine, you know, they came out of the box at 25 megahertz and I had mine running at 33, just setting the world on fire back when you'd, you know, you'd replace the crystal on the motherboard and get more speed out of it.

So it's doing that. But, uh, anyway, this emulator is a lot of fun and it's just so interesting to look back and think, to see how primitive the interface was, but remember how advanced it was for the time compared to everything else out there. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And I'm curious why they went with 8.1 instead of system nine. Hmm. I don't know. It's an odd one. Maybe, uh, Apple doesn't reach back so far and trying to clamp down on things. I don't know. Oh, maybe, maybe. Cause, uh, I tell you, I mean, I toyed around with the idea of getting an old Mac just to have it and be able to run some of the old stuff.

Cause that's what Brian and I talked about in, uh, apps and doodads is that, uh, it can't run shockwave and, uh, I want to be able to run, I want to, I want to be able to run Netscape 4.0 and shockwave. So all my old movie websites work so I can, so I can screen cap them.

Do you remember, uh, what was it? Was it dark castle? Was that the one with the lacrosse that flew around and you go, I don't know, somebody listening knows what I'm talking about. I think it was dark castle. It was a little, you know, you, you had to, it was kind of like, um, Prince of Persia.

It was a, it was before Prince of Persia, but it was that sort of thing. I know the game. Yeah. Yeah. I know the game you're talking about. Yeah. I thought you were talking about Darklands for a second, which was another, that was a four player game, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of fun and amazing that you can run these sorts of things in JavaScript under emulation and it just works.

I know. But yeah, speaking of that old stuff, I went to a steam and, and got the original Darklands because we had it, my friend Bob and I, who does our, our VO and it was like a 24 floppy disc game. It was a, it was a PC game, but you know, you'd get to a different level and then you would have to swap your, swap your discs out to get to the next level.

And on the last disc, there was a bug because we had version 1.0 and it crapped out at the end. Every time we played that whole game through for like maybe two years, we would get through it and it would die at the same spot.

And it was so annoying. So I went to steam and I got it, I loaded it up and then I started to play it and I'm like, eh, nope. You're not falling for that one again. I got my, well, they fixed it. It is in the, it is in the notes that that bug is fixed, but like I'm playing it and it's just like, you know, it was cool to watch the intro sequence again.

It was cool to see the 8-bit graphics and all that. And then when it got to the gameplay part, I'm like, wow, this is painful. I'm going to go play Call of Duty on my Xbox one instead in 4k. Yeah.

Some things are better left to your memory. Like, uh, some of those old games and the movie purple rain, that's to leave it to remember the way that you remembered it back in the day. Cause if you revisit it, you're going to be disappointed. Yeah. Also with Caddyshack and airplane, sadly enough, but I'd agree with Caddyshack.

I'm not sure about airplane. Give it a shot. We covered it on. Does it have legs? I, if you still have fond memories of airplane, leave it. I think top secret still holds up. I've never seen it actually. Oh, top secret is the movie that those guys did after airplane.

And it's kind of, it's even smarter than airplane. It's, it's worth a look. So it's very funny. It's along the same veins, but the jokes are even deeper than they were an airplane. It's, uh, I highly recommend it. Really funny movie. All right. Well, I think we're done with random shit with Dave Bittner this week.

It's right. That's right. Uh, all right. Well, have a good week. I hope Brian is enjoying himself on vacation. I have to say, I'm a little envious that, uh, he gets to do that. Good for him. I hope he gets some rest and relaxation. Look forward to chatting with him when he gets back.

Yep. He'll be back next week. So the gang will be all here. All right, man. Have a great weekend. You too. Originally, I was going to put this guy in as a hero, but that was just going off the headline. Uh, dump man gets public to call his ex-girlfriend impersonating Chewbacca.

Well, on the surface, it sounds pretty good. On the surface, it sounds good. You do find out that he was actually cheating on her. She dumped him because she found out his Facebook account and he was messaging all these other women. So he's kind of a jerk. He also dumped a car with no wheels on her driveway to block her in. Kind of a jerk move.

However, it sounds criminal. I'm sorry. Yes. However, however, the idea of going around town and posting her phone number on leaflets, boasting a $100 prize for the best Chewbacca impression is kind of genius. It's funny. And she even points out the, the poor woman who's dealing with this.

She actually thinks it's kind of hilarious, except for the fact that people are calling it like three in the morning, but people are calling and just making Chewbacca noises into her phone. Kind of funny. Yeah. At least she has a sense of humor about it. She has a sense of humor about it. She sounds like a catch. I think this guy screwed up. Totally screwed up.

I found this one over at the BBC and it's how lockdown, how lockdown, how lockdown, see I got COVID brain. How lockdown. That sounds like your Highlander name. I'm lockdown. Locked in. There can be only one. You bastard. How lockdown may have changed your personality.

And it's a long read. And it's interesting. A lot of it. Tired. Depressed. Well, you know what? Well, then if you want to go there, people who score highly for neuroticism might have particularly struggled in this regard. This trait is associated with a tendency towards negative emotions like anxiety, vulnerability, sadness.

And for you, Brian, irritability. People who struggle with high neuroticism are also prone to creating more stress for themselves, for example, by getting into conflict with other people or by avoiding situations they find threatening. But for the most part, they say that they've done some studies on it, but they were done like after we were in for a month.

And there's no real longitudinal data on it yet. But it's interesting. And they're saying that, yeah, some of the personality traits that may change over time, you may not want to go back to your old you because you might like the new you because a lot of people are becoming more introspective and actually more empathetic and nicer to other people.

Really? Not in Los Angeles? Not as far as I can tell. Haven't seen it. Must be nice. Gonna have to get myself to one of them places. Yeah. Let me tell you where one of those places isn't right now. The Glendale Galleria Parking Garage. I don't know if you looked at these pictures, but I know everybody's itching to get out and try to experience some sort of normalcy again.

But as the title points out from LA Magazine, the Glendale Galleria Parking Garage is officially the bleakest alfresco dining destination on earth. See, I've seen other articles that talk about this, how they took all the tables out and put it in the parking garage. And some people actually had a really good review of it.

So this is just a bad review of it. And, you know, the biggest problem is they didn't take the entire floor because there's still cars there. So you're going to get carbon monoxide. There are cars driving right past you as you eat between the orange traffic cones.

Yeah. And since we do live in Southern California, and that's where the Glendale Galleria is, I have a particular phobia of parking garages because just think about this morning, we had a 4.2 earthquake out here and parking garages tend to pancake and I do not want to be pancaked.

I will do everything in my power to avoid parking garages. And if I have to go in them, I am going as fast as humanly possible to get in and get out. Wouldn't it be ironic if you were eating IHOP in the Glendale Galleria parking garage when you got pancaked? Oh, God.

That was a good one, though. Give you that. Thank you. Closing shout out! So my closing shout is a strange one. This goes to Michael Cuervo from chimneycheckup.net. We had a chimney emergency today, and we had to have someone come out and check it for us.

And Michael, if you're listening, nice to meet you. And if you're in Southern California and you have a chimney and you need it checked up, definitely call Michael. His service is great. He came in wearing a mask, socially distanced the whole time. He was extremely professional, and now we're in the lane to get our chimney fixed, which is great.

Especially since it's going to be 106 this weekend. Yeah, that'll be useful. We're planning for the future, Brian. We're planning for the future. Well, I'll give a shout out to his friend, Jose Cuervo, who's been helping me get through the pandemic. All right.

Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to gog.show slash donate. And if you want to get some merch, go to gog.show slash shop. Toss us a few bucks and buy some shit, and we'll love you forever.

Your support really keeps us going, and we really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 460. 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! Stay grumpy!

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