465: The Best Tech Podcast of 2020

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. Low energy Brian Schulmeister. That's a distinction without a difference. You're always low energy Brian. A little discord follow up since we announced it last week. Turns out it's kind of a success.

There's quite a few people in there. Yeah, I didn't look at the actual. Last time I looked, it was like 50 some. I think it's near 100 at this point. Yeah, it's got to be a lot more than that now. I only looked after day two. So it's fun. It's actually kind of fun. Surprisingly.

Okay. Well, it's nice to be able to talk to people. Dude, I'm stuck like you are inside, but you have people to talk to. Yes, I know. That is the difference. I know. It's cool. It's nice to see so many people interacting and it's nice to see the fans talking to each other, which is great. I like to dip in every now and then, but yeah, I've got so much other stuff going on with kid and trying to be a teacher and chef and home planner and everything else.

It's like, okay, well, in normal times, this would be awesome, but yeah. Well, since it is normal times for me, I think it's awesome. Yes, there you go. Well, I'm glad that we went through with it because people seem to be enjoying it. So feel free to join if you want to. Link is in the show notes. Yes, it is. And a little follow-up on our favorite group of people.

Well, one of our many favorite groups of people. Oh, God. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his anti-vaxxer group is suing Facebook, claiming that fact-checking is censorship. Fact-checking is not censorship.

No, no. It's not. And vaccines are science. So there you go. Just throw that out there. Is Facebook taking down the posts or is it just putting little notifications? What's – let's see. Facebook currently censors children's health defense page, targeting its purge against factual information about vaccines, 5G, and public health agencies.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. My God. How – what's up with Robert Kennedy Jr.? I don't know, man. I don't know. I think all that inbreeding finally got to him. Yeah, well, you know, as we have a long history of hating on anti-vaxxers on this podcast, as they should be hated on, because, you know, hey, look what happens if we don't have one vaccine.

Exactly. I'm just saying. We don't need COVID-19 plus. Yes. So just give it time, though. Yes. Just throw in some measles along top of that. And I just – a little new segment I thought I'd throw in here called, Where Are They Now?

Do you remember Project Libra? Sure do. I remember a lot of banks bailing quickly. And a lot of governments going, hold the phone here, little sucky boy. Let's have a chat. Yes. So they're still trying to do something with it, but they're rolling it back to what it needs to be, which is, you know, a regulated currency because all the banks and all, you know, basically the, you know, the global monetary fund people are just like, you can't do that, Mark.

Stop it. Stop it. So he's now – they've launched a new fintech company. It's actually a group inside Facebook called Facebook Financials. And David Marcus, the co-creator of Libra, is in charge of that new dealio. Well, let's, again, take a quick look at this.

Basically, if you go by the numbers, as so many reporters like to say, it's kind of lazy journalism, but whatever, Facebook would be the largest government on earth. Obviously, it's a failed government, and other governments would not like this government to have its own currency. And we have some more updates on the Apple versus Epic battle, as it were.

Mark Andre actually wrote in and sent us a link. So since he kind of beat me to it, I'll just give him the hat tip and use his link from gamesindustry.biz. And basically, it is an update over who is the judge that will be taking on the case. It's U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers, who took over the case on Wednesday.

And she is known for having ruled in favor of Apple in a very similar case back in 2013. So this looks good for Apple. Back then, an antitrust complaint claimed that Apple was maintaining a monopoly over iPhone apps, leading to consumers being overcharged. The complaint also targeted Apple's 30% cut on the iOS store.

But the judge dismissed the case on the ground that the plaintiffs didn't manage to prove allegations that they have been deprived of lower-cost alternatives, paid higher prices for Apple-approved applications, or had their iPhones disabled or destroyed. So basically, yeah.

And concerning specifically the 30% cut, which is, I think, the one thing that you and I both kind of agree is slightly egregious. The judge said that the fee wasn't charged by Apple, but passed on to consumers by developers, and ruled that consumers can't sue for antitrust violations over passed-on charges. Well, there you have it.

So it's not looking good for Epic. No, it's not. It's not, especially with this judge. I wonder how many palms got greased to get her back on the bench for this one. Yeah. Free iPhone 12s for everybody. Speaking of iPhones, apparently, of course, people who are, just needed a little extra cash right now, have put their iPhones with Fortnite pre-installed on eBay.

And they're charging, you know, anywhere between $1,000 and $10,000 for the phones. Okay. Now, Apple, if they wanted to, could reach into said phones and delete said app, correct? Exactly. All right. So go ahead and spend $1,000 on your phone.

Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't. And it's not like you can play it in airplane mode because it's a multiplayer game. So you kind of got to be on the internet. So caveat emptor on that one. But some people are selling them normally. You know, of course, they're going to put the numbers in for the $1,000 to $10,000 people who will probably never sell it because it's Fortnite.

Play it on your computer for free. Look, there's only one thing you can't get off your iPhone, and that's that stupid U2 album. That fucking U2 album. In the news. Brian, we're going to start off the In the News segment with some sad news.

I'm sorry. Yep. A judge has granted Uber and Lyft a temporary stay on the driver reclassification case. So unfortunately, we did not see the Uberpocalypse yesterday or Lyftageddon, whichever one you want to pick. Because Lyft actually jumped the gun and said that they were going to shut down at $11.59 yesterday, and Uber stayed mum about it.

So they probably knew what was going on. They trusted their lawyers a bit more. Yeah, they did. They did. So because it was all over the news here. But I did watch a lot of protests against Uber and Lyft from the drivers saying, hey, if they've got all this money to put up Prop 22, why don't they use that to, I don't know, pay us so we can have a living wage?

Hundreds of drivers were out protesting. So it's, yeah, you know, we're not too far off on our opinions on this one. Some of the drivers are with us. Well, yeah, and some aren't. I don't quite understand that. But a lot of people vote against their own best interest.

Some people are anti-vaxxers, too. We don't get that one either. Yeah. You know, I'm not surprised that this happened. You know, it felt very forced and very quick. I knew that there would still be appeals processes involved. I'm not surprised that this has been pushed. September is not that far away.

So they have until early September to outline their plans about how they will make drivers employees if they lose their appeal or Prop 22 doesn't pass in California. We shall see what happens. I'm still just shocked at that. Well, why am I so shocked?

Hold on a second. Let me backtrack that a little bit and say I am dismayed but not surprised at the amount of people that are still taking ride shares in the middle of a pandemic. But then again, nobody here is treating it like there's a pandemic going on. Well, we are flattening the curve.

I looked at the numbers yesterday. We are going down a bit in Los Angeles. The curves are going back down. Would you like a little bit of bad news on the side to go with your Sunnyside omelet there, Jason? Last time they went down, they went right back up because we opened up too soon. So I was just going to get to that. But what do you got for me, Brian?

Well, I've got more international news. I was looking at the numbers in Germany and Spain throughout Europe where they did a much better job. And the U-shape is starting to take place. The second wave is starting to hit over there and numbers are rising rapidly. Well, the nice thing about that is they know how to handle it.

So they'll probably clamp it back down and not let it get out of hand. Here's hoping. But it is definitely proof that second wave will happen. I did see on the news this morning that traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels. So it's all for naught. I can 100% attest to that because I've been going down to see my mom on weekends.

And when I first went, it was a 30-minute commute. And it is now back up to the 50-minute drive that it once always was. The way it goes. Yes. Well, Uber can't catch a break. And I'm kind of glad about that. But even though they've got a reprieve and are popping the champagne from the executive suites because they get to continue bilking people and screwing employees, they did have a bit of bad news.

Because a week can't go by without Uber having some bad news, federal prosecutors have charged Uber's former chief security officer with covering up a massive 2016 data breach by arranging $100,000 payoff to the hackers responsible for the attack. The personal data of over 57 million Uber passengers and drivers was stolen in the hack.

They didn't tell anyone. They covered it up. They didn't tell all the reporting bodies they're supposed to tell about this. In fact, only one other person in Uber at the time seems to have known about it. Can I give you one guess who it might have been? Let me guess here. Does it rhyme with old St. Nick?

It does. Travis Kalanick knew about the incident and about the steps that Sullivan took to allegedly cover it up, including making the payout under Uber's bug bounty program. Yeah. So, okay. Oh, my God. Okay. So Joe's been charged.

What do you think the odds are that Travis will get charged as well, since he was basically the head honcho at the time? He knew about it and probably gave the green light. 0.00001. I actually give it a much higher percentage because how much do you want to bet Joe's going to flip on Travis?

He'd be nice. But, I mean, Travis isn't even involved in Uber anymore. But it would be nice if he lost some of his money and maybe his island. Yeah. But here's the other probable scenario. Joe takes the fall, does not blame Travis, and in six years or four to six years when he gets out, goes and lives in his new $20 million mansion that just happened to be gifted to him by Travis Kalanick.

Yeah, I think you're right, sadly. Yeah. Yeah. Snitches get stitches. Yep. And everybody else gets a mansion. So this is a head scratcher for me. We're in the middle of this Prop 22 fight with Uber and Lyft and the gig workers here in California.

And, you know, DoorDash is part of the Yes on Prop 22 campaign. Of course, because they don't want employees. Yeah. Right. So everything is up in the air right now on how gig workers are going to be treated in California. So what does DoorDash do? They launch a new grocery delivery service here in California and a couple other states.

But, yeah, they're pretty fucking confident that they're going to win. Well, on the plus side, since my hot food comes cold from DoorDash, maybe my groceries will still be cold when they show up. That'd be nice. Yeah.

Yeah. Here's what you do. You order a frozen pizza and then it'll just be cooked by the time you get there. That must be the way it's going to work. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is not too surprising. It's expanding their market, doing something that they already do, except for the whole shopping aspect of it. But given the slapdash performance of Instacart and all the other ones, I mean, come on, people.

Jalapeno in a jar versus pickles, different things. Anyways, I'm not, you know, this isn't terribly surprising and good on them. I mean, they're trying to expand their market in an area that nobody is using anymore because everybody is going to the grocery stores and nobody is getting the groceries delivered at home.

That's true. I did find it interesting, though, that they actually do white label their underlying tech to grocery stores. So the grocery stores can do their own delivery service with their own people if they want to. Yeah, which is a nice move. Yeah. Thinking that they're probably on the payroll if it's their own people.

Yeah. Because, you know, you don't go to Ralph's and meet a bunch of gig workers who just said, I only had about two hours today, so I'm just going to come and bag some groceries. Yeah. Don't forget to leave a tip. Five stars for that bag. Come on. So it will be interesting to see how this one plays out.

But I got to say, I have been using DoorDash throughout the pandemic. And when they first started, you know, I told you all about my horror stories on this show. And everything that I seemed to get had been basically put in a dryer and tumbled around and was delivered upside down.

But I've had like one screw up out of the probably 50 deliveries I've gotten from them since the beginning of March. And that screw up was just the guy didn't check the order from the restaurant because the restaurant forgot to put in my hot salsa. And that's been it. So I got to say that their service has really picked up.

And the other thing that they're going to do with this new grocery delivery service is if you do that $9.99 a month program with DoorDash to avoid the fees, that will roll over into the grocery delivery side, too. So you can get your groceries delivered and just have to give a tip, you know, tax and tip.

Right. I think you get that $9.99 thing free if you're a Chase credit card customer because I have it for free. Oh, I'm not a Chase credit card customer. Check all your free deals. Anyway, moving on. Here's my – oh, God, this one is going to – I'm going to have an aneurysm on this one.

Well, good, because they have the technology to check that out for you, Jason. Facebook and NYU are using artificial intelligence to make MRI scans four times faster. That means sloppier and not as – not as detailed? Not compared – not from what they're saying, man.

Not from what they're saying. So they're saying that they're going to use AI. They've trained AI to show what a normal MRI looks like. So they're only going to do one scan out of four, take that, and then from that, they're going to create the MRI from the, you know, from the data set that the AI has, you know, basically learned on.

And because it has an abstract idea of what a medical scan should look like. And then it's going to make predictions on the final output, kind of like – they say, think of it like an architect who's designed lots of banks over the years. They have an abstract idea of what a bank looks like so they can create a final blueprint faster.

So scan one misses the blood clot. And because there is no scan two, three, or four, a normal brain would not have a blood clot there. So there we go. So, yes, it's called interpolation, motherfuckers, which is basically they estimate and construct new data points within the data points they know, which is the learned data set.

And so this makes what they're doing, like you just said, even fucking worse because when you get an MRI, you want them to fill in the bits that they didn't scan with what they think that it should be because I'm there to find out what is.

I want to know what is, not what an AI thinks should be there. It's common sense. So it drives me fucking mad. It's like, okay, why not even just have the person walk by the MRI and hand them what a healthy MRI looks like?

Here you go. Here's your MRI, sir. Have a nice day. Nothing's wrong. Nothing to see here. Yep. Good times. No. Here's the thing. If you think I'm paranoid about AI and digital imaging, I have another article right after this where the – was it the Gigapixel AI who – it's kind of the same thing.

It knows what things should look like and it does more interpolation, smooths out images, fills in lines and things like that. So you can give it a grainy photo and it will, you know, fill it in for you. And so this photographer, I'm not even going to – Jean-Pierre Varacacalo, he threw his image – Not even close.

Not even close. I wasn't even trying. It's early. He threw a picture of a, you know, a cityscape at night through this Gigapixel AI and it filled in parts of his image with Ryan Gosling's face because that's what it thought was there. Now, can you imagine a Ryan Gosling tumor when you get your MRI back?

But you have to admit, the world would be a better place if Ryan Gosling was in every window in every building downtown. If you say so, not particularly a fan myself. But that just shows you that, you know, using AI for interpolation on digital images is not anywhere near perfect.

And what – the Facebook and NYU version just says, hey, you know what? Who cares? We don't need the rest of that data. Screw it, guys. Yep. But here, you can have more people go through and charge more money. That's the upside, they say.

That is the upside. So, yay. Yeah. We can have four times more people getting sick and coming back later going, but the MRI didn't catch it. Oh, well, that's not our fault. Blame the AI. It's kind of the American healthcare system in one story. That's true. It is.

It really is. So – okay. So, moving on a little bit. On August 12th, former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain tweeted from beyond the grave. Yes, he was an ardent opponent of mask-wearing protocols, and he had died from COVID-19 complications two weeks prior.

Would have made it into Moron of the Week, but we're trying to be a little bit less political. This is not a political story, therefore, much. His verified Twitter account, however, ventriloquized his criticism of Senator Kamala Harris. He died of an illness he may have contracted at a Trump rally, but he remains a loyal Trump supporter even in death.

His account has continued to tweet. Many observers found it unnerving. Some compared the use of a dead man's Twitter account to spout pro-Trump propaganda to the digital resurrection of dead celebrities like Tupac, whose music and image continue to earn massive amounts of money decades after his murder. And as tech journalist Kara Swisher put it, the whole affair is peak 2020.

It kind of is, yes. The account was taken over by people known as the Cain Gang, some of his family, some of the people that worked with him, blah, blah, blah. His team and his family, the mission continues, as they say. Now, you have not run social media accounts.

I have in the past, and I've run social media accounts for people that have deceased. It's a couple bands like The Doors and Janis Joplin and Rick James and stuff like that. Now, the difference being, of course, when I ran those accounts, we did not tweet about current events because the person is dead.

We promoted things from the past. We brought up historical things that had occurred, blah, blah, blah. Meet me at Woodstock. Yes. So, you know, and I know that on the right, there's a considerable amount of like, hey, it's his account and his legacy, and his team can continue on to do whatever he wants with it.

I wonder if they would feel the same if all of a sudden there was an official blue checkmarked Abraham Lincoln account who's just started tweeting saying, this party, this Republican party of which I was involved does not resemble anything I believe in anymore. Yes. I suppose the Lincoln Project is doing that.

Kind of. It's an interesting thing because it does – you and I have talked a lot about what happens to our accounts and everything after we pass away. And it's – we're going to have to come to some sort of reckoning about what we're going to do about these things. Well, here's the thing. I'm really not going to care when I'm dead, so fuck it.

But I think it's – I think the comparison to Tupac in here is wrong because you don't have like Jay-Z in the background writing new music and claiming it's Tupac's from beyond the grave.

Yeah, exactly my point. You're not commenting on current events that have occurred after you've passed away. You're just performing your old songs and things of that nature. Yeah. So that's the interesting thing about it. Well, I think from what you're about to tell us in the next story, it doesn't really matter anyway.

No, it doesn't really matter anyways. I found this incredibly disheartening. So Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, other social media companies are trying to take down and fact-check misinformation finally about topics like COVID-19 and the election that are spreading on their platforms. However, complicating that effort is the fact that the majority of Americans on both sides of the political aisle believe that social media companies are censoring political viewpoints, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center.

Pew, pew, pew. About three in four Americans feel it is very likely or somewhat likely that social media sites intentionally censor political viewpoints that they find objectionable, according to the survey. It polled around 4,700 Americans across the political spectrum. While people from both parties thought that social media companies were likely censoring content, Republicans were much more likely than Democrats.

That's 90% of Republicans compared to 59% of Democrats to hold this belief. Here's the thing. Here's two things here. Two things. 4,700 is a pretty small sample size when you figure – when you think about the breadth and the scope of all social media that they're trying to – they're saying Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter and other social media companies.

4,700 is a pretty damn small sample size. And also, I don't think they take into account just the general shittiness of the algorithms. This could not be – or this very well could be just crappy algorithms, which we've complained about day in, day out.

And yeah. Oh, I love a new one too on Instagram. It says you're all caught up when you get to – I was going to bring this up. Okay. This annoyed the hell out of me. How can I be all caught up when I know you're not showing me posts from all of my friends? How can I be caught up? Also, the modification now is you have to press a button to see older posts because otherwise, if you just keep scrolling, it's nothing but promoted and suggested posts.

Yeah. They just rolled that out this week. So now it's just like I'm like, who the hell? I hate that. Well, I actually found a bunch of really good stuff in there and some new follows. So all Rottweiler accounts. But sadly, the algorithm there worked. I mean, granted, I only generally favorite posts with dogs in it.

So it's pretty – I'm a pretty narrow target on that one. But yeah. So I don't know if they put in any type of algorithm bias into their questions. I would love to see the questions on that though. Yeah, me too. And in other famous news today, Apple, the world's most famous company, now has topped $2 trillion in market cap.

Yep. So there you go. I'm not going to lie. Half the reason I'm going to be all right in retirement is I bought Apple early. Not early enough, obviously. But – and I've kept buying Apple. Microsoft is solid, better than most index funds. And Tesla is obviously just going insane right now.

But Apple is by far my star sock. So I'm not complaining too much about this news. And finally, in the news, Airbnb has finally put a global ban on house parties to support social distancing guidelines.

Have they? No, they haven't. Okay. Because I've read this and I'm like, hmm, that doesn't sound like an effective – what they're still allowing sounds like a party to me. Yeah, they are going to impose an occupancy cap of – wait for it – 16 people.

Now, obviously, you have to sign some sort of thing that says these are the people that you're potting with, that obviously, you know, you're not putting people into contact with other people, that you're not seeing on a – surely they have that kind of thing in effect, right? Because nobody's ever lied on a web form, ever.

Well, first off, they don't have that anyways. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't exist. No, by all means, get together with 16 of your not-closest friends and have a party. 16. Again, I mean, I don't understand the world or people anymore.

There is no way in hell I'd put my house up right now. No. No. No way. Like, we're in a pandemic. I'm not going to have a bunch of strangers come live in my house for a while so I can make a few bucks. Exactly. I mean, even what you would spend, you'd have to spend on cleaning products just to make it habitable again.

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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. Do you have any new shows this week, Dave? Oh, you know, yes, but we don't have time to talk about it.

Yeah, we're always adding new things. So just go to thecyberwire.com, check out the latest, and there's always something new. So, yeah. Awesome. I did want to chit-chat with you a little bit about the new Cyber Wire music that you guys rolled out.

Yeah, pretty exciting. I like it. What do you think? I dig it. I totally dig it. Cool. The other one was definitely getting a little long in the tooth, as it were. Yeah, yeah. As somebody pointed out who was not a fan, this is probably two years ago, they said, the Cyber Wire is great except for that damn Hootie and the Blowfish ripoff theme music.

I was like, oh, that cuts a little close. What do you want, man? We had to fiber it. We were just getting started. Yeah, exactly. The old music was library music. We just picked it out of one of the many music libraries. And it served us well over the years. But, you know, as I said in the episode where we introduced the new music, having Elliot join our team.

And he's, you know, he's a real musician from the band The Stone Foxes, which are, you know, a real band that, you know, people buy their records and they've gone on tour and all that kind of stuff. So when we had a talented young man, he really is. So when we brought him on board, that was one of the exciting little benefits that he could write music for us.

And so he's been doing that and he loves to do it. And this has been the main, most public facing result of that. And we're really excited about it. Well, I hope like probably not for his other music endeavor. He got paid for this one. He did. Yes.

Yes, we do. Because we know what happens when people when people announce their extracurricular activities and get roped in to do things for free. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine that paying a musician. Yes. You do what Spotify won't. Right. Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. The cyber wire better than Spotify. Right. That'd be our new tagline. I really wanted to ask, you know, how has the hate been? Because, you know, when we change things around here, you always get the haters coming out. There's been none. Oh, my gosh.

I know. There's been no, nobody has come out and said that they don't like that. We haven't heard anybody say they don't like the new music and no one has said they like the old music better or anything like that. And I think a big part of it was, I think we were very smart in introducing it the way we did, that we didn't just spring it on everybody without giving them a warning.

Yeah, that was nice. That was very nice. It was interesting, too. You did get the one letter from the blowfish. Right. Right. Right. Yes. Yeah. Hootie was nonplussed that we stopped using his theme, but whatever. And go back to singing country music, Darius can.

So we did get a letter from Ralph. He says, hi, Grumps. Seems the San Diego Police Department has been able to secretly unlock iPhones for a couple of years. So this has come out recently that they bought one of those, what are they, the gray device? I can't remember exactly what it's called. Gray key. The gray key, yes.

So they have been using that for over two years now, according to a local report. And the devices, or the department implemented in the technology without notifying the city council. Basically, nobody knew that these people had this because they bought it themselves. The police foundation, not the department, laid out the money for the initial purchase.

Yeah. So I can tell you that the city attorney herself didn't know how many surveillance technology devices that our city is using. And that is, and this is a quote, problematic. That was the thing that caught my eye because the gray key devices are nothing new.

And we've, we've talked about those here before, but the fact that they, that they ponied up and paid for it using foundation money, that seems. Shows intending. Well, and the lack of any knowledge anywhere within the city council or anything means there's no oversight.

There's no transparency. There's no nothing. And no warrants. Yes. The warrant part is the, I think, the issue. So. Are there no warrants? I'm not, I'm not sure about that because I would imagine, I mean, a good defense attorney. Yeah. Well, if there were warrants, then they would know that it existed.

Right? Because the warrant would have to say, we are going to open this person's phone. And then the defense attorney would go, and how? Uh-huh. So. Yeah, I suppose. Don't know. Don't know how that all played out. Yeah. But, yeah, not good. Nope, not good.

But, uh, not unexpected. Not unexpected. And something else that's not unexpected is cops in Miami, New York City, and other places have arrested people using facial recognition technologies. Now, as we've discussed many, many times here on security, ha, uh, yeah, uh, this is not a good thing, and it generally doesn't work.

So, yeah, multiple cities have used different, uh, different competing products, and the only one that has been named is Clearview, which we've talked about because they scraped the three billion images off social media to build their, their database. But we don't even know who the other ones are yet.

So, what do you guys think? Uh, Ben and I discussed this on the most recent caveat episode, the incident in Miami, which was, uh, they went after a woman who was allegedly throwing rocks at police officers. So, this was not a peaceful protester.

If you're throwing rocks at police officers, then, you know, they're allowed to come after you for that. Um, but as Ben pointed out, it's the, it's the velocity at which they can come at you. You know, they, they can't, um, it, it throws off the balance because previously, if a police officer went around with some security footage and went around knocking on doors and saying, do you recognize this person?

Or, you know, does this t-shirt that they're wearing mean anything to you? There's a certain amount of effort that goes into that. And so, that puts the system at a bit of equilibrium. When they're able to run it through, uh, of a, uh, facial recognition system like this, that can, at least throw the traditional equilibrium out of balance.

Yeah. And they show up at your work like three minutes later. Yeah. Well, and, and also, uh, who knows what the accuracy is, especially if we're talking about, uh, a non-white person, you know, a person of color or, or, and even women, that they're not as, um, accurate as they are.

Well, we, we actually do know the accuracy. We've had a couple of different studies and I believe it was like 70% false rates or something like that. Some of them were in the nineties. Yeah. So not very would be the accuracy. Yeah. Now, I guess the flip side of this is if it is a component of an investigation, right?

And they say, okay, it is likely this person. And then they're able to use other photos from the event. They're able to, if they go and knock on that door and they say, is this you? And so basically if they can show their work. Yeah. Yeah. Um, like the FBI did with the, the t-shirt woman we've talked about a couple of weeks ago, they did actual police work.

They used some shoe leather and some brains and figured it out on their own. They didn't use any facial recognition to find her. Right. Right. So I think that that, to me, that makes this a little ambiguous. I have trouble with the ease at which they're able to do this.

I have trouble with the ways in which this can be abused. But in cases like this, where it seems as though it was a piece of a larger bit of police work, um, where there's a good chance that someone was actually up to no good. Um, I don't know. I feel a little more ambiguous about it.

But what if this woman was just a, you know, maybe she was a peacenik and she was, wasn't actually throwing rocks. What if she was there throwing Twinkies? Is there Twinkie recognition built into this? Can they prove that she threw a rock? Do they have said rock to do DNA on? Because, you know, I think everybody should be out there befuddling these systems with a big box of Twinkies.

That'll show them. Jason, a salt with a Twinkie is still a salt. The question that I have and that I'm really curious about is I want to know, I want to see some actual, like, case studies on how these things play out. Where did they get the image that they matched?

Was it from social media? If it was from social media, was the social media locked down? Was it set to private and they were still somehow able to get the image anyways? That's where I'm really curious because I would like to think at this point when people know this stuff is sort of out there and that there are companies, both private and government agencies that are just scraping social media for your photos, why you would still have an open account is beyond me.

But can they get images from accounts that aren't open? Yeah. That's what I really am curious about. Yeah. I mean, you need a court order. But by that point, you already know who the person is. So it's the other way around. So then one has to assume that these people that were caught through facial recognition leave their social media ass open to the wind.

A couple of things come to mind here. One is I was going through – I was using Google Photos recently and I was looking for photos of a friend of mine. I had a friend's birthday coming up and I was looking for some photos to put together, you know, something for this person's birthday.

So I was searching based on facial recognition of this person and it was remarkable to me the degree to which Google Photos could pull this person's face out of distant group shots. Oh, yeah. You know, like even where – if I – at first glance, I wouldn't have necessarily known this person was in that photo.

Google Photos was like, no, that's them. And it was right, you know. Yeah. Have you ever done it on yourself? Because I found a lot of pictures in there that I didn't know that I was in and I'm just like, oh, that's creepy. Look, it's gotten so good that it finds Ryan Gosling in the middle of a city looking out mirrors and windows.

Sorry, that was an earlier story, Dave. The other thing is when these incidents come up, like whenever we see somebody up to no good and there's video of it, you know, a police officer doing something wrong or a citizen doing something wrong. Inevitably, over time, over the course of a few days, there's always multiple angles that show up.

And I think that just speaks to, as we've said here many, many times, the Panopticon, that there's just footage rolling – the corner of every building has a camera attached to it. Well, and everybody, especially at anything kind of monumental or whatever, has their phones out and is recording and they're putting it up on TikTok and Twitter and everywhere, you know.

So you can keep your own house in order all you want, but that doesn't mean there aren't going to be 10 gazillion videos with you in them somewhere if you leave the house. Jason's safe. Yeah, I'm fine. I'm totally fine. Except for the Panopticon of Chinese security cameras in my studio.

God forbid Bam Bam ever commits a crime, though. Oh, man, she's hosed. She's hosed. Never should have left that open, man. Should have shut that down and made that private, Jason. I know. God, all those tattoos she has, too, man. I know she's in the database. What a good girl.

Yeah. So let's talk about this next botnet, Dave, because this one has me a little scared. Okay. It's a new P2P botnet, and it infects SSH servers. And it seems to be really hard to find and also hard to get rid of if you don't know exactly what to look for.

Yeah. It's, like, as soon as I did this, I posted it to a couple places, and everybody's like, oh, shit, I haven't updated my SSH server in a decade. Right. Right. And it's running on Linux machines. Yep.

Which means that there are machines that have quite a lot of horsepower that are vulnerable, you know, as opposed to lots of the botnets which run on, like, IoT devices, which, you know, don't have the power that, say, something in a server rack would have.

Yeah, because, I mean, I've got, like, a couple of Linux servers that I just keep up to have, like, single-page things on. And I never go in and update those things. And so I just went in, and I'm like, I'm running Cent 6.2. That's kind of long in the tooth. And I'm not going to, like, go update the whole OS for a one-page website.

But, you know. But you should. I know you should. I just did a little yum update, and it took, like, an hour because everything had to update. So, like, at that point, I'm like, well, has it been compromised? What do I got to do to figure out if it's been compromised? Because this botnet, it runs in memory, doesn't it?

Yes, that's right. Yeah. So you can reboot it, and it'll kick it out. But it still leaves, basically, a certificate on the machine or a SSH key on the machine so it can just get back in when it wants to. So you've got to be able to go find that SSH key and make sure that that is, you know, purged as well.

Right. They're calling it FritzFrog. So if you want to search around and find out more about it, that's the name to look for. It's the folks over at Gardacore are the ones who published the research. And so far, it just looks like the bad guys are using it for cryptojacking, but that doesn't mean it can't be used for other things.

So, yeah, it's an interesting one. Seems to be the new stuff. And if they're smart, you know, because, like, all of my servers have built in, you know, just alerts if the processor goes over a certain amount of processing power for a certain amount of time. So, you know, if I'm pegged at 100% for more than 10 minutes, I'll get a text message saying, hey, what's going on?

You might want to check this. Right. But if they're smart, they'll be like, you know, since it is a crypto mining thing, if they're smart, they're just going to, like, keep that processor threshold low enough not to trigger any alerts. So, it can just sit there and run on, you know, these machines without anybody ever knowing.

Yep. Yep. And if they didn't before and they listened to the show, now they know. Shit. Yeah, I'm sure that's all the best botnet coders are listening to grumpy old geeks to get upgrade tips on their software.

No doubt. Our stats in Russia have been going up. Yeah. That's all right. Well, good. Well, good. Welcome, comrades. Welcome. I found this one this morning, and it's not technically cybersecurity, but it is kind of security, and it is kind of funny.

Two Facebook security staffers have been accused of taking part in a plot to obtain concealed weapons licenses with false info when they worked for a Facebook contractor. And now some of them actually worked for Facebook, but we don't know if they still work there or not. But, yeah, they tried to basically bribe somebody that worked in a sheriff's department to put the paperwork through for a concealed carry permit because here in California, the only way to get those is from a sheriff.

So that's why they had to go that route. But somebody apparently blew the whistle on them. And there's some interesting things here because I'm figuring the Facebook executive protection team probably doesn't have to go too far out of its way.

To get concealed carry permits. I mean, these guys are like, what, ex-Massad and stuff like that. So why are these guys going around, you know, trying to backdoor to get these concealed carry permits? Is it actually for Facebook? Maybe these guys have got something iffy going on in their past where they would fail any kind of background check.

Could be. Could be. Could it be just to speed up the process? I don't know. Maybe Facebook was just like, hey, man, just get it done. Right. Or probably the contractor, AS Solution, probably said, hey, just get it done because we need to get this to keep the contract. We need to have people that have concealed carry permits on the Zuck detail.

And if we don't have enough people with that, then – or if you want to be on that detail and get a raise, then, you know, you need your CCW to get going. We're rolling out single login to Oculus soon, and we're expecting a lot of trouble from those guys. Exactly. Right.

I love it. So, I don't know. I just thought this was really interesting. What do you guys think? Yeah, I'd go Oxum's razor. I just think these guys probably had something shady going on in their past and wanted to get around it as quickly as possible and just get the job because jobs are scarce.

Yeah, it was a $90,000 bribe that they put out. I've known people that have bribed – don't wait. I didn't say that out loud. I've read stories about people that have bribed sheriff's departments for far less than that to get their concealed carry permit. Well, and that made me wonder, like what makes me speculate, I suppose, is a way to say it.

Is this a common thing that sheriffs in California are running little side hustles to get – to have things go through? I've read in places that, yes, it absolutely is. It absolutely is. I've read at least 10 articles of people that have done this.

Wow. That's – Interesting. Yeah. That's interesting. A little disconcerting, I suppose. California has no statewide governing board for the concealed carry permits. There's a group of states that you can go get a concealed carry permit in one state and it's good for like 25, 30 states.

So you can carry it around the country, but you have to like make sure you take it off as you cross the border to go into one of the states that doesn't have it, you know? Wow. All right. There you go. Everybody's got something to hide. These guys just can't hide a gun anymore.

So there you go. All right. And this last article I put in here I just thought was a fantastic read. It's called The Case of the Top Secret iPod. Did you guys get a chance to read this one? Yeah, I did. It is interesting. Yeah, the guy who worked on the iPod, one of the original engineers of the iPod, said that a couple of guys from DoD came in and Apple helped them create like some top secret iPods that nobody even knows what's inside them.

But the guy thought it was a Geiger counter. But if you read the comments, the smart people in the comments have pretty good cases to say that it wasn't actually a Geiger counter. There are smart people in comments? Yes, surprisingly. Okay. I did not read the comments because that is a policy.

That I adhere to and it served me well throughout my life. But maybe I should read these then. What do they think it might be? They don't know what it is, but they think that the shielding on the back of the iPod, the metal shielding, would pretty much prevent it from getting any accurate readings. And that there are other ways to get the readings that they need and the types of readings that they need.

It's like you're not going to walk around and get, you know, dosimeter readings from everything around you because you don't need them. All you need to know is like yes or no. If there's radiation here, then you pretty much have a match. You don't need to like trace it over time like they were trying to do in the article with, you know, writing to the database and stuff like that.

But it was still a fun read. Yeah. What I thought of when I was reading through the article before I got to the comments or actually before I got to the part in the article where the person telling the story speculated that it was a Geiger counter. I figured that it was just some way to install something on this iPod where, you know, somebody plugs the iPod into their computer to sync their music and now you own their computer.

You know, to me that seemed the most obvious thing where you pack up this iPod, you put it in a – somehow you make it so that when so-and-so in wherever foreign country goes out to buy an iPod, this is the one they get. You know, no matter how they do it and they get a package that looks just like a regular iPod, functions like a regular iPod but it has this secret payload.

You know, we've heard of cases like that with other computer hardware with laptops and so forth where somebody orders a MacBook Pro. It arrives fully sealed as if it came from Apple but inside there are some extra little tidbits that may assist.

That was – that's the NSA basically. Yeah. Read that from the Snowden docs. I can't remember the name of the group that did that but – because it's been a couple years now. But yeah, that's a thing that they do. But it seems like – since it was the DOD, it seems odd. You know? It wasn't the DOE, was it?

It was the DOE, Department of Energy. Weren't these guys from the Department of Energy? They were from a contractor that worked with the Department of Energy. Yeah, they were a contractor, right. Yeah. It was like – which one was it? It was – wasn't it like Bechtel? I think it was Bechtel. Yeah, it was Bechtel. Bechtel, yeah. Yeah, yeah, right, Department of Energy.

Yeah, well, I mean they cover a lot of different things and, you know – What's left of them. Yeah. Yeah. So, yes, but a really fun read, fun to speculate what it could be and it was interesting.

I guess Apple's participation, however limited, was kind of interesting to read too. You know, how do you – how do you have some outsiders come into an office from time to time and how does that not create scuttlebutt all over the office as to who are those two clowns, you know?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Interesting stuff. Interesting stuff. If any of our listeners has any theories on what it could be, then please let us know, funny or not, funny or real, we'll take them. I like the fact that you just opened this up to send us your conspiracy theories.

Yes. Wonderful. Hey, man, it's – let's work for us. You need a special email address for that. Conspiracies at GOG.show. QGOG. That's why we should go. QGOG. QGOG.

Very nice. Very nice. All right, guys. Well, that's all I got today. All right. Very good. Well, take care. I'll talk to you guys next time. All right. Talk to you next time. Apps and doodads. My Oculus Quest arrived.

Brian? How's your neck feeling? Well, so far so good because all I've had time to do is actually set it up and watch a few movies on it because my bedroom doesn't have enough space for it because of all the dog beds and everything in there. But I did get to wear it for a bit and look around and watch a couple, you know, like cool, immersive videos.

I got to say, man, it's spooky cool. It really is. That's funny because we were talking about it or you were talking about it and some of our fans were talking about it on the Discord channel. And I just saw that one thing about hang a brick off the back of your head to offset the weight so you feel more comfortable longer.

Yeah, but it's smart, though. It's a power brick, so it will actually run longer, too. So you plug it into the power so it'll keep going. It's, you know, just a little cell phone juicer battery, which I have the exact size. So I'm going to try that. It's not that heavy, though. And the great part about it is I put in the little glasses adapter.

I can see perfectly in the thing. It's great. I've never had a VR, like, goggle that actually fit with my glasses. So everything was crisp and sharp. And I put that thing on and I was in another place. And when I took it off, it was just, it was trippy coming back, even though I hadn't moved.

But it's really strange. I got to say that the technology has come a long, long way. Right. And I really like this one because it's, you know, it's untethered. Everything's on the, in the headset itself. Right. And in the controllers. But it does have a cool way for me to actually run VR games on my PC and tether them to the Quest so I can actually get even better games and play, you know, higher end ones, which will be pretty fun.

So I'm looking forward to it. I picked up a game already that I'm going to try this weekend because yesterday I was going to, I was going to beta test it and have a much better review for it. But I had to spend the time actually cleaning my garage to make a space big enough so I could actually use it. And by the time I was done, I'm like, oh, Jesus, I'm going to bed.

Forget this. But of course, while my quest was in the mail, I got a notice on Twitter from a bunch of people bitching about this. And it was a blog post from Oculus saying, a single way to log into Oculus and unlock social features. And of course, what that means is they're going to force people who have an Oculus to now use Facebook as a login.

And they're going to merge your Oculus account and eventually get rid of it in two years. And there's an article over at Ars Technica where it says, why the face bookening of Oculus VR is bad for users, devs and competition. Yeah. Fortunately, I still have my thing.

Quick question. Who owns Oculus? Facebook. Okay, then. Which is why I'm not surprised one bit. I saw it come through and I'm like, well, that's kind of shitty. But then I'm like, but it's not unexpected. Makes perfect sense. Yeah. You know, you know, that whole thing where companies should be separate.

Yeah. That's probably one of them that might have been might want to be spun off eventually to just saying. Yeah. But so far, so good. I, I, I look forward to not being here for a while. I just wish I could do it until like, say, December and not come back out. Yeah.

I have more reviews later as I try it and see if I have a neck brace or not by next week. That'll be interesting to see. Just in news of the weird, I love this little story. The new Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is apparently quite good and lets you take virtual trips to anywhere in the world, including the private island that was owned by the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

As the people of the internet are showing, people are gathering at Epstein's Island in Microsoft Flight Simulator and solving this case ourselves. Hey guys, I hate to break it to you. They're gone. Everybody left. The little girls went home and growed up. It's just funny what people do.

And in, in retro news, BlackBerry phones are back. Sort of. Not really. Yeah. I don't know. BlackBerry hardware is back from the brink of extinction. Once again, today, the security startup Onward Mobility announced plans to release a new 5G BlackBerry smartphone with a physical keyboard.

It could arrive in North America and Europe as soon as the first half of 2021. Onward Mobility CEO Peter Franklin says the newest BlackBerry will be both sleek and secure. The company plans to work closely with BlackBerry and FIH Mobile Limited, a subsidiary of Foxconn Technology Group. Now, this isn't the first time the BlackBerry has come back.

The BlackBerry was leased out by TCL a couple of years ago. They agreed to manufacture two BlackBerry branded phones. But in February, they decided not to renew the deal with BlackBerry. And as of this month, it stopped selling the devices. So here we go again. You know, I have a soft spot in my heart for BlackBerry.

I loved having my BlackBerry back in the day, but I will never have a BlackBerry again. I never had a BlackBerry, believe it or not. They were great, man. They really were. Everybody loved them. I had, you know, I skipped it because I had a sidekick for far too long. I loved my sidekick, though.

That thing was way too much fun. But yeah, I think I went from the sidekick to the Razer and then just never looked back. Yeah. And then I think I went from the Razer to the iPhone. I kept that. I still have a Razer around here somewhere. But Seth Miranda saw the new Razer in person with the foldable screen.

So that's pretty cool. That's cool. I'm still not buying it because it's like $1,400 for a novelty. Fuck that. And it runs Android. Yeah, it's Android. So, nah. No Android for me. Now, this one is really bad for Adobe. Adobe accidentally deleted people's photos in the latest Lightroom update.

Now, this is Lightroom for iOS and iPadOS. Yeah, if you were using Lightroom and you were saving photos just in the app itself, well, they did an update and deleted everything. If you were still storing your stuff on the Adobe Cloud, your stuff was fine.

But yeah, anything that was in-app is now out of the app. Gone. Gone, daddy, gone. Unrecoverable. So lots of people are pissed off. I can imagine that, but why are you doing that anyway? Just out of curiosity, if you were one of the people that were, you know, affected by this, just let me know why you were doing that and not posting them maybe to your photo roll or at least iCloud storage or any other storage.

Yeah, you didn't touch your photo roll, right? You'd think that for the most part you'd be safe. What have you always said, Jason? If you don't have three copies, you have no copies. Yep, exactly. And they also lost, this guy says he lost hundreds of dollars worth of paid presets. Well, if you paid for them, shouldn't you be able to load them again?

You'll be able to get those back. Yeah, I'd imagine so, you know, recover purchases is pretty a thing or it's a digital copy. It's a preset. You should be able to get that again. I'm just saying. Yeah. Big foobar, but you should have been covered for it. Yeah. But yeah, it's still a shit move by Adobe to not catch that one.

Well, I mean, shocking. Adobe not doing something great. Yeah. Well, this next one is just, I threw it in here for shits and giggles. Sonic's new home cubicle is a disheartening glimpse at our work-from-home future. This is the Komaru.

It is a $835 cubicle for your house. I looked at it. It's actually kind of cool. I like it. You know, on the one hand, it did give me the sads because, you know, I can imagine these in almost every house now because this is going to be kind of our new reality.

But as somebody who's worked at home for 20 years, I went, hey, that's kind of cool. Yeah. And I like how they designed it with pegboard so you can, like, you know, put hooks and stuff and hang things off of it. I'm like, man, this is actually a really good design for cubicles of the future. Unfortunately, not good for a podcaster.

That's a lot of sound bounce. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to get that if you're a podcaster. But if you're not, it's only available in Japan right now, but I'm sure it will eventually make its way over here. But it looks pretty easy to make. So you could probably just go down to Home Depot, since you have probably the time on your hands if you're looking for a home cubicle, and put one of these together for probably like $150.

The fact that IKEA has not rolled out one of these yet called, like, the Sadu is shocking to me. Give it time. Give it time. Oh, for fuck's sake, Brian. It's like 2020 is not messed up enough.

And I know this story doesn't take place until 2021, but it is a glimpse of our future. Florida is releasing almost a billion gene-hacked mosquitoes into the wild. First off, why are we gene-hacking mosquitoes? Secondly, do we trust Florida at this point?

Well, Florida is going to be Florida, man. Florida is going to be Florida. Florida is going to Florida. Oh, this biotech company, Oxitec, is going to release 750 million genetically modified mosquitoes over the next two years. And the EPA has approved this.

So that's interesting. Yes, they're trying to target a certain strain of mosquitoes, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which I'm sure I didn't get right. But it basically carries a bunch of diseases. So what they're trying to do is stop the breeding of it.

So it's like, I mean, I understand the concept, but come on, guys. Right now, you really think this is a good time to be doing this? Just saying. Just saying. Yeah. I'm just concerned. You know, we always talk about unintended consequences.

How much study have we put into this? Well, there are previous trials of this one, Brian. They've used this in Brazil. And 18 months later, though, the population bounced right back. And New Atlas has reported that the genetic hybrids turned out to be even more resilient to future population control attempts.

Meaning that they were more resistant. We tested this and it didn't work? No, they made super skeeters. That was the side effect. They made super skeeters. I'm never going to Florida again. Well, you should never go to Florida anyway. Trust me. There's Disney World. I have a kid.

Yeah. Well, you know, just tell them Disney World was destroyed in the flood and Disneyland is just going to have to do. Yep. Oh, boy. You can go see Mickey Skeeter. We're so fucked.

I know. Closing shout outs. Quick shout out to Herman Miller again. They did come and finally got the replacement parts. And I'm basically sitting on a brand new seven-year-old Herman Miller chair. This is awesome.

I love it. So thank you so much. I mean, look, you get what you pay for. That warranty on these chairs is amazing. So got to love that. Also, a shout out to my kid who in the future may listen to this podcast and realize how dumb his dad was. Happy birthday, kid. I can't believe we made it four years.

Don't. And shout out to all of our Discord people. Come on, guys. Join us. GOG.show slash Discord. It's a rip-roaring good time for a chat room without... It's not what it is. And a shout out.

Happy 40th to Thomas Benjamin Wilde Esquire, who wrote my favorite song of the pandemic, No More Fucks to Give. And he spent his birthday with friends masked up at Bletchley Park, which I'm very jealous of because I always wanted to go there. Very cool. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister.

And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. This show is a labor of love, but your support keeps the show going. If you like the show, please visit GOG.show slash donate to help us out. We'll love you forever. Or visit GOG.shop and pick up some good old-fashioned GOG swag.

And if you can't do that, then please pass the show along to a friend. Word of mouth is the only way the show grows, so spread the grump far and wide. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 465. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, donate to the show, buy our swag, and get links to stuff we like.

Stay grumpy. I've known what fucks to give. My fucks have all been spent. They fucked off from the building, and I don't know where they went. I've no more fucks to give. I've no more fucks to give.

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