467: A Desire for Desires

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. Gordon Morgan. Hello. Apparently that 4 or 5 a.m. thing didn't work again. Not so much. Okay, okay. You just fall into another, you know, set of routines and monotony, don't you?

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, pretty much. There you go. Yeah, we got some stories about that today, which would be great. A little follow-up. Tesla has had another car crash. Right. But, and also, again, well, actually the first car crash that we covered, it was debunked that the guy was watching Harry Potter movies when he basically got his head chopped off by the semi.

But this guy, nope, he admitted it. He ran into a couple of cop cars. Don't. Oops. I hope he was watching Speed. I was thinking Crash. Oh, that's good, too. Yeah. Yeah, I thought that would work out. Or, you know. There's a cannonball run. I mean, there's lots of.

Oh, yeah. See? Oh, God. We were talking about that on the Discord channel. Exactly. That's why it came top of mind. Yeah. That would be fun. That would be a fun watch again. But, yeah, the guy turned on his autopilot and then proceeded to watch a movie on his phone and voila, hit a car. Hit a cop car, nonetheless.

Which then hit another cop car. Keystone cops. There we go. Yeah. Well, you know, you, uh, we're not ready for prime time with these things, are we? 20 years. 20 more years. Except for the fact that Tesla's rolled them out and people are using them.

Yes. And how is that going, Elon? What, are we supposed to have, uh, what, level five this year? Uh, I think his argument will, of course, be, we'll look at the amount of, uh, hours that we have logged without an accident. In the news.

Uh, and further, this technology isn't quite there yet and what could possibly go wrong. Uh, Google's Nest Hub is, uh, going to be rolled out in tons and tons of hotels, assuming we're ever at a hotel ever again. Yeah, what's a hotel? Yes, but, uh, if we do have hotels ever again and we go to one, you might walk into your room and find their, uh, find the Google Assistant with its camera sitting right there in your room.

Just what I want when I visit a hotel room is a camera in my room. That we're not in control of and we don't know anything about the IT department and we don't know how it's been set up and we don't know what they've done to it. That sounds like a great plan, doesn't it? I don't know the first thing that I would do if I walked in and saw one of these things, I'd unplug it.

I was going to say just unplug it. First, I was thinking, ah, maybe bring some electrical tape, but no, just unplug the damn thing. Yeah, we've all got, we've all got personal assistants in our cell phones now. We don't, we don't need to have this one sitting there. So obviously they're pitching this as it's hands-free hospitality.

You'll have it set up in every room. You'll be able to ask the front desk for wake-up calls or more towels. I don't know why you'd need to ask the front desk for a wake-up call if you've got an assistant there with an alarm clock built into it. You can learn about pool opening times, which is usually conveniently in a sheet right in a binder that's right there.

And then you can set up the system to control smart devices in rooms, including blinds, lights, and the TV. Now, I've gone through my own personal odyssey about trying to get a lady in a tube to control the TV. I wonder if they figured it out. Somehow, I doubt it. I doubt it. So they're saying you won't have to sign into your own account, so your activity won't be tied to your Google account.

But guess whose account it will be tied to if they're smart? The hotel's personal account to collect all the datas. Yeah, no, this is bad. This is a bad idea. Yeah, that's the last thing. When I go into a hotel room, I want complete and utter privacy because it happens in the hotel room, stays in the hotel room.

Yeah, not a good idea. I'm not down with this plan. Well, it'll probably fail before it gets there. I mean, that's how these things usually work. They'll put it in. They'll put a test program in, and then they'll figure out that, oh, this was a bad idea. And then they have to scrap a couple thousand Google Nest Hubs.

But, you know, Google still sells them in the long run. So good for Google. Yeah. And we talked a couple days ago, a couple shows ago. It all starts to blend about the Amazon. Or Amazon. Too many couples with the letter A in them.

Apple. No, not Apple. What's the other one? Adobe. There we go. The Adobe Lightroom feature that launched and deleted everybody's photos because they didn't think to back things up. Well, Canon's got your back now. They have announced a new software integration that will enable automatic Google Photos backup of pictures taken with select Canon cameras.

So no chance of that ever happening ever with one of these new Canon cameras. So, yeah. It's an auto backup feature. Of course. Here's the caveat. It's only available to Google One members. So you've got to sign up and pay. What the hell is Google One?

I've never even heard of that. Yeah, I've never heard of it either, but it apparently gets you up to 100 gigabytes of cloud storage in some premium tier of theirs. Okay. I mean, I pay for two terabytes a month on Google Drive, so I don't know what the hell that's all about. But, yeah, my phone actually automatically backs up every photo that's ever taken straight to Google Cloud right away.

Right. Sometimes when I don't want it to, I have to go delete it. I'm like, I didn't want that in the permanent record. No, no, no. Abort, abort. Yeah, you know, the funny thing is, well, your pictures might be slightly different than mine that are doing that. But the funny, I've set up, like, there's a couple different games on the iPad that I've given to my son that allows him to take, you know, he takes pictures as part of the game and all that sort of stuff.

And it syncs directly to my phone. So I've got, like, 782 pictures of my son with, like, an astronaut's helmet around him as part of one game that have all been put in the cloud. And now I have to go through and delete them all. It's crazy. You don't want to save them for posterity? I want to save one.

He takes 700 in a row. Well, that's good. He's learning his angles. He's got to learn his angles if he's going to make it as an influencer in the social media, you know, world that we have. I was about to say, you're not going to say make it as a photographer, right? Because that's pretty much a dead profession. Yeah, there's three people in the world that can make money as a photographer right now.

So, yeah, pass on that one. This is the greatest article I've ever read, I think, at least this week. This is over at the Register. Facebook apologizes to users' businesses for Apple's monstrous efforts to protect its customers' privacy.

Yeah, the title is genius, and that's basically really all you need to know, doesn't it? Yes, yes. Yes, the new iOS update will rob people of personalized ads, wails the anti-social giant. Facebook has apologized to its users and advertisers for being forced to respect people's privacy in an upcoming update to Apple's mobile operating system, and promised it will do its best to invade their privacy on other platforms.

Well done, the Register. Well done. The funny thing is it's really not all that wrong. No, it's spot on. That's the great part about it. It is totally spot on. And, yeah, here's the thing, though. Facebook is bitching and moaning saying that they could see a 50% reduction in their advertising rates.

Last time I checked, well, the Mac doesn't have anywhere near 50% market share. iOS definitely doesn't have near 50% market share. So where are they pulling this 50% number out of their ass? There's a hell of a lot more Android phones than there are Apple phones.

That's true. I'm sure they'll be fine. I suspect that the idea being advertisers will be a bit – well, we'll find a reason to say to Facebook, hey, you're charging too damn much. Now we know that we can't target certain users anymore. Bring down your prices because they're too damn high.

Yep. Well, not going to shed a tear over this one. Nope. Not me either. I can't wait for iOS 14, personally. I'm looking forward to all these different privacy controls. It's going to be great. Well, go get the public beta. I've learned from you over the years. My life is a cautionary tale for others.

Yes, it is. Not to do such things. So I shall wait patiently. All right. All right. Facebook is doing something sort of kind of good. Not really. But I mean, it's more self-serving than anything else. But good on them for actually trying to go after some of these people. They are suing a man who sold fake Instagram likes and comments as part of a fake engagement service.

This service is called Nakrutuka. And it used a network of bots and automation software to distribute fake likes, comments, views, and followers on Instagram, according to the company. They filed a number of similar lawsuits against developers who misuse data or otherwise violate its terms of service.

Obviously, not enough of them. Could have started with Cambridge Analytica. Yep. Could have. But, you know, earlier this year, the company sued a Spanish developer for selling fake Instagram likes and sued a New Zealand company for its fake Instagram engagement service in 2019. This is all because... Oh, I think I know somebody that used that one.

The New Zealand service. Did you use one too? No, no, no. I used the fake Twitter followers one. Oh, right, right. No, this is the fake engagement companies. So if you buy, you know, say 800,000 fake followers and you need the engagement to look like something's actually happening when you post something.

Because if you have 800,000 followers and you get 20 likes and like one comment, the jig is up. Yes, it doesn't look good. Yeah, but the New Zealand one, I knew somebody that used a service in New Zealand. So, oh, well. Yeah, that's the thing. Once you buy into these things, you got to do the upkeep.

I worked for a client a couple years back, who shall remain nameless, that had a lot of followers and zero engagement. And I asked because I took it over. And I was like, at some point, somebody that you had hired has used a service to get likes, right?

And to get followers, right? Oh, no, of course not. I'm like, well, none of this makes any sense then. None. It's funny. I had somebody I was about to start working with and did just, you know, a cursory dive on their Facebook account. You know, millions of followers, lots of likes, lots of engagement.

And I'm like, why are none of these in English? Why is everybody that likes you from Southeast Asia? Some in Turkey. Turkey is a big one. Yeah. Saudi Arabia was another big one. And I'm like, you want to start a business that sells ads that most people are going to buy for the US and Canada and North America to people who are not in the country.

And you swear to me up and down that you do not pay for engagement. Well, I call, I call balderdash on that one. It literally took five minutes to figure it out. It was just like, come on. Yeah, I know. Well, you can't fake a faker. It's like, what are you going to do now? You've trapped yourself. So the one way to fix this is we remove all these fake accounts.

And then all of a sudden your numbers are down and you feel like you look bad. But the only other option is to continue to pay some of these sketchy companies to keep engagement going. So you're trapped now. Yep, you are. But I mean, it's like you can get rid of those followers because the people who are looking at your site obviously don't exist anyway.

So who's going to really care? You've got to clean house. You've got to clean house if you're going to be legit. But most people don't care about being legit. They just want the fake numbers and try and sell some face cream and shit. As we've said since day one on this show, statistics are bullshit.

They are complete and utter bullshit. Anyway, let's talk a little bit about the downside of competition when you don't have any qualifications besides a car and a pulse. Yes, that's right. Let's talk about Instacart for a second. We could replace that with besides any coding experience and a pulse.

Yes, that too. So when the pandemic hit, a lot of people, you know, lost their jobs or got furloughed and went to the old car. Crowd, crowdsourced, you know, crowdfunded. I'm going to go do not a gig economy. Gig economy. That's what I'm trying. That's the word I'm looking for. There you go, Jason.

I'm here for you. I didn't go for my bike ride yet either. They went to the old gig economy. And turns out that when you have a lot of people going to use the gig economy to make a living, well, there's a lot more competition. And the story over at Vice is called You Couldn't Swipe Fast Enough, How the Pandemic Devastated Instacart Workers.

And it's the woeful tale of this woman who found her, you know, her basically her company, if you want to call it that, her gigo company, fall through the floor. Yeah, I actually feel really bad for this person.

I read this story. And, you know, she is one of the few people that, you know, that this AB5 law, or is it AB2 or AB5 here in California, that's going to force people to be employees for gig employees. AB5. Gig workers.

AB5. So, she's one of the few people that AB5 would actually have been a bad thing for. And this is pre-COVID. She made her living doing that. She had a very unstructured life, single mother, all that sort of stuff. So, she needed something incredibly flexible. And it worked out really, really well for her.

Now, because everybody flooded in to do these jobs as well, instead of like, you know, most companies would give some, even the bar industry, for example. I know quite a few bartenders, and as things shut down, and even at this point, they're not up to full speed because you can't have people in the bar.

You only have the outside. And the longest tenured employees slash contractors would have get the plum spots. And the newest people that came along get less hours. And Instacart didn't do anything like that because it's all bidding, and it's all snapping it up first, and it doesn't matter.

So, what they should have done is a tiered thing like you've been with the company for seven years. You should be able to get the plum pickings here. Exactly. Exactly. So, she was ranked at one time at the top of the 390 Instacart shoppers in Jacksonville Beach.

Now, they hired another 900 people. So, that's, you know, that's a lot more competition right there. So, she's not in California, so she wouldn't have been. AB5 wouldn't have been a thing for her. But, yeah, this is one of the problems that we've talked about with AB5.

It's like, you know, it's, yeah, we don't like Uber and Lyft. We think they're predatory assholes. But some people do need to make a living on some of these things, and they were making a living. And then just the competition basically drove them out. Yeah. Sad story.

It is. It is. Another sad story. Revel's electric mopeds are coming back to New York City. Okay. Yes. They're going to have to, you're going to have to take a mandatory helmet selfie now. Hey, that's one way to solve the problem, at least until after you've sent in the selfie and can just take the helmet off.

Take the helmet off. Exactly. So we talked about Revel before because that was the scooter that Nina Kapoor, the 26-year-old reporter for CBS, was riding on as a passenger and died not too long ago. And three people were killed on Revel's electric mopeds.

And, yeah. I'm curious to know how fast they go because I certainly. Okay. All right. So, all right. Yep. Okay. 25 is fast enough. No, 25 is fast enough, but it's not fast enough to require a motorcycle license. Correct.

Correct. We'll talk about my new bike soon, which also goes 25 miles an hour. But we'll also talk about the fancy new helmet that I bought to go with my 25-mile-an-hour bike because I'm not a dumb shit. But, yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how these things roll out.

But I always said that these were a bad idea. They're too fast. They're too fast, and people don't know how to drive them. Yeah. I think these things need to be capped out at, like, 10 to 15 miles an hour. Absolute max. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. I mean, how fast do birds and lime scooters go?

No clue. No clue. Okay. After all this time, we knew, but I forgot. Well, I've never gotten on one. That's true. You know, I can't imagine that they go faster than 15 tops. Yeah. I'm hoping they don't because that's – it's still – I mean, I got almost clipped by one cooking by me, like, not too long ago before the pandemic, and he was cooking.

But I don't think it was 20. But I don't know if you've noticed. They are everywhere again. They've rolled them back out. Yeah. Apparently, the bird flu did not kill them. So, something else that won't die. TikTok. This goddamn TikTok story.

I'm getting over it. Come on. Make some moves here. Let's get this thing done. So, Walmart has now joined into the fray with partner Microsoft to possibly buy the talk. I'm scratching my head at this so much. Advertising, man. Advertising.

I suppose. I suppose. I can't wait for the people of Walmart channel on TikTok. Oh, yeah. I can't either. Although, you know, as you flip through TikTok, you do see, you know, the similarity between the people of Walmart and the TikTok users in a lot of cases.

So, yeah, they're still negotiating. It's basically down to Oracle and now Microsoft and Walmart. And Microsoft and Walmart have history, though. You know, they both kind of teamed up to go after Amazon. So, that's why Walmart has gone with Azure as their cloud platform.

But it makes sense. It makes sense, I guess, if they really want to get into it. You know, they don't have to be a majority holder. They can just be, you know, a minority holder. Yeah. And just get some prime access to the advertising on the talk. I just wish this thing would wrap up.

I'm sick of talking about it. Well, I know somebody else that was sick of talking about it. The CEO of TikTok, Kevin Mayer, who has announced that he is resigning just over 100 days after the former Disney executive joined the world's largest short video app in mid-May. Yeah.

He announced his decision to step down in a note to employees as TikTok came under pressure from the Trump administration over its links to China. Mayer did not anticipate the extent to which TikTok would become involved in tensions between China and the U.S., sources told the Financial Times. And the executive didn't sign up for this shit.

Exactly. Did not sign up for this shit. He just wanted a big-ass paycheck and an easy gig, not this crap. Yeah. Well, I mean, I didn't even realize this until I started reading up on him. He got passed over for the CEO of Disney job. That's why he's like, I'm out of here.

Screw you guys. I'm going home. Well, he's going back home now because he's unemployed. You know what, though? I think he's going to be okay. I don't anticipate him adding to the Instacart employee list. Yeah, I'm sure he's going to be fine. He's got that sweet mouse money.

So, yeah, this thing just needs to end soon. Although it's not like we've got much else to talk about. Tech news has just been a dire wasteland. There's nothing happening. I wonder what sucked up all the atmosphere this week. I wonder.

I wonder. I wonder.

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Security? Ha! We're joined again this week by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast. And 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.

Welcome back, Dave. Hello. Good to be back. Hello, Dave. Hello. Oh, it's come to my realization that we may not have mentioned that we have a Discord server now to Dave, and there's been some concerted effort and posting of furries to try to entice him to join. Oh, is that so?

Yes. I believe there was actually a furry stormtrooper. Yeah, somebody busted out a furry stormtrooper. I thought that was pretty clever. Say no more. All right. I don't know that I've ever been on Discord before, so...

I know my son uses it for his D&D stuff. Think of it as AOL from the 90s. It's a chat room. That's about it. It's a chat room. Okay. So, it's fun. I'll check it out. We got a lot of people over there. So, we got some follow-up.

Yeah. Quick one on the iPad story, where we got only one person sending us in their conspiracy theory on what the iPod might have been used for. But I got a note from an anonymous listener with ties to the spooky dooky world and familiarity with that actual particular department, and they said that the iPod was almost certainly a radiation detector, and the aluminum back wouldn't really have been that much of an issue, and they

were probably testing for different types of radiation, not just one single type of radiation. So, a little inside scoopage there. That's interesting. I wonder why they wouldn't... Why... Because dosimeters aren't big, so why would you...

Well, they're not big now. They wouldn't hide it in an iPod. But they haven't been big for... I mean, I did work with dosimeters back in the early 90s, and they were smaller than the first-generation iPod, like the stuff that folks would take into nuclear power plants and stuff like that.

Well, they may have been for situations in which you wouldn't want to be obvious about the fact that you're testing for radiation leaks. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm just saying it's not a hard thing to hide. It's not like a dosimeter is something in a suitcase. But, I mean, I believe this person. I'm just curious what the use case would be for making it look like an iPod.

That's fascinating. Well, yeah. If you're looking for plutonium or uranium or different types of radiation from different substances in different places... I'm just a tourist here in Iran. ...and you're not supposed to be in those places. Exactly. Or, yes, I've always wanted to see the Kremlin. It's been a dream of mine since I was a little boy.

I will tell you, I'm not sure what... I don't know what the actual story is, but I have noticed that on the highways, that surround Fort Meade around here, which is where NSA is, there are little pods in the median that have little, look like air intakes on them.

And they came right after 9-11 and they've been there ever since. I can't help wondering if they're up to this sort of thing as well, you know, sniffing out... Oh, sure. ...all that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, if they're just...

If they're testing the air quality to see if there's any trace of explosives, like, you know, say you're rolling up Timothy McVeigh style with a U-Haul full of, you know, ammonium nitrate. Right. That could probably be a setter offer, if it were.

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Incoming! I wanted to follow up because any opportunity to geek out on Star Wars for a couple minutes is a good day for me. Good for us because there's no damn news, so rock on.

It's been a slow news week, actually. That's true. So, thanks to someone who we all know and love, who may or may not be on the line on this podcast as we speak, who may be the person who is famously known on this podcast for being the guy you go to if you want to get something that's fallen off the truck in Sweden.

I got my hands on... You know a guy. Yeah. I, and Brian as well, we got our hands on a copy of Star Wars 4K77, which is a 4K scan of Star Wars that I believe came from a, an old, what do you call it?

What's the, the three, three strip process? 35 millimeter? It was 35 millimeter, but it's, what's the thing that they shot? Technicolor. Technicolor. Thank you very much, Jason. It's a Technicolor print. And Technicolor doesn't fade. So, it is a very good looking scan.

And let me tell you, I've been having so much fun with this because at 4K, every frame is like a print, print resolution. I mean, obviously it's film, but I've never seen, I've never been able to examine Star Wars at this resolution at my leisure.

And it's just been a lot of fun. I'm, I'm pausing all the time and just kind of looking around. What's in the background? What's, you know? You can, you can so clearly see that Han shot first. It's beautiful. Yes. Yes. But also, some of the matte paintings are really kind of crappy.

And the other thing too, is this is a version from 77. So, it doesn't have any of the, the changes or anything like that. But it is as God intended us to see this movie. That's right. That's right. So, I've been enjoying that a lot. So, thanks to our, our good friend who reaches out to Sweden for us.

Well, you're welcome. Now I got to watch it. Damn it. No, it's worth it, Jason. It's really quite wonderful. But speaking of the way it was procured, we do have a bit of news this week. Uh-oh. Three men have been charged with leaking movies for nearly a decade. So, in an attempt to take down the elite global piracy ring, Sparks Group, U.S. officials have charged three men with copyright infringement.

Two have been arrested and law agencies in 18 other countries helped shut down servers used by the piracy group. It's estimated that the Sparks Group cost film production studios tens of millions of dollars. This has been going on since 2011. They have fraudulently obtained copyrighted DVDs and Blu-ray discs from wholesale distributors.

And then they would basically open them up and put them online. So, slight crackdown in Sweden. Remember the old Mac the Ripper program? They probably had one of those. Oh, Mac the Ripper. Yeah, I'm always dubious when I see these, these dollar signs of, you know, how much they've cost the industry.

They always seem kind of, because it's not, I don't believe for a second that the people who are collecting a lot of these movies are also people who would have gone to the theater to see them. Yeah. You know, there's some people who just like to collect things to collect them. And I suppose they're missing out on their DVD or Blu-ray sale, but not really anymore, are they?

Like now it's just, you get your cut from Netflix or whatever. Yeah. I mean, back in the day, I would, you know, get movies wherever I could get them. But I also had a DVD collection. I still have it. It's in Chicago. A $30,000 DVD collection. I would go every week.

Now worth 30 cents. Now worth actually negative 30 cents because I got to recycle the damn thing. But yeah, I, I, I, that's why I don't have, you know, my conscience is clean. I put my, I put my damn dimes in to the damn movies.

Oh, you know, I, I, I, we, I, I'm sure we've had this discussion multiple times over the years, but my infuriation with the music industry and my, my, my ability to pirate without qualms is, is, is similar because I, some, some albums I owned as early as vinyl, I definitely had cassettes and then I re-bought them on CD and now I'm paying streaming every month.

So, you know, some, some albums in my collection I've paid for six to seven times. So to hell with you guys. Screw you guys. I'm stealing your torrent. Yep. I did. Yeah. I did VHS to DVD to Blu-ray and I still have a, a very small, but, you know, meaningful Blu-ray collection, which, you know, probably will be out of date when 8K comes out.

But I'll be blind as a bat by then. So I can go back to VHS if I need to. Yeah. I, I, you know how many times I've bought Star Wars? I mean, I do not feel the least bit of guilt about grabbing an extra copy. Do you have the laser discs?

I did. Yeah. I, no, didn't, how do I say this? Didn't have the laser discs. I may have copied the laser discs onto beta cam tapes. Ah, there you go. Well, I feel like you need to write a check and send it to Lucas.

Yeah. He's, he's not doing so well these days. I hear. That's how I have a copy of Song of the South, which you cannot buy. Oh, you're sharing that motherfucker. You're sharing that one. You needed to get that Mac the Ripper program out, Dave. Yeah, that, uh, we got our, I think we bought a Japanese laser disc and then went to a friend's house who had a laser disc player.

Again, copied it to beta cam. Um, and I think I still just have the beta cam copy. I don't know that I've ever digitized it, but. Get on it. I got beta cam decks sitting on shelves doing nothing. Might as well. Yeah. Fire that puppy up. Yeah. I think I have one animated DVD left and that's Rikki Tiki Tavi.

My favorite animation short of all time. Mm-hmm. I love that. Love that little short. Love that little guy. He was so cute. Was that a short? I thought, I remember that. It was 30 minutes. 30 minutes? Okay. Yeah. Okay. So it's a show. I remember when it would come on TV and, uh, it was scary and sad to me at the end.

But, uh. No, it had a happy ending. It had a very happy ending. Yeah, yeah. But the whole thing where, don't they like sing the song about Rikki, about somebody, like they think he's dead and. Yeah. Yeah. That was sad. Yeah. Yeah. No, that was. Spoiler alert. Yeah. If you haven't seen it by now, tough noogies.

Um, yeah, that was Chuck Jones. That was like, you know, the height, the height of like fantastic animation. The, uh, I think Orson Welles did the voiceover on it. Um, he was the narrator. It was just so good. I'll, I'll trade you a song of the South for a Rikki Tiki Tavi.

All right. I'll have to see if I can get my hands on it. I don't know. Don't know where it is. I know we have it somewhere. I'm, I'm sure there's a copy floating around in Sweden somewhere as well. I just haven't thought to search for it. So yeah. Yeah. So, uh, we do have a little bit of other news this week, uh, and within the realm of cyber security, we, uh, found out the FBI has arrested a 27 year old Russian citizen for attempting to carry out a ransomware attack.

Uh, apparently this was against Tesla. So according to a complaint shared by the department of justice in July, and here we go with the name, Igor Igorovich Kruchkov, I think. That name shits Russian. No shit. Yeah. That name smells of vodka.

Yep. So, uh, he traveled to the U S and contacted a Russian speaking non-U S citizen who was working at the Tesla gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada. And after meeting with the individual, he proposed a deal. He would pay the employee $1 million to deliver malware to computer systems at the gigafactory.

They plan to extract data from the network and threatened to make it public. If Tesla didn't pay the ransom, the employee immediately informed Tesla and the company contacted the FBI, which launched a sting operation. They arrested him in Los Angeles as he was attempting to leave the U S. So we got, we got a guy.

Gotcha. The Tesla employee got an extra 15 minutes on his lunch break that day. Pretty much. So, uh, they didn't confirm which companies were impacted, but a similar ransomware attack was carried out against CWT group in July, which, uh, they paid a $4.5 million ransom.

So this is a lucrative industry. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, I have a story here, uh, from C4ISRnet, which is kind of an inside the Beltway military Pulls off the tongue. Publication. I know. I know. Um, uh, but it's titled Pentagon's Acquisition Chief Wants Microelectronics Production to Return to the U S.

And, uh, it's about, uh, Ellen Lord, who is the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, who recently said in a webinar that they're trying to, uh, get companies to start making stuff here again. That'd be nice. We, yeah.

Yeah. And I think a lot of this obviously comes from the whole thing with Huawei and the 5G rollout and the, the realization that, uh, there aren't a whole lot of suppliers of this kind of stuff. And so, um, and can you combine that with it?

The devices are so complex that how do you know if they're hiding things inside of these devices? And turns out they are. Well, I, I, you know, I think we've established that when we figured out TikTok was phoning home. Yeah. Why wouldn't they put it into this sort of stuff?

Yeah. And all the news that we've had recently with all of the bugs in the IOT devices that we've seen, you know, they go way back. It'd be nice to at least have somebody here that we can smack around and say, fix it! Damn it! So now the question is, are we willing to pay the premium and the extra money to have them built here?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But Hey, it's the government, right? They're used to spending $7,000 on a toilet seat. Well, that's the thing. Yeah. If, if you could put military money behind it, then I think it has a possibility of happening, but it's interesting to me that it's a, it's interesting because obviously it's a national security issue, but it's not like we didn't see all this stuff being offshore.

And shifted over the past few decades, um, to the point where, I mean, I've read interviews where folks have said, if we wanted to manufacture iPhones here, we couldn't. And a big part of that is we no longer have the manufacturing expertise here to do it, but that specialized expertise in many, many different elements that go into building an iPhone, for example, both the electronics, but also the, the physical manufacturing, the making of all of the stuff.

Um, we just can't do that here anymore. We don't have the, the folks who know how to do that, who, who, because we haven't done it in so long. So it sort of feeds back on itself. So I think that's a fascinating element of this. And it seems like if they're going to bring it back, it would be a bit of a, uh, I hate to use the word moonshot.

Maybe, um, uh, what was the, uh, the other one, the, um, what was the nuclear power, the nuclear weapons program? Oh, the Manhattan project, which is what I was thinking too. That's what I'm looking for. We need a new Manhattan project instead of the Germans this time. We need some Chinese guys. Right. Some defectors.

Yeah. Yeah. We need some Chinese defectors and rebuild our, our systems. Yeah. Yeah. Do you guys have any thoughts on that? Yeah. Uh, I, I think we need to do it. I think it should be a top priority. I, I, I don't understand how, and this is where we've here into the political again.

So cue the one star ratings coming in. I don't see how we can run around screaming, you know, we need jobs. We need jobs. We need jobs here in the U S when there's such glaring need for these sorts of things where we need to staff up and educate and, and start building up our, our own systems again, our own manufacturing processes.

Uh, you know, the idea that it's American companies that, uh, well, I mean, that's an air quotes these days because they're global companies, but theoretically they're American companies that are, are making all these, uh, end products and all the windfall. And we have Apple, a $2 trillion company, but we can't build an iPhone in the United States.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you have to start at some point if you ever want to get there. So let's get going, you know, I mean, obviously the expertise exists in the world, so it can be done. And as they say in that, one of my favorite movies, the edge, what one man can do, another can do.

So surely, surely there's a masterclass about how to build an iPhone. Let's go check out Johnny Ives. Yeah. Johnny Ives masterclass. No ports, no ports for you. Right, right, right. Exactly. Right.

Uh, my last story this week, uh, has to do with one of the, uh, underground markets, um, basically shutting down with an exit scam. Allegedly. This is from the folks over at Digital Shadows, um, and this is the Empire market, which is one of the underground markets that came, uh, in ascendance after other markets fell, like Alpha Bay, um, Empire grew.

This is where you'd go to buy password lists, things of that nature. You could buy all sorts of things. I mean, on these dark markets, you can buy, um, it depends on the market. Yep. And I don't know, I don't know what Empire specialized in or anything like this.

In this article, they say that, uh, common things were drugs, software, malware, um, digital goods, databases, so breaches, um, counterfeit goods, things like passports and driver's licenses. And the world's largest selection and copies of Song of the South.

There you go. Credit cards, fraud, all those sorts of things. Standard fare. Yeah. And I, and my understanding is, uh, one of the ways that these, uh, marketplaces work is that you have to put some money in escrow if you're going to be part, if you're going to be a member of one of these forums, if you're going to be buying and selling.

Uh, so what happens is the marketplace, the people who run the marketplace end up with a large amount of money sitting there in escrow. And that's part of how the trust works. But these guys have, uh, evidently made a run for it. They've shut the market down and they're going to take all that money in escrow and basically have a big old exit scam.

Uh, I know this will seem shocking, but, uh, just goes to prove you can't trust a criminal. Yep. There is no honor among thieves. That is for sure. Yeah. They said that. Not surprising. I mean, if I was that guy, I would probably do the same thing because they don't know who the, who the, who runs these networks.

It's just, you know, based on faith. So how is it, you know, how are these people ever going to get caught? Probably not. Right. And, and I also think that there's a little bit of a race against time when you're running one of these things because law enforcement is going to come after you, uh, eventually, which is what's happened to some of the other markets.

So do you try to run long enough so that it seems like one of two things is going to happen. You're going to reach the point where you can do an exit scam like this, or you're going to get busted. Um, and it's not to say that, uh, that those are too mutually exclusive.

They could still get busted having already done the exit scam. But I wonder how much of, is the, is the exit scamming built into the ecosystem now where it's kind of a cost of doing business, the risk that this is what's the, the, not just risk, but likelihood that something like this is going to happen.

I'm guessing so. I'm guessing so. I mean, it happens on, with such regularity. You have to, you know, you can't be putting in more money in escrow than you can afford to lose. Right. Yeah. That is an excellent point. Yep. I mean, imagine they're just sitting there with a, with a number in mind. And when, when we hit this, we, we take it and run.

Or if they smell the cops coming, you know, they get some people in there who were, who were just, you know, smell of fed and they're like, okay, Joey over here. I think, uh, he might be, uh, he might be one of the cops. So let's just pack up shop and move on.

And we'll start up a new one when all this money runs out. Yeah. And is that the, the payout for having taken all this risk? Mm-hmm. I don't know. Could be. I mean, that, that actually is a very good point. It's like, Hey man, I've, I've been doing this for a long time. You guys got your goods.

This is the service fee. See ya. Yep. Right. Consider it a subscription. Yeah. So interesting, uh, sort of game of whack-a-mole that goes on with these, these, uh, places. And certainly another one will pop up to take its place. Yep.

And we'll see if the, the pattern continues. So. As long as there's an internet, the pattern will continue. Yeah. Ain't it the truth? Ain't it the truth. This has all happened before and it will all happen again. Yeah. History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

All right. Well, go enjoy your Star Wars, uh, navel gazing for the weekend. I will. I will. I am very happy. I'm a happy boy because of, because of this. So thank you very much. Very welcome. All right, gents. Talk to you soon. Apps and doodads.

I'm not sure what to make of the story. Uh, maybe the people over at TechCrunch are feeling the same way that we do about tech news this week, which is where is it? We need something. Because they managed to turn Spotify putting a virtual events button where the events button was before into a very long article extolling how they're developing a virtual events feature.

No, no, they've made a partnership with Songkick, which was giving them ticketing links and all that sort of stuff for artists. And, uh, Songkick has now included virtual events because there are no concerts. There are only virtual events. And now that's going to come in. And so they changed the button from reading, get your tickets to virtual event.

That's about it. But Brian, what about Smash Mouth? Yes. Well, uh, Amazon has released its new version of their fitness tracker called the Halo. Comes with a subscription.

Comes with a subscription. That's right. I like that. Four bucks a month plus tax. And, uh, yeah, it includes body composition, tone of voice analysis, sleep and activity tracking, and more. Free for six months. And then it auto-renews for four bucks a month.

And it doesn't have a screen on it. No. And they sell that as a plus. Fewer distractions. Fewer distractions. That's right. So what? You have to go through the Alexa app? How do you, how do you get your deets in real time? It must have tied to the Alexa app somehow.

Everything ties to the damn Alexa app. So you can probably say, hey, chick on my wrist. How many steps have I gone today? How fat am I? Yeah, I guess. I guess. All right. Well, I'm not going to be using that. No. And it looks awful. Yeah, it does.

It actually really looks awful. So I'll stick with my Apple watch and my Fitbit and my bed and everything else. Yes. I got rid of the aura ring, though. That thing just hurt. I don't know what's up with that. Yeah. You never liked that. No.

No. So I gave mine to Dan Nitro Clark, the gladiator. He can still wear it because he's got like these giant meat paws. I was like, that's what happens with a gladiator. But yeah, that thing hurt. So that's it. Well, there you go. Finally, after five years of talking about the Raspberry Pi.

Well, actually, we kind of stopped talking about it. We went through a period of a year, about four years ago, where we talked about the Raspberry Pi and actually getting one and doing something with it. I'm finally going to do it. I've ordered it. It's coming this weekend. And I'm going to set up a pie hole and test it out to block all those ads that Facebook is upset about.

All right. All right. Friend of the show, John Chevron, set one up back when we used to talk about it. And loves it. Yeah. Can't wait to try it. Yeah. I went the Lazy Man's route and just got a subscription to Eero Plus. So it's blocked at the router. It just does it for me.

So I don't even have to think about it anymore. Yeah. I wanted to do a little something hands-on. I need a little quarantine project. Yeah. No shit. Ain't that the fucking truth? So my quarantine project is my new bikes here. It's great. I got the Rad Rover 5 fat tire electric bike, which you can set to go 25 miles.

An hour. Took it out for my first ride yesterday. It's pretty sweet. Pretty sweet. My butt hurts. My legs hurt. So even though it's a cheater bike with an engine in it, the damn thing weighs 70 pounds. You can't move it without an engine. It is heavy as hell.

Right. But I sent you a text when I first got my new helmet. I got the Senna or Senna R1 smart cycling helmet. Now, I didn't even know how smart this thing was when I got it. I didn't even realize it was a smart cycling helmet. It was just the cheapest one in the store at $120 because the only bike store around here is one of those fancy swanky ones that sell $10,000 10 speeds.

Right. So $1,000 bucks a speed. That's what you get here. But I was going through the manual this morning because it has a manual. That's lovely. The manual for my bike helmet is bigger than the manual that comes with my $1,200 phone, which is ridiculous.

But I was going through it today, and it's fun. If you have a bunch of people that have these, it's got like chat in between the helmets, so you can actually broadcast to everybody on the channel and chat with them, which is kind of neat. So you're saying if I get one of these bikes and one of these helmets, we can do the show on the road?

Well, no, because then I'd have to figure out how to record it, and I'm not doing that. Surely you can sideload something. Yes, but if we went for a bike ride on the beach together, we could chat. Or we could just yell at each other because we'll be right next to each other.

Exactly. But it also has an FM radio, which is kind of cool, even though there's no good FM stations in Los Angeles anymore. But the real plus is that I can play audiobooks through it or whatever without having to put anything in my ears and get a ticket for riding with AirPods.

But, yeah, I got exercise. I went out in the sun. Something new and novel. Good for you. I got to say, man, that bike is so goddamn fun. You have no idea how fun that bike is. I'll stick with my cannon, Dale. Yeah, yeah.

This thing is, it is a cross between basically a Harley and a mountain bike. The tires are four inches wide. It feels like you're right. It feels like when I had Dr. Teeter's BMW motorcycle for a while. I think the tires on the BMW were skinnier than these.

Right. Fun times. Brian, I've been trying to find interesting things to read on the Internet because tech news has been a wasteland this week. Yes. I mean, there's nothing.

Nothing. No, nothing. I found this one over at The New Yorker, and it's called What Boredom Does to Us and For Us. And it's another one of those longer reads because I've got nothing but time right now. Did you get a chance to look at this one? I scanned through it, yeah.

Mostly I was curious what they had to say about kids and things like that because I know, you know, certainly watching other people's kids and the young generation, even teenagers at this point, they do not experience boredom, and they need to. Yes, they do. Because I've been trying to cultivate more boredom, surprisingly enough.

Yeah, listening to our own show. It's working. It's absolutely working. And I just, it's more philosophy than anything at this point. Like, you know, it's an interesting, it's an interesting read. I highly recommend checking it out. And I love some of the quotes in here.

Like they say, Boredom, according to Tolstoy, was a desire for desires. Which kind of it is. I would like to desire to desire again. Because I don't. I just don't. I'm like, oh. And this one, though, really stood out to me.

And this is from Seneca. And I don't know how I've missed this one. I've read everything I thought Seneca wrote. But he calls boredom the relentless cyclicality of life, which nowadays, wake up, shit, shower, shave, and go back to bed. That's about it.

Is it beer o'clock? No? Okay. Certainly it is. Why not? Yeah, that's pretty much it. And then I found another one over at eon.co called The Mathematics of Mind Time. Now, the headline is kind of not really on the mark so much.

This is more about consciousness. And did you get a chance to look at this one? Scan through this as well. This one I didn't care so much for. Okay. I enjoyed it. I thought it was a pretty interesting talk about consciousness and things like that. But, yeah, these are just some long reads for the fans to get us through to the next show.

And hopefully somebody will fucking invent something or do something fun in technology. That's never going to happen again. Probably not. Oh, wait. Here's this next one. Here's the next one. This is a good invention of technology. Exactly. That's why I threw it in here. This is something to, if you get bored, try and fill the time.

It's called Better Box Fan Air Purifier. I forget who I was talking to. It might have been one of our friends of the show around. I can't even remember anymore. It was Bittner off the air. I remember this conversation. Oh, okay. Got it. Yeah, that's what it was. People are using furnace filters and slapping them onto box fans to try and clear the air of either.

Some people are saying they're having luck with COVID with it, which I would like to see the science on that one. Show your work. But for us in California, with all the ash and the crap in the air, these are actually a pretty good idea. And this guy over at tombuildstuff.blogspot.com.

Fucking blogspot. This is an article from 2013. But it's a cool little box fan air purifier. It really is. It's a good design. So, if you're looking for some way to clear the air on the cheap instead of buying a multi-hundred dollar air purifier like some of us have that you have to clean the damn thing out every other day, check this out.

It's a pretty good little design. Well, it's a good functional design. I wouldn't exactly say it looks pretty in your room. Oh, hell no. No, no, no. It does not look pretty at all. God, no. It looks like you opened up a Domino's pizza box and duct taped it to the back of your fan.

Oh, totally. This is something that, like, college kids would try and blow pot into to try and get the stench down, you know? Yeah. No, this is totally, it's totally jankified, but it looks like it might work. Now, in keeping on with my long reads, this one I haven't read yet, and I don't know if I can, but I put it in the show notes because I thought maybe you might be interested in it.

No way. Okay. It's a 109-minute read, but for you, that's like 20 minutes. You're a fast reader. I'm a very slow reader. But it's called How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, a new book by Cory Doctorow. You know what?

I'll read it once we're not under Surveillance Capitalism. I just don't think I could do it right now. I really don't. I still have PTSD from the actual book, Surveillance Capitalism, which is this. You know, I think neither one of us could finish that book because it was just so damn depressing.

Yeah, it was too depressing. It's like, just give up. So Cory thinks he has a way to destroy Surveillance Capitalism, but at 109 minutes, I don't know. I don't know. Brevity, Cory. Brevity. You know what? He's not good at the brevity thing. He's one of those people that I actually am considering unfollowing on Twitter like I did with Kevin Smith because he just fills my feed.

Yeah. Cory, I unfollowed years ago. Kevin Smith, I keep, but I turned off retweets. If you turn off retweets, it's not too bad. Okay. Yeah. That's the trick with Kevin. But yeah, hey, if anybody wants to read this and send us a review, we'd appreciate it.

Give us the CliffsNotes. Exactly. CliffsNotes for this one, please. Yeah. We can use it at like five bullets or less. How's that? TLDR. It's probably going to be, stop using Facebook. Stop using Google. Get a Linux computer. Yep. I'm pretty sure he still uses Linux.

Do all your browsing through a Raspberry Pi. Yeah, there's something like that. Cory, Cory, Cory, Cory. Closing shout outs. And since it was really nothing good to read this week on the internet, big thanks again to all of our friends over at the Discord channel.

Go to GOG.show slash Discord. That'll link you right over to it. We've got over 200 people in there now. It's kind of rocking and rolling. Yeah, it's fun to look at every now and then. Certainly this week when there was not much else to pay attention to. Tell me about it. Unless you wanted to be incredibly depressed.

Yeah. 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. And 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 467. 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.

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