473: GOG+

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

Welcome to episode 473 of Same Shit, Different Day for Saturday, September 19th, 2120. I'm Jason DeFillippo. 2120? 2120, it feels like it, doesn't it? Okay, I'm Brian Schulmeister. I'm not used to the date thing and then, okay.

Threw you off your game there, didn't I? It is 8 in the morning. It is 8 in the morning, yes. No. Since we're giving all the times here. Yeah, no. It just feels like same shit, different day. I was going through the show notes this morning and I'm like, oh god, again? Is it Tuesday? Is it Friday? I can't remember anymore.

Well, let me jump ahead a little bit then right now and talk about something that I had a little further down in the show notes. My headline of the week award. This has nothing to do with the article itself. You can read it if you choose to or not, but this is my favorite headline. Wouldn't it be nice to get knocked out cold with a shovel for exactly six weeks and five days?

Yes, it would. Yes, it would. You can also do that with tequila. Well, yeah, I know, but generally that's frowned upon in child services. Well, there may not be child services anymore at this point. That's true. Who the fuck knows? Who knows?

So I got a little follow-up here from our dead media beat. Vinyl sales have surpassed CD sales for the first time in 34 years. Yay! I'm actually surprised it took as long as it did. CDs have been dead for a long time. I don't even know where you can buy them anymore. I think you can still find them on the shelves at truck stops next to eight tracks.

Yeah, Target, maybe Walmart. Yeah, Target and Walmart still have them. Most people I know don't even have a CD player anymore unless they happen to have a very old laptop sitting around somewhere. I actually just bought a new computer for my roommate's mom and it came with a CD slash DVD reader and burner.

Amazing. Woo! Yeah. I remember when those were big ticket add-on items. I know. And I got it for like $165, this computer. That is probably, let's see, a little bit less than I probably would have paid for my CD burners that I added on. Exactly. I know. I mean, it was an HP with eight gig of RAM and like a 250 gig hard drive, but with Windows 10.

So, you know, $165, isn't that what it costs to get Windows 10 nowadays? Basically, yeah. That's a pretty amazing price. I should remember that next time my mom needs a new computer. Yeah. Check out Amazon for those because there's these companies that go to – this comes from a hospital from Evanston, Illinois.

And they just – when people like, you know, phase out old computers, these guys get them, refurb them, and sell them cheap. And it came with a keyboard and a mouse too. I was amazed. Wrong power cord though, but fortunately I got a few of those laying around. Yeah. All right. So back to the point at hand. I am surprised it took as long as it did.

Vinyl sales have been on the upswing for a while. No, it's not coming back as a medium. A friend of the show can just shut up right now. It's not. It's a boutique item. High-end audiophiles, collectors, all that sort of stuff. Hipsters. Hipsters. You know, it's got cachet for that.

And thank God for the music industry because they've kind of roared back with it to some degree. They're, you know, producing high-end vinyl collections and compilations and reissues and all that sort of stuff because people want them. So they've got a product to sell, which is pretty nice.

There are some stats from this article as well. Overall, the music industry saw a 5.6% bump in profit, totaling $5.7 billion in the first half of 2022. But, of course, streaming is 85% of that revenue. Yeah. And there is some good news there.

Paid streaming service subscriptions have increased by 24%, which is good to know that people are not just choosing the free options anymore. They're actually ponying up and paying for some of their music now and then. And how much of that goes to the artists? Very little. Exactly. That's still a big problem.

Yeah. I was going to say, who cares if the robber barons are making more money? The artists definitely aren't. Yeah. Yeah. It's still a mess. But, you know, so yay. Yay, vinyl. Yay, vinyl. And I've been living with Facebook and Instagram a bit this week. I've been online a little bit more than normal just because random reasons.

Some friends are going through some stuff and they don't live here. And even if they did live here, I'm not seeing them in person. So, you know, we discuss and talk through various channels that are available to us. And I've been very aware of Instagram and Facebook's great move to save democracy by apparently giving us fucking annoying messages at the top of every page every time we log in about how to vote, registering to vote, blah, blah, blah.

You can click the X and it'll go away, but it'll come back when you reload. There needs to be a setting there. I'm registered. I know how to vote. Kindly fuck right off. We've actually clicked the accept cookies button. You know, that's what cookies are for. Yes.

You're supposed to remember these settings or, you know, at least provide us with please don't give me these messages anymore. I know you're trying to do your best to pretend that you're doing something while you're actively actually destroying democracy, but please stop it. Please. He's pretty pleased with sugar on top.

Yeah. And we've talked a lot in the past about Android and Apple devices. And I have to say my Apple TV consistently works very well. Unfortunately, I wanted to catch up on Lower Decks and I wanted to watch the Go-Go's documentary, which is on Showtime.

And I had some time because my wife wanted to catch up on her Real Housewives binging, which she does for her sanity, which drives me insane. So I get driven to the back room. The back room, I have an Amazon Fire Stick, and I had not logged into CBS All Access or Showtime or any of that stuff back here.

It took me almost the entire evening to get it all set up to run. Oh, my God. Because it's horrible. The interfaces are horrible. For whatever reason, the CBS All Access app in and of itself, when downloaded, would not load at all. Deleted it, reinstalled it, still did not load.

So then had to go through Amazon because you can go through Amazon and subscribe to services through Amazon instead of the app directly. Would not take my login. So even though I'm paying for CBS All Access, if I try to access it through Amazon on the Amazon Fire Stick, it wouldn't let me.

So then I was able to sign up for a seven-day free trial. So now you have to remember to cancel that because I'm already paying for it. And the exact same thing happened with Showtime. So that was fun times. That's funny.

I actually did have to sign up for Showtime through Amazon to watch one show that I wanted, which is why I guess the Go-Go's documentary kept showing up on my Amazon account. I'm like, oh, I didn't realize it was on Showtime. I was going to watch it this weekend. And yeah, now I know. But I've already canceled Showtime because I set a calendar reminder to cancel Showtime six days after I started my trial.

So I guess I'm going to have to wait for your review, see if it's worth it, and then sign up with somebody else's credit card for the free trial. Spoiler alert. It's worth it. Oh, it is good. We'll talk about that on the next episode. Okay, cool, cool. Okay, well, I'll figure that out then. I don't have that problem with my Roku's, though.

That's interesting. Yeah, I don't. Roku's are really easy. Yeah, I mean, in general, everything, once I set up, did the initial setup of the Amazon Fire Stick with some of the main apps that I use all the time, I really generally haven't had a problem. But, you know, it's always that when you've got two hours and you really, really want to do something, that everything breaks.

Everything falls to shit. That's right. Yeah, it's funny. On the Roku, basically, you have, like, multiple ways to log in, and the best one is they give you just a custom URL. You load it up on your laptop, and you log in to the service on your laptop, which you generally already are logged in for. And then after, like, five seconds, the TV just refreshes and says, you're logged in.

Here you go. It's the best way to do it. Might have to get a Roku. Yeah. I got some extras. I'll float you one. I got plenty of these things lying around. Speaking of CBS All Access, though, it is going to no longer be CBS All Access early next year.

It will be Paramount+. You will conform to the naming? Yeah, well, we should rebrand as Grumpy Old Geeks+. Yeah, GOG+, that's us now. God. All right, well, fine. I mean, we knew that was going to happen, right?

I mean, kind of, I was saying it as a joke, but of course, it's Paramount+. Everything is Plus now. Everything was I 20 years ago, and now everything is Plus. Yeah, everything is Plus. But apparently they're doing it because nobody overseas knows what the hell CBS is. But they recognize the name Paramount.

All right. Fair enough. They should have just called it Star Trek Plus. Seriously? Really? It's Star Trek Plus all the shit from CBS. Speaking of Star Trek, though, I did get my shirt from my Amazon loot box, my first Star Trek shirt. Yeah, I canceled. I figured.

The shirt's, the graphic's okay. It's got all the captains, and it just says, Go Boldly on it, which, you know, it's a cool-looking shirt, but the quality of the T-shirt is god-awful. Of course it is. Of course. Yeah. There was no way it was going to be good quality. Although I do like the fact that you'd wear a shirt that says, Go Boldly as you don't leave your house.

I know. Well, I go boldly on Zoom nowadays. That's where I go. In the news. Well, it's finally happened, Brian.

Trump has laid down the law on the talk of the tick in the chat of the Wii. Well, okay. Maybe. Maybe. Sort of. Almost. Because we're recording this Friday morning, as Brian mentioned, 8 o'clock, which is the ass crack of dawn. And it has come out that, yes, on Sunday, on Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, you might pay for the whole tick-tock, but you're only going to need the edge.

They're supposed to be shutting down from all the app stores, and anybody that does CDN delivery or payment processing for WeChat or the tick-tock has to stop operations. But there's a long time between now and Sunday. There's at least three weeks between now and Sunday, so we'll see how this plays out.

That's plenty of time for anybody who is thinking about getting these apps to be able to download them. The apps will continue to function except for the payment processing. But the CDN stuff might not. Yeah, that's true. But, you know, that's what VPNs were for. Yeah, it's true. But except VPNs are banned in China, so you're going to be able to do that.

I guess you can just go to any other random country. You can go to any other country. That doesn't have an idiot in charge. Yeah. You can go to any other country. Goj.show.vpn. Go get your private internet access on if you want to keep your tick-tock. And I did download the apps this morning because what I'm curious is, will they actually delete the apps later?

You know, who knows? But I want to at least have one copy. I threw it on an old iPad just to see if it goes away at some point. Right. Now, the real loser here, you've got to be pissed if you're Oracle, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, not just Oracle, Larry. You've got to be pissed if you're Larry.

Yeah, because you use your cronyism and your connections to score a big hosting deal, basically. And now the orange dumpster fire has basically just said, ha-ha, thanks for the money. We're still going to get rid of it, even though this was what everybody here seemed to want.

Yeah, so we'll see. I'm sure there's not going to be any more fundraisers over at Larry's Pad for quite some time. Nope. He got burned. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Sorry. Yeah, we'll see what's going to happen with this.

I'm not entirely sure. So TikTok, this will happen on November 12th. WeChat is going to be Sunday. Yeah, so we'll see. Maybe this next article of mine will feel outdated because nobody will have TikTok anymore.

But I did see this, the curse of TikTok brain. And this kind of goes back more to the music thing, which is kind of my interest. The author here is talking about how everybody got on TikTok, especially once the pandemic started, including the old people. And going in, the author was aware of the app's problems, how its dance crazes often left original creators without credit.

It's shocking. It's heavy-handed censorship of some content, the slippery slope towards digital blackface that it paved, although I'd argue that's much more Snapchat's domain. And, of course, the extra national ownership of data thing. But it got on anyways.

And in the weeks that followed, the author discovered another pitfall of TikTok. It infected me with an earworm. Oh, God, yes. Yes. Suck in a house, house in a house, bored. Every video that my roommate played for, like, a week had that same song. And it got so much in my head that I would sing that to the dogs to get them to go inside.

It just would not go away. Yeah. It happens with a bunch of songs. The one in specifics that they're talking about in this article is called Laxed slash Siren Beat, uploaded by producer Josh through 685 in 2019, and has been using over 55 million TikToks, often as background music for explainer-style content and tutorials, though it has had its own dance challenge.

How much money has this guy made? Oh, probably not very much. The phenomenon is experienced wildly enough to have its own name, hashtag TikTok brain. And this is entirely because of the way the system is built and that there are pre-populated options for audio to add to your clips.

And whatever pops up in that algorithm first ends up getting used by gazillions of people at that point in time. Yep. It's funny. I was listening to K-Rock on the way to the grocery store this morning. They were talking about another thing on TikTok today. Apparently, there's a new fad with kids filing down their teeth with nail files.

Is there really? I don't know. Or is this one of those things again? I don't know. Because, you know, like two idiots do it and then all of a sudden it's the fad and we have to talk about it. Well, the Tide Pod challenge really did was a thing and, you know, kids got really sick because they're really stupid, which, yeah.

Caveat emperor. It's like, I know, culling the herd, I think, is more like it, but fine by me. Yeah, it's TikTok. What are you going to do? Again, like we can talk about all of this. We've had, it's just another social media.

It's just, that's all TikTok is. And if TikTok gets banned, another one will appear and we'll take over. Or let's be honest, it's going to become Facebook and Instagram. Instagram reels. Yep. Yep. So. Apparently, YouTube is rolling out a competitor as well.

It came out in India this week. So we'll see how that flies. All righty. All the TikTok people I know that are in the top 100, which is two of them, already went out and made side deals with Instagram and got paid buckets of money. So I think they're going to be okay.

All righty. Yay. Yeah. Somebody who's not going to be okay, though, is the guy who is driving the Uber that ran down the woman in the road in Arizona. Okay. Apparently, this just kind of drives me a little crazy here. An Arizona grand jury has indicted Rafaela Vasquez.

He was the guy that was driving, looking around, dicking around on his phone, probably looking at TikTok when he ran the woman down in the middle of the night. Well, turns out he's being charged with negligent homicide with a recommended sentence of two and a half years. But the Arizona grand jury is not going after Uber.

Must be nice to be Uber. You don't have to have employees. You're not responsible for anything. Hold on. Was it a self-driving car project? So he was just supposed to be there monitoring it? Right. Here's the thing. Well, it's a woman. Oh, sorry.

Rafaela. There you go. Yeah. Looked like a dude. Dude looked like a lady. A lady looked like a dude. But here's the problem. The reason that that car ran that woman over is because they had all of the safety gizmos turned off. Right. And the driver is not the one that turned them off.

Uber turned them off. And that's why I'm like, I mean, you know, hopefully Rafaela will be able to sue Uber for turning off the, you know, the safety measures in the car as after she gets out of jail and charge them for time served as well.

But yeah, I think this is, you know, just kind of a travesty that Uber is not getting hauled into court for this. It's bullshit. Yeah. And Uber is certainly not stepping up and helping out their non-employee either. Seriously. I mean, actually, we don't know that. It might be pain for the lawyers.

Who knows? It might be one of those things where they're like, take one for the team. You're going to go to jail for a little bit. You'll serve some time. Good behavior. You won't go in until the Rona's over because you got led home with an ankle bracelet right now. Okay. And when you get out of jail, we'll take care of you.

Just like Travis Kalanick has taken care of everybody else who steps up and takes one for the team. All right. So, yeah, even though Travis is gone, I'm sure he's still part of it somehow. This is a new one that I haven't understood until now.

Amazon has hired two mobility experts to lead its e-bike team in New York City. Now, Brian, were you aware that Amazon had an e-bike team? No, but, you know, Amazon has a bit of everything these days. I'm not surprised. That's true. That is true. Yeah.

The last mile problem is what they're trying to solve. And it makes sense to have New York City to have, you know, basically couriers because that's, you know, that's a good use for it. And because, you know, you can't land a drone in a 20th store or 20th story apartment building. Be a little tricky there, but, you know, but yeah, it's interesting.

They've got a couple of people who are in the mobility space. And brought them on board. I don't really even care about them whatsoever, but I just thought it was interesting that they're working on e-bikes for delivery in New York City. Yeah. Makes total sense. And yeah, can definitely see it there.

There's a couple other cities where it would make a lot of sense. That would definitely work in Toronto as well. But most cities, LA, that's not going to really help very much. No, not really. Not really at all. Although my e-bike gets a pretty good, gets pretty good mileage. I got to say, but still, you still got to take twice as long to charge the damn thing that it does to ride it.

But now, God, Spotify, Spotify, Spotify. Daniel Eck is in hot water right now because he has defended keeping up transphobic content from Joe Rogan, but they took down other stuff.

So he's walking a tightrope right now. It's like, honestly, you bring Joe Rogan on, come on. You just got to keep it all. Yeah. You're all in or nothing. Exactly. This story to me is a little bit crazy. And if I were Joe Rogan, well, I'm sure they paid him enough money that he doesn't give a shit.

But if I were Joe Rogan, I would actually be offended by this. It's like, you wanted me enough to give me insane buckets of money, yet you're going to decide piecemeal on some of my shows not to bring over. Right. And he's already back in trouble right now for talking about the Oregon forest fires this week, saying that Antifa was setting the fires, which has been proven completely wrong, Joe.

But God, come on. Look, he's just spotted a spot in the marketplace that's been emptied because Alex Jones is gone. Exactly. Joe Rogan is going to become the new slightly toned down Alex Jones because there's a lot of money in being Alex Jones.

There is. Especially if you're the gay frogs. But yeah, no, Joe's going to Joe, right? And this whole thing is like, now I'm sure he's just, he's got to be laughing all the way to the bank. Like, well, you knew who I was when you gave me that hundred million dollars.

Hundred million dollars for a show that used to be a podcast. Anyway, I just thought it was kind of funny. Yeah. I just, you know, the simple solution is you put everything up. You bought it on Joe Rogan. So you get Joe Rogan. And Joe Rogan has a lot of stuff that's not so nice.

And you're going to have to defend. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And his, you know, basically his crazy touching friends have all been, you know, cancel cultured out right now. So, and that was a lot of his show. Yeah. And, you know, I can see why the staff would be pissed off.

But, you know, Daniel knew what he was doing when he signed up Joe. So he's got to take the flack from both sides. He's got to take those arrows no matter what. I agree. I agree. And speaking of censorship, this is definitely one of my favorite stories of the week, just because of what it's based on.

So what does Jon Hamm's penis have to do with the internet freedom and the future of memes, Jason? Ah, God. Quite a lot, believe it or not. Go ahead. Following a court ruling in New York. A federal judge in the Southern District of New York ruled on Thursday, last Thursday, that digital news outlet, the Huffington Post, news should be in quotes, didn't violate copyright law when it published a photo of Jon Hamm with a black box digitally inserted over his dick in a 2014 listicle titled 25 Things You Wish You Hadn't Learned in 2013 and Must

Forget in 2014. Ah, simpler times. Yes, simpler times. HuffPo, which is owned by the company called Oath, remember them, was sued by Lawrence Schwartzwald, a New York-based photographer who captured the original image and claimed that HuffPo infringed on his copyright.

Now, the ruling, first reported by Zoe Tillman of BuzzFeed News, notes that lawyers for Huffington Post argued that publishing their version of the photo was perfectly legal because it was transformative. I know, we all remember these rules back in the early days of the internet. You have to modify an image three to four ways, et cetera, et cetera.

HuffPo's version contained a superimposed text box, photo caption, and a title, which together fundamentally transformed the character and purpose of the photographer's use. Judge Abrams agreed, pointing out that the joke worked on multiple levels. Unlike the original photograph, which plaintiff claims had the objective purpose of illustrating what John Hamm looks like wearing trousers in public while he walks down the street, ostensibly without any underwear, Oath's use of the photograph served the dual purpose of mocking both Hamm

and those who found the photograph newsworthy in the first instance. The text box with the words, image loading in all caps, a play on words that alludes to both the nature of digital technology and the body part at issue, suggests that Oath is making fun of Hamm, not merely illustrating his appearance. The judge was able to sneak in a subtle dig at HuffPo in a ruling, noting that the listicle listed multiple times as 25 things you wish he hadn't learned in 2013.

They must forget in 2014 may or may not qualify as news, but it doesn't really matter anyways. So basically, if you're making memes, you can use any photograph you want as long as you do a couple changes to it. This is such a bullshit ruling. That photographer has to be so pissed off right now.

Yeah, I'm sure he is. Yeah. You take a picture of Hamm's huge hog and, you know, what do you think you just, you know, you're going to cash in, ka-ching, because I'm sure TMZ paid for it when they used it, because I remember seeing it on TMZ. But I really wish Hamm's huge hog was a hoax, like, you know, because he used to be a stand-up comedian, and he just basically wears this giant fake dick wherever he goes.

But sadly, no. I've heard, did you hear about the women on Mad Men complaining about it, trying to dress him on the show? No. Yeah, he doesn't wear underwear, and they're like, it's almost impossible to hide the thing so damn big. His wardrobe ladies really were not happy with Hamm's huge hog.

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So, I updated my lady in the tube this week. I still had a first-generation Amazon Echo sitting in the bedroom. And in pandemic times, we've spent a lot more time in the bedroom with the kid and all that sort of stuff, playing a lot of music.

So, I needed an upgrade, because the thing was getting slow. And they had the Echo Plus second-generation premium sound with a built-in smart home hub, Heather Gray, on sale on Amazon. So, I ordered it. And then, I also saw the Amazon trade-in program, which will take my old lady in the tube and give me a couple ducats.

Not a lot, but they'll also give you 25% off future purchases if you do the trade-in. So, that's quite a deal if you're looking to do your upgrades, if you haven't thought about these things in a while. Did you use the bucket of Echoes that I gave you to trade in? No, because I still have those.

Most of those are, well, the big ones are set up at my mom's. The small hockey pucks, I couldn't even give away. So, I think they went to recycling at some point. Yeah, sorry about that. So, yeah, the Next Generation has much better sound. I will give them that.

And I also saw that you could actually hook up two of them to create the stereo experience. I'm not sure how well that works, but I'm definitely going to give that a try at some point when I actually have room to do so, and the time. But I'm very impressed by it. It looks a lot nicer, obviously. It's a lot smaller with a smaller footprint.

It's not as tall, which is great. And it really does sound a lot better. So, definitely worth the upgrade. Huh. That's pretty good, because the first gen sounded pretty damn good. Yeah, this is better. Oh. Even more betters. Mm-hmm. What's not better is the Echo Dot third gen with Clock with Mandalorian the Child Stand.

This thing is the... What the hell? It's pretty ugly. It's not impressive at all. No, it's just an Echo with ears. That's it. And I guarantee they didn't pay for licensing on this. No way. No, because it doesn't even look right.

Like, yeah. There's no way they paid for licensing. Yeah, even though they called it Mandalorian the Child Stand. I'm sure somebody will take that down. Yes. Oh, God. And I was thinking, you know, we always call it the Lady in the Tube. Mm-hmm. There was an original Lady in the Tube long before the Amazon Echo.

Mm-hmm. Fleshlight. No. Fleshlight was the original Lady in the Tube. Come on. Well, it's more Ham's Hog in the Tube. Well, Ham's Hog in the Lady in the Tube. There you go. Oh, but speaking of the Mandalorian, Disney has won its first Emmy Awards.

Well, Disney Plus won their first Emmy Awards. Well, well done. Even though the Emmys aren't done yet, but they're not out yet. These were the creative Emmys, so. But yeah, not too bad. Not too bad. All for the Mandalorian. Well worth it, especially for the creative stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. I am purposely not watching the Mandalorian trailers. I'm going to wait for it to come out and watch it then. I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't want spoilers. I don't want to see anything. This is one of those ones where I'm laying down the law. No trailers for the Mandalorian. I watched it. It didn't give much away.

I'm still not going to watch it. There may be future trailers. It'll probably give a lot more away, but I got the feels from it. I'm very excited about seeing it. I'm already excited, so I don't need to. All right. Let's talk a little bit about apps, and I know we're going to get into Apple's event at some point, but we'll do that.

I was using SafePass, which is a citizen's contact tracing app, and it's the LA-approved one. I've been using it for the last, I don't know, week or so after you said that you had installed it. And what it's taught me is that there's absolutely no point in using SafePass. None whatsoever.

None. None whatsoever. I think there are maybe 1,000 people that have it installed in my general area. The app tells me that there's a bit over a million that have it installed nationwide. So 0.001% of people, which is nowhere near the critical levels that we would need for them to actually make any difference whatsoever.

I've had five Bluetooth contacts, apparently, in the last week, which I'm assuming is probably from my bike rides as I go 10 miles up and down the area, and I'm sure I pass a couple people and joggers and whatnot that are probably pretty safety conscious, so self-selecting sample.

Yeah, there's absolutely no point in having this installed, and it does seem to do a bit more battery drain than my phone is usually getting. Yeah, and all it does is tell me, hey, if you open the app, it's actually more useful. We're like, remember to open the app. I'm like, well, if the app's open, I still close my phone and lock my phone, so what the hell are you talking about?

Exactly, exactly. And again, it requires you to do all the work, obviously. You have to report if you're sick or not. So I don't know. Do I trust all of humanity? No. The past six months have taught me no. So yeah, there's no point in it.

I guess contact tracing is dead as a theory for America. Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. Great. I can install it now. Yep. I'm going to do the same for sure. Now, the skies have finally cleared up here in lovely SoCal for a little while until the next batch of fires comes through.

And I was looking out my window the other night, and I saw the moon and what was obviously a planet underneath it. And I'm like, ooh, I bet that's Venus. Let me go check. And I got out the Sky Guide app on my iPad and could not get the damn thing to work. It wouldn't, like the compass wouldn't move.

I could manually drag it around and try and figure it out. But I had to go down the rabbit hole to figure out why my damn thing wouldn't work. Here's a pro tip. Jason's pro tip corner. If you have an iPad or an iPhone that has any kind of magnet in the case, it will not work because it blows the compass out.

So I took off my magnetically attached iPad case, and boom, works like a charm. And the new version, version 8's out now for Sky Guide. It came out in between me trying to figure this damn thing out. That's a really cool app. That's all I got to say.

It is. It is so cool. It's so well done. It's very cool. A little too advanced for my kid at this point to geek out on. So I've got some kids' versions of that that are also good as well that I've talked about in previous episodes. But yeah, it's a bitchin' app. Yeah. I remember when it came out for the iPad 1 when these things first came out, and it was so slow.

You had to move it at one-inch increments. And now this thing is in real time, and you can look through the planet, see what's going on down there, where the sun's at, and all this. It's fun. It's a really fun app. You just click on anything, and you get all the super technical information that I'm just like, I don't know what you just said there.

So it's a good app. I really enjoy it. And I'm not even a space guy. Yeah. So I look out to the stars and realize my insignificance in the universe, and then I just go have a beer. That's how it generally works. Nice. Yeah. So over at 9to5Mac, they have a commentary on, yesterday's Apple event was a solid one.

And I wanted my hour back when I was done with it, because it was just a big, long, slow plotting ad. But it was cute that they had Craig Federici sit in the interstitials, because he's usually up there for the iPhone stuff. But there's no iPhones.

But it was cute. If you're a fanboy, good inside joke. But man, yeah, it was definitely too long. And I was pissed off that there was no iPad mini. Yeah, that bums me out, too. I love the iPad mini. I think it's just such a great form factor. It's such a wonderful size. And not to get any further updates on that is kind of bumming me out.

But it is what it is. Yeah. I want them to rev it and take away the damn home button on it and basically do what they did with all the other ones. Now, you can keep the Touch ID, put it in the top, go from there, and just give us more screen real estate on it. But that form factor, that size is perfect.

So are you going to get a watch? No, I'm fine with mine. Okay. You said you were interested in the cheaper version, so I thought maybe you would pull the trigger. Mine's working just fine. There's not much in it. It's like there's not much in it that makes me want to upgrade.

There's not enough to entice me. Yeah, I've got a fifth gen. And the only thing really that the sixth one has is the blood pulse oximeter stuff in it. And I've already got one that I spent $18 at Amazon on, and it works just fine. Yeah, I think I'm good waiting for yet another revision to see what the next version has.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, the fun part about this, which I had no idea when they announced iOS 14 was coming out, it was news to the developers. It was big news. They had no idea that it was coming out in a couple of days. So a lot of app developers didn't get their updates out on time.

Yeah. So they're kind of irked at Apple right now. Well, I'm kind of irked too, because I've installed iOS 14. And you know what developers did have plenty of time to tinker around with stuff. Apples. They make changes just to make changes, and it's starting to drive me insane.

Now, I know we're all just going to get used to it, because that's what we all do, and we bitch at it at the time. And after a month or two of using these things, it's just the way it is. But all of their built devices, Fitness, I know you don't use their podcast app, Podcasts, they have changed the UI so much to make it look cooler.

But now it takes more clicks to get all the normal stuff done, because you used to have a lot more information on your screen when you launched Fitness. Now you've got to scroll or click different buttons to get your granular data that was just there before. Thanks. The Podcast app used to just have a list of the upcoming podcasts that I have downloaded.

Now it's got nice, pretty screens of everything, and I have to scroll and find and download, and then I can finally get a list of the freaking podcasts that I want to listen to. Why must they keep changing things for no reason? Literally, it makes me wonder if the designers and developers actually use their own products that they're messing around with.

It's job security, man. You've got to keep updating, you know? You've got to. Well, it's horrible. Well, since I couldn't care less about the podcast app, fitness doesn't bother me, because all I do is use it on my watch. I never even open the app on the phone. So, but I have to say that the iPad OS update with the pencil updates, worth the price, worth the price of admission, which of course is free.

Free, yes. But the new Scribble stuff they have, man, that is cool. Although the biggest problem is it can't tell the difference between an S and a 5 if it doesn't have context. If you just write an S, it always comes out as a 5, which is crazy. But for the most part, I have terrible handwriting, and it is like a rock star.

Cool. That part is really cool. Do you use a pencil on your iPad? Hardly ever. I got it. I have it. I just never use it, ever. I'm much better at typing. Yeah, I just, I like it because of my, for the RSI factor, it's much easier to just use a pencil.

And I like it in the notes, because I like to just scribble notes. And this new version of notes on the iPad is just stellar, stellar. We'll talk about note-taking in a second. But I, you know, the funny thing about it is if you didn't tell me what the updates were, I couldn't tell you that it was updated.

It seems pretty much the same to me. That app pain is just really stupid, but yeah. Let me skip down a little bit into the links then again. I'll move this up later. But there is the 17 things you can do in iOS 14 that you couldn't do before from Gizmodo. So you can learn all about the things.

Again, it's like that no manual comes anymore, right? So if you just installed iOS 14, you wouldn't even know that there's all this other stuff there now. And some of it is pretty cool. I like the widgets that you can now put on the home screen. It would be great if you could customize them a bit more, because there's a scrolling one, but it kind of looks like you just get the default of what Apple thinks you should have, as opposed to being able to put whatever you want in it.

You can edit that. You can edit those. Yeah, you can edit those. Because I took out the one that was the AI-generated memories that I didn't want to see. Yes, exactly. I'm like, okay, I don't care about those. Stop it, guys. Stop it, guys. So I do like that. And I like the whole app library thing.

I think that's great, because then I can kind of delete a lot of these things on my pages and just have, you know, for the OCD in me, it's nice. Yeah, and I'm not super fanny about that, but I do have to say, though, that there is kind of a manual. When you open up an app that has new features, it kind of gives you a walkthrough for some of them.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, good luck getting back to it. But if you can never see it again, if you accidentally just click out of it, yeah. Yeah, seriously, it's very mission impossible. This message will self-destruct in 15 seconds. You better figure it out now, boy. So, oh, man. The other interesting thing, though, is that Apple Fitness.

Yes. Yeah, and you saw Peloton stock took a giant dump as soon as that was announced. Yeah. I'm fine with them taking down Beachbody, because Beachbody is an MLM scam, and nobody should ever use them. If you didn't know Beachbody was an MLM scam, go Google it. It is.

And we don't like MLM scams. No, we don't. But some of us may use Beachbody because they like their programs. Okay, fine, fine, fine. But they're in trouble now, too. Let's be honest. Yeah, they definitely are. Because everybody that I know that uses those are on Apple devices.

And if you get the Apple One bundle, then you can get it all together. And I was looking at the bundles. The $30 bundle actually isn't too bad, because you do get two terabytes of iCloud storage. It's like the movie theater soda model.

Right. You can have this tiny one for $10. You can have this little bit bigger one for $11. Or for $12, you can get the ginormous half a keg of Coke. Yeah, then they just turn on the tap and let it run. Yeah, exactly.

So I don't know if I'm going to use it or not. I'm pretty happy with my Google storage, which would cost me $20 a month for two terabytes. But for $10 more than you get all of the other Apple services, it might make sense. But the trick is, do you trust iCloud to not screw up? I don't know.

I don't know. I've decided I'm just never going to use Apple Music. So one of these bundles, because they burned me far too many times. So these bundles don't make too much sense for me. I'll keep getting my Apple TV for free as long as I can by buying new devices. I have no interest in Apple Arcade.

None whatsoever. Yeah, and again, Apple Fitness, we'll see. We'll see what they offer. I have Beachbody that you don't like, and I'm happy with them. So we'll see. Yeah, and I have a real bike, so I don't need to ride a bike in the house to actually get my pedal on.

But speaking of the music side of things, Spotify is back going after Apple because of the Apple One subscription. Mm-hmm. Great. Okay. Yeah, everybody's pissed at Apple right now. But you know what? Hey, get in line.

Get in line. Yeah, it's okay. I mean, I kind of get it. You know, I can understand why competitors would be annoyed because Apple is using its ability to – and its clout, which, you know, is good on them. They can be allowed to do that.

They would have an issue if Apple just decided not to put Spotify on their devices. Exactly. They don't. They allow that. So it's competition. You know, they're not trying to drive Spotify out of business. They're just saying, and here's our product. And yes, we're going to bundle it with some of our other products, so it might be a little cheaper than your product.

Daniel Ek, I remember, told musicians that maybe they just should release more music. Maybe Daniel Ek should just charge a little less. Yeah. You're not paying the musicians anyways. By the way, Spotify bundles too because you get Hulu with it now. Yep, that's true. They're doing the same damn thing.

Yes, I agree. And on the Spotify podcast tip, they have belatedly added notifications for new podcast episodes. Now, having not used Spotify for podcasts, one of the most important things that I like to get is notifications when new episodes come out. And it is shocking that they did not have that, but they do now.

But you actually have to go to a podcast show page on Spotify and click follow to get – and then switch on the option to get notified of new episodes to actually get notified if you have a new podcast in Spotify. Yeah, I have so many podcasts in Overcast that I know that I'm going to have a new show as soon as I open it up.

So I don't really need notifications for a new episode. Yes. That would actually get really annoying. I got 10 new episodes a day coming through. It's too many dings. Mm-hmm. And I said we were going to talk about note-taking a little more, and everybody's been telling me about Roam Research.

It's a new way to take notes, and everybody is very culty about it right now, which makes me very scared. I don't trust that. It's expensive as fuck. It's like $165 a year. There's no apps, and it's all online.

So I don't know why everybody's going bug nutty about this. So I'm putting this out there. If you're listening to the show right now, drop me an email and let me know why this thing is so damn good. I've watched the videos. I thought about giving it a shot because I'm a massive note-taker, and Apple Notes seems to do the job for me right now.

It's all the stuff about linking notes, though. I love Apple Notes. I think it's great. This one quote in and of itself makes me want to run screaming from this app. This is from Sarah Constantine, the executive director at the Longevity Research Institute. The most exciting piece of software I've yet tried, a replacement for the essay, has the potential to be as profound, a mental prosthetic, as hypertext.

It's a note app. It's a note app that you can link notes in using Markdown, basically, is what it is. Okay. And it is expensive, of course. It's a subscription-only model, of course. But, yeah, it is believer level, $500 for five years.

$100 a year for a note app? It's $160-something if you just get it now. Wow. Regular. Yeah. So I'm like, you know what? When I do, like, big note projects, I use Scrivener. Scrivener has an incredible note-taking section in it with note cards and all that stuff.

So I don't see what the big deal is here. And I paid for Scrivener once, or I did the upgrade maybe a year and a half ago, and I get free updates. And it works with iCloud, so it's on all my devices. And I don't have to pay every month. So I think I might just stick with Scrivener, you know?

All right. So I know you were talking about how Rome research was a bit culty, but I have to say, it's been a rough year. 2020 has not been fun. And we've spent a lot of time, seven years now, talking about how horrific the internet is. I am here to announce the most important plugin that has ever been made.

Okay. What is it? It will change your life. It is like a mental prosthetic for cooking. Okay. We have, finally, the recipe filter. What's it new? The recipe filter seeks out recipes buried in pages and shows them to you in a handy pop-up. This extension will detect recipes on any page you visit and will highlight them at the top of the page.

Easy. No more scrolling past the entire fucking story about the trip the stupid girl took to Tuscany with her boyfriend. And 7,000 pages later, you actually get the recipe for veal. Okay. I like it. It's awesome. I've installed it because I'm always looking recipes up online and it's always scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.

Photos, photos, photos, scroll, scroll, scroll. Here I am smiling in Italy. Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Recipe. Boom. This thing pops it up right away when you load the page. It's amazing. I love it. I love it. Can you donate to the author and give them some money to make sure that the development continues?

I didn't actually look. I just installed it last night. So I will find that out. But yes, this is amazing. I can't believe that it didn't exist before. Probably did. I just wasn't aware of it. But this one is just great. And boy, boy, does it serve a real need. All right.

I'm installing now. Security? Ha! We're joined again this week by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast. Dave is also the co-host of the social engineering podcast Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, as well as the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy as well as surveillance and privacy.

Howdy doody dare, Dave. Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. I have to say I am in a good mood today. It's been a good week. I am in a good mood. Well, good for you. I know. I'm the one. Yeah. Can I borrow a cup? It's inexplicable.

You know, everything going on around the world. There's no reason for it. But no, I have my reasons and I'm in a very good mood. So hopefully some of that will rub off on everyone around me. But I'll take it. I'm happy for you. I'll take it. Thank you very much.

Is this the first week in a while where you haven't launched a new podcast? Is that why you're happy? Actually, you know what? That could be part of it. Yeah. Actually, he's just sitting there in a full Stormtrooper outfit, just not letting on. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Or just the helmet and no pants. It's okay. Either one works. Happy Friday. Stormtrooper helmet, furry, rest of it all. Ah, business on top, party on down below. Oh, the summon bit of your channel on our Discord is exploding as we speak.

Yes, yes, I know. I shouldn't feed that beast and yet here I go. All right. Well, our first story up is a light story. I thought it was a lighthearted story to start the day off. And Tony Abbott, former prime minister of Australia, Australia, was hacked after posting his boarding pass on Instagram.

And the guy who, quote unquote, hacked him, it wasn't that much of a hack really, ended up getting in touch with the proper channels, the proper authorities, and everybody fixed the bug. Everything turned out fine. And it's one of those happy stories, but it's also a cautionary tale, which you shouldn't post documents like that to Instagram, no matter who you are.

That is not a wise thing to do. Apparently, they were able to get his phone number and passport details, which could have become quite a big deal. But it was obviously a very nice hacker who did not want to do anything nefarious with this information. Yes. Yeah. If anything has a barcode on it, don't post a picture of it.

Or anything that has a barcode on it that is associated with you, don't post a picture of it. Because who knows what's encoded in that barcode, which is what happened here. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Oh, man. I've got to take down those pictures of my barcode tramp stamp that I got in the 90s.

Damn. That was a pretty – that was a cyberpunk-y cool thing to do back in the day. It was. People would figure out what they wanted to code for. Is it link back to your MySpace page? Yeah. Friendster. You know. Right. Well, speaking of security for politicians, Twitter is vowing to step up in time for the elections here.

For elected officials and other high-profile figures ahead of the election, they are going to require users with weak passwords to update their logins and will encourage them to enable two-factor authentication. The company will also enable password reset protection to prevent unauthorized password resets and impose other measures to protect against hackers.

So they are going to do a couple of other things as well, more sophisticated detections and alerts to help us and account holders respond rapidly to suspicious activity, increased login defenses to prevent malicious account takeover attempts, expedited account recovery support – that would mean any support – to ensure account security issues are resolved quickly.

They are applying this to all politicians at federal and state levels, as well as people associated with political parties, campaigns, and candidates in U.S. House, Senate, or gubernatorial races. They are also going to apply this, and I do like this move by them, to major U.S. news outlets and political journalists.

Twitter helping the mainstream media again. Why don't they roll it out for everyone? Yeah, that is a good question. I also have concerns here. They are going to say they're going to require users with weak passwords to update their logins. Now, technically, they shouldn't know what your password is.

That should be hashed seven ways from Sunday, so they shouldn't know exactly what your password is. So how do they know that? Hmm, indeed. Hmm, indeed. Can they infer the complexity of it based on the hash? Generally not.

Once it's hashed, it's usually a pretty big string, no matter what you put into it. So I think what they might be able to do is the next time you log in, they can do analysis on login when you do it. But most people, I mean, I haven't logged back into my Twitter account in six months.

I just stay logged in all the time. So I don't see how that could go. But it's interesting. That's just an interesting little thing that I saw there that caught my attention. The thing that caught my eye was that they say they're going to encourage them to enable two-factor authentication. I think they should require them to enable two-factor authentication.

It's an interesting thing, but something that caught my attention that they don't really talk about in this thing is, again, a lot of these people don't necessarily run their own Twitter accounts. Now, obviously, more and more we're seeing people do that as younger and younger people are getting involved in politics.

And obviously, the reporters are pretty savvy about this stuff. But again, going back to my own past of running accounts for musicians and things like that, when you do two-factor authentication, that becomes a whole new level of weirdness. Like, who gets the authentication if you're having someone else running your Twitter account?

Right. Yeah. It's not like you can have multiple authenticator apps running. Exactly. So that immediately crossed my mind is like, okay, so now every single time I need to log in, the text is now going to a Senate candidate, a 75-year-old XYZ guy who's getting a code, text it to him, who now has to send that code to me as his staffer who can do his tweets and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So I don't necessarily think that that's really – they need to have some sort of other way to deal with accounts that are being handled by staff. There's got to be a way to have multiple authenticator apps linked to the same account. I'm guessing there has to be.

And because you should not use SMS as your second factor. I mean, we all know that now. But let's be honest. Most people do. Yeah. But they shouldn't. That's all I'm saying. Yeah. We deal with that little dance with some accounts and two-factor here where there are multiple people who need access to things and one person has the access.

And so every now and then you'll see something come by on the Slack. Who tried to log into such and such? Here's your code. That sort of thing. So it's definitely not perfect. Well, they need to do the Twitter key fobs, like the RSA key fobs.

So everybody has a generating key fob with them at all times so they can log in if they have to. Right. They won't do that. They won't do that. Right. No, they won't. I saw another interesting article. We've talked a lot about machine learning biases or AI.

And again, I've been beaten down by journalists so much that I no longer even care. But this article just, you know, switches between machine learning and AI randomly and for no reason or rhyme or model. So so shall we for the sake of this discussion. But yeah, they were talking about how, you know, we have this machine learning bias and there is a way that we can fix this by using fake data.

And I did not realize that fake data is now being used all the time by particularly startup AI companies because they need to train their models to be able to compete with the big boys, the Googles and whatnot, who have access to tons and tons and tons of data. And data is expensive these days and it's time consuming to collect it yourself.

So they're starting to use synthetic AI created by AI for AI. And it's a cheaper and faster option. But what they're discovering is that it can actually amplify harmful biases in the data, because if you give a bunch of data for white people and then all of a sudden you're using an AI to create more fake data, they're creating more fake white people, not an actual usable AI that would get rid of those biases.

But what they've discovered is, of course, there are ways to inject your fake data with fake, non-biased information. So once again, AI is people because we have to sit and watch the AI and train the AI to not be racist. Yeah.

It's bias all the way down. Yep. It's bias all the way down. I just found it really interesting that we're actually at the point now where instead of using real data, we have companies that are making a lot of money generating fake data. Mm-hmm. There's so much fake data on the internet, though.

Why can't they just let a web crawler go out and get as much as they want? Jeez. Well, it's kind of specific. My take on this is that it just kind of shifts the problem one layer away. Yeah. Right. It's even further down the black box now, right?

Right. Right. I can't say I really understand this, and it may be because of how much it leaves me scratching my head and going, wait, what? I guess, I mean, I could see, I don't know.

I guess I could see being able to train up the AI so that when you feed it the real data, it's ready to go. But again, what good, I mean, it's like, you can use all the sports analogies in the world. You know, what if I train you to be a major league baseball player, but everything I've been sending, I've been throwing you wiffle balls the whole time.

Yeah, I mean, I'd be ready for that. I suppose the sports analogy is a good thing. If you can run, say, if you can run, say, 35 years of baseball series of full seasons and kind of try to figure out patterns and things of that nature, maybe you can transfer that to the real world somehow, as opposed to using, you know, basically, you know, the past 100 years of baseball history, most of which isn't relevant because rules changes, blah, blah, blah.

So that's kind of what they're doing. And they talk about the department, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs are basically using it to create what they're calling realistic medical histories for thousands of fake patients in order to study disease patterns and treatment paths. Okay. You know, I'm thinking, like, if you fed an AI 100 years worth of football games versus feeding an AI 100 years of Madden.

Right. Right? Yeah. 100 years of Madden, just Madden playing against itself. The Buffalo Bills still lose. Right. Using that as your training thing. Because, you know, Madden is based on real information. It's based on – but Madden has its own flaws for sure. So what would come out different if you fed the system Madden versus real – is it possible that Madden would be more accurate because Madden has been – has had its edges sanded off?

You know, Madden doesn't have some of the social things from the early days of the sport and things like that that could cause things to head in different directions. It's an interesting thing to think about. It is. And a little bit terrifying. And by interesting, we mean terrifying.

As per usual on this show. Right. Right. Well, speaking of interesting and terrifying, I have a story that got a lot of attention this week over on the Cyber Wire. And this is a situation where, you know, Microsoft released their normal monthly Patch Tuesday list of things that they patched.

Yes. And there was one that came out. It was CVE 2020-1472. Ah, yes. Chestnut. Good old CVE 2020. I remember sitting by the fire with old CVE 2020-1472. Yeah, right. And people – it had a maximum score on it.

So it was a serious sort of thing. But about a week after Patch Tuesday, when people really started digging into it, the response from the security community was, holy crap, this is really a big deal. The folks here, this article we've linked to from Ars Technica, one of the researchers called it an insane bug with a huge impact.

And basically what it allows you to do is if you have access to a network, if you can get into someone's network, you can use this bug to have – very easily get yourself admin control over the network.

Yeah, Windows is always – I haven't used Windows in many years now, but Windows was always – that active directory is a scary thing. And anything that accesses it needs to be super tight and reviewed a lot. And when something gets in there and somebody finds something in there, that is bad for you.

And this is always – Microsoft has a long history of these updates bricking your machine. So people are often very gun-shy about installing any update that comes out on release day because invariably a better one comes along a couple days later that is actually – will work without destroying your machine.

I mean that's happened back in the day for me with my Windows machines a gazillion times, so much so that I turned off auto-update and would wait a couple days. So that can't be helping. I was updating my PC last week and I was going through the process and then it just rebooted in the middle saying, okay, Windows is installing.

It got to 45% and then got in a reboot loop. Reboot loop, reboot loop, reboot loop. And unfortunately, I could go back to a previously saved state and then try again and it worked the second time. But it's like that was four hours of my day gone, sitting here watching my PC reboot over and over again.

It's like the worst feeling in the world. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this exploit is called Zero Logon. It was put together by some researchers at the security firm Secura. And it works by sending a string of zeros in a series of messages that use the NetLogon protocol.

And I love – there's a part of this article, again, from Ars Technica that I highlighted. It's – they say, the vulnerability stems from the Windows implementation of AES CFB8 or the use of AES cryptography protocol with Cypher feedback to encrypt and validate authentication messages as they traverse the internal network.

And of course, I mean – Yeah, of course, you do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What else would it have done? But here's the fun part. It says, for AES CFB8 to work properly, so-called initialization vectors must be unique and randomly generated with each message. Windows failed to observe this requirement.

No! Whoops. Yeah. Yeah. So somehow by sending a string of zeros, that's the ballgame. Another interesting part of this is Microsoft issued a patch on this.

That's what triggered the awareness of it. But it seems like Microsoft has also said, we're going to have another patch for this out this coming April, I believe. Right. Which means we've sent out a Band-Aid. Yeah. The underlying issue.

It's going to require a little more doing. So stay tuned for that. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, that's kind of the nature of Windows and has been for a long time. So, you know, you got to give them credit for – they tend to find things and they tend to patch them and they tend to eventually get around to fixing root causes.

But the insane complexity of Windows these days, it boggles the mind. Yeah. So if you're someone who's working in that world, don't let this one pass you by. NetLogon is a serious one. Do check it out. My last story this week is actually a sad one.

This is from Graham Cluley, host of Smashing Security podcast, a cybersecurity guy, well-known in the industry. And he's commenting on a report from the Associated Press. There was a hospital in Dusseldorf, Germany who got hit by ransomware.

And because they got hit by the ransomware, they had to shut down their ER and divert patients to other facilities. And there was a woman who, because of this shutdown, had to be transferred to a facility about 20 miles away.

And because of that delay, she died. Now, it turns out that the hackers or the bad guys were not after this hospital. They were after a university, the Dusseldorf University, that is associated with this hospital.

They were not after the hospital itself. So, when the police reached out to the criminals and said, you've reached – this is a hospital. Knock it off. They sent them the decryption key to unlock everything. But for this one woman, it was too late.

And they say the prosecutors, the local prosecutors are launching an investigation into the hackers on suspicion of negligent manslaughter. Who knows if they'll ever catch them, but people are noting that this may be the first case of someone losing their life because of – directly or indirectly – because of a ransomware incident.

It's interesting. I figured it would have happened already with everything that was going on at the beginning of C-19 and everybody – all the hospitals getting slammed. Probably this is the first directly provable. I mean, obviously, we've had ransomware attacks that have shut down city centers and emergency response things and things of that nature.

But this is probably the first you could draw the line between the two so easily. I hope they prosecute. I hope they catch them. That's the first step. That's true. Right. Yeah. And, you know, word of note to any ransomware developers out there.

Make sure you send your stuff to the right place. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, think twice about it. And leave hospitals alone. Right. Well, and, you know, at the outset of COVID-19, there were several ransomware organizations who made hay out of saying that we are not going to go after medical facilities.

How long did that last? It didn't last long at all. Well, criminals are going to criminal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So no honor there among thieves. But, yeah, so kind of a sad milestone to mark, a reminder at how serious this stuff is.

In this case, these guys were sloppy. And because of their sloppiness, that certainly contributed to someone losing their life. Yeah. So good times, guys. All right. On that happy note. Still in a good mood, Dave? I am still in a good mood, so.

Oh, well, good for you. Ain't no ransomware going to bring you down. No. You're walking on sunshine today. That's right. That's right. I've got bouncing my step. And the little bluebird of happiness is perched on my shoulder.

So there you go. All right, guys. Good catching up. I will talk to you guys next time. Excellent. When you're probably sad again. Probably. Yep. Closing shout outs. Baseball's been going great.

Shout out to the Dodgers. Bundesliga starts back up again today, which is, well, there's just, yeah, it's because their whole season got delayed for three months. So it only just ended a couple weeks ago, and now they're starting up again. So, yay. Things are going well enough in Germany that there will actually be crowds.

They're letting fans in. 20% capacity. Dependent on, of course, levels of virus outbreaks. Only hometown crowds. They're not letting people travel to the other cities to see the game. So kind of responsible, given their levels of what's going on right now.

So, yeah. Hey, and we get a new Ted Lasso today. Woo-hoo! Oh, that's right. That'll be tonight. I'm very excited about that. Very excited about that. So, see, we kind of had some shout outs. There we go. Ish. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

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