482: Choose Wisely

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. So it's Taco Tuesday. It's also my wife and I's anniversary today. Anything else going on today, Jason? I think it's called Erection Day, where I have to look at a bunch of dicks on TV all day.

You've been waiting to use that one for three and a half years, haven't you? No, I came up with it this morning when I was looking at all the dicks on TV. Yeah, it is Election Day. I'm recording from Canada. So this is a bona fide international podcast right now.

Yes, it is. And you sound like you're in a cave in Canada. I basically am. I'm in the basement because right now it's the only thing that isn't completely chaotic as we move through the process of getting into our new house. So, you know, eventually I will be up in a loft studio. But as for right now, I'm panicked to the basement.

And you are recording on a USB mic, the AT2005 from Audio-Technica. I am because my regular setup is a bit bulky and I opted for things like winter clothes since it's already fucking snowed since I've been here. Well, you moved to Canada. What do you expect?

Hey, turn on your TV with the talking dicks. Yeah, that's true. That's why I'm out here talking to you. I've got to say, I mean, as much of a joke as it is, yes, I am in Canada now and eventually will be here full time. But once I got past across the border, man, my stress levels dipped a lot.

I'm sure. I'm sure. I have been calm and relaxed and, you know, obviously I'm not dumb. We all know that what happens in America affects the entire world, particularly America's hat, Canada. We're very close to you. But so there is some trepidation.

We want the best result. It will affect us either way. But the fact that it's just not 24-7 and, you know, I'm not hearing reports about people buying guns and, you know, bricking up and blocking up their storefronts because they're worried about what's going to happen.

I've had a relatively calm three days, four days now in my quarantine. Yeah, go fuck yourself. It still sucks down here. And I'm sipping my Tim Hortons coffee and I had a Tim Hortons breakfast sandwich this morning, Jason. Oh, good for you. I'm having a Guinness because fuck it.

If I were there, I'd be drunk already. Oh, well, you know, doctor's orders say no, but reality says, oh, maybe just a little. It's a special day, Jason. It's a special day. It is. It is a special day. And it's funny that I mentioned the fact that you're on a different microphone.

So I figured, hey, you know, today's going to be a shit show anyway because it is. That's just what it's in the universe. Mercury must be in shit or a grade or whatever those quacks talk about. I am talking to you today on the MV7 podcast microphone from Shure. Okay. How is it?

I mean, Shure is a very respected and well-known brand in the music industry. A lot of live mics for concerts. The Shure SM57 and 58 are stalwarts of the music industry live performance aspect. As sure as is the Shure SM7B, which is famous with many podcasters, but in also Michael Jackson recorded Thriller on it.

Those have been around for ages. This is a kind of a brother of the Shure SM7B. I did some tests side by side yesterday on it and they were almost identical. All right. The cool thing about this is it's 250 bucks, but it's built for podcasters.

So it's XLR and USB, much like the AT2005 you're on. That's right. Yes. And Shure SM7B is going to cost you 400 bucks. Then you still have to buy the cables. You got to buy the interface, the cloud lifter because they're so gain heavy, all that crap.

That's going to, it's going to end up running you like 800 bucks to get a SM7B. This is 250 bucks out of the box and you're good to go. So yeah, I hear your dulcet tones clearly. Yes. Yeah. So we might just actually say, fuck it and send you one of these. Okay.

Oh no, this AT2005 is going to work, but we'll go. Just think of this as a retro show for a while until Brian comes back and gets his real stuff. I do have to say though, this week I made the mistake of looking at my spam folder on Gmail. I usually have like, you know, three or four a day.

There were thousands and thousands of spam email this week asking for money for Trump and for Biden. The scams have gone through the roof. Yep. And the non-scams. I've legitimate gotten ones from both campaigns and I have no idea how I got on their mailing list.

I guess when he registered as an independent, your fair game. Yeah. I signed up for one thing from Biden, then I canceled it. And I know that they sold it because or just gave it away because it just continued and continued for every race in the country.

I got so many text messages now and I'm sorry, but it's short-sighted to do this because next time I'm not going to sign up for anybody. No way, no day. I'm not going to donate to anybody. It won't matter unless you change your email address and your phone number before the next election.

Yeah, that's if there's a telecommunications infrastructure in place and we're not dealing with nuclear winter at that point. But hey. True, true. It does depend on who wins. That's right. Yep. And speaking of the election, I found this one over on Slate and I – you don't agree with it probably anymore, but I certainly do since I'm still stuck down here in the Great Wasteland.

It's called Let's Just Lie on the Floor and Scream Together. And I think that we can all relate to this one now. It is basically about how everybody deserves a good tantrum now and again because – I mean, you know, that's – and it's not just the election.

It's also obviously COVID and then the pandemic and the ongoing craziness going on with that and George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and, you know, it did kind of feel like we had things kind of going the right way a little bit over four years ago and shit's just falling apart and, yeah, tantrum.

I mean, it's funny because one of the first lines in that was – the author was talking about how they used to just drink one night a week and now they just drink seven nights a week. I'm like, amen, brother. Yep, yep. And what is a night and what is a day anymore? Yep. It's a good article. I certainly recommend reading it.

And I recommend everybody go have a tantrum every now and again just to get it out of your system because we fucking deserve it. Hey, man. Hopefully by the time everybody's heard this, we've really turned a corner. We're hedging our bets on this one. No, I seriously – there's no way we're going to have a winner by the time people hear this podcast.

This is going to go on for at least a week. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. Unless it's a landslide. Fingers crossed. Unless it's a landslide. In the news. Not a lot of news I see that we collected this week for multiple reasons.

You've been having tantrums and testing mics. I've been trudging through snow to pick up IKEA boxes to try to get some motochrome of a house set up here. Also, you know, election has kind of squeezed all coverage off the known universe that isn't related to the election. So, not a lot of tech news I saw this week.

Yeah. I mean, there was a little bit, but I'm just like, screw it, man. Yeah, screw it. Nobody cares about it this week. And also, we've got enough feedback in here to choke a horse. So, we're going to get a couple of weeks of feedback from you guys. So, we're going to get to that pretty quick. But you have at least one news story for us, Brian.

Would you like to tell us? I do. I found this last night, and it was immediately put into action, which I thought was hilarious. So, this is from over at TechCrunch. Twitter explains how it will handle misleading tweets about the U.S. election results. So, they have updated their policies again in advance of the U.S. elections, and specifically one day in advance this time around.

Yep. Yep. So, they offered more information about how they plan to prioritize the enforcement of its rules and how it will label any tweets that fall under the new guidelines. They will be talking about presidential election and any other highly contested races where there may be significant issues with misleading information.

So, if you are eligible to be labeled, if your account has a U.S. 2020 candidate label, including the presidential campaigns and candidates, and if you have more than 100,000 followers or if you have significant engagement with a tweet, the threshold is either 25,000 likes or 25,000, quote, tweets plus retweets, the company is saying.

So, they're casting a wider net, and they're trying to clamp down on misinformation going viral, even if the tweet in question was initiated by a smaller account. Now, obviously, you know, they're shooting here for we won tweets.

Right. When it hasn't actually been called. Yeah. So, then, obviously, the next question is, what are we considering an official election result? So, Twitter is considering it at least two of a select list of national news outlets, which include ABC News, AP, CBS News, CNN, Decision Desk, HQ, Fox News, and NBC News.

So, they've got to have two of them. CNN's not in that list. Interesting. I said CNN. Oh, you did? I missed that. Sorry. Yeah. Of course, they're in there. So, they're in trouble. So, they're trying to stop amplification of posts if that has not happened yet.

So, they're really going to try to do something here. Now, the thing that always kills me, and we always have to remember this and take this with a grain of salt, very, very, very, very few people are actually on Twitter. Really? You think so? Yes. This has been pointed out numerous times.

What happens on Twitter is not necessarily the real world. Not a lot of people are on Twitter. It is a very intense focus group. Now, obviously, it's mostly reporters, which is kind of a big deal. But we've got to keep in mind that Twitter is not America.

You've got to surprise me on that one. All right. Well, you think differently. But you live on Twitter. So, you're kind of in that bubble. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I have my Twitter-colored glasses on. But I want to ask you, Brian, if a policy has failed to be enforced, is it really a policy?

No. No. It just smells like shit in the woods with a pope. Which is where Jack Dorsey is because I don't know if you saw his beard. Holy Jiminy. I know. He's like growing his election beard like he's playing in the World Series or something.

Pretty crazy. But it's funny because Twitter announced all of this and then just immediately last night they already slapped Trump because, of course, he can't not break the rules. Oh, I'm sure he won already last night before we even had the election. Landslide. Huge. Huge landslide.

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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.

Coming to us from ground zero, just about. Can you see the non-scalable wall from your office? You know, I cannot. The most interesting thing I can see from my office is the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. I can actually see them from here.

And what's most – they have a really cool dish. You know, they have – I don't know, it's probably a 10-meter antenna or something like that. I mean it's big or as I like to call it, the world's most complex bird feeder, birdbath rather, birdbath rather. But – so I can see them from here.

Of course, we are a stone's throw away from NSA and then, yeah, right down the road is Washington, D.C. I was talking to somebody today, a researcher from Recorded Future, and we were talking about how never in my life did I think that in an election situation we would see walls being put up around the White House.

Well, I hope they're working on some sort of physics application to extract the current occupant behind that wall. Or maybe they could just create – When needed. Yeah, maybe they could just create a singularity in the oval that just sucks all the occupants out into another dimension.

Let it be a problem. By all accounts, I don't think he's just going to walk out the door. No, I think maybe they lure him into the decoy bunker and then they bolt the door. Yeah, they just put some animal crackers through the slot and some water every day and say, this is what you deserve.

By the way, if Biden does win by whatever landslide and it's obvious that he has one, he would be remiss not to use the opportunity to say, Mr. Trump, tear down that wall. Oh my God.

But you know what? This is literally the biggest wall that Trump has built, but we did pay for it. Yes, we did. Mexico did not pay for it. That's true. That's true. Okay, guys. So here's the real elephant in the room. The Mandalorian's back.

Yes. What did you think? No, the real elephant in the room is Boba Fett's back. True that. True that. Well, aren't the real elephants in the room all those Banthas? No, that's true. That's true. It's all true. It's true all the way down. It's true. It's true.

I thought season one of The Mandalorian was glorious. This is by far the best Star Wars that has existed since I was 10. Yeah. I would agree with that. And it's got Timothy Oliphant playing the only part that he knows how to play, a fucking Marshall. That's all he knows how to play.

Talk about being typecast. Yeah, seriously. But he does it so good, he can just do that forever, and I'm cool. I'm cool with that. Yeah. I enjoyed it very much. I thought it was a heck of a way to kick off the new season. You know, an old Western standard story, right?

You've got the settlers have to team up with the natives to fight a common enemy. And boy, there were just so many beats in this that I enjoyed. At one point, I looked over at my son Jack while we were watching it, and he was just grinning ear to ear as it was happening.

And I'm with you, Brian. I think it is so nice to be seeing high-quality Star Wars content being put out, and this show is consistently doing that. Sure, she ain't the last Jedi. No. No. I could care less about the Skywalker portion of the Star Wars universe nowadays.

Yeah, and I love what they're doing with the Sand People, just, you know, fleshing them out and turning them into something. I think that's really interesting. Yeah, yeah. I love what they're doing with this universe. It's just great, and I really hope that the quality of the new shows that are being greenlit is going to keep up with this.

Yeah, you know, there's one thing I was wondering about is how much do you think that the fact that they don't have the pressure of doing the features has been an element of their success?

That they have the time to let the stories breathe, and it's not, you know, the be-all, end-all that the sequel trilogies are? I think it's not just the time to let it breathe, it's the fact that they are removed from the main characters from people who are now in their 40s and 50s grew up with.

You know, there's no pressure whatsoever to tie in with the Skywalkers, with the Galactic Empire, with all the things that we have poured over and studied and loved all of our lives. Like, they just need to exist within the universe and make it look like it.

That's all they need to do, and that's benefited them greatly. Hmm. I tend to agree with you on that one. It's really nice to, like, you know, let them stretch their legs. And even though, you know, they are doing quote-unquote new stories, just like you said, it's a classic story, just like Star Wars was, you know?

And it's just fun. It's what it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be fun. This isn't supposed to be, you know, Shakespeare by any stretch. Yeah, yeah. And I think there's also a sense that the people who are making this truly love Star Wars in the same way that those of us who love Star Wars truly love Star Wars deeply.

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's to their benefit and very smart of them just to completely, basically put this in a universe where the Force really kind of almost doesn't exist, except for Baby Yoda. And it's not really understood. And there's no talk of Jedi or nobody gives a crap about taking over things or overthrowing a government.

It is just out there in the universe, just kind of regular people trying to get by. And that's really cool. That's great. What do you make of the fact that Mando doesn't seem to have any knowledge of Jedis? This, to me, seems problematic.

Why do you consider it problematic? Because it hasn't been that long. It hasn't been that long since Jedis were a big deal in the universe. Well, okay. So are we going to go this deep into this right now? Hey, it's better than the options.

It's better than the options we have. So, you know, it's only been a generation or two already. So since all the Jedi were wiped out, you have a government that's probably wiped any knowledge of that. These people are on the outskirts. You've got in A Force Awakens, they already think it's just a myth.

And Han Solo, who's still alive and not that much older, has to tell them, no, it was real. It really happened. And so apparently, you know, this stuff disappeared pretty quick in this universe and probably wasn't known by many people at all to begin with. Like how, you know, it's a far-flung universe.

It's probably only in the inner core, I can't believe I'm saying this sort of stuff, that people even knew about the Jedi, really. Unless the Jedi showed up on your planet to fix something. Yeah. All right, I can go with that. I can live with that. I can suspend my disbelief enough for that. Also, it's not real, Dave.

None of this is real. Shut up, Brian. Shut up. Bite your tongue. I thought I knew you. I thought we were friends. Of course it's real, Brian. He can go buy a suit. That's true. That's true. If it wasn't real, there would be no stormtrooper suits.

Hey, look, you know, we follow the prime directive in this household. Oh, wait. Hold on a second. Oh, shit. Oh, man. Oh, my God. All right. Well, so thumbs up all around for the Mandalorian, and we're all excited for season two, yes? Yes.

Make it so, Chewbacca. Yeah. Oh, man. Well, since as we record this, it is election day, I thought I'd share some notes with you all. CISA, which is the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, one of our federal agencies, they've been holding media calls throughout the day here on election day, and the first one was at nine o'clock this morning, and they're having them every few hours up

until 1130 tonight. When Trump declares victory. That's right. And so far, so good. Everything that they're, the information they're providing us, everything's on background, so we can't attribute to individuals, so we just say senior CISA officials are making these points, and they are senior CISA officials, and they're saying people should be confident in the vote, the vote count, and the vote certification.

The Iranian and Russian efforts over the past few weeks were quickly addressed. In particular, the Iranian email and video campaign were recognized and attributed within 27 hours. There's been some limited Russian activity, but it's been relatively ineffectual, and no voter data has been altered.

Trevor Burrus But I'm actually concerned about the Republican efforts. Aaron Powell Yes, yes. That is a fair- Trevor Burrus The only pregnant pause. Aaron Powell No, no, no. That's a fair point, which I suppose is outside of the- Trevor Burrus Their jurisdiction.

Aaron Powell Range of what CISA is looking at. Aaron Powell Right. Aaron Powell Right. Trevor Burrus Apparently we need a Mandalorian. Trevor Burrus I mean, I guess the good news here is that there's really not a whole lot to report from this side of things.

We could have had this compounding thing of, I think many of us were holding our breath and seeing, were we going to see huge disinformation campaigns released from foreign adversaries? Trevor Burrus And so far, it has not happened today. Aaron Powell So the takeaway is if our election is interfered with, we really only have ourselves to blame.

Aaron Powell You are just little merry sunshine today, Brian, aren't you? Aaron Powell You know, safely on the other side of the border now, you're just lobbing those grenades over the fence. Aaron Powell Yeah, I guess that's one way to look at it. Trevor Burrus Well, I mean, that's good news.

Aaron Powell It is good news. Aaron Powell It is. Aaron Powell I mean, it's a bit of good news in what is certainly continuing to be a day full of anxiety and strange things and all that. I guess the usual stuff that, the usual dirty tricks seem to be what we're hearing about today.

Aaron Powell Right. Aaron Powell You know, robocalls going out and saying, hey, the lines are long, wait till tomorrow to vote, that sort of thing. Aaron Powell Powell Right. Aaron Powell That's actually happening in Flint, Michigan. Aaron Powell Powell They're getting robocalls. Aaron Powell Powell Oh my God. Aaron Powell Powell Yeah. Aaron Powell That's insane. Aaron Powell Powell So what's more insane is that there are people that will actually fall for that.

Aaron Powell They do it because it works. Aaron Powell Powell That's the fucking thing. Aaron Powell Powell Right, right, right. Aaron Powell Powell Evidently, there's some meme, or not memes, but there's tweets going around that are being amplified on the Republican side that voting machines are being disabled in Philadelphia.

Aaron Powell Powell That's not true, but that's gaining some traction. Aaron Powell Powell But hold on. Twitter announced all sorts of new policies that were supposed to stop that. Exactly. Yes, yes, yes, they did.

But I would say overall, overall, it's going well. And there's still plenty more day to have today. Oh, yes. But overall, many of the things that we were we had reason to be concerned about.

Do not seem to be coming to pass. And that is good news. Excellent. Good. Oh, dear. This is the longest day ever. It's going to be more than a day, man. It's going to be more than a day. But it's, you know, the journey of a thousand Trumps starts with one election or two.

All right. Well, that's good news. Okay. Yep. Yep. That's all I got. Forget it. Forget the rest of it. You're not going to do your story. Oh, no, no, I can't. I can go into my stories if we want. I'm going to put these a little bit out of order because I thought this was actually good news. Zoom has finally enabled end-to-end encryption for all accounts, not just paid accounts.

So it's a pain in the butt. With some caveats. Yeah, with some caveats. It is a pain in the butt to turn it on. And you have to be using certain clients. You can't use the web client, apparently. But you also have to have everybody on the call using it, having it turned on.

So as someone who has a Zoom account, I went and turned it on for my channel. So if I start a Zoom meeting, it will require people to have it. But if I let somebody in that doesn't have it turned on, I don't know what happens then.

I haven't gone through the whole use case. I was going to ask, do they throw up a notice saying, by the way, your end-to-end encryption is not working now? Or does that symbol still sit there? Because of Bob, who is the weakest link. Yes, with some shaming. That would be nice. Right, right, right.

Snowden, we told you to upgrade. If Bob wasn't still running Windows XP, we'd all be enjoying end-to-end encryption. Oh, man. Good stuff. Yeah, I don't know how that works, but it's there. It's a pain in the butt. You can't actually do it in the app itself, which I thought was interesting.

You have to go to the settings on the web page to turn it on. And it's buried a little deep under the settings and meetings tab. And it's like a third of the way down. You got to scroll a bit to get to it and to turn it on there. And they do have warnings saying that, look, everybody's got to be on board or nobody gets their encrypted bits.

And you have to have the latest version of the desktop app, which I downloaded yesterday. And I actually tried it between two computers. It worked. But I had it already turned on. So that's what I'm saying. I don't have the full use case scenario of it yet. I see.

OK. Well, I mean, to Zoom's credit, they are getting high marks for how nimble and responsive they've been through all of this. I mean, they had a talk about having an avalanche of users, you know, being crushed under the weight of your own success. Yeah. And they've been really responsive. Yeah.

It's like taking eight months. They've also had an avalanche of money. So they could have probably gotten on this a bit quicker. Yeah. Yeah. And I also think that they only the only reason they did this for all the accounts is that all the public shaming. It wasn't they were never going to do this.

It's all the public shaming that came with. Why isn't this encrypted? Why isn't this encrypted? And, you know, when we came into the pandemic, it was like, Zoom is a shit show for security. And then they're like, oh, man, everybody's looking at us now. I guess we better get on that. Maybe. Well, I think you're right.

Unprecedented times for everyone, right? I think if we had not had the pandemic, the end-to-end encryption would have remained a premium feature. Mm-hmm. And, you know, I guess I can't fault them too much for that to differentiate it that way.

Although, you know, privacy shouldn't be something you have to pay for, I suppose. Welcome to America. Yep. Yep. Yeah. What are you talking about, Canuck? Yeah, seriously. Traitor's expat bitch.

Not going to lie. It's feeling pretty good over here. Yeah. Yeah. It really is. Got your Mountie uniform on, riding a moose to work every day. Pretty much, yeah. Feeling pretty good. Feeling pretty good. Growing out a big old beard, you know, like you do. Yep. Going to use up that health care.

Oh, good times. Good times. You know, all of that, I couldn't care less about all of that, but he's eating Tim Hortons and that just irks me. It's just mean. It's just mean. It is just delicious. It really is. All right. See, exactly.

Rub our face in it. Freedom of donuts. It's really nice. I don't think I've ever had Tim Hortons, so. Oh, man. Their breakfast sandwich. It is to die for, yes. And you will die from it. Don't get me wrong. Now that I get my blood work back, I think it comes, all of my problems come back from that one Tim Hortons sandwich I had at that festival that we went to.

Yeah. All right. So we got a note from a listener, Vincent, who says, no honor amongst thieves, such dick wads. And this is something that you and I, we've been talking about in this segment a couple times. Basically, stay away from the hospitals, people.

A cyber attack has hit Vermont network, including six hospitals. So they're still at it. Ongoing network problems for the University of Vermont Health Network, which affects its six hospitals in Vermont and New York. The network is working with the FBI and the Vermont Department of Public Safety on the investigation.

The FBI and two federal agencies warned and alerted on Wednesday that they had credible information of an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to U.S. hospitals and health care providers, which is not what you want in the middle of a pandemic. I am hoping that we are going to see a shift in cyber norms away from this sort of thing.

I'm not sure what it's going to take. I do know that I've spoken to several folks in cybersecurity who are saying that in direct response to this and other attacks on hospitals, they've seen an increased amount of information sharing among cyber professionals who are not just looking to defend against this sort of thing, but to be on the offense to prevent it from happening in the first place.

And we saw that, you know, we saw the thing with one of the intelligence agencies went after the trick bot botnet to take down a bunch of their command and control servers going after because those are the folks who are doing this sort of thing. Microsoft went after them as well, taking down a bunch of their domains.

So I think there's widespread agreement that this is despicable. It's like in a time of war, you don't bomb hospitals, you know, that sort of thing. So I don't, but I don't know what it's going to take.

I don't know if it's a matter of getting the local governments to agree that this is despicable and put it on the list of things that thou shalt not do, or we will stop looking the other way when you're doing all these sorts of things. Cause that's a big part of how this ecosystem runs right now.

I say no safe Harbor for these people. You know, that's the only way that this is going to really put the fear of God into them. Like the people that caused that woman's death in Germany after that last attack, we need to go after them, like with everything we've got and make an example out of them and keep doing that until the shit stops.

It just, that's the only way. Yeah. The, the, the threat of what happens when you get caught just has to be so severe that it's no longer worth their time or effort to try to do it. It can't, it can't be profitable for them. And, and what, and so when you say go after them, what do you mean? Catch the perpetrators, not just shut down their command and control.

Get the people behind the keyboards and lock their ass up, you know, lock their ass up, take their assets. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh, that's right. They don't exist, but yeah, we need the actual internet police because this is not, this isn't like internet police anymore. This is real world police.

We need some real shit happening to get these people and just, you know, get them where they live, find the rocks that they're under, turn it over and step on them, step on and just get rid of them and make it so unprofitable to do this that, you know, take down the organizations that, that actually make all the money from it.

Cause we all know this is organized crime that's doing this and you know, we need to make it. So we, we need, uh, basically the untouchables for cybercrime, especially when it comes after hospitals. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I cannot disagree with you. The complication of course, and I know, you know, this is that these folks are in Russia overwhelmingly and we don't have an extradition agreement with them and they may be working

for organized crime on Monday and working for state sponsored actors on Tuesday. Well, then we shut down their hospitals and, you know, come to an accord where it's like, okay, these are not cool to go after. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I'll say to that point that the, the shutdown of TrickBot, um, was done with a good bit of swagger.

In other words, our intelligence agencies, the way that they took it down, it was like, look, we know what you're doing. You think you have, uh, all these capabilities. Look what we can do to you. So, you know, knock it off. We're willing to burn our sources.

We're willing to, to demonstrate our capabilities, which is something that, um, particularly the intelligence agencies like to keep under their, keep close to their vest. Um, so maybe we're seeing the beginning of that. Maybe with this tax on healthcare and we're going to start to see some things that, you know, it's a nice network you've got.

It'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it. More of this offensive, uh, attack from our point of view. Yeah, it's hard though. It's hard though. I don't think we're going to start to knock their dick in the dirt. That's what I want. Well, but nobody, I mean, internationally, nobody wants to cross that line that requires a kinetic, and by kinetic, I mean military response.

That's true. That's the line nobody wants to cross because then you're, you're slinging missiles, bombs and, and grenades at each other. And now you got a war. Normally we had some sort of united, oh, I don't know, nation organization.

God, that would really solve a lot of problems if something like that were effective. You've been in Canada too long, Brian. You're dreaming about a utopia that just doesn't exist. The United Federation of Planets. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If we had a TARDIS, we could take care of all of this.

Well, we had a time machine, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I'd go back and shoot Zuckerberg as a baby. If ifs and buts were candy and nuts. All right, guys, let's put a button on this. Yep. I hope you all guys, I hope you, I hope Dave that you survive.

Brian, I know you're going to survive because you're a coward and you ran off to Canada like a damn Vietnam. ROTC. ROTC. Exactly. ROTC. Run off to Canada. That's right. You're all just jealous. I'm planning on taking whatever medicines or whatever I need to take this evening to get a good night's sleep tonight because otherwise I will not.

Well, I was talking to a friend of the show, Chris Lockhead, who was on his way to go pick up his, he just ordered 600 bucks worth of pot. I was about to say, I was imagining like a cartoon Bittner hitting his head on an anvil.

Right. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. All right, guys. Talk to you next time. All right. Hopefully. Hopefully. Yeah. Yeah.

Media Candy. There was some interesting news I saw this week. Joe Rogan had Alex Jones on. Okay. So I, I, I, I, I scratched my head because I, I seem to remember not very long ago, Spotify had removed all of the episodes with Alex Jones from the Joe Rogan show when it was brought over.

And I saw, I'm thinking, well, isn't Joe, uh, you know, pushing the edges here by trying to get Alex back on. And apparently he was, I, and this is, this is what gets me. Spotify is defending the appearance now. Now. Uh, okay.

Yeah. Scratching my head on this one. Scratching my head on this one. I guess they're pivoting to, we're just a platform. Here's what I'm thinking. This was a dick measuring contest between Joe Rogan and Spotify. And Joe says, mine's bigger. I'm going to do what I want.

Shut up. And Spotify says, well, in for a penny, in for a pound. What are we going to do? We can't kick him off. We already gave him the money. Shit. There's something in his contract that lets him decide who the guests are. And Spotify doesn't get to say anything about it. So he tested that out. Yep.

So this was a big fuck you to Spotify, his new overlords, or are they? That's the real question. Now I got to say that Spotify's take on this in, in their stance, you know, we've always talked about if they've got buckets of money to give us, we'd go on the platform. But I'm thinking now that that bucket got bigger than their entire valuation.

So I think grumpy old geeks is probably okay where we're at. Yeah. I don't think they have much money left for people. No. Well, all the other podcasters got it and it's just not us. Well, and other Spotify news, they have attempted to make some more money. I don't know if you saw that. That was kind of just breaking.

But they're rolling out an option for musicians to be put into the promotional playlist and things of that nature if they take a lower percentage on their plays. Yeah. Isn't that shitty? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yay, Spotify. Spotify is the Uber of music now.

That's all they are. They really are. They really are. I'm actually going to have to rethink my subscription to them. Good man. Good man. Then you're going to have to pay for Hulu on your own. Or is that just me? I don't think I've watched a single thing on Hulu. Me either. Me either. I did.

Oh, no. You were watching MASH, remember? Oh, that's right. MASH. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I didn't hear about that for a while. So I'm guessing it got old pretty quick. It kind of dropped off. Yeah. Yeah. I thought so. I watched a couple of them. I'm like, yeah, this was nice. I kind of got the feels. I remember it.

It's a good show, but we're also like in the golden age of television right now. There's so much else to watch. Oh, yeah. We'll be talking about that in a second. I did see this one this week. It was a video going around. Tenacious D did the time warp. Yeah. I saw that. It was fun.

I thought it was really fun. I liked it. So if you're a Rocky Horror fan or a Jack Black fan or a Tenacious D fan, go check it out. It's pretty fun. I think I put this in the wrong spot in the notes because this was supposed to be the pick-me-up feel-good at the end. Oh, yeah. You definitely misplaced it.

Yeah, because right after that, I watched Lewis Black's Thanks for Risking Your Life. Did you get a chance to watch this? No, no. Is it free or is it one of his downloads? Pay for it. You got to pay for it. It cost eight bucks. All right. And it was an actual show that they recorded. It was the last show before the lockdown.

Okay. So it's not special quality, like polished. Right. But it's pretty funny. I got to say it's pretty funny. It's not 15 bucks funny, but it's definitely eight bucks funny. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. This is where I would normally have my Drunk on a Plane movie review edition, but instead of that, I have the Not at All Drunk but Scared Shitless on a Plane movie review edition.

All right. Oh, how was that process, by the way? It was actually fine because nobody's flying. Nobody. And we had a very early morning flight, so LAX was completely empty when we landed here, YYZ, completely empty.

Our plane was like the only plane that came in. They're flying the super wide bodies, and there was hardly anybody on it, so we were completely away from everybody else, even on the plane. However, having said that, we had to talk to the stewardess multiple times because there was an entire family that decided wearing a mask meant it doesn't go over your nose.

Oh, Jesus. The entire flight to the point where actually the stewardesses finally came up and said, if we have to tell you one more time, you are officially banned from Air Canada for life. Oh, shit. They're taking the shit seriously on planes.

You know you're in trouble when a Canadian's yelling at you. That's right. I take that seriously. So that was not fun. But other than that, it's weird. They don't serve alcohol, so I don't even have the option to give you a drunk movie review. There's no alcohol. You can buy a couple snacks if you plan ahead of time.

It's strange. It is a strange environment. But you just hunker down, you watch your movies, you get off the damn plane. All right. So what do you got for us? I did watch two movies while on the plane. I watched Bad Education, which has got what's-his-face, I can't remember, Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney.

And it was actually a bit slow for being on a plane. I can see sitting at home watching, sipping some wine, and enjoying this movie a lot. It's not a feel-good movie because it does make you realize how shitty most people are, especially if given the opportunity to get away with being shitty. People tend to be that way.

But very well done. Very good movie. Highly recommend it. And we do have- I have my own little pick-me-up here. I watched A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the Tom Hanks take on Mr. Rogers. Wonderful, wonderful movie. All right. I've heard nothing but good things about it, but I have not seen it yet.

Highly recommend it. And particularly if the election does not go the way we want, curl up with a bottle of whiskey, watch this, and cry. Okay. There you go. I threw this next one in here because it is really hard to find. But if you know where to go in Sweden, you can actually find it.

The Name of the Rose. This is with Sean Connery and Christian Slater. It's an old movie from the 80s. I'm surprised it's hard to find. I mean, it was a big movie at the time. Why is it so hard to find? You can find like a version on VHS on eBay maybe.

You can't buy it. It's just one of those movies where it's like $60 for a Region 2 DVD. It's just out of print. Basically out of print. But it's streaming somewhere, surely. Nope. Wow. That's weird. If you can find it, let me know. I checked all the services.

I didn't look on Quibi because, as we know, that's not there. It's cut into 120-minute slices. Exactly. But it is a great movie if you want to go to Sweden because we'll talk about Sean Connery at the end of the show. But I threw it in here just so you can start looking now because it's going to take you a while to find it.

A little Tehran follow-up. We finished that on Apple TV+. And okay. Not great. Worst Mossad agent in history is the heroine of the show. Weird cliffhanger. It was okay.

It was okay. I was into it at the beginning, but then there were so many issues with it that it was just like, what? Channel my Louis Black. So, yeah. I mean, watch it if you want. If you're into the first couple episodes and it hooks you, good for you.

Then you'll stick to the end. But if you're not into that kind of, you know, Middle Eastern action adventure type of thing, skip it. But if you are into that, I recommend Fauda. This is a new one that a friend sent us because we have a lot of Persian friends.

And they're like, when we were done with Tehran, they're like, oh, have you watched Fauda yet? And we're like, nope. And this is another one shot over in the Middle East. Oh, I do have to say Tehran was not shot in the Middle East. Their version of Tehran was Athens, Greece. So that should tell you what it's like to go to Athens nowadays.

Close enough for Americans. Just saying. But Fauda was actually filmed in Israel. So it's pretty, you know, pretty close to home, I guess. It's, you know, it's kind of like a 24 type of thing. Special ops, blah, blah, blah.

Terrible continuity, I got to say. They're like, we need an answer in two hours. Then the guy goes home, talks to his wife. And it's like, first, he's like, it's daylight. Like, we need, you got to have this in two hours. Guy goes home, have a cigarette, talk to his wife. It's dark. Then they come back. It's the next day. And then it's like 10 minutes to go before the drop.

I'm like, you guys really didn't, like, mark this out on note cards or figure it out beforehand, did you? But it's all right. We're only on season one. But it was decent. You know, just looking for random stuff now because we're out of everything.

Out of everything. And I got to say, when I put the link to Tehran in here, you just got to love Apple TV Plus' pretty URLs. You'd think they could figure out some URL forwarding or something. It's unbelievable. It's how bad it is, yeah. Yeah, if you go to tv.apple.com slash US slash show slash Tehran, then it's slash, like, you know, hash key for, you know, a piece of software.

But if you just go to slash Tehran, it 404s. I'm like, guys, come on. Come on. For everything that Apple wants to be pretty, you'd think their URLs would be one of those. Yeah. I watched a couple new things as well.

I watched on Netflix a movie called Over the Moon. Now, this is based on a Chinese myth for the Moon Festival, moon cakes and all that sort of stuff. It was really cute, really well done. Very cool. You know, if you don't know the story and you're not from the culture at all, you're probably not going to be interested at all in this, especially since they definitely targeted it towards an Asian audience.

It's, you know, it goes all like K-pop in the middle. It's pretty crazy. But, you know, if you're younger and of a bent of the kind of person that likes to take, oh, I don't know, magic mushrooms or drop a tab of acid or two. Oh, put this on. You'll enjoy it. And I watched four out of the five of the new Somebody Feed Phil because we needed something to do at night when we finally got the kid to sleep here and we can't leave our house because we're in the mandatory two weeks quarantine.

Good as always. Amazing show. My God. I love this man. I got lucky because I forgot that I had two left from the last season. So I got the last two from the last season. I watched two from this season so far. And yeah, love that.

And the chef show is back with a new half season, which was it's great background. It's fun. You can just look up and they're cooking. It's funny you mentioned that one because we watched the Wolfgang Puck episode last night of that. And that was hilarious. Wolfgang Puck needs his own show. Yeah, he does.

See, that's the thing about that show. I enjoy it. I do enjoy it. And like, you know, I'll find myself like looking up from whatever I was doing, usually checking stories for the show at that time of night. And I'm like, oh, wait, that looks good. And I just rewind it and watch it again. But the way they do the recipes in there, it's always tough to catch, though.

You kind of like pause it when it. Yeah, it is not the Food Network. That's for sure. Yeah, this is not meant for like recreation. This is meant for entertainment. Yep. Yeah. Food utainment. But I still enjoy that show. I keep it in my list. So when new ones come out, they're always there.

But and I saw this news, which I just want to say day late and a dollar fucking short. Jon Stewart is returning with a current affairs series for Apple. Could have used you. Could have used you, buddy. His non-compete must be over. Well, what's really funny is he had a like, you know, a first look deal at HBO and they couldn't close the deal.

I'm like, OK, Jon Stewart and Jon Oliver on the same network would have been great. Yeah, absolutely would have been great. Now I know I got to do two. I'm going to have to go buy more Apple shit to keep my Apple TV plus thing going. Yeah.

But yeah. So we'll see what that turns out to be. It's not going to be like the Daily Show. They're going to be like, you know, weekly one hour deep dives. So that's it. Jon's coming back. Hopefully, hopefully the next 72 hours will tell.

Ups and doodads. Now, last week talked about Clip Drop, but you weren't here. So I wanted to give you a chance to talk about it, too, because we both had a chance to play with it. I actually did the show notes using it last week. What do you think?

It's amazing. You mean the show art and yeah, it's going to make doing show art so much easier for me. This tool, you know, if Magic Leap would have put out this tool, we've all would have been impressed. Yeah. If there was just a button on the side of the goggles that you press and then boom, it clips it and throws it into Photoshop.

How cool would that be? This is the closest thing to like the future that I've seen in a long time. No, it's unbelievable how good it is. And I just tried it out on a bunch of like really cluttered photos that people had uploaded. Like, you know, 10 people at a party, like just in a total mess and just picked one person and it just clipped it perfectly.

It's unbelievable how good it is. That picture of Scaramucci, he was in a crowd with a completely crowded background and it cut him out perfectly. Yeah. It's so good. This thing is unbelievable. This is the closest thing to AI that I will allow. Exactly. This is almost AI.

You can almost claim that this is AI, people. Yep. AI meets AR. AI. It's pretty stunning. It's pretty stunning. So if you are somebody that deals with a lot of like cropping and trying to pull things out of images and all that, you need this tool in your life.

It will change your life. It really will. And I've got a note into them to their support because I don't know if you've been able to find it. I can't find a way to pay for it. They say it's on sale for $39.99 for the year and it ends in November 20th.

But I can't find a way to pay for it. I install the desktop app and then go to the – I can't remember exactly. It's not where you'd think it would be, but you can find it. It's somewhere on there. It's like your account or something like that and you click on that and then that will take you to a web URL and that's where you can pay.

I have – okay. That's fucked up because I clicked every link in the desktop app today and I could not find it. I went through every menu methodically, starting at the top, clicking everything, and I could not find it. All right. I'll run through the steps off the air and send it to you. Okay. Yeah. Send me a screen cap of that.

But they need to make it easier because I just want a big button that says take my money. That's right here. I do remember they made it surprisingly difficult. I was like, how do I pay for this? Let me give you money. I know. And that's what I wrote them. I'm like, can I please give you money? I want to support development on this.

How do I do it? I'm like, you guys are so smart that you can create such an amazing tool, but you can't figure out to put a giant button on the homepage of your website that says pay now. It's like, oh, God. So I got a couple pieces of kit here. I got the Elgato Keylight with metal pole mount.

This is like a streamer's kind of light. And I noticed a friend of the show, Seth Miranda, uses one for his fill light for his video stuff. And my fill light was a piece of garbage newer with a big box on it on a tripod.

This thing clips to my desk. It actually runs with an app or a piece of software that runs on my Mac. And you can change the color temperature and you can change the intensity. And it's beautiful. This is what I want out of my lights.

It's not cheap. It's 200 bucks, but it works. And it looks really good on your desk. I mean, it just clamps to your desk. Boom. No tripod or anything. And it's built solid. This is another one of those pieces of kit that I always say you can kill a man with if they break into your home.

You can take this, stand this thing on, and it probably weighs about eight pounds. But it's solid and the light is gorgeous. You know, if you need this as a key light, you could use it. I don't use it as a key light, just as a fill, but it's nice. So for you streamers out there who are on Zoom all day, because we know there's a lot of you out there, check out the Elgato Keylight.

And I already talked about the Shure SM, or not, I was going to say SM7B, the Shure MV7 podcast mic. Link will be in the apps and doodads section for that mic in the show notes. But so far, sounds like a good mic. We'll see. All right. And I got an app this week called DigiSlate.

All right. I bought one of those, you know, just a little slate marker that you can, you know, draw with, you know, a whiteboard marker and all that stuff and click, because I'm doing all these videos now for my podcast course. And I need to mark them so I can go back and find them and also do sound.

That's the problem with a lot of these, this camera stuff. I've got Nikon Z6 going into a Blackmagic ATEM Mini and then sound going in from another way. And you have to like do all these millisecond changes to the audio to delay it. So the lips all match up and stuff.

So to do that, you're using a slate all the time to really get the mark. And mine broke. Of course it broke because it would cost $6 on Amazon. It's a piece of garbage. And then I went and looked. I'm like, oh, maybe I can get one of those digital ones, you know. So it syncs up.

Then you do the clap. And then I can just do frame by frame and get it. Then I'm like, wait a minute. There's got to be an app for that. Well, yeah, there is. It's called DigiSlate. It's free. That's the best price. And the digital slates that I was looking for, $400. So I will take the free app over the $400 one anytime.

So if you need to do any video syncing and things like that or just use a regular slate, check it out. You can pay for it to get rid of the ads. It's like $4 to pay for it. So good app. Good app. All right. And I know we talked about this when it first came out.

This is the ASUS AC5300 tri-brand gigabit Wi-Fi gaming router with Mubemo supporting AI protection network security powered by Treadmicro AI mesh for mesh Wi-Fi system built-in WT fast game accelerator and adaptive QoS.

It's a wireless fucking router by ASUS. That looks like an upside down spider. It looks like an upside down spider or an octopus. It is tremendously ugly. And I think we pretty much laughed at it when we first got it. Now, having said that, I was loaned one by a friend here in Toronto because I didn't want to unplug my Eero from home and I wanted to still be able to control my home network, turn on lights, monitor things going on, etc.

So I didn't want to bring that with me. So I was loaned this. I didn't know this is what I was going to get, but it's what I got. And this thing is phenomenal. I love Eero, don't get me wrong, but I think I will be purchasing one of these for multiple reasons. Our place here is four stories.

We've got a basement to a loft. It's big, right, in terms of height. This thing sitting in the basement reaches all the way up to the loft with perfect, perfect, no degradation whatsoever. So I do not need a mesh network. I just need my one router plugged into my basement.

That's a plus. But it says right there on the tin, AI mesh for mesh Wi-Fi system. So you can do it if you want to. I can do it if I want to, but I don't even need to. It just works all the way down here. It reaches all the way up to the top. No problem. Which is awesome. The other reason I think I'm going to get this and ditch Eero is a better reason.

I cannot get the food network. I cannot get any of my American cable networks. Nothing is streaming unless I'm on, you guessed it, my VPN. And you know what you can do with this thing? I can put my VPN directly onto it and have an easy interface to switch back and forth between just straight up, nothing, all Canada.

Boom, press a button. I'm in the United States. Boom, press a button. I'm in the UK. And it all goes straight direct from the router. So my TVs will think I'm in America. I'll be able to stream all my American TV shows again on all my American networks. This thing is perfect for that.

It's built into it. You can just install it. And guess what? I can even install our VPN of choice. Right onto it. That would be a gog.show slash VPN. Yep, exactly. So I can use private internet access directly on this router, which reaches everywhere in this house perfectly.

So for me, it's almost a no-brainer. I loved you, Eero. I'm going to still use Eero for my mom's house and all that sort of stuff. But I am switching for my Canada house. All right. Because I need my VPN. Well, I'm going to stick with my Eero setup, too, because I love it. I don't need a VPN here because I do live in the good old U.S. of A.

But I do use – I still use private internet access, but I use it on the machine that I'm on. Yeah. And also, Eero hasn't renewed, so you can say what the fuck you want. That's true. They haven't renewed, so that's right. I actually did double-check, and they do not offer router-level VPN yet, which is kind of crazy because they have everything else known to man.

And it's funny because I pay for the extra security service through Eero, the Eero Plus service. I'm sure it's Plus. I don't know what it's called, but I'm guessing just – It's Plus. It's probably Plus. I pay like $100 a year for that for all the ad blocking and malware protection.

And it comes with a family license for 1Password. It comes with their VPN and a bunch of other stuff. But I cannot set the VPN at the actual router level, which is annoying. Yep, you can't do that. So, yep, I'm going to be making the switch to the ugly octopus.

All right. Enjoy those. You know what you can call those antennas? Those are your cancer sticks. That's right. I'm going to point them directly at my crotch because I don't want any more kids. All right. You can just actually point at your wife's ovaries and be done with it.

Save the boys. Okay. And this one I put in here for you because you have a kid who might be getting into computers soon. And this is neat. It's cute. And it's the Raspberry Pi Foundation PI 400. I'm sure they call it the Pi 400. Yes.

And it takes a Raspberry Pi and actually integrates it with a keyboard and a mouse. And that's all the computer is. And it's got a ton of ports on the back. And it's a cool way to like get introduced to the Raspberry Pi like out of the box. And it's $70. $70. Pretty cool. Yeah.

I mean, and what I was saying was, I mean, you can basically put like, you know, a Linux desktop on there and run Chrome on it. So that's the cheapest, you know, well, you got to plug it into something, but you can plug it into your TV, you know? That's right. So you can plug it into your $3,000 TV.

Exactly. Well, I have a $300 TV that I can plug it into, which gets the job done. But yeah, I thought this was pretty cool. So if you wanted to get your kids started on something, this might be a good way to go. Excellent. So I put up a list of different books that I was going to read before this show, which I got to almost none of.

And just because, you know, shit happens. But I did start to listen to the audio book version of Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow. All right. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. This is prime Cory. This is not a novel.

This is not a novel. This is a tedious exercise on how much Cory knows about hacking and a how-to on how to not engage an audience. So basically he's just reading his Twitter feed? No, no. He actually got one of the girls that was on Buffy the Vampire Slayer to read it.

And speaking of that, the audio quality is pretty terrible because I can tell there are a lot of places where she did pickups. And it sounds completely different. There's a lot of echo in the pickups and not in the main. Fortunately, I listened to it on Overcast, which you can put on their signal boost and their time compression on.

So you can get through it faster and it sounds better. And I listened to it at one and a half speed, so it's even better. But if you listen to it at 1x with no sound adjustments, it is bad. It is really, really bad. Okay. But I tried to get through.

I got to chapter two. And it's one of those things where you can tell where he's getting ready to go Cory on you. And he's just like, he starts to actually explain the job of an IT person or what a hacker is doing. I'm like, you know, I really don't care.

I really don't care what they did with Tor to get the malware on the machine and what the malware did and how it works in a virtual environment. I'm like, you know, I want a story. William Gibson doesn't tell you the minutia. He tells you the story and you get to figure out.

It's like, okay, this person's a hacker. They're smart. They know what to do. I assume they know what to do. You don't have to tell me every step of the fucking way and just all the detail. It's just too much detail. I don't care what this woman's sweats were made of.

I don't care what her shirt was made of. Period. I'm like, okay. Okay. It is work to listen to this book. And I'm sure reading it would be even harder. But if you're a Cory fan, you're a Cory fan. For me, I don't think I'm going to finish this book because it feels like work.

And it feels like the job that we quit, you know, almost eight or nine years ago at this point. All right. Well, speaking of minutia, I've got a book that is all about minutia. Everyday minutia, how we go through our entire day from what we sleep in to how we brush our teeth to everything else, except it's absolutely fascinating.

I cannot recommend this book enough. It's called A Million Years in a Day, A Curious History of Everyday Life from the Stone Age to the Phone Age by Greg Jenner. And the conceit that he uses for this book is that he basically goes through a day. Like, okay, alarm clocks. How did alarm clocks start?

What's the first known alarm clock ever? And how did they progress through time? And how did they, you know, it's stunningly fascinating. And let me let you guess where you think I heard about this book from. Cory Doctorow. No, no such thing as a fish.

Okay. And it is exactly in the realm of that. So it is very funny, insanely weird facts about our everyday life and how we got to do the things that we do. Beds. When did beds start? How did that all start? Absolutely everything.

And it's like, it's no such thing as a fish meets what's-his-face that did the home book. Bill Bryson. Exactly. Bingo. That's what it is. Yeah. So if you're a fan of both of those things, you're going to love this book. Okay. I'm in. That's my next book. I need to clear my palate.

That's exactly why I got it too. I needed to like, I didn't want to read any sci-fi. I didn't want to read any dystopia. I had read too many kind of like, you know, computer and business books recently. And I just needed something completely different. And this fit the bill perfectly. Yeah.

Okay. That's good. Because, yeah, I started reading High Rise by J.G. Ballard. And I think I'm going to have to put that one down for a while because it's a little too much dystopia for me right now. Yep. Read this one. You'll love it. Feedback loop. Over at Patreon, we've got Tracy.

That's it. Just Tracy. Just Tracy. Thank you, Tracy. Thank you, Tracy. Over at PayPal, we have Alex, Adam, Doug, Shailene, Nicola, Scott, Charlie, Jonathan, John, Judge, Matt, Michael, Nicolai, Simon, Justin, Martin, Jean Willem. And he says, thanks, guys.

These days, it's a therapeutic pleasure just to hear sane people banter, bicker, and vent. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Over at Twitter, Lucy wrote in, having abandonment issues without you, Brian. However, Dave Bittner comforted me with his humor and regular chuckles. I think it's going to be okay.

What am I, chap, Liva? You're the stalwart. You're always there. Hopefully, by the time you're hearing this, Lucy, it is all okay. Hmm. Yeah. All right. And Corstar writes in, LMAO. It's a perfect demonstration of where the self-driving cars are at, always 20 years away.

And this is an article from Daily Mail. Self-driving car race crashes straight into a wall from the starting line during the world's first autonomous race series. You can't beat that, right? So, this was a robo race held in the UK, and one of the vehicles crashed into a wall before the race even started.

Yep. That's perfect. Amazing. And this is another good one, too, that John sent us. One for Brian and his sports ball news. AI camera ruins soccer game for fans after mistaking referees' bald head for ball. So, this is great.

A Scottish football team put out a big press release saying they had this new—I mean, they're getting rid of all their human camera operators because they've got a cool camera controlled by AI. The club proudly announced at the time that the new Pixelot system uses cameras with inbuilt AI ball tracking technology and will be used to capture HD footage of all home matches.

And that would be broadcast directly to season ticket holders' homes because you can't go to a game because of COVID. And, of course, they basically started a game last Saturday, and they had a linesman with a bald head, and the camera kept swinging back and forth between the ball and the man's head.

Oh, my God. That's just—it's too good. You'd figure they'd have some kind of technology on the ball to really, like, you know, know where it's at. Yeah, well, people were suggesting that maybe the club would have to provide the linesman with a toupee. A toupee or a hat. I was going to say, you can foil the AI with a hat.

And if he did get the hat, I would hope they would write not a ball on top of it. Excellent. I should put a toupee on the ball. There you go. And this next one we got from a couple people, Moz6502 writes, this is why I still buy physical media. And Ivan says, I knew it. I knew it.

I fucking knew it. And people wonder why I still buy physical media in this day and age. Buying digital media is really only licensing the product until the store pulls it and you're S-O-L. My disc is mine to keep. Mickey Mouse isn't breaking into my house to take back my MCU movies when my license expires.

Grump long and prosper. And this is a story about Amazon argues users don't actually own purchased Prime Video content. Yes, there's a lawsuit against it. Amanda Caddell in April is suing Amazon for unfair competition and false advertising.

She claims the company secretly reserves the right to end consumers' access to content purchased through its Prime Video service. I would argue it's not secretive. We all know about this. We've all known about this. It is what it is. Yeah, it sucks. But I also understand why. Amazon does not own these things.

Amazon is licensing them. So if they lose their license, they can't serve it up to you anymore, whether you paid for it or not. You can argue about whether that's right or wrong. It is what it is. And I totally understand why people keep physical media. I get it. I don't know what you're going to do when they stop making DVD players.

Which they mostly have. Which they mostly have. Yep. Yep. We'll buy a DVD, rip it, and put it on an old Mac that you have to buy at a garage sale. Yeah. Nick writes in, you might like this burn rate. And this is about Quibi. Imagine burning $2 billion of VC funding in six months.

That's $10 million per day, $455,000 per hour, $7,589 per minute, or $126 per second. Yowch. Yep. Impressive. Dan P. writes in, hi guys. I just left a five-star review on Apple, but I have a couple comments slash questions for Brian.

I read six of the Expanse novels before I simply wore out slogging through those books. An aggressive editor would have worked wonders. How are you doing reading them? Next, again for Brian. I lived 60 years in Michigan before moving to southern Utah. I visited Toronto often, and it's a great town and a wonderful country.

However, are you ready for cloudy skies, humidity, and bugs? Not to mention snow. Lots of slushy, wet, cold snow. Brian, take it away. I'm still somewhere in the middle of book three of the Expanse. I find that one of those every six months is good before you get sick of it, and then you just need a break.

So if you pace yourself, I think it works kind of well. I'll be getting back into it at some point. And I've been going back. My wife is from Toronto. I used to come here for months at a time way back in the day. So I'm aware of what I'm getting myself into. All right.

We've got another question for you regarding Canada. This comes from Ed. Will you retain the Social Security benefits you've earned in the United States? Well, let's see who wins the election tomorrow. There might be no Social Security left. There may not be Social Security left after that point.

So who knows? But yes, I'm applying as a resident. I'm still a citizen of the USA with all that entails. So thank you for your concern about that. I still get my money that I paid in. So do you have to pay Canada taxes and U.S. taxes now? Yeah. There's a NAFTA, again, depending on who wins the election.

I thought, yeah, I thought they repealed NAFTA already. And where we're going to be at, there are agreements in between that in which, yes, I still have to pay U.S. taxes, but there is a tax crediting system dependent on how much you pay in Canada and all that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's very complicated, and you end up having to hire accountants, but it all works out.

And I've already fallen asleep. Moving on. Yes, exactly. Mark writes in, hello, geeks. In this post-commute world, your podcast is still worth carving out time for a listen. Some shareage. He's got a couple links here. Brian Kerrigan's grumptastic comment perfectly captures the modern programming experience.

Comment at two minutes. Will JavaScript take over the world? This is a YouTube video that I did not watch because when I see JavaScript, I get PTSD and run away. Fuck JavaScript. Yep. Yep. And better just love headlines also applies. Yes. And came across this today from my email provider, Fastmail.

And this is a link to nomoregoogle.com, privacy-friendly alternatives to Google that don't track you. Stay grumpy and healthy. Mark. P.S. Eric is a great guest host. He doesn't sound very grumpy at all, though. The privacy-friendly alternatives to Google are it's at nomoregoogle.com.

I checked it out. No more web design either. What an ugly-ass site. Jeez. Good stuff in there, though. I voted for all my favorites. Darren writes in, I'm sure you've seen this and others have sent along, but it's quite funny. Nonetheless, 2020 Darwin Award nominee. A Florida man was mauled by a leopard after paying $150 for a full contact experience.

Well, sounds like he got what he paid for. Yes. One would argue he accomplished that. Yes. Got his bang for his buck. Also been using private internet access for a VPN through your affiliate program. Thank you very much. I know it's not much, but hope it helps a tiny bit. It does. Stay alive, Jason.

I'm working on it. Working on it. Jay writes in, hey, guys. Long time grump here. I got swept away by 2020. I'm one of those people who 2020 has been kind to. I tuned back in recently after working 16-hour days. Not a humble brag. It's toxic, but sometimes necessary in short bursts.

I was sad to hear it had whittened. I think you meant whittled. Whittled down. Whittled down and realized I'm one of those people. Hang in there. We're all coming back. I just tuned into another episode after rediscovering this common pastime of the land beyond time, which we used to live in.

Anyway, I also found this fantastic video from back in 2004 about web design, which is all still relevant today. Does anyone ever learn? And this is a YouTube link to our very own Jason DeFillippo on Call for Help with Chris Perillo. I couldn't believe he found that. All the best, guys.

I've done my bit and donated 10 buckaroonies to help keep the lights on. For anyone listening who's been giving support during this time, don't forget to pay it forward, even if just a little stay grumpy. Thanks so much. And thanks for that blast for the past from Jason. Yes. I see you have a note in here, though. That was pretty funny. Oh, that's true.

Yes. I did load it up to take a look at it just for nostalgia's sake. And I'm happy that I made it the 666th view. Nice. Very nice. And Matthias writes in, just an interesting film. British police breaking parties due to COVID rules. Just listen to them.

How they handle the situation. I have a hard time believing cops doing it like this. Well, you should move to America. Just the movie, not the text. But I'd love to hear you read Swedish. Here, arbiter, brutisk pols duppvist, ger ut 15, 115,000 kruner i bruter.

How's that? Close enough? Sounds like a Swedish chef. Yep. That's how I read it. I grew up with the Swedish chef. Burk de burk de burk de burk. Burk de burk de burk. Burk de burk de burk. Probably shouldn't do that too much, considering how many Swedish people we have on our Discord. But we love them all. We love all the Swedish people.

They keep giving me all my movies. Jake writes in, gentlemen, first, I have only experience with Celebrite. But when using the software, you have to mark what authorizes you to search a phone, such as consent or search warrant. Second, at the federal level and all the states I've worked with, you can only access a phone, even an unprotected one, if you have consent or a search warrant.

If police are conducting extractions without these, then hopefully some inspector generals are getting involved. The Fourth Amendment does apply to your phones, and I would imagine in almost all of these cases, they had search warrants. Also, you would be amazed at how often an alleged criminal will give you consent to searches, phone, computer, car, etc.

It sometimes feels as though they want to be caught. Okay. All right. Michael writes in, follow up from Barnes & Noble Data Breach. You would think they would change the max password length to something more than 15 characters with letters and at least one number. These days, I mostly use the local bookstore pages in downtown Manhattan Beach, but there is also a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan Beach.

I just created a Barnes & Noble account over the summer to get some books shipped for my daughter to avoid the other book behemoth. I think the breach is just payback. Worse, when I created this account, I had to call Barnes & Noble to apply my existing rewards account to the new one. So, low-quality security and low-quality integrations, why would you even question if they are still around?

Well, I'm sure they don't have the bankroll to do all that very well. So, that's the problem. Yep. And Brian writes in, sending this site because it overlaps with Brian's team and a tech story. Not sure if you have come across this site slash company before. If not, I would say that they fully embrace the AI as people description of AI, just not in the way most tech companies do.

Their research is pretty cool, and they have an impressive track record with their past predictions, too. So, this is unanimous.ai. We talked about them. Yeah, we did. And they tout themselves here. Once again, unanimous AI correctly forecast the winner of the World Series before the season started.

So, they picked the Dodgers to win the World Series. And to be fair, so did everyone else. Well, there you have it. The Dodgers were number one on everybody's poll to win the World Series this year, and they did. So, there you go. All right. People are AI.

Yes, that's true. And Barrett writes in, and yet more tech garbage. Because lamps and smartphones apparently don't already exist. This looks like what is possibly the worst conceived device ever. And this is TikTok parent ByteDance launches its first gadget in a big education push.

It's called the Dali Smart Lamp, and it features a display camera and built-in digital assistant. I looked at this thing. It's $119, and you can kind of basically do everything that this thing does by Velcroing your smartphone to any generic table lamp that you own.

I suppose if your kid doesn't have a phone, this might make some sense. But for $119, $119, you can get an old Galaxy, you know? Come on. And it looked okay, but still.

Yep. Ben writes in, looks like hackers stole $2.3 million from the Wisconsin GOP in the run-up to the election. And this is a link. Wisconsin Republican Party chairman says hackers stole $2.3 million from Trump re-election campaign. Oh, no. The party noticed suspicious activity on October 22nd and contacted the FBI.

Hill said the hackers were able to manipulate invoices from four vendors who were being paid to send out direct mail for Trump's re-election efforts and to provide pro-Trump materials, such as hats, that could be handed out to supporters. Invoices were altered, so when the party paid them, the money went to the hackers instead of the vendors.

Nice. Good job. Good job, hackers. Sorry. I want that hacker sign on this one. Go team. Tracy writes in, hi, Grumps. I'm no tech person, can barely work my iPhone, but love your podcast after coming across Jason on Jordan Harbinger's show. I'm currently going back and listening to your old podcasts.

I've joined your Patreon and ordered some merch, so I'm hoping you're going to be around for a while. All the best from Oz. Signed, Grumpy Gal. Yes. Thank you very much. With people like you, we will be around. That's true. Highlander writes in, hi, Grumps. Arse book is getting sued.

Ain't it great? Looks good on them. Love the podcast. And this is a Canadian class action suit against Facebook, alleges misuse of personal information. And this goes all the way back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. So, you know, the law moves very slowly. Yep. And Vincent writes in, don't need this.

I swear, winky emoji. Six apps to hide your secret nude photos. And he says, anyone who's tried dating online has this recurring nightmare. You show your friend, mom, Lyft driver, a nice photo on your phone, a picture of your dog at the beach, or the overpriced avocado toast you had for brunch.

And then they start swiping. Suddenly, the nosy phone holder swipes one photo too far, and bam, they're hit with an explicit photo of your land down under. Yes. Yeah. I can see that being very useful for a lot of people, especially if you're dating.

Cameron writes in, Dave literally. I activated my Google Assistant twice while I was listening in the car. I thought you might get a kick out of that. Always. Yes. Justin writes in, hey, Grumps, I keep hearing a comment about how wireless charging is terribly inefficient and is going to destroy the environment. And while I love the sentiment, I really feel like the amount of energy that's wasted is so small that it's just a non-issue.

Jason's mentioned some difficulties with alignment and the phone not charging, so we'll treat that as a separate issue. But don't write off the technology for environmental reasons. Thanks for your work and grump on. Math and sources below. Okay, so yeah, I went through all of this, and still, my argument would be it's compound interest.

Mm-hmm. Study compound interest. There's a reason why if you invest $5 when you're five years old, it becomes a lot more money later on. If you think about the amount of people and the number of years they're going to be using these things, I'm just saying let's do something that's more efficient. It just makes sense.

Mm-hmm. And Marc Andre writes in, hey, guys, I hope you are holding up. Eh, sort of. Two of your favorite platforms, Medium and Airbnb, combined for your enjoyment. And this is an article over at Medium about get ready for Airbnb's IPO to blow away expectations.

And I hope it fucking doesn't. Nope. Also, clickbait. Yep, that too. It's a fucking ad. Yeah. Shiloh from Baltimore writes in, I was recently engaging in some deeply disgraceful, consumerism, and had the opportunity to get some AirPods Pro on the cheap.

They're great, but I'd recommend the Jabra Elite Active 75T even more. The mics are better, and the sound is a bit more punchier. Only real downer is they can't each operate independently like the AirPods Pro can. But aside from that, they're phenomenal. Also, what do you guys think about Elon Musk rolling out Tesla's full self-driving car mode?

Color me skeptical. Color you an episode behind. But, you know, that whole only being able to use both at the same time sucks because when I'm out for a walk, you have to take one out, charge it, and then swap it, charge it, and then you've got two ears again.

That is a major feature, not a bug. Yep. Agreed. Judy writes in, Barnes & Noble fun fact. My God, this is the most Barnes & Noble has probably been mentioned in a long time anywhere. I want some ad money, damn it. I work at a community college and wanted to let you know that we contract with Barnes & Noble for textbooks and class requirements.

We don't have a physical bookstore. I don't know if that's the case with other schools, but every community college in Washington State uses them for textbooks. Love you guys. Good to know. That's cool. Yeah, it's cool. Staying alive. Yeah, that's it. That's their final bout of revenue. And Lars writes in, probably nothing shocking to you or your audience, but I thought this article helps highlight an unseen cost to our online shopping obsessions.

And it's Amazon's warehouses have more costly workplace injury claims than meatpacking or logging, says Washington State. Ouch. Ouch. Yep. That doesn't look good. Nope. Yeah. That's about it. Jake writes in, you guys said they should make a corner tree in episode 479.

Well, here you go. The Park Avenue corner tree. Suitable for small spaces and city dwellers. Our new Park Avenue corner tree with True Nature Evershape, registered trademark, is the perfect solution for those who have extremely limited space but do not want to compromise high-quality tree design. I have completely changed my mind on the corner tree idea because this tree looks like it's hiding from an alcoholic father after a bender.

It is literally cowering in the corner. So, yes, I've changed my mind. It's a little pathetic looking. It really is. It's really bad. Yep. And Alex says, Quibi is dead. Shocking. But besides being a stupid idea, they also had a shady practice to get around paying writers and actors their full due.

And this is a Twitter thread by John Wick. J-A-W-N Wick. Clever. Must be one of those writers that got screwed over, I guess. And they say, by playing credits between each act instead of commercials, Quibi claimed a 10-episode season was actually 40 low-budget, under-12-minute episodes, allowing them to skirt SAG actors' unions and – oh, SAG is the actors' union, yes – and the Writers' Guild of America, their minimums.

So they were a scab-based business model. Well, guess what? I guess Quibi got karmaed. Look, what drives me nuts is a little bit earlier in the episode, we went through their burn rate. What were they spending that money on? Seriously? Oh, you know what it was?

Spielberg. And the big names. They paid it on the big names, but they didn't give the money to the people who actually made the shit, which is, I'm sorry, welcome to Hollywood. Yeah. And Carol writes in, you have to see this. And this is over at Reddit. Interesting Tesla stoplight detection.

Have a good weekend. Yes, one per week is fine. Enjoy life. Thank you. This was hilarious. It's basically these banner signs that Tesla's tried to figure out where stoplights are not, and they were not. Yes. Which goes back to everything that we've ever said when all this stuff came to be.

It's easy to spoof. It's easy to hack. Yeah. Completely. Eric writes in, hello, relatively new listener here, but I was going through the backlog and noticed you guys used to talk about stocks but stopped. If you'd be so kind, would you consider going back to talking about them? I'm really interested in starting to invest, but really have no idea how it works.

Thanks for the laughs and the thoughts. Hope you can go back to doing two podcasts a week someday. P.S. Please come to Brazil. We don't do live shows. Yeah. Here's the deal. Check out our Stock Talk channel on Discord, and you can sign up for that at GOG.show slash Discord, where Martins is always talking about all of his crazy stuff, and we've got more people on there talking about it.

I'm not going to be investing in stocks. I don't know if Brian is, but not for the show anymore. Well, maybe if things get back to normal, but it's just been too volatile recently and insane. So, yeah. I don't want to talk about it at the moment. Yeah. We talked about it when we had disposable income.

Ain't none of that lying around. Yeah. I spent it all on my gear. Ralph writes in, hi, Grump said, long last, squeezed boobs are being freed on Instagram and Facebook next week. Turns out that content filtering, both human and machine, has had an inherent bias against certain black women.

And this is from The Guardian. The photo sharing app owned by Facebook was accused of hypocrisy and racism in allowing an abundance of photos of semi-naked skinny white women on its feeds, but deleting those photos by black women in similar poses. Thanks for continuing your podcast, even at its reduced rate.

Well, I'm happy that any reason will bring untethered boobs to our feeds. Boobs for life. Boobs for life. Barrett writes in, hey, Jason, I have a whole new income stream for you. Just build a fake airplane set in your garage. This is an article at Daily Beast, how Instagrammers are faking the luxury of a private jet for just $64 an hour.

And he says you might have to charge extra if they want the pups to influence as well. And yeah, this is a place here in L.A. that's just a it's a studio. You can go in and influencers go there all the time and rent it out and take some pictures. Yeah. So dumb. Dicks on a plane. Over at iTunes, we have a five star rating from Grapefruit Man, who said K and then KK.

You know what? That works. Okay, it works. Look, we get the numbers. Thanks, Grapefruit Man. And we got a five star from Jack Mullins in Australia. And this is Grumpy Gal. You don't have to be tech. You just have to listen. You will love this podcast.

Another five star from Dan P., who says an eclectic collection of tech, sci-fi, and life. Jason and Brian offer opinions on everything from sci-fi, fiction, movies, and TV, life in Southern California, and now Toronto, and how the tech industry has gone to hell in a wicker basket. If that doesn't catch your attention enough, listen to how Jason is constantly digging himself out of a financial hole.

See, last comment. Or pull a foot out of an early grave. Still working on that one. For Spice, Dave Bittner will jump in to sing a few lines from the Music Man or discuss his furry addiction along with the day's security topics. Sounds weird? Oh, yeah. All right. And I said Jack Mullins, I believe, on the last one.

It's Jackie Mullins. That's why she's Grumpy Gal. Ah, there you go. Yeah, yeah. Guinness works. This next one comes from Podcast Addict from TheHobbit81 with a five-star rating. Aussie Review here. Love the show, the snark, and the politics. I recommend the podcast to my techie friends and will continue to do so.

Looking to donate on Patreon soon. I teach IT, virtual and in person when not locked down. And I have found your podcast useful to keep abreast while so also staying awake. Stay healthy and grumpy in equal portions. I sense the Guinness is really taking hold now.

It really is. It's really getting difficult. Can we wrap this fucking thing up, man? If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash review and toss us a five-star and snarky review.

As we've learned from this episode, it doesn't take very many keystrokes to leave us a review. K, K, K. And if you're on Overcast, please click those stars. We're still trying to get back to the top just because it's a matter of pride. Closing shout-outs!

Well, obviously this week we have to give a closing shout-out to Sean Connery. So, yep, he died at the age of 90, which was a good run. I've got to give him a good run. Good run, good life. One of the funniest things I saw on Twitter was something like, how many wives are being annoyed right now by their husbands attempting to do Sean Connery impressions?

Yeah, true. And a shout-out to everyone in the U.S. that voted. And I'm not going to say that condescending bullshit that everybody on the news says about voting for who you want. If you voted for Trump, suck a bag of balls. Damn it. We're over this shit. I'm with you on that.

I've got to give a shout-out to Canada. I've got to say, I'm here. I'm in a two-week mandatory quarantine period because they actually have a coordinated federal response, a government-level response to the coronavirus. They are on it.

They call us every other day or so. They're checking in on us. They're asking how we're doing. Would you like some poutine? Not quite that wonderful. They haven't shown up with deliveries, but they do check to make sure that you know how to get food and things of that nature should you need them. God, it's nice to have a functioning government.

It's insane. It's crazy. So, you know, why don't you guys work on that? Because I'm coming back there. So get me a functioning government before I come back. Okay, everybody? Go vote. But you're not coming back for good. You're coming back to pack up your shit and go back up north. Come on. You're sneaking in to get your goods.

I want it as an option. All right, everybody. Stay calm. Stay safe. Don't be an idiot out there. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmester. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. The show is a labor of love, but your support keeps the show going. If you like the show, please visit GOG.show slash donate to help us out.

We'll love you forever. Or visit GOG.show slash shop and pick up some good old-fashioned GOG swag. 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 482.

From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, donate to the show, buy our swag, and get links to stuff we like. Stay happy. I'm Canadian now. I can't be grumpy. Re-verify our range to target.

One ping only. Captain, I just... Give me a ping, Vasily. One ping only, please. Aye, Captain.

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