491: Set Democracy to Zero

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. Are you happy you're in Canada? Yep. Fun week, fun week. Actually, it seems like a month, but yeah, what it is.

You know, it just keeps going, doesn't it? Like we started with COVID and a week felt like a month and a month felt like a year. And then we had all the protests and a week felt like a month and a month felt like a year and we were still in COVID. And then we had the election and a week felt like a month and a month felt like a year and we still had COVID. And now we got this.

It's so funny. It's so funny. It's like, I feel like I haven't talked to you. The time that we've we have not spoken in, you know, seven days. Right. And it really feels the distance between the last show we did in this show feels like the entirety of the Christmas break.

Yeah, so much. I mean, this is a I some people I think will be disappointed in this show because I'm too tired to even do rants about everything that's happening. And I know some people want that from us and other people will be disappointed in the show because we're not going to talk about virtual CES very much. And it's going to be political. There's no winning here.

We never talk about CES. So that's okay. That's true. Yeah. CES is not our, you know, not our jam. So yeah, unless unless there's some great teledildonics startup that we can riff on. But I don't know this year. Yeah. Yeah. It's let's get going. Let's get into this.

Well, it's true to everyone who said we were making too much of this Trump stuff. The line to kiss our asses starts at patreon.com slash gog. There you have it. We were right. You know, but I don't even know what to say just following social media and all that sort of stuff. But people that I don't expect anybody to apologize to us.

People would rather forgive the person that wronged them than forgive the friend that warned them because we make them feel stupid. That is a that is a truism in life to which I say what they said to us four years ago. Fuck your feelings and suck it up, snowflake. That's true. That's true. I do have to say the 2021 does have the worst 14 day trial ever since Quibi.

Yep. I would like to I would like a refund and like to skip on to the next one if we could. But since we are somewhat of a tech show sometimes I need I need I'm going to interject some tech notes here as as you go along as you trundle along with your your news.

Roku has acquired the rights to all of the Quibi content. Now, the number that was going around was 100 million dollars. But apparently somebody that was on the inside says, oh, no, no, no, it was significantly less than 100 million dollars. As it should be. Was there any show that broke out? Was there anything that even got buzz as far as I had an Emmy nomination in there somewhere might have I mean, you know, money can buy those things.

Here's the thing, though, if your show is in 37 parts, do you get 37 Emmy nominations? That's an interest. No, you don't. Same way as normal TV shows work. You submit one under 10 minute chunk. OK. Yeah. So, I mean, maybe Roku will also acquire the rights of the presidency at this point. It's all going left, right and center. I saw the best meme ever.

I absolutely the best meme. And as you were just stating, even though this meme is only five days old, it feels like a lifetime ago. This was by a Twitter account called sketches by Bose. And it says 2016. It's only four years. How bad can it get?

2021. Are the armed insurrectionists storming the Capitol aware that there is a plague ravaging the land? Yeah. I have to say, though, that you can sum that up with the the two photos that everybody was putting side by side. The the inauguration photo of Donald Trump at the Capitol and then the Capitol one year later.

Yeah. With and one of my favorite memes was all of the white guys climbing the wall and everybody labeled it honky Kong. I like vanilla Isis, too. That was just one of my favorites. So good. Yeah. And, you know, I think we're kind of almost forgetting and all this news that we are just hitting peaks with COVID-19 every single day.

Every single day is the worst day. Lest we forget, we are in a pandemic that is actually far, far worse than it's ever been. In fact, it's even so bad now that the NBA isn't sure they can play some of their games because not enough players can take part. There you have it. Are you surprised about that, though?

I mean, I know they were the shining beacon of the bubble, but, you know, like I said, when this whole thing started and everybody was talking about the bubble and we're going to do this, we're going to have studios and everybody has to rotate out every couple of months. I have seen every zombie movie ever made, and it only takes one dumb shit to ruin the lives of everyone.

Yeah. Yeah. That's very true. And speaking of just being up here in Canada and kind of what what our take, what the Canadian take is on it. It's not good. I mean, we're looking down there going, well, what? What is going on? I figured it was the standard takeoff, eh? Yeah. There was a good article in the Toronto Star here.

The dreamers who left Trump's America for life in Canada. And they say even Joe Biden won't lure them back. You're losing the best and brightest America, not just the tech talent. We've covered that many, many times over the past couple of years. Tech is not going to the USA anymore.

They're going to the USA. They're going other places, but you're losing regular hardworking people who just happen to not be white. And they've decided we're not going to go to the US. We don't have a good quality of life there. Our quality of life is better elsewhere. And I don't see, I don't see going back even under a democratic president.

Yeah, it's not worth the effort. You know, it's like, it's Canada. You have really nice people, really shitty weather and Tim Hortons. So it all balances. It's a balance. Yeah, it really is.

So this is the first time in 491 shows that I felt that the news was just coming so fast and quick and I was just getting so burnt out that I basically stopped collecting articles for the show. I've deleted more articles for this show than I have put in for any other show that we've ever had. Because yeah, it's just like, then you just, you just declare Trump bankruptcy at some point.

I kind of do. I guess there's a couple points to share in case you're under a rock or don't see news or have half a brain. This thing wasn't a joke. It appeared so at first with the silly images from, you know, the guy in the Chewbacca bikini running around and idiots, you know, posing with stuff in the Capitol. But the more video we saw, and the more that we saw what the journalists did and the Capitol police, the ones that didn't open up the gates for people.

Yeah, that's bad. It's dark. And it was scary. And it was an attempted coup. I don't, you know, there's no denying it anymore. Except, of course, there is denying it. Everybody's denying it. I just I love the people that said, No, it was Antifa. And they're like, No, guess what? Nope, it was not.

Didn't wear a mask. And you basically posted it on your Facebook account where you said, Maga, Maga, Maga. Yeah, I mean, this is this is the thing that is just killing me about this is everybody is just implicated themselves. And now it's boohoo, because there are consequences.

So, yeah, see, we're gonna we got a lot of technology to talk about with this, though. I think we have it sprinkled throughout the show. But we do. We do. You know, and one of the big things that I guess that it falls upon us to discuss is is the plot, the deep platforming that's happened. And yes, the whining about that.

Well, I had this lower down in the show, but we'll just bring it up right now. Let's call this the big red button of treason. So this is what happens when big tech says, No, this is when they turn on the sprinklers. Like I've said many times, you build your build your house in somebody's backyard. Don't get pissed off when they turn on the sprinklers. This is the sprinklerization of Donald J. Trump and and everybody that has been around him.

And there's lots of splash damage because, you know, we have talked many, many times about how the government can track you. And obviously, a lot of these people don't listen to our show because we are seeing it brought out in full fucking force right now. And, you know, it's it's good that it's happening. It's a shame it took this long and it took this for for these social media giants to wake up and kind of say, hey, hold on a second.

We do have some responsibility here. And, oh, we have these terms of service that we could actually enforce. Yeah, well, God, the the problem here is, yes, we're happy that they have hit the big red button of treason right now.

Yes. The problem is, once it's been pushed, how easy is it to push again? You know, we've talked about this with Cloudflare when Cloudflare has gone on on their basically cancel culture, you know, sprees. It's like, yeah, we don't like the frogs turning gay guy. Let's turn him off. Let's turn that guy off.

OK, let's turn everybody else off. So there's going to be a lot of discussion in the next coming years about how much power do they have? What recourse do normal people have? Because Parler is actually suing Amazon now for turning them off. And that is, you know, I think that's cute.

I think I think it's cute as well. They don't have a fucking leg to stand on. No, again, this this is when that terms of service that everybody just, you know, scrolls on by and clicks the yes, I read it button comes into play. They did break the terms of service.

And here's the thing. Terms of service is not like trademark. If you do not actively enforce a trademark, you can lose your trademark. Terms of service are kind of like that. Yeah, we'll let you slide on this one. Yeah, we'll let you slide on this one. And now you're screwed now. Forget about it.

And they can't come back and say, well, you let this guy slide. You let that guy slide. You let that guy slide. It doesn't matter. It's like you still broke the terms of service. You're out, you know. Yep. It doesn't matter with a cop saying that. Yeah, that guy was everybody else was going fast. Yeah. So why'd you pick me? Because I wanted to.

You're still speeding. You still broke the law. So here's your ticket, bitch. Yep. Pretty much. I think the two big takeaways for tech for me this week is we need to deprioritize social media in terms of news and public welfare.

I think that we have relied upon it way too heavily. And I think that this is exactly what happens and what comes from it. The other thing that really came out of it, and it's something that you and I both know, and many of our listeners know, but I think we forget about it a lot. The internet is not decentralized anymore.

It is very much centralized. Oh, yes. And if somebody wants to push off on you, they can. Yes. Yes, they can. Now, the news part, you know how much money is involved with that? That's never going to change. That's just like saying, hey, you know, 24-hour news networks have just as much blame as the internet at this point.

Nobody's going to get rid of them either because there's just too much money, too many jobs involved. It's never going away. Now, you can say that people have personal responsibility not to watch that crap, but come on. Let's be adults here. We know that people are dumb fucks, and they're going to watch whatever they want to watch, and they're going to go down those rabbit holes.

So, you know, it's going to be a slippery slope going forward, like we said, and everybody's going to get knocked down. And one thing that you have to also realize is the United States is not the internet. It's a big, wide world out there.

It's a big, wide world, and servers can go in a lot of places. Granted, we do own the DNS, which makes it a little easier to turn people off, but it just turns whack-a-mole into an international game of whack-a-mole. Yeah, yeah, it is. It does. And, you know, obviously we watched – I was actually on Twitter and watched Trump meltdown in real time.

I don't know if you were, but it was – Of course it was. It was very funny. You know, I was on when they shut off his account, and then I saw, you know, the attempt to tweet at POTUS and then the attempt to tweet at the poor IT guy. I mean this – he was literally running around the White House just grabbing people's phones, trying to tweet.

I mean the game that we played here at the house was, what's he thinking? What's he thinking? He's got to be freaking the fuck out because his lifeline has been taken away. And when the next day, after his account was shut down, the silence was beautiful.

It was beautiful. And then it's just like, how much power did he have because of social media? He had all the power, which means guess who had all the power? Jack the entire time. But we've been saying this for four years. Jack should have shut him down in the beginning, and we would not have been in this situation.

Exactly. Exactly. It's very true. And then, of course, the uproar from the idiots saying that this is, you know, stymieing free speech. No. He's the president. He can call a press conference at any time at 3 in the morning, and all of the reporters will be there, and all of his words will be printed in the papers.

Yeah. I mean, he can walk out on the front yard buck naked with one of those big horned helmets on and give a press conference. Hey, we've got a few more days. We've got a few more days to go. That could still happen. This is true. Today, he's off to the Alamo, which I believe is just so great.

Yeah. I mean, you know, this is – should he be removed from office? Personally, I think so. I like to – I mean, what's he doing with his time right now? Slate has reports, United States essentially leaderless as president feuds with Twitter and the PGA Tour because they took away his golf.

The tournaments will no longer take place on any of his golf courses. You know, this is all much ado about nothing. All that stuff is kind of silly. If you really want to see how bad it's gotten for Mr. Trump, the banks. Oh, yeah. The banks are leaving him. The banks will not do business with him anymore.

That hurts. He can fume all he wants about Twitter, but that's going to be the real thing that takes him down. Speaking of the international aspect of this, I thought – I did read through this article. I don't know if you did, but I'm curious about your thought on this. After Trump, should Twitter also ban all the dictators?

Yes. Yeah, I agree too. Yes. You do not have a natural right to Twitter. And I think when it comes to all of this stuff, I think Facebook is way more dangerous than Twitter. Trump was an anomaly as far as fomenting dissent.

When it comes to the real problem, it's Facebook. And I mean, there's Myanmar. That's all you have to do is look at Myanmar. That's it. I saw a really interesting proposal that basically Facebook should no longer allow anybody to create a group. It has to be approved. I don't think that's going to fly.

I just think that – I don't think government officials should be allowed on social media. How about that? If you have a job in government, you give up your right to have a voice on social media. You can't reach the people directly anymore, Jason?

It's what television is for and radio. Shortwave. Morse code. I don't agree with that. I totally think that they should have. But I do think it is time. And I don't know how we do it. Because, again, what are the stats on the amount of hours of footage that is being uploaded to YouTube every minute?

Moderation and actual enforcement of terms of service has to start. Moderation at scale is never going to work. I know. It is done. It's over. You cannot do it. I will argue that since these companies are making billions, and that's in the B, billions of dollars, they need to start spending more money on figuring it out.

There's another option. Charge people to upload shit to your network. That's true. You know, there's always other options that people are too scared to talk about. That is true. The long and the short of it. I just put it down as my one line for the week.

It actually got me shadow banned for a while on Twitter, which is great because I dropped the H word. Twitter and Jack banning Trump in the last minutes of the final act is about the same as the moral equivalent of Hitler saving a kitten, which I still believe. But, yeah, I got shadow banned for that one, which was pretty funny.

That's pretty funny. But my favorite headline of all was Gizmodo, which had jack-offs Trump. Which is the best. That is the best. It's pretty good. And, you know, none of this has really done much. FBI is now warning that armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitals and in Washington, D.C.

We shall see if that's much ado about nothing. It could just be five people showing up. Well, two people showed up at the big Twitter protest yesterday. So, yeah, it signs point to. Yeah. And I would like to just put things into perspective with this because I have to talk people off the ledge all the time.

This is where I get down on 24-hour news cycles and mainstream media. I, too, am not. If you listen to 5% of what they say, that's about the average of, you know, where you should be with what is really going on. Donald Trump got over 70 million votes, right?

He has been talking for weeks and weeks now about how everything was stolen from him and taken from him. And everybody should show up because we're going to storm the castle. And we're going to do it on this day. Out of 70 million people, approximately 8,000 people showed up.

Out of those 8,000 people, a much smaller subset are the ones that stormed the Congress building. Now, extrapolate that out to his network around the world. And after seeing everybody who will – everybody will eventually be caught and, you know, dragged in front of the back shed to be shot.

At least, you know, metaphorically. Metaphorically. If not, the guy with the fire extinguisher, he should be shot no matter what. Although, I will tell you, if this were the other way around and there were a bunch of black people that did that, they would not be metaphorically being shot. No, they wouldn't be. No, they wouldn't be.

They would have been shot. So just extrapolate those numbers and look at it. And, yes, it was a terrible thing. But turning this into a, quote, unquote, civil war, I think, is the height of hyperbole. I think that – I'm looking forward to everybody coming out at one time and trying to, you know, do what they're going to do.

Because that just puts all these people in the same spot at the same time so we can just start sweeping them up. Yeah. This is all going to come out. We will get into many of the reasons why later in the show. Yes, we will. And I'm looking forward to a very straightforward – here is exactly what happened.

Here is what you said, sir. And here is what you said, sir. And here is what you did, sir. And we have the video right here. And we have your tweets. And we have your parlor posts that you tried to delete. And there will be a reckoning. And it's not going to be pretty. And the U.S. is going to get a hell of a black eye from this.

But there will not be a civil war. Trump will be taken out of office. And we will try to move forward the best we can. Yes, we will. And speaking of things being laid bare, let's talk some important stuff. Okay. Let's do it. We will be finding out all UFO information, sort of, buried in the last federal omnibus spending bill signed into law on December 27, 2020, which is about 18 lifetimes ago right now.

Notable for its inclusion of coronavirus relief is a mandate that may bring UFO watchers one step closer to finding out what the government knows. So, according to Snopes, the Office for the Director of National Intelligence has confirmed that it included a 180-day window for the U.S. Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense, assuming we have any at that point, to prepare a report for senators and armed service committees on the potential existence of UFOs and any potential they may have to pose a threat.

Of course, there is language in there that says there is a classified annex for sensitive information, so we may not get shit. Okay. It's funny, too, because this week I read an article over at Science Alert that I was going to put in bric-a-brac but ended up scrapping it. But since you put this in here, I thought it would be fun to bring back.

An astronomer who believes in aliens explains why he's not convinced by UFO sightings. And it's a good read, and he lays out a lot of the stuff that we usually know, the Fermi's paradox and all that good stuff. If you're not up to speed on that, then go read the article and Google all the terms because that will get you up to speed.

And it is always important to remember that UFO just means unidentified flying object. It does not mean alien. I have a feeling we're going to learn about a lot of now declassified drones. Yeah, that, too, that, too, although there's a new book coming out that we'll talk about soon that actually makes the case that we have been visited by aliens and recently.

Oh, bullshit. I believe that as much as I believe that the horn guy should be running our government.

Media Candy. Okay, let's just call this what this really is. Media Candy is now just this week in escapism. Because what I have learned from the past seven days, the past four fucking years, is that I sleep better when I don't watch the news.

So I watch other things. I watch Star Trek Discovery, STD, which you also can't get rid of. What do you think about that finale, Brian? Spoiler alerts coming up, people. So fast forward if you got them. It was disappointing. The reasons for the burn, blah.

I hated that whole storyline, didn't care about the characters, didn't. It was such a mamby-pamby way to go about it. Ending up with Burnham, of course, as captain. And everything's hunky-dory. And we're just going to exist now that the lithium is back. And we're going to rebuild the Federation.

That's going to be the next season. Exactly. Honestly, they could cut it right now and I'd be fine. Yeah. I mean, it felt like they could have ended the show right there. You know, I don't know where they're going to go with it. I don't. I'm not.

I'm just not that interested. Yeah. I'm just not that into you, STD. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's everything. There were so many just so convenience things going on in the show. Like, okay, the ship that's been there a hundred some odd years breaks just right when you happen to be there.

Okay. All right. Sure. Well, there was an inciting event where the kid got pissed off because they showed up and he broke the ship because they were there. So there was that bit. But still, it was stupid. It was dumb. A kid had a tantrum and destroyed the known universe?

Yeah. Okay, great. Basically. Basically. So. And would this kid not be in protective custody for the rest of his goddamn life if everybody found out that he had a tantrum? It wasn't him. It was Antifa, Jason. It was Antifa. Oh, that's right. That's right. Oh, God.

Anyway, yeah. It was dumb. It was just dumb. Yeah, I'm with you on it. I found myself not caring. I thought the season started pretty strong and I was kind of into it. And the more it went on, the less I cared. And we'll see. I mean, if they continue the show as is, like I said, a snooze fest, if they're going to reboot it, I don't see how.

I just don't see why. You know, we've got two new series coming out. We've got the Michelle Yeoh series and we've got the Captain What's-His-Nut series. Pike. Pike. Yeah. Those two can take over the reins and get rid of this one because this one is just. Yeah.

I'm with you. Yeah. Put this one on the lower decks. How about that? I've been watching Succession still. God, I love that show. It's a good show. I have found that I have turned, you know, kind of into a dick watching it more than usual, which is pretty fun.

I do, you know, I feel for the main character, Logan Roy, Brian Cox. You are a dick. Yes, I am. And I just love. That's like feeling for the Trump Tweedledees and Tweedledums. So I was going to pull a one of his signature fuck offs for the show at the end.

And then I found like a three and a half minute super cut of every fuck off in the entirety of Succession. There's a lot that is like a fuck off is their spirit animal. It is there. It is. I cannot wait. It is the frack of Succession.

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. I cannot wait for season three. Hopefully they'll get back on that soon. We are going to switch over to Billions, which is probably going to make me even a bigger dick, which is it's such a good show. It's such a good show. But unfortunately, season five got cut short because of the Rona.

Right. And they're going to finish filming season five hopefully soon. What am I talking about? We're not getting that to 2026. I'll be long dead by then. Well, with a with a discovery done, I was getting ready to cancel my CBS all access subscription until I realized I still have the stand to finish, which they are dribbling out.

And for what it's worth, I'm still enjoying it greatly and massive kudos to the casting directors. Now, Whoopi Goldberg and Alexander Skarsgård, who play the light and the dark, respectively, main baddies and goodies are the only missteps for me. I'm still not thrilled with them.

I was good with the mother Abigail from the 1994 version, which is Ruby Dee. But so far, no one has done Randall Flagg justice at all. Jamie Sheridan was just terrible in that one. That was my my biggest pain point in that particular version. And he's Alexander Skarsgård is better, but not great.

My real issue with watching it right now is we're going into the extreme sadness porn part of the story. OK, no spoilers. I'm still reading the book. I'm not going to. I'm not going to. But this is this is when the story gets sad before, you know, picking back up in the final battle. So I'm sad enough right now, so I don't know if I want to watch the next two episodes of this.

So that's where we're at. But it's it's very well done and I'm enjoying it and I won't be canceling CBS until they've dribbled this out to the end. OK, I do like Alexander Skarsgård. That sucks. He's not a good fit, but it just say it doesn't fit with my Randall Flagg. You know that again, this is the problem with any adaptation of a beloved book of yours.

Right. You have in your head what you think it should be. And yeah, I had that problem with good omens recently. So, yeah, same thing. Same thing. I subscribe to Discovery Plus so I could get my beloved food network up here in Canada via VPN. Yes, I'm the one because of all the licensing, blah, blah, blah.

And which is great. Unlike the confusing food network kitchen app that I got for free for a year from Amazon, which only works on mobile devices and can't be tossed to a TV. This is the real deal. All the show on the various networks, food network discovery, blah, blah, blah. Except, and this caused me to fire off a fiery tweet pre-insurrection.

Oh, shit. Brian has unleashed a fiery tweet. Stop the presses. They're not up to date with current broadcast schedules on a ton of the shows. Really? Many are months, if not a season or two behind. And here's the thing. If I'm paying your blood money to get access to your entire network and all of your shows and all of your archives, I expect you to keep your fucking shows up to date on your pay app.

I don't want my Christmas cooking shows to show up on your app in the spring or summer when they're aired on broadcast networks before fucking Christmas. Otherwise, what exactly am I paying a premium for? Yeah, that should be a 24-hour turnaround, if that, you know? Yes, but they're all so far behind.

And so I tweeted, like, what the hell? Are you going to bring them up to date? Because there's no information to be found anywhere. You cannot find any information about when shows are going to be posted, anything like that. But, like, all of my favorite Food Network shows, they're all, like, before I even left Canada.

Like, I've seen all those shows. You've seen them all, yeah. Thank you for signing up to Discovery Plus Reruns. Yeah, so they basically just stole five bucks out of my wallet this month for nothing. So until – I'm going to cancel, I think, until I can get an answer about this or what – I don't even know how to get an answer.

Who am I supposed to call? Okay, Ghostbusters. Yeah. Call Guy Fieri. Yes, I will call Guy Fieri and say, what the actual fuck did I just pay you for? I got to say, though, I've been watching a lot of Guy Fieri's grocery games from home. They've been doing these from home. You're not a Guy Fieri fan, so – I like Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives quite a bit.

Have you watched these grocery games that they get from their homes? See, I don't like the reality shows. That's the thing for me. I like the actual cooking shows and all that. These are cooking shows. Yeah, I know, but it's a competition, blah, blah, blah. But it's fun because they got a lot of people from Triple D in there anyway. Anyway, I thought it was fun. We've been watching it.

It's pretty good. All right. And in other sad news, Jeopardy's final Alex Trebek episode just aired on Friday. And they did do a little warm, fuzzy tribute. The link is in the show notes so you can watch that. The clips highlight Trebek's warmth, charm, and humor.

But above all, they show how much fun he was having hosting Jeopardy. He will be missed. A little tear in the eye. Oh, I did find this over at Ars Technica. What I learned playing 30 plus years worth of Jeopardy video games. So I wasted 30 plus years.

Walking down the history of those. Also in the news, which is kind of fucked up, Ken Jennings is taking over for a while as the host. And I think he should be permanent. I do believe so as well. But he got swept up in the Bean Dad debacle with John Roderick from the Long Winters.

And a lot of people who can't take a fucking joke. I know. Irony is dead. It was a joke. It was a fucking joke. And everybody went back through John Roderick's old tweets. And, you know, there were little fucking snowflakes calling him a Nazi and shit like that.

I'm like, if you cannot figure out if a tongue is firmly planted in a cheek on the internet, you should not be on the internet. Because a lot of his old jokes are pretty fucking funny. And he's nothing what these people think him to be. But, yeah.

The level to which he had to apologize. Oh, so stupid. Is unbelievable for a story about. It was a story that was amplified. It was a fucking joke. I know. These people are saying that.

Okay. So just the long and the short of it is his kid wanted some beans. And he said, okay, figure out how to put some beans in a pan. And here's a can opener. And you've got to figure it out. And it took her six hours to figure it out. So he starved his kid for six hours.

Which, by the way, in most countries is the time between lunch and dinner. I would like to point out. True. What's the big fucking deal? Look, he was just teaching her intermittent fasting. It's all the rage. God, at least he didn't try the Wim Hof method and throw her into a bucket of ice water.

Jesus. And the kid came out of it with a useful skill. How to use a can opener. So the internet fucking sucked on that one. Big time. But Ken got wrapped up in that as well. Yep. And this seems like a fine time to remind people about tweetdelete.net.

Yes. Keep your tweets current, people. And don't give everybody a history to go through out of context. Yes. I have a recurring calendar message that reminds me to go do it once a month and remove anything that's over a month old.

Of course. And I recommend everybody else do it. Of course. For you and I, we would really need podcastdelete.net to scrub these shows from the internet after they have aired. Yeah. No, we're good, man. We're good. I do want to do a quick final shout out in Media Candy here to my friend Sean Rafferty.

He just launched his new podcast, The Security Pro Podcast. He was a security expert for 20 years, and he talks about all that fun stuff that I like, you know, how to not get shot and killed or stabbed type of stuff. And it's good.

It's really good. He's doing a good job with it. So check it out. Excellent.

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With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. Cops and doodads. I have finally given in to the fact that it is winter here, and it is cold, and I will not be doing my outside bike rides here once I actually even get my bike here for large chunks of the year.

So I gave in, and I purchased the Echelon Smart Connect fitness bike. Okay. How's that working out for you? I like it. It's a cheaper alternative to Peloton. Plus, I didn't want to join the cult to Peloton because that kind of creeps me out a little bit. They've got some, they're adding a lot of stuff to their app.

You know, they've got the live classes, which I am never going to do, but they have a lot of the scenic rides, which I like. So those are great. But it was a bit janky on setup. You're supposed to, like, scan, use your cell phone to, like, scan the serial number off the box, but it wouldn't scan anything.

So when I Googled it, I mean, seriously, the answer on their support forums is make yourself a Photoshop, Photoshop up to yourself a page with the serial number. Just type it in and then scan that. Really? Okay. Why can't we just type in the serial number then?

Why with the whole photo and all that shit? I don't get it. Anyways, whatever. It is what it is. You know, and it's one of those things where there's all these different standards out there now, and nobody wants to play along with anybody else. The ability to hook it up to your iPhone and the Apple Fitness is super, super janky.

It's so bad that people are just saying, don't even bother. And, of course, Apple has no reason to do it because they want to push their own fitness product. They don't want to have other people's fitness products work. So there's all that. But it's fine. It's a good exercise bike, way cheaper than a Peloton, as good as a Peloton.

It does what it needs to do. So I got a good sweat on the other day. All right. I'm surprised you just didn't get a rack, like one of the smart racks, and put your regular bike in. But I guess your regular bike is probably still in Santa Monica, isn't it? Yes. My regular bike is in Santa Monica. So that doesn't help. And I wouldn't want to bring my bike inside the house and, you know, all the time and in and out and all that sort of stuff.

Just bring it in for the winter. Yeah, that's true. I guess, but whatever. A friend of the show MXV just brought his in. He got one of those smart ones and put a TV up in the room. So he's doing like 50, 60 miles a day, which I'm just like, doesn't your ass just hurt after that long? But anyway, those things do work.

But yeah, I'm going to not get this because I don't have to. Yeah, you don't have to. I don't have winter. Woo-hoo! I know. And I remember we had a lot of hot dock talk. So I saw this and I thought of you. This is the Kensington's SD5700T Thunderbolt 4 dock, which has all the ports you could need.

So this does look pretty impressive. It's got 11 ports, 90 watts of power delivery and transfer speeds of up to 40 gigabits. It goes to 11. It goes to 11. So this has got all sorts of stuff. So I thought this might be of interest to you at some point. Okay.

Well, it would be, but I already bought the Bridgestone Pro. A multi-port hub, which actually works really good for me. It's got a ton of other ports. It's about 60 bucks less than the Kensington, which is nice. I've had had a few issues with it, with doing carbon copy cloner backups with two drives and them just randomly unmounting, which is not good.

That's not good. I need to do some more research on that one. I think it might have been the cables, though. I was using the wrong cables. But it's a nice one. It gets hot as hell, though. But for 240 bucks, it gets the job done. And I want to get the sister item with that, which is the Bridge MacBook Vertical Dock for the MacBook Pro 16 inches.

So if you have that, if you have the Stone Pro and the Vertical Dock, it's pretty easy to just walk in and click it in and you're done, you know? Right. You have all your stuff together so it doesn't take up as much desk space. But it's pre-order only right now. So I'm going to wait until that hits the market in January of 2027 and give it a shot then.

But if anybody else has tried this. Oh, the Kensington's on pre-order still, right? Yes. It's not quite out yet. So. Okay. Yeah. These jacks things, they work somewhat. So we'll see. We'll see. It's just, they're so fucking hot.

Yeah, they do heat up. It's pretty crazy. Yeah. And as I was just scrolling about through Amazon, I saw something that I believe I would use your nomenclature. Looks neat. This is the Elago W3 Apple Watch Stand Compatible with Apple Watch Series 6 SE 54321, 44 millimeter, 42 millimeter, 40 millimeter, 38 millimeter, classic white.

It's just a cute little stand for your watch. It makes it look like an old school classic monitor. Okay. I think we've talked about this on the show before when they first came out. May have. I don't know. I saw it again and I just thought it was cute. Yeah, it's cute.

It's cute. I just don't want to have to sit there and plug it in like that every day. When my thing goes on the charging stand, I never look at it. It's like I put it on, then when I'm done, I pull it back off. That's it. Pretty much. Exactly. That's kind of it. I had to buy new studio monitors for my bedroom setup.

I got these Mackie Studio monitors, those black and green ones you see everybody have. Yep. Little three-inch speakers on them. Do not buy. Do not buy the Mackie Studio monitors. When I first got them, the bass was so bad, I actually had to put tape over the holes on the back to knock the bass down because there's no adjustments for it or anything like that.

They were only $100, but they died after three years. The switches went bad on it, which I'm like, seriously? Yeah. My experience with Mackie is if you're spending under a grand for their monitors, they're not worth shit. Yeah, no. But they're incredibly good at the high-end pro level. Okay. So I found another set of $100 ones because I'm just like, I don't want to spend more than I have to because these are literally just for my bedroom.

And if I need to really sound check something, I can plug in some headphones, some good monitor headphones. But I got the PreSonus Ares 3.5s. They're near-field studio monitors. About the same as the Mackie, but they've got a few more adjustments on them for different room noise and things like that.

So they get here tomorrow, so I'll check them out. But I just really had to tell people, man, just don't buy those fucking Mackies. They're garbage. And since you are Mr. Chef DuJour, I found this site called Recipe Search. It's literally it. Recipe Search. You can instantly search over 2 million recipes, and it is fast as hell.

It is. It is. I'm curious as to where these 2 million recipes were sourced from because I did search for some of my, like, go-to recipes that I always use, and none of them came up. So it's, you know, they don't seem to have bon appetit in the New York Times and all that sort of stuff.

That's probably copyright. They probably know where the cease and desist lie. True. So there you go. So that might explain it. I found some good stuff in there, and yeah, it is fast. It is so fast, yeah. But I did sign up for the New York Times cooking app for 40 bucks a year, and so I had it on my iPad, and I got some really good stuff out of that.

Yeah, they've got great recipes. Yeah, it's pricey, but it really, like, when you're at the end of your fucking rope with, what are we going to cook tonight? Yep. It's really nice to be able to just dig into that. Hey, interesting. You get what you pay for. What a novel concept, Internet. Amazing.

Amazing. Well, actually, on this next one, you do get a little more than you pay for. I got Pedometer Plus Plus, which is just a cheap app. It's a free app, actually. It's that cheap that it's free. And I got it because it does one thing, and it does one thing well. All I wanted was to add a step complication to my watch.

That's it. Because with the health thing, you have to, like, click on it and scroll to find how many steps you had during the day. This thing, you plug it in. It's free. You set how many steps you want to do a day for your goal, and it just gives you a little monitor if you've hit it or not. That's it. All right. So it was fantastic.

And I still have whatever you had me set up on my watch first, which tells me my step count, and I know what my goal is. So I can just go, hmm, that's not the number. I wonder if that's it. It could have been so long ago because I dumped my Fitbit finally because I don't need to.

The reason I've been using a Fitbit for the past couple years now is because I was on my treadmill desk, and, you know, the Apple Watch does not really work well when you're on a treadmill desk and your hands are on the thing. And I kept it because I had friends who were doing it, and then they kind of all dropped off.

So I'm like, you know what? Screw it. Let's just deal with the watch. I only need one thing to worry about. Since my watch is actually on my wrist and it just involved a click, I can tell you that the app is called Steps App that you originally set up. Yeah, I thought that was it. Yeah, easy enough. Easy enough. At the library.

So, Brian, I did try to do parallel books here. I'm working my way through the stand, which is very good but very long. So I took a side mission, and I downloaded Star Trek Picard, The Last Best Hope by O'Neill McCormick.

All right. Now, I've never been a Star Trek or Star Wars book fan. Now I know why. They're not good. Yeah. This is the story that is in between, like when the Romulan star explodes and all that and them trying to get everything off and basically leading up to Star Trek Picard.

This is one of the many vessels that they've used. They have comic books, and they've got a couple books that fill in that gap. Now, the problem with me is if I read this book in word form, I probably would have been fine with it because I could put the voices in my head, but I listened to it on Audible.

Now, I know what Geordi LaForge sounds like, and I know what Jean-Luc Picard sounds like, and you, sir, are neither of the two. So thank you, Audible, for your generous refund policy. That one went right back in the hopper, got my credit back.

And I'm still slogging through the latest laundry files. I read it. It's okay. I get bored after 10 minutes, and I put it down. Yeah, I think I need to put it down. The problem is I've just been too lazy to search Amazon for something new. Okay. Well, check our Discord channel. People have been putting some new stuff up there with some new sci-fi writers I've never heard of.

That is true. Security? Ha! We are joined again this week by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast and also the co-host of the social engineering podcast Hacking Humans with our friend Joe Kerrigan, as well as the co-host of Caveat with our other friend Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy as well as surveillance and privacy.

How's life out there in D.C. adjacent land this week? It's okay. It's okay. How's the mood on the streets? It's all right. I think – I don't think it really matters. Well, we're far enough away, you know, and as I – because we recorded – I'm probably about 20 miles away from the capital proper.

So, it's hard to feel like you're having any opportunity to get your energy back with just all this stuff happening.

I know you guys talked about this in other parts of the show, but it just – it's sort of relentless. For me personally, I thought about, you know, oh, well, if once we get past the election, then things will be better. And then, well, once we get past – we put 2020 behind us, things will be better.

And all those thoughts were adorable, weren't they? Yeah. Yeah. So – Well, yeah. Hanging in there. Hanging in there. Good times. Well, your rant last week on – Rant?

What rant? Directed to us. You're diffusing – you're diffusing of your angst and anger, let's just say. I think I blocked it out. Yes. Well, fortunately, our fans did not. Clips have been made. They have been posted and disseminated.

Yep. That was good. It was a hit. It was a hit. Let's just say it was a hit. And as per usual, when any of us on these shows talk about any of our problems and our missteps, shall we say, with our tech, people are always ready to be very helpful.

So we did have another pointed out tip here for you, Dave, from Allison. Please tell Dave to run Mac OS Disk Utility, usually a repair of the disk and of the permissions. They might have renamed it to a single first aid step. We'll fix a disk that broke during migration, which is, of course, very helpful three weeks later.

Well, I appreciate Allison taking the time to send that in and the thoughtfulness of her sending that over to us. So thank you very much, Allison. I did try that step. I did try the built-in disk repair, and unfortunately, it was to no avail.

I have recovered many of the missing files. I will say a couple of the files I realized that I have not been able to get back, which I may be having a little side conversation with you about, Jason, were my 4K scan of Star Wars.

And my collection of all five seasons of The Muppet Show. None of these are difficult to get back, but you kind of need to know somebody who has a direct line to Sweden.

A Swedish chef, perhaps. Yes, yes, absolutely. Beardy, beardy, the files. Don't load in the files. Bork, bork, bork, your Mac got borked. Yes, that's what happened. My Mac got borked.

So a little other follow-up story on there. I talked to Jordan Harbinger about your woes, because he was telling me about his new iMac that he bought, because he did the same thing, and it hosed his iMac. And he's like, I'm just going to buy a new one and plug in my time machine backup that I fortunately unplugged before migration.

Yeah, great, Jordan. He had that one. And it happened to me, actually. I was trying to do some work on my old Mac Air, my MacBook Air that I'm getting rid of, because I got the new M1. And I came across the same thing you did. It was gone.

Your time machine was gone. No, no, no. Just the drive was gone. He unplugged it, Dave. Come on. Well, yeah. My time machine was fine, but I imagine if I'd have left it plugged in, it wouldn't have mattered, because the main drive and everything was gone. And I did do the disk utility, obviously.

And they were just like, yeah, that disk is empty. You have to format it. There is nothing there. I was like, wow. It really – that really is a problem. Yeah. Yeah. So, OK. So two things come to mind. First of all, I'm sorry that this happened to you.

Second of all, I'm happy that this happened to you, because it means it wasn't just me. Misery loves company. Right. It's good to share your misfortune, to know that you're in the same boat with other people. So how interesting – it's interesting also to me that I haven't seen widespread reporting of this.

You'd think this is the kind of thing that – the circles that we all run in, something like this would bubble up on Twitter or somewhere. But interesting that it's hit three out of three of us who happen to be doing similar kinds of media management and so on and so forth. Yeah. I think the thing nowadays is it's just – we've had it happen so many times.

It's just like, oh, shit, this again. Once again. It's not even worth tweeting about, you know? It's like – That's a good point. And fortunately for me, I was – I mean, I was preparing that MacBook Air for, you know, resale. So it's like, okay, the drive is gone. Fine.

It's actually convenient. It's actually convenient. I just have to, like, go into the, you know, disk tools recovery mode. And then it, like, put on an older version of the OS and then I just did another upgrade to Big Sur again. And this time it worked. And then I just had a clean machine, which is what I was going for anyway.

So that part didn't really matter. I still did have my time machine backup if I had to pull it over. But, yeah, it was just really like, oh, Dave was telling the truth. I was – I'm trying to – I'm trying to back you up on this one, Dave. I didn't make it up, guys.

I didn't make it up. Well, we know how many cocktails you like to have around the office when nobody's around. So – Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, boy. Well, my first bit here is I didn't even have to read the article on this one because I – this is – I have a completely different take on this.

The title of the article is Ben-Gurion University Targeted by Cyber Attack. Oh, no, they didn't. Talk about – I'm like, okay, the people who are the scariest motherfuckers on the planet when it comes to computer intrusions, you want to go after them?

Yeah. I figured this is going to be a short story because there's just going to be a couple extra bodies that show up around the world and people will be like, he had an accident. No, that's it. It's done. It's over with. Right. It will happen in some sort of strange way like someone was using – I don't know.

Their iPhone will explode. Right. Basically. And it turns out – and it happened because someone had a laser in a parking lot across the way that they'd hit a window and made it resonate and that created a microwave energy that then resonated with the phone and had it burst into flames or something.

It will befall them the same way that Ben-Gurion does all of their research. They will be motivated to go after these people. Yeah. It doesn't seem very smart to me. If you're going to go after somebody, maybe it was a random attack.

But if you do your homework, this would – I don't know. Ben-Gurion would be a place I would avoid. Yeah. It seems almost as crazy as, I don't know, say, attacking the capital. Well, yeah. Actually, Ben-Gurion – attacking Ben-Gurion is a lot crazier than attacking the capital because, you know, that ain't going to work.

The other thing kind of worked. Anyway, yes, air-gapped computers everywhere have exploded, killing their targets. Right. Right. Mysteriously. Yeah. Oh, man. And, of course, you know, with everything that happened, use of Clearview AI facial recognition tech spiked as law enforcement seeks to identify the capital mob.

But what I say is basically, why? I mean, they posted it on Facebook themselves. We have video. We have parlor chat. We have just about everything that you can find. Why do they even need to bother to use Clearview? Well, that's what they're feeding in. Because as we're increasingly seeing, there seems to be two separate groups that were involved in this.

The morons that posted their selfies and then the people wearing the tactical gear running around in the background. Yeah. Right. But they're also – I mean, all of that publicly available photography and video is being fed into Clearview to see – to match it up with other things, other places.

I think somebody made a good point, which is worth remembering here, which is that facial recognition is bad even if it's being used against someone you don't like. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we talked about that earlier on the show that it's just like this is – the ramifications of everything that's happening right now are going to be far and wide because, yes, we've talked about how this is bad for so long.

And now that they're going to be doing it for something for good, it's like, oh, are they going to get really trigger happy and use it a lot more or where are things going to get rolled back? How is this going to play out? Mm-hmm. Yeah. What if it's successful? Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. And along those lines, Senator Mark Warner, the incoming chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is asking mobile carriers and social media platforms to preserve content and associated metadata that may be connected to the attack on the U.S. Capitol. He said in a statement Saturday that he had contacted the CEOs of AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Apple, Facebook, Gab, Google, Parler, which we are about to discuss, Signal, Telegram, and Twitter.

Now, the interesting thing about this, and this is a conversation we often have in this segment, all of these companies routinely – well, not Parler or Gab – all of these companies routinely comply with court-issued preservation orders issued during criminal investigations. But this is not that.

This is an informal request. Well, fortunately for them, we know that nothing is ever deleted. Move on to the next story. Okay. Well, let's move right on to the next story then. Yes. Yes. 70 terabytes of Parler's user messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers.

This, of course, includes things that were supposedly deleted, and our Twitter broke up with set visibility to zero posts. Yeah. Eight years of yelling at people that nothing is ever deleted. Everything is just visibility set to zero. Finally, some fucking vindication.

Thank you, Internet. Yeah. This is a bit of a crazy story about how it happened, of course. Reddit users are claiming that this scrape was made possible because of Twilio, an American cloud communications platform that provided Parler with phone number verification services.

They cut their ties with Parler just about the same time that everybody did. And this apparently allowed hackers to deduct that it was possible to create users and verified accounts without verification. And then they were able to get behind the login box API used for content delivery, which allowed them to see which users had moderator rights, which in turn allowed them to reset the passwords of those users with the simple forgot password function.

And since there were no longer authenticated emails, they were able to access admin accounts with ease and therefore basically get absolutely everything, including real estate driver's licenses, which were used to verify citizens on Parler. So, how do you guys feel about this?

Couldn't have happened to a nicer group of people. Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. How is this not in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? It 100% is. Yeah. There's no... It 100% is. It's ands or buts about it, yeah.

You know, there's the schadenfreude and there's the bad things happening to bad people feeling, but obviously this is incredibly against the law. And, you know, you can justify yourself as Robin Hood all you want, but this never should have happened. It's interesting to me that when, again, when we're doing this sort of thing against, quote-unquote, bad guys, people we don't like, and just let me be clear, in my mind, these folks are bad guys and people I don't like.

That's my personal opinion. But when we're doing that, the people who are doing the scraping are security researchers. And when it's against people we do like, they're hackers and, you know, threat actors.

Yes. The white hat has gotten a little bit gray on this one. Yeah. Yeah. Quite a bit. Quite a bit. Yeah. No, this shouldn't happen. And, you know, we can say this kind of scrape should just go to some sort of shadowy government agency or not even shadowy, just the FBI who are going after these people.

This is helpful to them. Should it have been put up for everyone to look at? No. Here's the other thing, though. Is this legal for the FBI to use because it was stolen? It's stolen information. So is there precedent where the FBI can actually even use this data?

Is this something that is, you know, legally admissible or does it screw up their cases when they try and go after these people? You know, this might be. We're doing really good at like rolling into next stories, which my next comment is we aren't lawyers, much less constitutional lawyers.

Well, I'm glad that you all are helping write my next episode of Caveat with Ben Yellen, because these are all questions that I will be asking him next time he and I speak. Yeah, so this this Parler thing is definitely troubling. Every aspect of Parler is troubling and Parler is a subsequent basically demise.

I mean, I guess they're making noises about trying to come back. And that was some that caused a lot of people a lot of fun on Twitter saying, oh, yeah, you're just going to migrate to a new service in a couple of days and rebuild from the ground up in a few days.

Although, given how secure the system seems to have actually have been, it seems to have been kind of duct taped together to begin with. So maybe they can move it pretty quickly to a new service. They hired fresh talent to build the thing in the first place. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Built for security. Yes, it seems as though they were under-resourced on the security side of things for sure. And moderation. Mm-hmm. Well, yeah. Wasn't that kind of the point, though, of Parler is we're not moderating, right? That was a selling point.

That was a feature, not a bug. Right, right. That was their differentiating factor. Yeah. I guess on the one hand, I mean, I see the value in this of obviously gathering up all this data for law enforcement, particularly when we're talking about things like photos and videos with the riot at the Capitol that evidently Parler did not strip any EXIF data from photos and so on.

And so that could all be very useful for law enforcement and I see there's value there. The thing that troubles me is suppose – and I've never been on Parler so I don't really know how it works. But I'm imagining if private messages between people were to become public, I don't – that makes me feel icky.

I don't think that's the right way to go with this. Yeah. And again, even if they were deleted, those private messages, they weren't deleted. Right. And as we've discovered, there is only one account on any social network that we're aware of that actually can delete messages and that's Mark Zuckerberg's personal Facebook Messenger account.

That's it. Yes. It's good to be the king. Yes, it is. Yeah. So – and Holly wrote in and said, would you guys kindly have a segment on the show regarding the First and Fifth Amendments? They kind of go together like peas and carrots, what types of speech are protected by the First Amendment and what is not, how this is related to privately owned platforms, even if those platforms like big tech are viewed as monopolies, how those things not protected by the First Amendment are often covered in a company's terms of service.

As an IT professional, not a lawyer, I am exhausted just listening to these people and I know you guys are friends with more than a few lawyers. Maybe we can make pamphlets or an instructional PowerPoint. Much appreciated. Love the show. And like I said, I mean, we aren't lawyers. We aren't much less constitutional lawyers and all I will say about this is some clarification would be nice and that sort of clarification is something we've actually kind of been screaming for on this segment for quite some time.

People don't really seem to know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's a job for Ben Yellen who is a constitutional lawyer. So why don't I get him on the horn and let's see if we can get him to maybe join us either next week or in an upcoming episode and we can address this directly and maybe get Holly's questions answered by someone who actually knows what he's talking about and isn't just talking out of his ass like us.

Yeah. Excellent. That would be good because I have questions. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. No, it's nice to be able to ask questions of people who actually know what they're doing rather than just spewing ass facts. I think you should rename caveat to get yelling on the horn.

It's really what it comes down to. Get yelling on the horn. Yeah, I like that. I could just see like an old police captain sitting there where he's got the bat phone on one side and he's got the other phone on the other. He's like, get yelling on the horn. We need help. Right. Right. Absolutely. These people are asking questions about the First and Fifth Amendment.

Get yelling on the horn. Yeah, absolutely. I love it. All right. I'll see if I can't get that done. In the meantime, gosh, I hope we have an opportunity to rest up and get our energy back here. Eight days.

I doubt it. I don't think it's likely, but someday, gents, we're going to have to, I don't know, maybe we'll be out on a catamaran somewhere out near some beautiful tropical island with fruity drinks in our hands with little umbrellas in them.

And then we'll look back on this and we'll all down our drinks quickly and say, that sucked. Then we'll wake up and we're back to where we started. Yeah, that's right. That's right. All right, guys. We'll hang in there and we'll talk to you guys next week.

All righty. Moron of the Week. Brian, because our moron cup overfloweth, I decided let's just have some heroes today. Okay. Right? Uh, there's a cancer doctor in Arkansas who wiped out more than $600,000 in medical debt for his former patients.

That guy deserves a medal. Yep. More than, actually more than $650,000 in unpaid medical bills. He was closing down his practice. He didn't need the money. And he said, here you go, guys. We're just, we're wiping the, wiping the slate clean. Unfortunately, he hasn't been claiming that the election was rigged or stolen.

So he will not be getting the national medal from Trump. No, he won't. No, he won't. Uh, and we do have another person that does deserve a cape. And this is the disgruntled employee that changed the State Department's website to say that Trump's term ended yesterday.

I was so excited. I, as soon as I saw that, I'm like, oh, somebody's having fun over there. Yeah. They're like, do they know something we don't know? I'm like, no, you dumbasses. This is a kid who's got the keys to the castle. Good times.

Good times. Good times. But, and, and of course, we do have to have a more another week. I can't let this one go because it came up on TV this morning. Super spreader swinger party busted in South Central LA. Now you try and say super spreader swinger party five times fast. I was actually just more stuck on if I were to attend a swinger party, I would prefer one in Beverly Hills, not South Central.

Exactly. They were showing video. There's actually a link to the video in the show notes if you want to watch it. They've got stripper poles. They've got beds with condoms laid out. They've got cages for people. And the people that are getting led out of there, I'm pretty sure a lot of them might have been swingers, but there was a lot of hoes.

Let's just say there was a lot of hoes. I do hope they were all wearing masks. None of them. Not a goddamn one of them. The sheriffs were handing out masks on the way out. That's why it's called a super spreader event, Brian. No, I know. I'm tired. Oh, yes.

They were wearing leather masks. I think that's what you're trying to get. There we go. Ball gags. And I just have this in Brickaback. I'm an actual real homeowner for the first time in my life, as opposed to condos where most of the stuff is taken care of for you.

But I found this list over on Lifehacker, which is occasionally useful. So it's how to put your home maintenance on autopilot this year. It is basically everything that you need to do to keep your home up and running at peak efficiency. So go through the list, pop it in your schedule of choice, your calendar of choice, and have your lady in the tube remind you each weekend exactly how it's going to be ruined because you have shit you need to be doing.

Oh, yeah. This is old hat. I know this is your first house, but I've lived in this house for like five or six years, and I'm the handyman around here. So I have alerts for everything. Yeah. I spent the weekend popping things into my calendar, so I know exactly what I won't be doing having beer.

Exactly. I do have to say the nest is nice because it does tell me when I have to change my furnace filter. Yep. That's a nice one. That's a nice feature. Over at Patreon, we've got Martin, Scott, Yan, S. Beezes, and Robert.

And over at PayPal, we have Navipole, Breed, Andrew, Mark, Michael, Ralph, and Elizabeth. Thank you all so much. Over at Twitter, basically, we got everything that's covered elsewhere. Unamplified and a crap ton of set visibility to zero posts, so thank you, everybody. I'm glad people actually paid attention and remembered that.

I know. It was nice. It actually felt really good. I was like, hey, that's one of our things. Yeah, finally. All right. Martin writes in, and he says, not the one throwing money at you all the time. Well, get on it, Martin. You know, you got a namesake to protect there. I've listened to every episode from you guys, but have never heard you cover anything in regards to Venmo.

This may interest our local furry friend, too. And Dave says, indeed, I would like to use this story on hacking humans, so we'll pass it along to him. My wife recently sent a small transaction to a friend, which triggered the both of them to receive a ton of friend requests on Venmo. Shortly after, she received a text message from a different friend and her mother confirming the payments she had asked for.

She was baffled as she had obviously not asked for anything. It turns out her friend and mother had received a message from quote-unquote her claiming she was at the store and had forgotten her purse. She needed $42 to check out and would pay them right back. My wife quickly changed her password, and I went ahead and disconnected all devices from her account in the security settings just in case.

I thought at first that her Venmo account had been compromised, but it turns out that it was a lot simpler than that. Somebody simply looked her up on Venmo, all accounts are public by default, used her first and last name, as well as her profile picture, and sent her friend's payment requests at random asking for money.

The people simply recognized her profile picture and accepted the transaction. The fact that you can freely change your profile picture, first and last name, as well as username, as many times as you want and without any verifications or any checks at all from the Venmo app boggles my mind.

You would think that a company which is solely used to transfer money in between parties would have had a modicum of basic security checks in place. Considering you need to link a bank account or credit or debit card to your Venmo account in order to cash out, it should not be possible to change your Venmo account's name to anything but what's on your account slash cards.

To further add insult to injury, because transfers are instant on Venmo, there is no way for people to recover their money through Venmo, and the only possibility for people that have been scammed to do so is to contact their bank directly, which is an open door for the bank and Venmo to simply throw the ball at each other until the victim simply gives up.

Fuck Venmo. Regardless of whether the transactions are legit or fraudulent, they make money, so who gives a shit, right? So long as their terms and conditions state they won't do anything for you, they're in the right. Well, I mean, a financial social network, what could possibly go wrong?

Yeah. Who started Venmo? Wasn't that PUD from Fucked Company? I can't remember. I think, I don't know. I fucking hate Venmo. It's the millennial Gen Z money app of choice. Just don't use it. Almost every bank now allows for easy money transfers.

There's still PayPal. There's no fees for transferring money between friends. Venmo filled a niche briefly. Now everybody else has been caught up with, like, regulations and shit, and they just went and did it. And why the fuck does anybody want money transfers to be publicly listed on a timeline with cute emojis?

What the fuck is that about? Do I give a shit that Linda sent Rhonda $25 for champagne and salad emojis? No, I fucking do not. And is this an incredible vector for hacking? Yes, it fucking is. So I was wrong. It wasn't PUD. PUD actually did one, though, that was the first one, I think, to have that public timeline.

And I'm like, you're a fucking idiot. Yeah, it's just dumb. It's dumb. It's dumb. I actually didn't know this about Venmo. I actually turned it on about two days ago because somebody that I know needed to transfer money to somebody and didn't have a Venmo account. I'm like, I got one, like, from 2010. Right.

And I'm like, oh, okay, put my bank account in, and then I read this, and I'm like, oh, take out that bank account. Yeah, I mean, you know, I have Venmo because a couple of my friends, that's all they have, and, you know, there you go. But it's just, you see the timeline, it's like, I don't want to know what other people are buying or doing, and I don't want them to know what I'm doing.

It's ridiculous. It's crazy. Anyways, Mark writes in, a story for your consideration, and thanks for doing what you do. And this is from the BBC. Somerset, cattle grid mistaken for wall by car sensors. Cars have come off the road trying to cross a cattle grid after sensors mistook it for a wall and slammed on the brakes.

The city, or the county council said the grid had been causing a very real danger to road users where they are. It was cut into a steep hill, and it appeared to be an instruction to modern car sensors, which automatically applied the brakes. They have now spent £70,000 ironing out the problem by creating a virtually smooth ride across the grid, which is what they've had to do to deal with these things.

You know, we've talked a lot about self-driving cars and the bias, racial bias in them. This is just more bias, in my opinion, as I'd imagine developers are often focused on urban environments, which we've documented a ton in this podcast. They can't even really handle fake stop signs at this point.

Now, multiply this a thousandfold for rural roads and all the various things that you're going to come across there. It's a problem. Oh, man. I think I figured out a new one. We basically, you take a brick wall picture, you know, just paint a brick wall on the road, but you keystone it.

Wiley Coyote style. Exactly. But you keystone it, right? So to the car, it looks like it's vertical from the camera and the sensors. So it looks like it's coming up on a wall and it just stops. Right. You know, you don't even have to do like, you know, build in a cow crossing or whatever. You can just actually go out there and spray paint this thing in about probably 10 minutes and really screw with traffic.

Oh, that might be fun. Right. Armchair Rambo says, hey, guys, I have a request. Will you give the Brave browser a try again? I tried Brave last year and said, fuck, it's mining crypto. It overheated my machine with the Google homepage. Christ. Also, it was slow, sort of as fuck.

Highly suspect. Pass. Now I get it. Their concept is to allow commerce on your gear and allow you to opt in or out of monetizing yourself through ad buyers and skipping brokers like Facebook and Google. Maybe you get $10 in crypto for $20 in electricity. But hey, good model.

It works perfectly, but I'm still sort of pissed about the earlier fuckery. What do you think? Oops, just re-listened to the last episode. Please continue with Brave evaluation. Looking at you, Brian, your opinions are very much. Welcome. Stay calm and carry on, gentlemen. You bring value to the time spent.

I am perfectly happy with my combo of Vivaldi still for day-to-day laptop browsing and Safari on my mobile devices. I don't have an M1 laptop, which Brave is now optimized for. And I'm pretty cheesed off by their past tactics, so I don't plan on revisiting them anytime soon unless, of course, my browser guru, you, Jason, tells me I should.

But yeah, those early missteps are enough to turn me off to them as a company. Yeah, yeah, I have thoughts about that, which are basically, you know, I'm trying it now because I did want to try it on the M1. It is fast. It's also optimized for Intel processors as well. It works pretty good. I left it open on my laptop, and I only had that open, nothing going, and I left the activity monitor going so I could see what it was doing with the processor.

Like in the old days where it would just spin up to 100% every, you know, 10 seconds out of every minute. It doesn't do that anymore. That's fine. It still comes built in with all this, like, crypto crap that it tries to get you to sign up for and sponsored ads on the start page, which you can disable.

That's fine. But, I mean, it's a decent browser. It does what it says on the 10. It's Chromium-based, so it's up to speed with almost everything. It's just, you know, it's – yeah, I got a bad taste in my mouth from what they did before.

And also the guy who founded it, you know, Mr. JavaScript. Yeah. Covered that story too many times to go into again. But, yeah, I don't trust Brave, and I don't trust Brendan Eich, and so I think I'm just going to stick with what I got right now. And if I have to, I'll use Safari.

Fuck it. I don't care. There you go. Using Safari is actually not bad because then it does at least sink your bookmarks, but half the shit that I need doesn't work, and Vivaldi takes care of the rest. Yep. Scott writes in, big fan, long-time listener, GOG clan member, VIP 77. Brian, who is shacked up in Canada, might check the CBC news site.

After laughing so hard at Dave Bittner's computer backup disaster, I saw this the next day. Funny stuff, perhaps not suitable for all children, but damn, how does this get made? And this is a Danish kid's show about a man with a magic penis, which is innocent and goofy, says TV critic. Yeah, this was doing the rounds during all the craziness, so it was kind of like, here's a funny story to distract you from all the shit.

So, yeah, it's a children's TV show about a man who's unnaturally long and magic penis, gets him into all sorts of trouble, just like me, is very Danish and nothing to fret over, says a TV critic who watched every episode. It's a claymation show called John Dillermond, which basically roughly translates to John Wienerman.

And, yeah, I have no idea how something like this gets made. Well, I mean, yeah. It is an innocent little show, and it's funny, you know. Not everything has to be sexualized. So, some people like to make fun of their wieners. That's the way things are.

It's no big deal. I don't think it's a big deal. Things are different over there. I guess so. I mean, you know, I wouldn't care if this aired at, you know, Cartoon Network at night, but the fact that there's actually four kids is a little bit crazy. I think it's pretty funny that he can play tennis with himself with his own wiener.

That's pretty clever. I call that Sunday. Oh. Fiend of the show, Barrett, writes in, I know you've probably been through most of the new stuff on the streaming site, so I thought I'd suggest a film to you that I'm pretty certain you'll both enjoy. The catch is that it does have subtitles, but the story and cinematography are amazing.

The movie is called Control. That's with a K and two L's. Filmed in 2003. The first time I saw this, I was actually in a Budapest hostel backpacking my way around Europe. Here's the YouTube link to the full film. It's also available via Sweden, Amazon, etc. Enjoy and stay grumpy.

And he follows up with, and also, no thanks, Dell's new monitors have a dedicated Microsoft Teams button. I mean, I suppose if you're working at an all-Microsoft shop that uses Teams, it would be quite convenient. Otherwise, no thank you. I'll pass.

Yeah. If it came with your company monitor, but why would you have this at home? You could just click on an icon. Everybody's working at home now, I suppose. That's true. Neil writes in, hi, Grumps, in episode 490, you talked about Rune. Have a look at Subsonic. You can open it on anything essential, including video.

Subsonic, your complete personal media streamer. You can just buy a lifetime license, but it works with audio for free. All right. Okay. Another streamer. Everybody check it out. And Michael says, I have nostalgic memory of Johnny Mnemonic for no good reason. That's right.

I should have left it in the past and not re-watched it on Amazon Prime, but watched I did. The opening date was January 17th, 2021. For a movie from 1995, it had some eerie predictions of 2021. There was a worldwide pandemic occurring.

People suffered information overload from the internet, and corporations reigned supreme. The stuff it got wrong is just quaint and amusing. Well, the movie's just bad. I mean, it's bad. And I put a video in here. The Black Shakes. Let's go and watch The Black Shakes, which is what they get when they have too much technology.

And it's got Henry Rollins in a very Henry Rollins role. He was just big. There's nothing more 90s than Henry Rollins. I know. I know. Henry Rollins being a scientist, it was just even funnier. Good stuff. Chris writes in, I blame Jason.

And this is a link from Bleeping Computer. WhatsApp. Share your data with Facebook or delete your account. After WhatsApp updated its privacy policy in terms of service on Monday with additional info on how it handles users' data. Basically, good luck. The company is now notifying users through the mobile app that starting February, they will be required to share their data with Facebook.

From the article, Facebook said, respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA. And he says, I personally blame Jason for this because it's obvious Zuck listens to the show. Follow Jason's recommendation to watch the human nature CRISPR doc and has successfully edited out the pesky privacy shit from the Facebook's genome.

So F you very much, Mr. DeFillippo. For God's sake, please don't share any history editing tools with the tool. Okay. Well, actually, Brian, you're the one that did the CRISPR doc recommendation, I believe. True. Yep. So I guess it's my fault. Yeah, it's all your fault.

It's not mine. Craig said, did you see the Waymo news? Self-driving pioneer Waymo dumps the term self-driving. Now they're going with fully autonomous. Six of one, half dozen of the other. Tomato, tomato. Does it really fucking matter? Yes.

This is an argument that I make on this show all the time. Words do manner. And I'm actually very impressed that this came out of Waymo. They said, this is more than just a branding or linguistic exercise, Waymo said in a blog post published on Wednesday. Precision in language matters and could save lives.

Yes, it does. Thank you. I'm impressed. But does their technology work? No, I mean, I don't care about that. I'm just talking about English right now. Okay, fine. Tim writes in, a little outside your wheelhouse, but fun nonetheless. And this is from guitarworld.com.

And yes, this made the rounds with all my musician friends pretty quickly. And it is hilarious. Conspiracy theorists share a schematic for 5G chip that they claim is implanted in COVID-19 vaccines. Only it's actually for the boss metal zone, a guitar pedal. And it's very fucking funny.

Sadly, we have no iTunes reviews. Get on it. So if you want your question or comment read on the show, head on over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And please head over to GOG.show slash review and toss us a five-star and snarky review. We miss you guys.

You've been slacking. Slacking, I tell you, slacking. And a big shout-out to the Hall of Fame Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, mainstay in Los Angeles, celebrity, a route town, who passed away at 93.

Sad news. He was amazing. All right. And hat tip to our friend Michaela over on Discord for keeping the show running over there. We really appreciate all the work that you do for us. Yeah, thank you so much for that. And rest in peace. Peaceful transition to power.

Even with Nixon, you made it 245 years, but I guess we have to reset that sign. Zero years. Oh, well. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you like us, please head over to GOG.show slash donate to help us out.

And if you sign up for Patreon, you do get early releases of the ad-free version of the show. We will love you forever. And you can go over to GOG.show slash shop and pick up some swag when we can get it working. There's stuff up there, but I fear every time I try and get something approved now that they're going to take the score down again.

And if you can't do any of that, just pass the show along to a friend, really. Word of mouth keeps us growing, and we really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 491. 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.

And we will never set visibility to zero. Stay grumpy. It's NES, right? Yeah, the black shakes. Like half the people on the planet. Let me tell you something so you get this straight. It's not my work that got it this way. My work is clean. Besides, you don't get this shit from am jobs.

That's just a myth. So what does cause it? What causes it? The world causes it. This causes it. This causes it. This causes it. Information overload. All the electronics around you poisoning the airwaves. Technological fucking civilization.

But we still have all this shit, because we can't live without it. Let me do my work.

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