494: Jib Jab as a Service

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. Good morning. Good morning, sir. What is new with you? New monitor, new podcast layout, which is confusing me, and we're using a new service to record. So what could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, let's change up just about everything before we do a show and test it for three minutes.

Yes. Well, here we are. So hopefully this will go well. The other week we talked about, well, okay, for about seven years we've been talking about how Flash is on the chopping block and it's going away for sure. And, you know, everybody around the world knew this for a long time and we had a countdown to Flash being taken away.

And finally, Flash was dead and people were not ready for it. Of course not. We talked last week about the Chinese railway service that ran their entire operations off of Flash, which, of course, is crazy enough to begin with. They did not get the memo for some reason.

And their solution, of course, was to install some sort of hacked version of Flash they called Ghost Flash. And, oh, did we have a chuckle over that. Yes, we did. They weren't the only people. So we found we found a few more people that did not get the memo that Flash was going away and didn't do anything about it.

The South African Revenue Service, they would be the tax collectors of South Africa. And they were in the midst of their tax filing season and in the middle of weaning their e-filing systems off of Adobe Flash. So, of course, they were working on it, but they did not get it done in time. Sure, they were working on it.

It collapsed on January 12th, sending waves of anxiety and frustration rippling through the country. And let's see, how did they get around this? Hmm. To solve the problem, they moved their e-filing system to a new, and this is air-quoted, browser built by a Russian software company that ran an old version of Flash.

Oh, my God. Next week on Security, how the entirety of South Africa has been doxed from Russian hackers. Yes. But we're not done yet here, Jason. Okay. The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, which regulates death certificate filings, relied on Flash software until January 11th, the day before Flash's own death.

They had a late and rocky software transition, which extended the limbo period for people waiting to lay their family members to rest. I suppose they're in Flash purgatory. Moving on, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Oh, nice. On January 13th, the SEC announced that people were experiencing technical issues filing Form 13H, which is used as a reporting measure for people trading in very large sums of money, $20 million or more in a day, which ran on Flash.

Let's put $20 million plus transactions and let's put Flash on it. Little assistance was offered except for a few workarounds, such as Internet Explorer 11 on January 26th.

Two weeks later, the technical issues were finally resolved. And of course, schools all around the world, because almost every single educational animation used heavily in elementary schools and science classes have been done in Adobe Flash forever. So all this free and accessible educational content during a period of time in which this is basically the only education occurring for people because they are all working from home does not work anymore.

Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely. You know, some of these people should have taken either that tax money or those SEC transaction fees or, well, we know education doesn't have much of a budget, but somebody should have, you know, gone back and fixed that stuff beforehand.

But, you know, when was the last time you had a Flash developer, like an enterprise, this is, you know, an oxymoron here, an enterprise Flash developer on staff that could even remember that these things ran on Flash. Yeah, yeah. So good times for everybody.

In the news. A while ago, we made a proclamation that we would not talk about WeWork anymore. We did? Well, we kind of did because we were we were dunking on them so bad and it was so crazy and we kind of decided, hey, hold on a second.

They're not really a technology company. Oh, that's right. That's right. So. But they said they were. But they said they were. Well, in the same way that Uber is. They've got an app. So I feel like we have to because there's special circumstances involved here.

Now, the article is entitled Somehow WeWork is on the Cusp of Going Public. And it says, here's a surprise. As the Wall Street Journal reported last week that WeWork now plans to go public this year with something called an SPAC or special purpose acquisition company that would value the company at $10 billion.

Now, this is a fraction of the estimate that made us all scoff back over two years ago. 10 billion still makes me scoff, by the way. They actually own a fair amount of real estate. But that's true. Yeah. So there's there's that. They actually do have assets. 10 billion is a great deal more than the 2.9 billion that they were looking at previously or right now anyways.

So this is this is a way of getting around a traditional IPO, which basically means people can't like scrutinize your company. So if you like investing and pouring a bunch of money into a company that hasn't been scrutinized, this is the way you do it. So they're going to they're going to go that way.

You know why they might be doing this? Because they've been pre-scrutinized from the previous IPO. Well, yes, last February, T. Rowe Price declared its involvement in WeWork a terrible investment and a debacle that had caused outsized headaches and disappointments. Yes, but it did spawn a couple of podcasts.

So it did. It did. And everybody basically made fun of them, particularly their founder, Adam Neumann, who sold the rights to the word we to the company for $6 million. Yeah. Can't forget that. You know, we kind of genius, though. Kind of genius.

I got to give them that. It is evil genius. Yes. It's like, yeah, we troll. Yeah. Now they've got somebody kind of normal running the company and they're giving up on all the different ideas that they had, like we education and we farming and we all the other crap that they were trying to do instead of just actually running the business they're supposed to be running.

And they are just running the business that they're supposed to be running now. And since things have kind of gotten back to relative normalcy in a lot of the Asian markets, they're doing great. And basically, I would almost even consider investing in WeWork at this point because at some point we are coming back and we're going back to work and a lot of offices and a lot of companies are giving up their office spaces because they're kind of down with this work from home thing.

So there is a real possibility that coming out of this pandemic, unfortunately, WeWork might do quite well. What an interesting turn of events. Get rid of the crazy founder, put an adult in charge, and you might actually make some money. You listening, Tesla?

Oh, oh, zing. Well, yeah, let's talk about Tesla there for a second now. They have just bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin. Now, there's something that's going on here that I really don't – I can't find the timeline on this.

I don't know when they actually made the purchase of the Bitcoin. I'm not sure either. I'm willing to bet it was approximately two days ago when I checked my Coinbase and all of a sudden I had made money in Bitcoin. See, I would expect it to have been three days ago because I think Elon Musk's tweet was two days ago where he pumped the value of Bitcoin.

Now, this is where we need regulation, people, because all Tesla really had to do was go in, buy the $1.5 billion in Bitcoin, you know, the great leader goes and pumps it up, and then they can come back and say, no, we made a mistake.

Dump it, and then there's their working capital for the next six months, you know? Yep. It's nuts. It's nuts. It's not that different from what happened with GameStop, except the people didn't get out in time. Exactly. So, yeah, this is all because Tesla says they plan to accept Bitcoin as a payment for their swanky space cars.

Yes. Which is silly. Yeah. Because you don't want to be that guy that bought the pizza that's now worth $13 million. Well, the guy that bought the pizza is worth nothing. The guy that made the pizza is a gazillionaire.

So, the interesting thing about it, though, really is that, yeah, this is just the Wild West, and I fear for the sanity of Tesla, because what if that, you know, somebody comes in and devalues Bitcoin somehow?

Or does something, because as we know, it's a gameable currency, quote-unquote currency. Yeah. So, that $1.5 billion, if, you know, by some great miracle, Bitcoin dropped in half, they'd lost $750 million, which can't, you know, I mean, they're not Apple.

No. You know? That would sting. They can't really afford that. Yeah. Yeah. That would hurt. So, this seems like an unnecessary risk to me. If I was a shareholder, I would say this is a very unnecessary risk. As a shareholder, I am saying. That's what I was going to ask next. What do you think? I'm not a fan.

I think it's a silly move, but Elon Musk does tons of silly moves, and yeah, I don't like it at all. Get your money out of gameable currencies. Jesus Christ, what are you thinking? Because, you know, all it takes is these Redditors to turn around and go, hmm, let's mess with Tesla by messing with Bitcoin right now.

And Tesla was already in their sights after the GameStop thing. They're just basically searching for a target. They're like a torpedo that's homing Beacon is still on, and Tesla is swimming through the water with a couple other ones that they're just waiting to get locked onto, you know? Well, the thing that they may need to be able to do that is a stable trading platform that will let them, which leads into my next story.

People are furious with Robinhood, but they keep on downloading it. Yeah. So, they are furious with Robinhood because Robinhood basically restricted trades on a number of the meme stocks like GameStop right when we were in the middle of it. So, they basically said, oh, let's put pause on this here.

Now, in their defense, there is a very real reason why they did this. Basically, they did not have enough cash on hand, and because of regulations, if they do not have that cash on hand, they cannot cover these trades. Okay. That was the issue. So, they stopped the trades because we do not have the money to cover this, and nobody is giving it to us.

Now, the next day, they got a billion dollars of investment and all that sort of stuff. So, they have upped their amount that they can actually trade and continue to do and all that sort of stuff. Before you continue, though, the lawsuits. Yes. Because I've seen people say, well, basically, if you read the terms and conditions, you would find out that your lawsuit won't actually work.

Have you heard much about that? No. I've just heard that lawsuits have been filed. But I assume that the terms and conditions, one would assume, and again, this is a very dangerous thing, Jason, because every time we assume anything about a tech company, it makes an ass out of you and me.

Yeah. But one would assume that their terms and conditions were pretty airtight, and you would get pretty airtight terms and conditions if you were running a financial system. However, we shall see. However, there are a lot of people calling for Apple to buy Coinbase and become basically a Bitcoin trading house.

I don't see Apple getting anywhere near cryptocurrency. Yeah. I'm just like, somebody has been hitting the We Drink too much that night because that is so not in their wheelhouse. No, Apple, Microsoft, nobody. None of those big guys are going to get anywhere near this stuff.

Oh, but wait. Apple does have one of the world's largest payment platforms, and they sell a bunch of digital goods. So if you actually do think about it for a second, it might make a good play to have a cryptocurrency behind Apple, but Bitcoin would probably not be the right one.

Apple coin, on the other hand, or Jobs coin. Sure. If they controlled it. Turtle coin. Turtle neck coin. Yeah. Or what's the Facebook one that is stuck in? Oh, jeez. Isn't that one dead now? I can't even remember what it's called. Well, every time we think it's dead, they come back and say, you know, okay, we'll do more regulation.

Okay, we'll do more regulation. And then it turns out that I don't think there's enough regulation in the world to let Facebook run a global currency of that scale. All right. Well, we just went on a massive tangent. The main point of the story that I had was basically everybody hates this app, but they keep downloading it, which is basically humanity and the internet in a nutshell.

I hate this thing. I need to keep using it. So everybody complained about it. It's had its biggest download days ever. Let's just proving there's no such thing as bad publicity. Speaking of things that people hate, but keep on using it anyway, you've got some Twitter news in here. Twitter confirms plans to experiment with new models like subscriptions.

A new model to Twitter. A new model that we've been. It's new to you. Yeah, that we've been clamoring for from Twitter since, I don't know, day one. It's like, yeah. Well, you know they're not going to roll out basically just a standard subscription model. It's going to be some cludged weird-ass shit.

So they're continuing to explore the addition of subscription services and other paid features to supplement its advertising revenues. According to a report from Bloomberg this morning, they're considering a range of ideas, including tipping, paid customer-facing features like profile customizations. Oh, boy, that would be great.

Do we get spinning cursors? Can we make it look like MySpace? Or an undo send option or subscription-based access to Twitter's TweetDeck app? Okay, define undo send. How is that different from delete? I don't know. I would just like to know that. Maybe visibility is set to zero on that one.

Yeah. The funny part is it's like the one thing that everybody wants is not in that list of paid features, which is- Of course not. Can I edit my fucking tweet? No. No. Nope. Still can't do that. Yeah. So they're going to do something. They won't provide any details. I do like Jack Dorsey.

This is why Jack Dorsey runs these sorts of companies, and we don't. Here's the statement. We do think there is a world where subscription is complementary. We think there is a world where commerce is complementary. You can imagine work around helping people manage paywalls as well that we believe is complementary.

So that's what we're looking for. We have a small team who's exploring our options. Obviously, we're hiring for those teams, he said. He had noted. That says nothing. No. That's an entire paragraph of nothing. It's Jack. What do you want? Exactly. Exactly. It is Jack. It's Jack shit.

Jack shit. That's right. This one came across my desk this morning, and it's new AI tool predicts who will die from COVID-19 with 90% accuracy. Hmm. They say the system could help prioritize vaccinations, predict respirator demands.

What could go wrong with this one? This comes from the University of Copenhagen. They say they have developed an AI tool that can do these predictions with up to 90% accuracy. And they use data from almost 4,000, count them, 4,000 COVID-19 patients in Denmark.

That's as many people as we get in one day in Los Angeles. One day. That's right. I would like you Danes to come join us in Los Angeles, please, because I guess you can fly here. We can't fly there. So you might as well just come here or we could upload you some data. But 4,000 is a fairly small sample size, considering the scope of people that have been infected with this.

I'm just saying. Just saying. And yeah, and they can say with 80% accuracy, people who were admitted to the hospital, if they'll need a respirator or not. Now, the article goes on. I'm like, okay, you have the data, right?

So you have your training model. You have your AI back end. So you know what the outcomes are. You have the inputs. You know what the outcomes are. Why is this only 90% accurate? Why can't you tweak the model to be, I don't know, 100% accurate since you have the answers? I don't understand why there's the lag here.

I'm just saying. Well, there's always outliers, Jason. Okay, but they do go on to say, unsurprisingly, BMI and AIDS were the most decisive indicators. They also showed that males and people with high blood pressure or neurological disease had elevated risk, which we knew from the data that we put into the damn machine.

Why can't the machine disappear? I'm just saying that this is a bad idea. I mean, we can't even have facial recognition work right without bias. So the ability here to game the system and use this for prioritizing vaccinations or hospital beds would be the height of stupidity, which means it'll probably be rolling out on Microsoft Azure next week as a service.

Sign up now. I mean, I agree with you in that it should not be made, should not be used for triage. It should not be made for actual hospital level decision making in terms of who is getting care and how we're rolling that out. However, I do like the idea of using these models just for preparation, right?

Like, okay, we obviously need to order more respirators or we obviously need to get more beds into our hospitals. Our models are showing us that we are understaffed and we are under-equipped, et cetera, et cetera, and we use that data to bring us up to snuff.

But we do not use the data to actually decide who gets the bed. Okay. There's other factors I would like to put into what this AI is determining, too. I would like IQ. I would like propensity to vote for specific political parties, conspiracy theory websites they've visited, all the different things to find out if they're just dumb.

Yes. Have you posted about not wearing a mask? You do not get a bed. Exactly. Exactly. I want other factors to be taken into account for this data model when they train it is all I'm saying. All I'm saying. But as a thought experiment for machine learning, it's perfect. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to discriminate against stupid.

Yeah. Our country would be a much different place if we were. Apparently, we're allowed to discriminate against everything else in this country. But not stupid. Moving on. What do we got? Well, right after we hit stop on our recording last week, the big news was announced that Jeff Bezos would step down in July.

He will be replaced by Andy Jassy over at Amazon. He will be the brand new CEO. The first time in 27 years, the entire life of Amazon's existence, that there will be a new CEO. And I read this really long article over on Vox about what to expect from Amazon's new CEO, Andy Jassy.

And it basically says he's been shadowing him for like the last 20 years. So same thing. So we're not going to get Sassy Jassy? Nope. Nope. We're just going to get a Bezos clone. Great. He has been running the Amazon Web Services. So we can expect no passwords automatically enabled on anything.

Well, I mean, he wasn't running Amazon Web Services. He basically built that thing. So he's a heavy hitter over there. So we've all been working from home. We've all got some new computers here and there, new gadgets, new tablets, new super lactic ding dong things here.

I just got a couple of them yesterday. So it turns out working from home has caught a massive chip shortage. And Doritos? Well, no, I've got Tostitos and Lay's here. I've got cases of those. I wish Doritos, man, but I just blow up like a balloon. Anyway, moving on.

So car companies are having a really big problem with this right now because they don't have the chips to put in the cars for all of their super fancy new EV cars and things like that. So they've had to roll production back. It's going to cost them billions. And turns out the iPhone might also be getting hit with this as well because some of those new fancy LiDAR chips.

Yeah. Well, turns out they don't have all the components for those and they're hard to make. You know what? Maybe we need to do for just another year or so until this whole pandemic thing is kind of sorted out and solved. Maybe we don't need a brand new phone or a brand new car. Maybe we just exist with our iPhone that we have for another year.

Well, you can say that until you sit on your iPhone and you break it and you still need a new one. I was thinking more along the lines of why the fuck is LiDAR in a phone anyway? That's a good point. Yeah. If the car companies need the LiDAR for the cars, which aren't going to be self-driving for another 20 years anyway, but they think they need them, give them to them and, you know, give me an iPhone 12 Pro with no LiDAR.

There's not a situation where I need LiDAR. Make it an external component, something. I need exhaustive statistics on the fall rate of my phone when I smash it and break it. Well, no, it will map the world in 3D as it falls so you can recreate it and send it to the NTSB and do that.

I got to say, the only cool thing about the LiDAR is that there are apps out there that let you scan your environment and make 3D models, which everybody will try once. Exactly. And then forget the app is there and never use it again. So anyway, save the LiDAR for the new AR glasses that you're building, guys.

That's all I'm saying. Or what they could do is they can go to Toyota and pull out a couple of those chips that Toyota has apparently put into the world's first self-drifting car. Guess what we need? Yeah. Did you watch the video? I did. It drifts.

It drifts. Yep. That's it. It's what it says on the tin. Self-drifting car. But you got to admit, the title of the article is why I put it in here. Watch Toyota's self-drifting car put Vin Diesel out of a job. I'm like, Vin Diesel still has a job? Last I saw, he was singing for the pandemic.

I've never understood the lure of Vin Diesel, but there you go. He was good in the first Pitch Black movie. I liked him in that. The rest of them, no. And I've never seen a Fast and Furious movie. Yeah, if you need to cast somebody to grunt and just kind of stare off into space, he's your man.

Media candy. I don't suppose you watched the Super Bowl, did you? I'm a puppy bowl kind of guy. I figured. Yeah. Well, you didn't miss much. It was incredibly boring. And what I definitely learned is that the Super Bowl, when watched home alone by yourself, is not worth its time at all.

Your family wasn't even there? They absconded? Well, they don't care. Like, oh, they were watching stuff in the back bedroom. Whatever. So, yeah, you kind of need to watch it with people that have some passing interest in sports ball and have the big party and all that. Otherwise, it's just bleh. But Reddit has aired its first Super Bowl spot celebrating the famous Wall Street Bets subreddit.

It aired for exactly five seconds. It was very Max Headroom-esque kind of thing. So, it showed the orange and white logo with, you know, they did, of course, the standard. Like, you hear almost the static and the record screech. Like, this isn't supposed to be here. We hacked into this kind of bullshit.

Shit we did in the 80s on CD-ROMs. Exactly. And it said, if you're reading this, it means our bets paid off. One thing we learned from our communities last week is that underdogs can accomplish just about anything when we come together around a common area. Okay. That was basically it.

Now, I'd like to point out that Reddit is hardly an underdog. No shit. They like to call themselves the homepage of the internet. That does not sound like an underdog to me. Yeah. I don't know. Are they still owned by Conde Nast or were they, I think they, were they sold off? But I don't know. Either way, they're not a fucking underdog.

No, they're the big dog. Yes. So, I thought that was rather ironic. Moving on from that, this particular special, which forced me to go use Hulu, which still has an absolute horrific interface. It's gotten better. It's gotten better.

That says something. That says something. I will tell you that. It's gotten better. I mean, honestly, if you set five monkeys down and program a UI, it would have been better than what they had. And that's obviously what they did. So, they did it. But this show became a bit of a cause celebrity. It was posted everywhere. Everybody was talking about it.

And I will just say, I went to go watch it. It is Derek DelGaudio's In and of Itself. I cannot talk about it because if I talk about it, it will ruin it. It was delightful. It was. Okay. It was absolutely delightful. Absolutely delightful.

Like, gave me a bit of faith in humanity for a minute. Yep. I actually went back last night and watched the one segment in the middle about the wolf and the dog. I went back and re-watched that segment last night because I think that was, for me, the best segment of the show because that's just skill.

I mean, that was just pure skill and fun to watch. So, yeah. Yeah. I can't, you know, recommend this more highly. It was just so much fun. So much fun. I wish I'd have gotten to see it in person on stage. That would have been a mind fuck. Yeah. It was very well done.

So, the other thing that happened this last week, the Expanse Season 5 finale. Yes, it did. What did you think? Well, there was definitely some spoiler alerts coming now. Just so if you want to fast forward for five seconds if you haven't seen it or five minutes if you haven't seen it.

Maybe five minutes. The thing about it is, I was so bored with the entire damn season. So, there was at least some good stuff in here. Yes, the Alex twist was a little, what the fuck?

Until later on, which we'll talk about in a second. And the very ending, though, I thought was phenomenal. And I actually had to explain it to a friend of the show. I'm not going to even tell who it is because they might get embarrassed. But, yes, I had to explain the ending to a couple of friends, actually.

And I was just like, I can't wait for next season now, even though this one was boring as fuck. Next season, I can't wait. I feel like they were definitely treading water this season. They'd spent the entire time doing next to nothing. But the end, yeah, I agree. It was a good setup.

It felt very Empire Strikes Back. At the end, they're all just kind of sitting around and staring off into space. And you know shit's about to go down, right? Mm-hmm. Well, then, I mean, the final scene is what... Yeah, that was very good. Yeah, just making sure you got it because the people I talked to didn't get that last scene.

So it's like, yeah, that was kind of important. A little bit. Mm-hmm. Now, here's the thing I don't get. There was a bit of a twist. Alex, I hope everybody's still spoiler alerting. Skip ahead again. Alex dies.

Now, you and I have been big fans of The Expanse since it started. We are on the internets all the time looking for stories for our show. How did we miss the whole thing that this guy is an asshole and basically got canceled and they had to write him, the actor, and had to write him out of the show.

So, of course, they killed him this season. How did we... How were we not aware of this? I have no idea because that happened back in November. Yeah. I don't get it. Like, we read the news constantly. We would have seen this. It was all over the place. Deadline reported in November that the show had been renewed for one final season and that Cass Anvar would not be returning for it.

So, obviously, he's going to die. Yeah. Whoops. Missed that. Yeah. We're bad internet people, I guess. I am shocked that this one just kind of somehow eluded both of us. Yeah. So, it was...

Yeah. There was no spoilers for us. That's for sure. It's a bummer, though, because he was my second favorite character, so... Yeah. Yeah. And quite an important character in the book moving forward, too. So, obviously, this is going to vary wildly from the books moving forward.

Well, I guess just one more season, so... Yeah. Well, hopefully two, but we'll see. The thing about this is my faith in Hollywood has been shaken. Shook, I tell you. My faith in Hollywood has been shook because this is like, you know, a mid-level character in a mid-level show.

And Hollywood used to be really fucking good at covering shit up. You know, they used to be really good at it. Yeah. You know, for the fans. They did it for the fans, which you can believe that if you want to. They did it to keep the damn show going and not screw it up. But you'd think that, you know, okay, this guy, he didn't...

I mean, yeah, he was creepy. He was a jerk. But he wasn't, like, criminally creepy. He wasn't a Weinstein, as far as I could tell. So... No, but, you know, you can't cover shit up anymore. Those plucky underdogs like Reddit make it impossible. Fucking internet. Fucking internet.

So, you know, he used his middling level of fame to basically try to get laid quite often. Yeah, well, that's what you do when you get famous. That's kind of why you get famous, damn it. But you just went about it the wrong way. The underage targets. Well, you know, that's the part where the cover-ups come in.

That's all I'm saying. Well, I guess they were busy with Marilyn Manson. They must have been too busy that week, yeah. Their NAMBLA budget had been drained for the month, so he couldn't get in on it. By the way, why is anybody shocked and outraged that Marilyn Manson turns out to be a shitty dude?

I thought we all knew this already. I thought this was common knowledge, yeah. Yeah, we cleared this up a long time ago. It's like, I mean, what's her name? Rose. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the one that got all the plastic surgery. I can't remember her name now.

Rose McGowan. Rose McGowan, that's it. After Rose McGowan, we all knew that he was a shitbag. So, why is anything new coming out about him that we didn't already know? Anyway, I did watch Fake Famous on HBO Max. And did you get a chance to check this one out?

Nope, not going to. Don't care. Good. Save your time. Save your money. Nick Bilton did this. He's usually a Twitter historian and other stuff. He's been around for a long time. He wrote the Twitter book that I covered on the show that I thought was, okay, missed a bunch.

But that's what it was. So, he made a movie. And he should have stuck to writing, as far as I'm concerned. It could have been great. There were moments where he was on the path. Could have been great. He made some really bad casting decisions, some really stupid casting decisions, and just tried to be very vapid and surface level with a lot of this stuff.

There was no real deepness to it. So, I'm going to put a link in the show notes here, too. What HBO's Fake Famous doesn't understand about young people and influencer culture? It's by Judy Berman, and her wrap-up of the movie is spot-on perfect for – I agree with everything in there.

So, if you want to check out a review before you waste your time on the movie, go read that one. If you want to waste your time on the movie, go for it. But it's nothing that we don't already know being on the internet. You know, anybody with a fucking TikTok and Instagram account knows exactly what these people did. It's been out for a long time.

So, it was honestly a waste of an hour and a half.

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With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. So, my wife is still working for a big corporate – corporation-type thingy.

And work-from-home is continuing, and they've been very good about providing the occasional perk, including here is a large sum of money for you to buy something to up your work-from-home game. You can use it at these specific retailers, and that's that.

So, we decided we needed a new monitor. I had a very, very old Dell second monitor that we were plugging into, and my wife really wanted a curved monitor. So, we had X amount of dollars, and a limited selection, and I found the one that fit the exact amount of dollars that we had from our limited selection and purchased it.

Okay. It is the Samsung LC34J791 WTN XZA 34-inch CJ791 Ultra Wide Curve Gaming Monitor, comma, white. Yes. And it came, and my God, this is the biggest monitor I've ever seen in my entire life.

And I would have potentially murdered someone, certainly taken out their kneecaps to get a monitor like this about 20 years ago. It's insane. So, you posted about this on Discord, and I'm like, I looked at it, and I'm like, ooh, that looks interesting.

Because I had a Acer CB241HYK BMJDPRX 23.8-inch IPS Ultra HD 4K 100% sRGB monitor with tilt-swivel pivot height adjustment and built-in speakers. It was a piece of garbage.

Acer monitors are garbage. So, I'm like, you know, we just got a little bit of money, and I might go ahead and order one of these. And I did immediately, because you put this on Discord at the witching hour, which I might say is after a few cocktails and before bedtime.

If you want Jason to purchase anything, that is the time to post it. That is about it. I am supremely susceptible at that hour. So, I, of course, ordered it, and it came two days later. And I unboxed it and was like, holy shitballs, this thing is big.

It's massive. The problem is my desk isn't wide enough for me to use it where I was going to use it because I was going to put it with my editing setup with my Yamaha monitors. My monitors have to be in a specific position. Well, if they're in that specific position with that monitor, they would be floating four feet off the ground in space.

So, I had to make some adjustments for it. But I have to say that the thing is beautiful, and it is the best editing monitor I've ever had in my life. I can have the widest logic project going on. It's just like, here's the great part about it.

It is actually going to make me money because I can edit faster with that monitor, which means I can charge more and do more and pay it off faster and actually make money from it. So, thank you, Brian. And that's the sign of good technology. That is it. I actually bought something that makes me money instead of sits on a shelf.

I'm looking at you, Oculus. And, yeah. Yeah. I mean, this monitor is going to be perfect for me back in the office that we're building in Toronto where it will sit on an adjustable desk that is very wide and can fit the monitor with everything else. Here, I have it attached to my very slimline stand-up or desk that's in my room.

The monitor is at least 8 to 10 inches wider than the desk itself. Yeah. So, I've had to kludge things around, especially for the podcast setup. I literally have my mic boom is attached to my dresser that sits next to my desk because I can't fit it on the desk to get around the monitor to be able to talk into the mic.

So, it's a bit of a kludge here, but this thing is stunning and it will make the perfect home office once we actually have everything set up. So, yeah. I can't recommend this monitor enough. I've never used anything quite like it. I'm still trying to figure out window placement on it because, like, I just have so much space and so many windows.

And, oh, my God. It's wonderful. Yeah. It's pretty interesting. Check out that piece of software called Magnet. It lets you, like, pin certain things to different spots in your screen. If you're trying to make some kind of standardized layout. Yeah. Yeah. Mine's on a massive Veridesk in my bedroom.

So, because I love my Veridesk because I can just put all of this crap on one little platform and it takes up the entire width of it. There's just no extra space. So, those little Presonus studio monitors that I talked about on the show a while back, I got those and they sit right underneath it. I've got to say the speakers in the monitor themselves, not bad.

I mean, obviously not as good as having anything like that, but certainly beats the hell out of your laptop speakers. Yeah. And the speakers in my Acer monitor that I got rid of? No. No. It was like the speaker phone on a Danger Sidekick.

It was about the quality of it. But then this came across the Wired today, too. And I think the 90s called and want their movie props back. Or we could have just got this. This is the Aurora 7 prototype. And it comes with four. Count them, four. 17.3-inch monitors with 4K and three 7-inch screens at 1920x1200.

And they're all in one laptop. And when you fold them in, I looked at the prototype. They're held together by Velcro. The thing weighs 12 kilograms and has a running battery time of a whopping, wait for it, 40 minutes. It looks so stupid.

You're right. It does look straight out of some sort of 90s sci-fi movie. Or Swordfish. That movie Swordfish. You can see Hugh Jackman typing away on this in Swordfish. Or any shitty hacker's clip art that you would ever want to see. That thing is ridiculous. Oh, man.

But, yeah, I saw that. I had to put that in here. And, Brian, you might want to get one of these. They're cheap. They're easy. And if anybody has headphones that they, you know, over-the-ear headphones, this is the Anker, the original under-desk headphone stand mount. It's just a little T-hook that you stick under your desk and you hang your headphones on.

I use these all the time. I had to get a new one for this new setup I have. And I just thought I'd tell people about it because they're important to have. Yep. That will fit perfectly, again, with the Toronto office, not with this small desk that is dwarfed by a large monitor. Yep. And they're nice, soft rubber.

They're neat. They're neat. And I saw this. I had to post this in here. Magtech Magnesium, which is what I take when I go to bed at night. Pop three of those. I'm out like a light. So I had to go order some more. And I was reading the product description. And I got down to the bottom. And it said, the world's first open-source supplement company.

I'm like, oh, oh, do tell me more. Tell me more. I can make my own Magnesium now. Natural Stacks' open-source transparency program provides ingredient traceability and third-party lab test results for every batch. It's powered by blockchain technology and supported by Health Lock.

Trademark. Yeah, Trademark. I don't know if it's Health Lock or Health Log. I'm guessing it's Health Lock since it's secured by. For transparent, tamper-proof, trusted data. So, yes, my fucking vitamins are on the blockchain, but they don't have a EULA. So, let me get this straight.

You take Magnesium, which is on the blockchain, to go lay down in your bed and fall asleep. And your bed does have a EULA. Yes, my bed has a EULA. You are so cyber. My vitamins are on the blockchain. But here's the funny thing. You know, I started to make fun of this, and I'm like, wait a minute.

This is exactly the use case you and I have said would be perfect for blockchain technology. And lo and behold, here it is in my nightstand. It makes sense. I mean, this is how we can get around the – I mean, this is how you solve the organics issues and things of that nature.

Like, when you can see where your food or your supplements or whatever, where everything is coming from and it's open and transparent, that's a perfect use. It's a perfect use case for blockchain. I finished Heaven's River by Dennis E. Taylor, the latest edition of the Bobiverse books.

I was surprised we got a new one. I thought it had ended pretty well. But I was also delighted that we got a new one. And I thoroughly enjoyed the story. And they've definitely teed it off for there to be more. I don't need more, but I'm not going to complain. This isn't a story.

This isn't a series that has worn out its welcome. I think the writing is just as good. I think the ideas are just as good. I think there's a lot more that he could still explore. So, all hail Bobiverse. Yeah. And here's the funny thing. You know, Bob was in it. Yeah.

Which is great. Yeah. Not like the, I don't know, fucking Laundry Files where we haven't seen the main characters for how long now? Long enough that I don't care about that series anymore. I was actually going to point that out as well. In comparison to the Laundry Files, which I am done with, the Bobiverse has a lot more that they can do.

Yeah. Yep. Exactly. I like it. And I'm still listening to Calling Bullshit. And you got to read this book, Brian. You're going to love it. It's fucking hilarious. They go through everything and tear it down in a very humorous way. But as a, as a psychologist kind of guy who dabbled in that in college, I think you will thoroughly enjoy the book.

Excellent. 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 Joe Kerrigan, as well as the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy, as well as surveillance and privacy.

Welcome back to, shit, we got nothing to talk about Star Wars on. That's right. That's right. Well, to be fair, purists would argue there's a lot to be talking about with Star Wars, but we just don't do the comics or the video games where all the action is currently taking place.

There is always. I mean, like we need a reason. Have you had any update on your, your Star, Stormtrooper quest? Well, I mean, no, I think we're waiting on COVID. I mean, as I think last time we talked, a very kind listener had, had offered to finance the purchase of a Stormtrooper uniform for me.

And as much as I appreciate that and, yes, fantasize about it, it's a bit, I think it's a bit too much. So I think what we're going to do is when we get out of COVID, we're going to, I'm going to reach out to one of the local 500 firsts.

And this kind listener is going to make a donation in our names in exchange for me being able to try on someone else's Stormtrooper outfit, you know, trot around in it. Maybe do like a fundraiser event or something, just, you know, spend some time in a Stormtrooper outfit, which is really the thing that I'm, I'm hoping to do.

And that way, the money goes to a good cause. I get to do the thing I've always wanted to do. And, you know, everybody wins. So that's where things stand. You know, of all the things that have been put on hold because of COVID, families have not seen each other for over a year.

People are out of work. This is the one thing that I'm really hoping COVID ends for. You and me both, man. You and me both. No, but, you know, I mean, how awesome that we are.

Our listeners are so kind and generous to be able to provide such a, to provide such, to finance such folly, right? I'm just looking forward to having lots of pictures and show art for the years to come. Yes. Oh, there will be pictures. There will be pictures.

Count on it. Count on it. And the hardest part is going to be that whoever the poor 500 first person is of getting the thing back because I'm going to really, you know, try to make a break for it. I'm going to like, yeah, I'm going to love the security cam video of you running down the street in the outfit. Right. Right.

You'll never catch me, copper. Where's the land speeder? Hop on. Right. Right. They'll be using the force to pull me back. Yeah. So. All right, gents. Well, I want to start off with this one from the New York Times. It's an opinion piece called They Stormed the Capitol. Their apps tracked them. Something that we knew was going to happen, especially with everybody holding their phone up and taking all their photos.

But we have seen this before with some of the leaked data sets that the New York Times had gotten. And also there was one at the beginning of the pandemic that basically made me give up on everything because it was so good, which was the Florida Party Goers.

Remember that one where they showed the kids on the beach in Florida when it was on lockdown? And then they showed them when they went home and disseminated across the country. Right. But they were anonymized, Jason. They were anonymized. That's right. That's right.

They just happened to sleep at a certain place every night at the same time for all night long. But no way we could correlate that. We've been talking about this for at least, I think, three years. Three years ago around Thanksgiving time was one of the first times I believe that we actually talked about it.

And then, Dave, you pointed that out as well. It's like, well, if they know where I sleep every single night, like how anonymized is this? Like it's got to be one of the people that lives within this house or it's a squirrel that got my phone. Yeah.

Which in my house is a distinct possibility. Oh, yeah. And then you correlate that with where they go, where they spend their days. OK, now I know where they work. Exactly. Yeah. Well, nowadays you can't do that. Because everybody's still stuck at home. Well, work and home, same thing.

Yeah, exactly. So they got another data set from the rush on the capital and basically did the same thing. Now on – and this – they have a new twist on it now because now the data that they come back come with mobile advertising IDs.

So they can now track it with other databases and put it all together, which makes it even easier. Thank you. Thank you for your mobile ID sauce. The one thing that they do say in the article, which I thought was really good, was they talk about accuracy when it comes down to the capital riots because it is very difficult to pinpoint accuracy.

So you can't – you can't – you can say somebody was at the capital. But not in Pelosi's office. Exactly. So they're like, this data will get you there. But that last mile problem is on law enforcement and going to Facebook and watching all the videos. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. But I thought it was a really good follow-up piece. Yeah. I wonder too because, I mean, you've got GPS. You've got – which is one – has a certain amount of accuracy, right? And not particularly high and even worse, I suppose, when you're indoors, right?

A building is big and thick and made of stone as the – Apparently not impregnable but thick and made of stone. Well, it helps if they open up the gates for you. Yeah, there are glass parts of it. But then you've got Wi-Fi networks.

So I would imagine as these folks were moving around, they were pinging the different Wi-Fi access points. I wonder if they're – same thing with Bluetooth. So just the combination of all those things probably gives law enforcement a lot more accuracy. I have to wonder, is this the most well-documented crime scene in history?

I think so. It was certainly the most well-documented by the criminals themselves. Right. Right. Yes, that is a better way to put it, yeah. Didn't really need to call Dexter on this one. History's greatest self-pone.

Yeah. So my question as we talk about this, and we've known that this is so easy. How does this square with Tim Cook and Apple's position as we are the privacy phone when so obviously they are not, no matter how hard they try?

Well, you can turn off those mobile advertising IDs on your phone so they do not exist anymore. But, yeah, I mean, it's baby steps. It's baby steps. They're trying, but, you know, it's a big hill to climb. Yeah. Well, that's what we saw with our battle – with his battle with Zuckerberg.

You know, he's trying to force Facebook to follow certain privacy guidelines, and they want nothing to do with it. Well, I think a lot of it, too, has to do with the mobile carriers where, you know, a lot of your location data comes from that. And didn't we see – I'm trying to remember.

The mobile carriers stopped selling that information when it was revealed that they did, right? Maybe for the second or third time, but the first time they kept on going. Yeah, the first time they definitely kept going. So I think it's – yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting.

Well, because there's a difference there. There's a difference between being tracked to deliver advertising and being tracked for your location. I suppose in some cases it's a distinction without a difference, but in this case, it would make a difference.

Well, since – I mean, the real chilling effect comes when, you know, they're tracking you for whatever purpose, advertising that you've opted into, blah, blah, blah. But then they own that data and they sell that data to somebody like a mortgage company. It's always the selling of data that really bothers me. Like, that should be illegal.

You opted in, so they can do it. I know. Yeah, the thing that bugs me is when law enforcement gets around having to get a warrant by purchasing it from companies that you granted permission to have the data.

To me, that's a troubling civil liberties issue that needs to be addressed head on sooner than later. But who's going to do that? I mean, the government wants the data, so why are they going to put in regulations to not get the data? Well, some parts of the government want the data.

Some – this is what we're supposed to have our House of Representatives and senators for. We contact them and say, hey, this is a no-go. Can we do something about this? Yeah. This is actually something Ben Yellen and I were chatting about on Caveat a couple weeks ago, sort of the check your privilege kind of moment of, hey, it's great when the civil liberties of people we don't like are being trampled.

But it doesn't work that way. So, you know, you just got to be careful with that sort of thing that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. And yeah, this is where we'd see – I think where we're looking for some sort of national data privacy law, this would be one of the things we'd want to be addressed.

That would be good. So, we had another big story this week and I'm not sure if we've learned anything new since this just kind of broke yesterday. But what has long been a staple of many cyberpunk and dystopian sci-fi books and something that many experts and podcasters such as ourselves who are not experts at all have been screaming at the rafters about for a long time.

It's the hacking of our infrastructure and we've got a big story out of Florida. In Florida, a computer hacker gained access to the water system of a city and tried to pump in a dangerous amount of a chemical – it's basically lye – which in a small amount needs to be in the water to control acidity.

But a large amount could have caused, as they say, major problems, as in killing people. So, a plant operator saw an attempt to access a system in the morning – and I love this part – but assumed it was the supervisor. Okay. And another attempt was made early in the afternoon and this time the hacker accessed the treatment software and increased the content from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million, which is not good.

None of this has gotten out. So, they caught it in time. They were able to save the Florida city, which wouldn't have happened in the sci-fi books. No arrests have been made yet and it is not known if the hack was done from within the U.S. or outside. But I'm sure that our best and brightest are on this one because this is terrifying.

Yeah. So, a couple additional details. The software that they were using for remote access is called TeamViewer. Was it done in Flash? Sorry. We've had a bunch of stories about people have been going around and finding all the people that just ignored the warnings that Flash is going away and all these critical systems that were still running on them.

Right. Right. Right. Exactly. So, yeah. Oddly enough, the hacker's name was StrongBad. You beat me to it, you bastard. Nice. I'm dejected sodium hydroxide. Yeah.

It's the last, I think, bit of affection we all have for Flash. StrongBad. That's like the only thing that people pull out there. But it gave us StrongBad. Yeah. Yeah. So, it wasn't all bad. So, this TeamViewer software is used for remote access.

It's something, you know, legit piece of software, very easy to use. This sort of remote access is not at all unusual for these sorts of systems, particularly these days with work from home. It's not unusual to be able to have the folks who work on these systems to be able to monitor them remotely.

That's generally considered a good thing. It's also not unusual to be loved by anyone. That is true. Sorry. No. In this case, obviously, whoever got in, that's the next thing we have to figure out.

They didn't, you know, probably didn't have multi-factor enabled. So, no one was in any immediate danger. They say that it would have taken between 24 and 36 hours for the chemical composition of the water to change to the degree where it could have been dangerous.

There are multiple alarm systems in place that if the pH of the water gets thrown off, that it will alert them. It's possible that the bad guys could hack those alerts. Disable that, yes. So, that is a real possibility.

But a lot of folks are looking at this and saying this doesn't look like the work of a sophisticated actor because, first of all, one of the biggest giveaways is when you make someone else's mouse move because that draws attention to itself and people find that really creepy.

And so, sophisticated hackers tend to not do that. They use the command line or use, you know, shell scripts or, you know, the other things that they use. I know that that's actually supposed to make me feel better. But the fact that someone unsophisticated managed to get in doesn't really make me feel better.

It actually makes it worse. Well, no, that's – I mean, yes, you are absolutely – that is a good point. Another point I think is that if it was someone sophisticated, they wouldn't have gone in and changed it from 100 to 11,100 like they were leaning on the one key.

You know, they probably would have changed it to 101 and stood back a little while and see if anybody noticed. And then they probably would have started out by trying to boil the frog and see how much could they get away with. These and other tips on the next episode of.

Yeah. I mean, it could have been just somebody who, you know, went on Shodan and found this thing was hanging out there wide open and decided to have some laughs and see what would happen. Could be a nation state actor who's getting in and testing our systems.

It's a small town, 15,000 people. Not that that, you know, makes that much of a difference. It's still 15,000 real people who were – who could have potentially been put in harm's way. But in this case – That's just an afternoon of COVID here in Los Angeles. That's nothing.

We're all so numb to it. It was actually a hacker from Sparklet's Water. Right. Right. Yeah. So is it a big deal? Yeah. I think there's been a lot of breathless reporting on this as always.

You know, we're all going to die. And I think that's a little overblown. But I think certainly this requires a certain amount of attention, which will be paid to it. And hopefully we'll find out soon who was responsible. I mean I can't help but wonder, and then this is just me being me, is – I think it's a big deal because this is at least the first case that we know of or I would say the first case that has been reported of somebody breaking into a system like this.

In the U.S. Yeah. I was going to say in the U.S. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was one in Israel in the past couple of years. There was the – remember there was that dam control system in Rye, New York. There was that one. So people are poking around in these systems.

But yeah, in terms of actually affecting the chemical composition of water and trying to make it dangerous, I think you're right. This is the first I can recall of that sort of thing. So – Kevin Costner trying to pitch Waterworld 2 maybe. Yeah.

I'm no chemist but I was trying to look up yesterday just how dangerous 11,000 parts per million of sodium hydroxide is. You know, where on the scale between water and Drano, where does that sit?

And I could not find a good answer. So I don't know if any of our listeners or actual chemists who know this stuff could tell us how caustic would this have been if you get to that level. Is that – is that, hey, this water tastes a little funny or is this – there's a hole been burned in my stomach?

I suppose we could ask the people of Flint, Michigan. Or we could ask the FBI when they show up at your house tomorrow, Dave, after seeing your search history. Right. GFG.show slash VPN. My search – my search history with the stuff that I cover?

Oh, my Lord. That's a mess. You'd be in Gitmo in 10 minutes if you were a civilian. Yeah. Speaking of search histories, our next story. Oh, Pornhub will use biometric data to verify uploaders as part of ongoing safety updates. I mean, this one just writes itself.

It's like, do we even need to talk about – I'm just like, yeah, what biometric data? Yeah. Oh, my God. So they're going to be using a service called Yachty. Okay. Not to be confused with Yahtzee, which is what you say when you have finished a Pornhub video.

That's funny. I usually jump up and down and scream, I won! I won! But that's just me. Yeah. I kind of go with, clean up on aisle two! Oh, yeah. So Pornhub is going to be partnering with these people to try and get an added layer of protection for their uploader verification system.

Now, let's talk about what could go wrong and what could go right. On the what could go right side, I've got a very short list of nothing. On what could go wrong, oh, just about everything, like your future employment possibilities.

What do you guys think? You know, again, it was always odd that they were doing this to begin with. The fact that Pornhub is, of all sites that I can think of that most people visit fairly often, is doing actual more verification than Facebook does, per se.

The fact, I don't know, you know, is that a good thing? I suppose. I mean, they're trying to combat trafficking. They're trying to combat abuse. They're trying to combat a gazillion other things. Copyright. Do copyright. Do I need my porn verified?

I don't know. I guess so. It just, like you said, Jason, I don't see a lot of pluses here, and I see a lot of what could possibly go wrong. I think a lot of this comes back to the fact that MasterCard and Visa has blocked them, so they can't get payments. And there are a lot of...

I could just take Bitcoin. Yeah. Good point. Tip coin. There we go. A new cyber currency. That one's for free. But there are a lot of people that do make a living on there, and that is how they, you know, earn money during these troubling times.

And they're trying to... I mean, I suppose, like, are the people that are verified and make a living, and this is what they do, are they bothered by this verification level? Or is it just, it's part of their job? It's what they do for a living? Well, I don't think they're going to be bothered by it, and, you know, they are getting probably $10.99 from Pornhub with all the money that they're making.

So they're going to have to have socials or EINs on file. So there's your verification right there for a lot of it. Right. You know, if the whole point of this is that people are uploading videos to Pornhub to make money, there's a financial trail there that that should be the verification.

Me holding up a picture of my driver's license, you know, when I'm 35 pounds heavier and had really bad hair. Well, I still have really bad hair. But anyway, that's not going to really prove anything. Actually, yeah, that's a phenomenal point.

I mean, that goes to, say, the same way that we have set up PayPals and Patreons for our donations. We have to provide financial information. And there you go. That's verification. So why not just do that? Wouldn't you have to provide ID, you know, back in the old days, if you were a traditional porn actor, wouldn't you have to provide proof that you were of age?

Wasn't that a thing? Yeah. Don't you see, you know, at the head end of the videos, I've been told that it includes a section that says that there's someone who is the trustee who keeps all of the paperwork that verifies everyone is of age? Yep.

That and every photo shoot that we ever did in the business, the first Chrome on those pages and pages of slides, the first one was the actor holding up their driver's license next to their face. So we had proof that everybody was of age before we took a single other frame of film.

And, you know, that's – but that's the legitimate porn industry. This is Pornhub. So I can see where they're probably catching up because it's – you know. Oh, yeah. And the other thing is why are people paying money on Pornhub? The head scratcher from the get-go.

I'm like, why? It's free. Isn't that the genius? But, yeah, I understand how it works. And, you know, it just seems like there have to be better ways to do this than trying to use any kind of biometric ID.

I was just – just earlier today, I was talking to a researcher. We were talking about deep fakes and that some of the cryptocurrency exchanges, they will ask you to submit a video of yourself if you want to get access to an account, a cryptocurrency account.

As verification, they will – let's say they already have your ID, they have your driver's license, whatever. But as sort of a not-quite-real-time verification, they'll ask you to send a video of yourself, you know, face the camera, face to the right, face to the left, hold up a piece of paper that says I am who I say I am, that sort of thing.

And there are a couple of companies who have sprung up who are offering deep fakes as a service to help get around these things. So if I'm trying to – let's say I'm – Jason, let's say I'm trying to break into your Bitcoin account. I can hire this organization to create a deep fake of you doing the things that these companies request in the video request.

And it will look just like you. That's an interesting point. A hundred bucks? Wow. A hundred bucks. And you can have that done to get access to your cryptocurrency. Interesting. And one other interesting thing on the trying to break into cryptocurrency, somebody tried to break into Kevin Rose's crypto account last week.

And he's like, silly rabbit. I don't use my real email address. And this is where he screwed up. He's like, I don't use my real email address. Everything's in cold storage. And I have a three-day lockdown period for any withdrawal. So I'm notified as soon as a withdrawal is set up. So I have three days to fix it.

And I'm like, why did you tell him that? Why did you tweet that? Why the fuck did you tweet that? Right. Right. Let me explain OPSEC to you, my friend. This is not it. Well, hubris gets you every time, doesn't it?

Hubris gets you every time. Yep. I am so good. I'm that good. Well, let's try. You know, that's the next step. Right. Game on, Kevin Rose. So, yeah, that deep fakes as a service was not something I had anticipated this soon.

Well, I thought it took longer to make them. No, it's pretty fast these days. The software out there has gotten incredibly sophisticated very, very quickly, which is a little bit terrifying. You know, we've talked about it for a couple of years now, saying that very, very soon video evidence is going to mean absolutely fucking nothing.

And we got a video sent to us last week that was a one of the new cloud providers is providing access to GPUs so you can buy time on GPUs. And what they sent around was a video of a scene from The Fly where Jeff Goldblum does the transport, except they replaced him with the guy from Mr. Robot.

I forget who that is. Rami Malek. Rami Malek. There you go. I saw that video. Yeah. Yeah. So that was a promotion of this cloud company's ability to basically you can buy as many GPUs as you need very inexpensively and to do this sort of thing.

So the infrastructure is there, just a matter of making it affordable. And evidently it is. You know why it's affordable? Evidently it's legal. Bitcoin. That's why it's affordable. Because everybody keeps upgrading their Bitcoin miners. So these really nice GPUs get thrown on the market for secondhand and you can buy them for, you know, a tenth of what they originally cost.

And you can make a GPU farm out of those to just do regular video rendering instead of trying to mine Bitcoin. So that's a little side market. Thanks, Bitcoin, for that. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting times. Interesting times.

Well, I'm going to go make a deepfake of Dave in a stormtrooper outfit. Shouldn't be that hard. That's not that hard to do. I think you can do that. You can do that over at JibJab. That's all they have left. Exactly. Wait, but JibJab isn't a flash.

The original deepfake. Oh, no. Yeah, JibJab can't be used anymore. It's gone. It has to be. Oh. Right. Right. Email. Over at Patreon, we've got Darren, SleepTooLittle, and FakieMcMadeUp.

Thank you, FakieMcMadeUp. Thank you. And over at PayPal, we've got David, Breed, Andrew, Ralph, Mark, and Michael. Thank you all so much. Over at Twitter, we didn't have too much this week. I see you put this one in because, you know, it agrees with your opinion. 502 writes in, I've been hating the end of The Stand for 35 years.

I'm Team JP Def, most def. All right. That's my man. That's my man. Okay. So I didn't talk about The Stand on Media Candy because it's not done yet. We have one episode to go, but this seems like I might as well talk about it here, right? So here we are. The episode that just aired, and again, spoiler alerts, if you have not read a book that's been around for 35 years or seen the first iteration of the miniseries or haven't been watching the next generation of the miniseries,

I'm not spoiling anything for you because obviously you don't give a shit about The Stand. So you've had time. They fixed a bit of this in the latest one. It's not a hand of God coming down to touch the nuke anymore. The special effects have come along.

They must be using that monitor with the seven screens on it. Seven screens on it, yeah. Seven screen laptop for the special effects on this one. It was a lot better. However, as a whole, the miniseries sucks. It speeds over everything. It's too short.

Half the character development is gone. Half the good stories are gone. All the little nuggets that make it really great are gone in the interest of speeding up the story. I'm kind of bummed out about it. There's one episode left, which is going to be the wrap-up and aftermath and all that, but they did fix—this scene is a lot better.

Now, having said all of that, I will say to everybody that hates the end of The Stand because God basically shows up and helps, that was the whole fucking point of the book. That's not why I hated it, so that doesn't matter to me. All right. It's fine. Well, a lot of people say that that's the part that they hate, and for me, it's like, okay, so you bought in on the fact that there was Mother Abigail who's talking to God, and then there's the dark man who is obviously Satan's representative on Earth.

And they talk about how the good guys have to go make a stand, and speaking of that, no fucking stand was made in this miniseries, as opposed to the book. Did Ronald D. Moore make it? I feel like it because, sure, you had the good guys head towards Las Vegas, but in the book and in the first miniseries, they actually take a fucking stand.

There was no stand taken in this miniseries, and the title of the fucking miniseries is The Stand. Like, that part bothered me. Yeah, okay. Anyways, if you're buying in on this whole premise, then you have to buy in on the fact that God is eventually going to step in and say, well, they took the stand, so now I'm going to help them out.

Yeah. That's all I'm saying. That's the point. No, that's not the part that bothered me about the ending of the book at all. I expected God to show up. That was the point. I got that part. It was way, way more other stuff, but it's – I mean, it was a 48-hour audio book, and so I – what's that, 800 and some odd pages?

Something like that, yeah. Yeah. You did do the extended crazy edition. Yeah, but it was – I wanted the extended crazy edition because those generally tend to be better. And so you take a 48-hour book and turn it into, what, an eight-hour – less than that with commercial breaks in it, you know, or time for commercials.

It's not going to be the same. You're cutting out a lot. And even in that first episode, they cut out a lot of the stuff that I actually wanted to see. So I'm like, ah, fuck it. Yeah. That and that whole, like, you know, moving timelines around, not for me. I hate that. That's what everybody does now. It sucks.

Yeah. I still hate it. Okay. Over at GOG Show, Raph writes in, quant fund or metal band? I played this last night. Yep. I played this last night. I suck at it. I had a 10% hit rate. It is very difficult to tell.

It's extremely difficult to tell. So it's fun. Give it a few minutes. Barrett writes in from the I just give up already file. Next step will be to find a way to target the indigenous tribes with malware hidden in smoke signals. And this is from Bleeping Computer. New phishing attack uses Morse code to hide malicious URLs.

This is ingenious. It is pretty crafty. I got to give them that. It's pretty crafty. This is worth reading. It basically translates letters and numbers encoded into a series of dots and dashes, and then uses some JavaScript, of course, to unwield all that and screw up your computer.

Yeah, but it's clever as fuck. I give them that. Yes, it is. Totally. And Gerard writes in, recently discovered your show on Spotify and really enjoy it. Well, welcome to the club, Gerard. Not sure if I qualify as a grumpy old geek, but I'm definitely a cynical next or but I'm definitely a cynical Gen Xer who's way too into dorky things.

Case in point, I used my COVID lockdown to write a satirical sci-fi about potatoes. It's also about social media, world domination, mind control, popular culture, ancient aliens, and fast food, but mostly potatoes. It's called God Squatter, and I think you guys might dig it.

So go check that out at godsquatter.com. It sounds pretty good. Link in the show notes. Yep. Yep. Sleep too little writes in, so I'm a little behind on the shows thanks to a nice stay in the hospital with COVID sponsored by my Trump believing no mask wearing Facebook knows all the truth COVID denying even when she has it mother-in-law that lives with us.

But I digress. I'm back at work. And I believe Jason mentioned that he was having some sort of issue with his AirPod Pro on show 488. I was also having issues with mine with the controls not working right and the noise cancelling acting up randomly. I just figured it was the noise in the truck was too much at times for it.

Cheaply made semi-trucks and road construction play hell on one's hearing. I found this link by accident when I was trying to replace one of my earpieces after my dog found out how yummy they are. I did have to pay for the one my dog chewed on but that was done via mail and I took the other one to worst buy because Apple shut down the two stores they had in my area.

They did their little test on it found it to be defective per recall and ordered me a new one. In a few days I finally had two working AirPod Pros at no cost other than I had to go to worst buy. Keep on grumping and remember kids mask up so we don't end up ass up in the grave. And this is the AirPods Pro service program for sound issues.

Well thank you very much sleep too little I'm glad that you're feeling better now. Yep. Carol writes in hi guys hope you're good. I'm writing because it's getting more and more common for people to think that after vaccinating we won't have to wear masks anymore. I heard Brian say that in the latest episode if I'm not mistaken.

I believe you're mistaken. Yep you're definitely mistaken. I certainly did not say that. Yes I just want to let you know that it probably won't be that easy. It's likely that after the current vaccines you can still get a low viral load in your mouth and nose but it won't infect you further. Snicker. Shut up.

But this also. Turn your head. But this also means it could possibly spread to others. If you're interested they covered it in episode 811 of the Skeptics Guide podcast. It starts at 49 minutes. And yeah now we're going to have masks for forever.

Yeah I'm sure I didn't say that. There's no way I said I'm well aware of the fact that we're going to have to be masked for at least another year. Speaking of that GOG.show slash shop. Get yours now. Get your masks. Yeah I mean what I am hoping for you know best case scenario is I'm hoping by like Christmas time with everybody in my immediate family vaccinated will be able to have a Christmas dinner indoors without masks with just my family that is vaccinated.

But out in public grocery shopping things like that you're going to be I expect masks for at least another year. I'm wearing one forever man. I kind of like not getting a cold. It's great. Well you know that's prevalent in Asian cultures. You see that especially if people if people are starting to feel sick at all they wear a mask to protect other people because you know nice.

Yeah but we're in the United States people don't do things nice for other people. I found a link over at CNN that my friend sent me and it says I've had the COVID-19 vaccine now what can I safely do? Your question is answered and it is actually a really good write-up. So I recommend everybody go read that.

It doesn't matter who just go read it so you know. Yep and Elon Musk's wife Grimes writes in what if home security cameras had an option to only give footage to police in rare cases such as child abduction knowing how hard it can be to place trust in authorities with that lack of trust outweigh the seemingly insignificant chance that giving this footage could potentially help save a child.

We have a mechanism for this. It's called a warrant. We have warrants and and still right now they still have to ask for it. There's no there's no like give it to them filter. They have to come ask you for it. Even if you opt into the programs they have to come ask nicely.

They can you know they can what they can do on their end is they can see where a crime was committed and then they can look at the the area map and see who's got ring cameras in that area and then they can come ask you if you opted in and say hey we noticed there was a crime you know two houses down can we get your footage from this time to this time to see if we can find a suspect barring that they can come and subpoena you and you can get the get the footage for or they can get the footage from Amazon without you even being

involved at some point I'm probably sure but yeah yeah and uh no sec writes in in case you haven't heard this yet this is pretty great this is disturbed the sound of silence which is a parody of the social distance or the other way around because I haven't listened to it yet so I can't tell yeah let's do it either all right well it's in the show notes been a little busy this week but uh check it out and over on iTunes we have a five-star

rating from Trev 2 well-produced and entertaining podcast which is as grumpy old and geeky as it says on the tin probably why I enjoy it definitely made it to the top of my playlist when it comes out each week from a long-time Australian listener well thank you very much and Kalman tree-hugging swamp ass gave us a two-star saying it's just too political if I wanted politics I would subscribe to it these two are interesting confusing and I also do want to point out that

he wrote it's just too political twice and he spelled two in two different ways yeah I mean that happens I'm fine look he redeemed himself by saying these two are interesting okay so I'll give that uh just you know stick around it's getting better it's getting better yep it is 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 and if you're still listening to us on overcast just throw us some stars why not get us back in the listings we could use it it's uh it's been a little dire over here closing shout outs a big shout out to friend of the show mxv on a speedy recovery from his surgery he got surgery yesterday and uh they kept him overnight which was uh not part of the plan so hopefully everything is going okay and he'll be back home soon and uh listening

to his vinyl records as always I hope he's good I know that the record player elbow can be a touchy touchy thing well he had robot surgery so we were joking was like I hope they didn't install any malware that's funny until next time I'm Brian Schulmeister and I'm Jason DeFilippo thanks for listening to grumpy old geeks show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 494 if you like the

show please considering visiting gog.show slash donate to help us out patreon subscribers do get the show ad free and early when available or visit gog.show slash shop and pick up some gog swag get those masks and you can come hang out with us at gog.show slash discord if you can't do any of that then pass the show along to a friend like covid19 at a super bowl party hey oh again show notes for this episode

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