503: Grumpy Stuff

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 GOG. I'm Jason D. with my co-conspirator.

Brian Schulmeister. Brian Schulmeister. Come on, you gotta rhyme. You gotta rhyme. It's early morning here. Lots of caffeine. Not enough caffeine for Yo MTV Gripes. Whatever the hell we're doing. How are you doing?

I'm doing good. Doing good. Waiting for my second shot. Coming up soon. I know. We're all getting close. And, you know, throughout the year plus that we've been recording podcasts during the pandemic, we've talked about like the mood swings, the up and down and all that. And I was on a bit of a high. Then comes the low.

I'm not feeling good right now. I gotta say, even though, you know, theoretically there's an end point in sight, but we're slowly watching numbers inch up incrementally even here in California where we're doing relatively well. And, you know, obviously there are countries that have done very well with Israel, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand.

And then you got Florida. Oh, boy. See, I've completely stopped watching now. Well, I'm jealous of you because there is some news here. We've got the South African variant has seemed to have found its way around the Pfizer shot.

Okay. So the foot race is on. Go get jabbed, idiots. Yeah. Yeah. Get it while you can. While it works. Get it while you can. Get it while it works. Got a little bit of follow up. We talked last week about how Google had planned to open up their offices. Was it Amazon as well?

I can't remember. Yeah. Amazon was making people go back and Google was spending over $7 billion on new offices and data centers. Yeah. Well, this article is called I do not trust people in the same way and I don't think I ever will again, which I thought at first was a Smith song that had never been released.

Yeah. But apparently it's not. This is an article over on Slate written by Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for over a decade on her website, Ask a Manager. And, yeah, talking about how initiatives, reopening initiatives are gathering steam. And she's been getting a lot of people writing in going, I'm not so sure about this.

A lot of people are actually even wondering whether they should tell their employers if they've been vaccinated since they fear that knowledge will be used to compel them to return to work. Join us. Yes. Part of the problem, she says, is timing. It's one thing to plan on reopening in the late summer. But employees are talking about bringing everybody back in in May or June and ignoring that it's highly unlikely we'll have reached herd immunity by then.

And here's the big sticking point, which I always tell people who are talking to me about, oh, wow, you're on the path to get vaccinated. It's about to be really normal for you again. No, because kids aren't getting vaccinated yet. We don't have one yet. And if you're a parent, that means your life ain't changing all that much.

Nope. And you certainly don't want to go back into an office. So, yeah. And I love this. This is just you and I to a T. Workers have also seen over the past year that even when employers claim they'll implement safety measures, the reality is often very different. Oh, yeah. No, no doubt about that.

I was completely lied to on a job. They're like, oh, we're going to be testing everybody. It's going to be, you know, clean room. I get there, talk to some of the people. They're like, no, nobody talked to us about getting tested. I'm like, great. See you later. I'm out. Social distancing requirements will often go unenforced.

Many people report colleagues going unmasked without any consequences. So, yes, people are quite skeptical about this. There's also the fact that some people have just started to enjoy working from home and like the flexibility. Now, that's a rich white person problem in general because we have the space and all the accoutrement that we need to make it worthwhile and good.

And obviously, it only works for certain jobs. And but as she points out, the real problem, I suspect, is in the past year, we've experienced a massive loss of trust in our institutions and in one another. Well, I got to say, once again, we're ahead of the curve on that because that's been my life since I was about 12.

Well, certainly in just the last few months, even here in Santa Monica, which I have to say, in general, people have been very good about following social distancing, wearing masks and all that. I went out for a little walk yesterday. People don't even have masks on them anymore, much less the rudeness of just having it put around their neck or whatever.

So, yeah, we seem to have we seem to have dropped trow pretty quick and we're flailing in the wind here. So and I just really like this last one. This person who wrote to me speaks for a lot of others. I do not trust people or institutions in the same way.

And I don't think I ever will again, even as we go back to normal. And since much of the world is not vaccinated, it's not even close to over yet. I will not forget how our society has treated vulnerable people and essential workers as expendable minorities, escape, scapegoats, facts and public health as suggestions or lies.

Amen, brother. Way to start on an upside. On the other hand of things, Uber says March was its biggest month ever. So things are returning to normal for ride hailing companies like Uber. According to the Wall Street Journal, their mobility business, which includes ride hailing bookings, has had its best month since March of 2020 when the pandemic first hit in the U.S.

Correct me if I'm wrong here. Didn't we see news last week that Uber can't even find drivers, so they're dumping another $250 million into incentives to get people back in the cars? Well, interesting you mentioned that because people were questioning the timing of this news release because they're not scheduled to report its quarterly earnings in early May.

But talking about record-breaking months could help up its stock price, of course, and also help the company get more drivers and delivery people back on the road as demand likely continues to ramp up. Okay, so it's bullshit. Yeah. Or probably bullshit. Suspected bullshit. I guess we have to say alleged bullshit.

Well, I think everybody is well aware of our stance on statistics here. That's true. That is true. Yes, and of course, they have to end the article with my feeling. That is, of course, assuming the coronavirus infections don't continue to rise rapidly yet again, which they probably will.

In the news. Drop down menus on online forms. They could be the death of us. Now, that's a hell of a way to start an article. Yep. On Thursday, journalist and programmer Dan Nguyen pointed out a darkly comic incident report connected to a flight over the summer.

During the pandemic hiatus, an unnamed airline operator upgraded their system. Oof, that's always not good. It helps ensure an accurate load sheet, the document that tabulates estimated weights of passengers, crew, cargo, etc. The problem is the new system included titles and assumed that anyone listed as Miss must be a child.

Whoops. I'm not entirely sure what culture does that, but okay. The system allocated them to a child's standard weight of 35 kilograms as opposed to the correct female standard weight of 69. Consequently, with 38 females checked in incorrectly and misidentified as children, the takeoff mass from the load sheet was 1,244 kilograms below the actual mass of the aircraft.

That's bad. Yeah. Luckily, the crew noticed the discrepancy and thought that the number was high but plausible, and they took off, and luckily no one was injured, but it could have gone differently. So, mind your programming. Yeah, yeah. This is not good.

This is not good at all. I'm not going to say who I think it probably was, but you know my history with outsourced programming on this show. Yes. They did point out that the system programming was not carried out in the UK. In the country where it was performed, the title Miss was used for a child and MS for an adult female, hence the error.

Yep. So, yeah. Yes. Might want to check those things every now and again. Anyway, yeah. That's pretty bad because, yeah, if those loads are off, nothing takes off. There's a video of a cargo plane leaving Afghanistan that, like, the load shifted as it took off, and everybody on board died.

It was terrible to watch, and it's one of those things that I still can't get out of my head. So, they're lucky that wasn't them. Yeah. I remember being on a puddle jumper. I used to do a lot of flights. Like, I would go to Buffalo a lot, and there was no direct flight at the time, so I would have to fly into – I can't even remember where – and then basically get on a puddle jumper to get to Buffalo.

And I remember one flight, they asked a couple people to switch sides of the plane to even it out, and I was like, I got to get off these fucking things. Yeah, they're – yeah, they go down like $5 whores. Yes, they do. Yeah, if we've got to shift the weight of one guy that had a few too many Buffalo wings the other day, I don't know if I want to be on this plane.

Yeah. Seriously. But they're fun. You got to admit, they're pretty fun. Yeah, they were. Yeah. This is interesting. Tesla now has crypto stock token by Binance to buy fractional shares. So now you can buy a – you can buy a Tesla with Bitcoin, and now you can buy Tesla with Bitcoin.

And it's a zero commission digital token. And the thing about this is it's like, you know, every time I hear Tesla going for Bitcoin, all I can think about is the environmental impact that Bitcoin has on the planet. Hey, bro. I love my Bitcoin, man.

It's awesome. There's no problems. Fuck the man. All I can say – I just – the Winklevi just popped into my head as you were saying that in synchrony and harmony. Yeah, so it's zero commission but not zero emission is what I was going to get at.

That's good. I'm sorry I stepped on that. That's OK. That's all good. It's all good. And when I was thinking about this, I'm like, has Tesla ever said that their mission with the electric car was to actually save the planet? No. I don't think it is. It was to make money. It's to make money so we can go to Mars.

So I'm thinking maybe this Bitcoin thing is just, you know, one of Elon's sinister plans to make the planet uninhabitable so we can get on the Mars Express because that's the only place we can go. All right. I think you might be on to something there. He is an evil villain. So what are you going to do?

I will continue to invest in my Tesla in the normal manner, not through the non-zero emission manner. All right. And since we were talking about Tesla, Barrett just sent this in a few minutes ago and says, and this is why we can't have nice things. Tesla owners say open butthole and get a little surprise.

It seems Tesla added support for a voice command that allows you to access the car's charging port by saying open butthole with the accompanying command close butthole meant to shut the port when you're done charging. Five-year-olds work at Tesla. It's just five-year-olds. Yeah. Nice.

I mean, if you wanted to do it just to open the pod bay door, Hal, that would have been fine. Yeah. Just even open Sesame. You know, that would have been good, but open butthole. That's what we get. And you want to get on this guy's Mars Express.

I'm thinking not. I'm not going to fucking Mars. I'm not either. Hell, man, I don't even go to Pasadena. So I saw this one, which was pretty interesting. Google's secret Project Bernanke revealed in Texas antitrust case. So this is about the antitrust case about advertising and how Google is basically just using their own internal data to win auctions over other competitors who they had to open up to, blah, blah, blah.

I don't care about that. I couldn't – that's going to play out. That's funny, but I just love – this week's filing, viewed by the Wall Street Journal, wasn't properly redacted when uploaded to the court's public docket. A federal judge let Google refile it under seal. So basically the only reason we know about this is because some clerk somewhere didn't know how to redact properly.

That's pretty funny, I thought. Yeah, that's pretty funny. I mean, listen, people. You've got to get your clerks and your secretaries – got to get them schooled up a little bit. Like, you know, just a reminder for everybody, Microsoft Word keeps all the edits. So, you know, you need to clear those out before sending out Word documents.

In fact, never send out a Word document. Never. Just don't. No, and even when you're doing a PDF, you know, doing a black highlight across the text oftentimes doesn't work because it's still text underneath and it's just highlighted black. You can still copy and paste everything. So, yeah, images.

Images are the way to go, people. Let's go back to GIFs. It's the way it should always be. Mint an NFT of your document and charge them for it. Exactly. Oh, and I love this. Twitch will act on serious offenses that happen off-platform. So, now if you are a Twitch celebrity and a Twitter douche, they're going to come after you and say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

No, no, no, no, no. You can't do that. So, they're going to start following you around, I guess, and seeing if you're a jerk everywhere else. Well, I don't think that they're going to – they're not going to follow you around. If it's reported to them that you've done something very bad. Oh, you mean they don't have an AI? And it would look bad for them to continue to provide a platform, then they will stop doing so.

Okay. Okay. Well, we'll see how this goes. But, yeah, it's like – I think it's a good stance to take personally. I'm 100% on board. I don't think that – I don't think anybody should just provide platforms to everybody. And these are all publicly traded companies.

Twitch is owned by Amazon. They have a fiduciary responsibility to continue to make me money and putting whatever that fucking Logan guy is on their platform when he continues to do really stupid things is not a way to make me money.

So, knock it off. So, that's going to be interesting when you think about it. It's like, okay, I signed up for the terms of service on platform A. I go to platform B, which has a completely different set of terms of services that doesn't jive 100% with service A. But if I'm doing something on service B that breaks the service A's terms of service, then service A can kick me off, which is – it's an interesting thought experiment to see how this is going to play out.

And, you know, did they change their terms of service to say, hey, you have to abide by these terms of service everywhere you go on the internet for the rest of your life? Because that's what – it's kind of what it boils down to. Well, I mean, yeah, it does.

And it is interesting. But at the end of the day, you know, what do you always say, Jason? You don't build your house in somebody else's backyard. Yeah, that's true. These are all backyards, people. All backyards. They can decide that you don't get to play here anymore. Yep. So spin up your own server and build it yourself.

Oh, wait, but your server is going to be on somebody else's backyard too. Probably Amazon's. Amazon's or Microsoft's or Google's. Yep, yep. The old days of just going to buy an e-machine at Fry's and plugging it in, long gone. Sadly, long gone. Now, but what's not long gone is yet another clubhouse ripoff.

My God, another week, another clubhouse. Facebook is testing Hotline, which is basically a mashup of Clubhouse and Instagram Live. So you can do basically the same thing. But now it has video. Woo, yay. Two crappy things that are crappy together.

Exactly. Great. Just what I'm looking for. Does Facebook really feel... They're floundering, man. They're floundering. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Facebook has a shelf life at this point, as far as I'm concerned. They're going to be fine for another decade or so, but we're going to see influence wane.

And at some point, there will, believe it or not, not be much of a Facebook left. It'll probably just be an ad engine. Yeah, and all the kids are gone, man. So it's like anybody... It's everybody's parents now. Nobody young wants to be on it. So as these... Well, maybe they'll come back as they get older.

But they have to age out of Snap and Instagram, even though they still use Instagram, which is technically Facebook, but Facebook proper, you know, is not doing too well, it seems. Well, and they can't innovate. And that's the real problem here, is Facebook has come up with one thing, and even that was kind of stolen from MySpace.

They came up with Facebook. Which was stolen from Friendster, which was stolen from Friendster, which was on and on and on and on. So there is no innovation, and there hasn't been for a very long time over at Facebook, and that's going to be the death of them. There's only so many times that... Well, right now, they basically exist in a monopoly, and we need some actual attention being paid to that at some point.

And when that happens, I don't know what their business model is anymore. Because right now, it's intimidate, imitate, or steal. That's it. That's what they got. Or acquire. Or acquire, yeah. But I think that's one of the things that they were saying, that the reason that they're trying to do their own is because everybody is under a microscope right now with antitrust, so acquisitions are kind of off the table for a lot of these people.

They're like, we can't acquire... Do we have any coders left? Or are you just all ad salespeople? Hey, hey, hey, Joe, over there. Yeah, come here. Write some code. Make us a thing. Make us a thing. Make us a thing that does that thing. Yeah. My favorite company, Pinterest, is in the news. Hmm.

Yeah. Have they been sued out of existence for basically flouting copyright across the entire internet? No. They haven't. Well, damn. No. No, they've actually announced a $500,000 Creators Fund, a creator code content policy, and new moderation tools.

So... Hold on a second. Pinterest doesn't fucking have content. Not their own. Oh, but they do. They do. Okay. It's just, yeah, it's, you know, you're on the hook for whatever you post up there, but they're, you know, yeah. God.

I would like a large chunk of this money to create things by going around the internet and stealing other people's things. That'd be great. And yes, and well, first you got to steal the image. Then you have to steal the quote. You have to marry the two into a terrible inspirational poster, then post it to Pinterest.

That's how it works. It is, you know, it's transformative, Brian. It's transformative. Yeah. So, yeah, the creator code. You have to agree to be kind, check your facts, be aware of triggers, practice inclusion, and do no harm.

Nowhere in there does it say don't steal other people's shit. Well, yeah, that would be, there'd be no business model for Pinterest if we had that. Yeah, that'd be a very short-lived company, but no. Be aware of triggers. Oh, God. I get triggered by Peter Thiel.

How's that? There's my trigger. Me too. He came out saying that China is going to use Bitcoin as a financial weapon against us, which they probably will at some point, but. Well, I was about to say, as much as we hate Peter Thiel on this show, and we do, don't get me wrong, we both do, there's always a kernel of truth in the bullshit that he speaks.

Oh, yeah, yeah. You don't get to be that rich without being right a lot of the time. But what's not right is the real reason I put this in here. This comes from finance.yahoo.com, the article that I found. And I'm reading it, it goes, Thiel made these comments.

After he expressing worry, the Chinese are using Bitcoin to corrode the U.S. financial system. And I'm thinking, hmm, after he expressing worry, sounds like GPT-3 to me. Yeah, I think you might be right. I think I caught one. We were wondering where those, you know, 4.5 billion words a day were going.

Yahoo. Or is it Oath? They still have yahoo.com, but isn't it Oath now? Or did they already divest that? I can't remember. It's like a hot potato of turds over there. Well, we can go to Yahoo questions and go wait. No, we can't. Can't do that anymore either. Oh, too bad.

Well, Alibaba was hit with a $2.8 billion fine in a China antitrust case. Amazing, China can do this, but we can't. Jack Ma had to look under the cushions today. And it's not insignificant. $2.8 billion is a bit, I mean, it definitely is going to stretch the coffee budget over there.

No, it's not. Because you know what happened? As soon as they paid the fine, the stock went up. Yep. I know. I happen to be a shareholder. Ah, bastard. Yeah, you're going to do just fine on this one. Yeah, I am. You know, I will make some money, but I will be sad about it.

No, you won't. Well, a little bit. I still feel guilty over Facebook. I got to sell that shit. You still have it? Yeah, it keeps going up. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. So, Brian, I watched some more of Coded Bias on Netflix.

I had mentioned it last week, and I was going to check it out because it talks about AI discrimination. AI, which is machine learning and visual intelligence and things like that. And I had to stop 15 minutes into it. Bad. The use of the term AI was, I was triggered.

I was triggered too damn much. I'm like, I got tired of screaming at my TV. I was hoarse. I was just, yeah. And even one of the people in there, one of the experts, she's like, AI, machine learning, whatever the hell you want to call it. She gave up too. This is a documentary with experts.

You'd think there would be a little more care. Yeah. With the terminology thrown around, maybe an explanation. Yeah. Nope. They go to MIT and things like that. Smart people places. So, I just got true. Maybe they're just over it like we are. Threw their hands up in the air and said, fine.

You're going to keep fucking calling it AI? Fine. Yeah. I just couldn't watch it. Also, everything that we saw or that I saw in the first 15 minutes, we've talked about for years on the show. So, it's just another shit we already know kind of documentary. But feel free to watch it if you want to, if you're not up to speed on AI.

I'll pass. I'll pass on that. Yeah. Please do. Yeah. I watched Hotel Transylvania 3. This is kids viewing, obviously. We did not watch one or two because my kid is basically only into squids and things of that nature. And he saw a commercial for it or a trailer for it on YouTube and it's got a squid in it.

So, therefore, we had to watch the movie. It was actually rather enjoyable. Quite funny. Which is very surprising for anything involving Adam Sandler. Zing. So, but it was the weird thing about this and the only reason I'm talking about it, and I wrote an old friend who also has kids about the same age while I was watching it, was realizing that I'm watching this and the dude from Devo did the soundtrack and the big music set piece was by Tiesto.

So, this friend and I, we went from, shall we say, altered states at Coachella watching Tiesto perform about 10 years ago to Tiesto playing for our kids on our TVs. Maybe you're still tripping from back then. Maybe. Maybe this is all a trip. Yeah. Are you talking about Mark Mothersbaugh? Yeah.

Yeah. He does lots of soundtracks. Yeah. And it's good. And the movie's actually very clever. Okay. It's extremely funny. I enjoyed it. I guarantee it's better than Coded Bias, so maybe I should have watched that instead. Maybe. And at some point, I was reminded that I actually have HBO Max, which I kind of forgot about, so I went in and took a look around to see if there was anything in there, and I saw that there's a new show called Made for Love.

Mm-hmm. It's a darkly absurd and cynically poignant story of love and divorce, which follows Hazel Green, which is the actress Kristen Bellotti. She was in Palm Springs recently, which was actually very good, and she plays roughly the same role here. Okay. In the same way, but it's okay.

The main character, she's married to this guy, Byron Google. Google. So they really thought hard about trying to take a stab at high tech here. Okay. By naming him Google. Okay. There you go. That's about the level of good writing that you get on this show, and it's not worth watching.

Is this the one with the dating service, the DNA dating service? No, it's not a dating service. He creates some sort of thing that is supposed to connect to people if they're in love, hence the Made for Love title. So you get a chip in your brain, and you're connected to your wife 24-7, except it doesn't really work very well, and it only works one way.

So basically, he can spy on her, and she's trying to escape from him. Okay. Yeah. Not worth it. Okay, good. Don't bother. Good. Good to know. Then Hard, which is another show that's a Brazilian show that was on HBO Max, and I watched the first season, and it was about a wife whose husband dies, and she didn't know that he was basically running an online porn store, or porn company, and then she takes it over, and it was actually quite clever and funny.

Season two of that is now out, and I've been watching that, and it's still very funny. All right. Same story? Same people? Same people. Same story. Okay. I watched John Oliver for the first time the other night, because I, too, remember that I had HBO Max. I'm done with him. I can't watch that show anymore.

Yeah. Every time I finish it, well, A, it's the same episode over and over again with just a different topic. I mean, the jokes are the same. Everything is the same about that show, but I'm always angry at the end of the show, and I'm like, I don't need that anymore. I mean, maybe I'll come back to it later when I need some more hate in my heart, but the last episode about the seniors and the elders, I'm like, I can't watch this.

I can't watch this. Yeah, that was really depressing. Yeah. I lived through that. I can't do that. I'm not done watching it yet, but I totally get your point, and it's lost some of its, it's lost a bit of its joy being stuck in the empty white void that he's been in. You know, a lot of shows have gone back to studios and all that, and I think he needs to sooner rather than later, because I think it's, you're right, the joy is gone from that show.

There used to be, it used to be angry and joyful, and now it's just angry. Yeah, not a fan, not a fan. Yeah. But, hey. And, hey. But, hey. But, hey. I found this bit of news. Science Canal says you can judge people by their taste in music after all.

Okay, which every teenager has known forever. Exactly. But now they've found a link between music preferences and a person's propensity to empathize with others. So, you can read all this. I thought it would be a lot more exciting than it was, but it's a little bit boring. But, yeah. If you're a certain type of people, you'll like certain types of music.

Shocking. No. The problem with this is they're using, was it Myers-Briggs? Yeah. Yeah. Myers-Briggs is bullshit. You know, it's, it's, this is bullshit built on bullshit. So, I, it's a bullshit sandwich. I can't, I can't. But it makes for a snappy headline, Jason.

Yeah. I can't get behind this one, unfortunately. You know. I mean, I do believe that you can totally judge people by their taste in music because, you know, you can. And I do all the time. Exactly. But, yeah, I think slapping Myers-Briggs on top of it just, just kind of negates anything that you would have to say about it.

I know. I got super excited about this article. I put it in, then I was like, ooh, there's a quiz. Dave and Jason and I can all take it and we'll figure it out. And then I was like, oh, it's Myers-Briggs. This is bullshit. Yeah. Too bad. Oh, well. Well, I am looking forward to the fall because Jon Stewart is coming back and they have a title for the show now.

It's called The Problem with Jon Stewart. The problem with Jon Stewart, I will tell you, is that he went off the air for like a decade and he should have been here through the Trump years. We missed him. We missed him dearly. I'm sure he was happy not to be, but. Yeah, he was happy. He was doing documentaries and things like that and doing whatever, taking money baths and other things that one does when one doesn't work and it has that much money.

I think you're going to have a problem with the problem with Jon Stewart because from the get-go and from the description, this sounds like it's going to be Jon Oliver sadness porn. Yeah, it kind of does. It kind of does. But we'll see. Maybe they'll turn it around because he is a comic. So. So is Jon Oliver.

Yeah, it was. Jon was. Maybe this vacation that Jon Stewart has taken will, you know, lighten him up a bit. I tend to doubt it, though. Give him to, left to his own devices, Jon gets sad. Yes, he does. So Mortal Kombat comes out also on HBO Max.

This is the HBO Max show this week. It comes out on Friday. And I saw this over at Slate, an interview with the guy who yells Mortal Kombat in the theme for Mortal Kombat. And I filed this immediately into, I know not what the, I know these are words, but I do not know what they mean. Yes, Mortal Kombat, one of my favorite video games of all time that I've been playing for decades now.

But I'm looking forward to the movie because anything is better than the old movies. So knock on wood, I just probably ruined the movie right there. Crumpy old geek's curse. Sorry. But if you are a fan of Mortal Kombat from the old days, this is a good read. Highly recommend checking it out.

All right. And in the music world, Turntable FM came back for a little while and might be coming back. Were you ever a Turntable FM fan? Nope. Okay. That's surprising. That's surprising. I like to DJ for one, me, and don't like hearing other people's selections that much.

Okay. Okay. I get it. I think it was cool, but it just wasn't my thing. Yeah. Back in the old days, a friend of the show, Fogarty, was on there all the time trying to get me to come in and listen to his room. And I'm like, no, I'm kind of on team Brian. I'm like, I like to listen to my own stuff when I want to listen to my own stuff.

Yes. I curate for myself. Yep. I did watch a show on Netflix called The Serpent. It was an eight-part miniseries about basically kind of a serial killer back in the 70s who killed a bunch of young hippie travelers all over the world. This is a true story.

And if you want to get truly angry, I mean, like just soul-crushingly angry at the justice system around the world, then watch this. And I mean, it's mind-boggling how bad the French were in this entire story and the United Nations, actually, near the end.

But it was good up until the end when I found out what actually happened to this guy. And it's just like, yeah, no justice is out there for some of these people. It's like, ugh, drives you nuts. And I watched The Nevers. Did you? Did you?

Again, on HBO Max. So, again, as I've been watching a lot of HBO Max as well, I've literally been carpet bombed by commercials for The Nevers, which looks like Downton Abbey meets The Avengers. Meets Buffy. Okay. You've got to throw in some Buffy in there, because this is by Joss Whedon, who has been canceled already.

Canceled, right. But it is written, directed, and executive produced by Joss Whedon. The first episode, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Really? Yeah. Worth a watch? I totally dug it, yeah. All right. Yeah, there's even some boobs. Jackpot. The Venn diagram of Jason's watchability.

Exactly. That's kind of it. We got, there's no superheroes, but there's kind of Victorian-powered people, I guess. Okay. It's interesting. It's definitely worth watching for the first episode. I'm looking forward to the second one.

It was a nice change of pace. Okay. Excellent. Well, we've had an awful lot of Star Trek news as far as TV goes, but we haven't had much movie news. There had been a, the last, well, let's just say the Star Trek movie universe has not been going terribly well.

It petered out, yeah. It petered out, and basically we had heard that that was kind of it, especially after the actor that played Chekhov tragically died. And I think we had all made our peace with that. Okay, fine. No more Star Trek movies for a while. Let's focus on the TV shows, and eventually that'll spin off into something that'll become the new movie universe again.

Fine. Unfortunately, they've decided, no, we're going to give you another one of something that you don't really want. Well, I mean, I think what it really, like, boiled down to is, yeah, Chekhov died, but they were kind of done with the Chris Pine line, you know? So they were, I think they were just done, like, they were blocking that one off until they came up with this.

I thought that they were always going to come back to movies. I mean, it's Star Trek. Kind of gotta, at some point. Yeah, but this is going to be the Chris Pine people. It is the same people? The same cast? That's the thing. Okay, I missed that. That's what I was, okay. That's why I had the whole preface about we were okay with it, and eventually they'd come back with something else, and those would be the movies.

But no, they are bringing everybody, we get one more of something we don't want. Okay, well, I mean, I like the Chris Pine crew. That's not, I don't have a problem with that. It's the story. The third one was... Like, they went to this whole trouble of creating a splinter universe, and then it was all just so fucking boring after that.

I mean, I don't know. I liked one and two. I really did. Number three, I fell asleep in the movie theater. I literally fell asleep in the theater watching that, in an IMAX theater. So, but okay, well, we'll see how it goes. Like I said, I don't mind the whole Chris Pine team, and I like him as Kirk. I thought they were a good team.

It's just they need a freaking writer. It was definitely a good cast. Yeah, they just need a writer. Exactly. And I just threw this in because I thought it was funny. Spotify has now deleted 42 episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience. Oh, the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Exactly. But one of the new missing episodes is episode 149, which featured several comedians, including Al Madrigal, Brian Redman, and your friend Felicia Michaels.

What did she say, Brian? What did she do? I didn't listen to it, so I don't know. You can't listen to it now. I'll write her. Yeah. I'll see if there was anything particularly controversial. Cops and doodads. At a special look inside Disney Parks press conference, as they're starting to ramp up to, say, reopen said parks, Disney has reportedly shown off a working lightsaber.

That is false. That is not what they did, which is right in the next paragraph. Basically, he said to have pulled the lightsaber out of a small box and stated it's real. They have not released any pictures. They have not released any movies. They have not actually turned it on in the press conference.

But they're saying, and I think this is a horrible PR move, because now every geek in the world thinks they're going to be getting a working lightsaber, and whatever they actually end up giving us is bound to disappoint. They should have just shown it immediately. Yeah. That was really dumb. And it's not real.

It's not real. It's a stick inside of a tube. Well, they're not going to sell something to kids that cuts through fucking walls. You know? Of course it's not real. It's supposed to be retractable. Yeah, it's just basically a stick in a tube that they figured out how to make go up and down.

Which could be extremely cool, and they should have shown it right away. But now I'm going to have months of thinking I'm going to get a real fucking lightsaber. Bad, bad PR for Disney. Yeah. Did you look at the patent application, though? Yeah, I did. Looks cool. You can pretty much figure out how it works.

But yeah, it's going to be cool. But here's the thing, it's definitely not going to be, you know, like the big plastic ones you have now, you can whack the crap out of each other with those. I have a feeling this thing is going to, it's going to go whoosh, it's going to light up, it's going to be really cool, and it's going to break in about two seconds when the first kid that gets it whacks his dad with it, and then it gets broken in half.

And that might very well be me. Yep. And there's 300 bucks down the crapper right there. Yeah, and speaking of money down the crapper, Logitech is done making Harmony remotes. You were a fan of these, right? I, well, I don't personally have one. I was a huge fan of them for my parents. Okay, that's what it was.

I was able to program everything so they could do basically one button touches to turn all, you know, turn on the sound, and then turn on the TV, and then switch it over to the Netflix, and the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was perfect for that. It was the ultimate, like, parent remote, if you could sit there and program it all. So it's a bummer.

They're getting rid of it. They are not going to continue making them, but they say they will continue to support them for as long as customers are still using them, which is, you know, a load of crap. That never happens. Well, actually, I heard something about that, and the reason they're going to keep doing that, Logitech was heavy in with the AV guys, like professional audiovisual guys, who they would have contract to, you know, build in-home studios for people.

So they don't want to piss those people off because they still have relationships with them. So that's why they're going to keep that program going. And it's just keeping a database updated, so I don't think it's going to be, you know, that much work for them. But that was, that's one of the reasons I heard that they're definitely going to keep that going for quite some time.

Yeah. Well, good, good. They were good products. I'm sad to see it go. And there really aren't that many people making these kind of universal remotes anymore, which is unfortunate because it can be pretty handy, again, for parents or for super complicated setups like home studios or home theaters and all that. So it's a bit sad. And I'm not the only person that feels this way because I was looking around online and people were talking about it.

Prices for these things have skyrocketed. Oh, I'm sure. Because people are buying them to keep backups in case, you know, their one dies and all that sort of stuff. Like, they're going for like five, six hundred bucks now, which is crazy. Jeepers, jeepers, jeepers. I'm like, maybe I should go over to my mom's and just teach her how to use the other remotes.

Exactly and sell that one. Buy her a simpler TV, maybe. Yeah. Speaking of remotes, Roku has come out with a new remote, which I really like. It's basically an upgrade to their voice remote, the Voice Remote Pro.

Okay. So that's the thing about all this stuff is like everything is, you know, moving to voice. So you can just yell at your remote and say, like, you know, it's almost like when we were kids. My grandfather would say, Channel 7, and I would have to get up and I would walk to the TV and I'd turn it to Channel 7.

I would sit back down. He's like, Channel 53. I'm going to get up, move it. So he did have voice control back in the day. And this is basically the same thing. So, yeah. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. I'm a Roku household, so I'm kind of looking forward to getting one of these because I had one, but the batteries melted in it and it died.

But the new, unfortunately, is rechargeable. So I can just plug it in and let her rip. But it's nice. They're nice because you can, there's two reasons that it's nice. One, yeah, the voice control is cool, but also they come with a headphone port. So you can just basically plug your headphones into it if you're sitting in bed and just want to listen to the TV without having to go all the way to the TV and run cables or have wireless headphones, which suck, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. Because they still have the same. Well, Amazon has their box that they use to control the TV as well. And actually, it does work pretty well. The problem is we put the kibosh on it. It is not allowed in our household because I don't want my kid to start to be able to control everything.

Oh, yeah. That was the fire cube, right? Yeah. So the fire cube. It works great. But the last thing in the world is I want my kid to be able to turn on the TV whenever he wants or I'm in the middle of watching a baseball game and he'll just start yelling at it to switch over to Paw Patrol. Yeah. Porn, porn, porn, Danny, play porn.

He's a bit young for that. But time goes by fast, my friend. It does. It does. It does. I'm going to have to look into parental blocks pretty soon. Fun times. Jared wrote in, I was hoping to get y'all's opinion on what iPad my wife should get. She is a teacher and the plan is to replace her laptop with an iPad.

Would y'all suggest she get the iPad Pro or the normal iPad? I'm not 100% sure how much better the Pro is. I've used a normal iPad for years and it served me well. She's going to be using it for lesson plans, teaching videos, email, etc. I plan on getting her a keyboard case, dongles, VPN, PIA, since I have my own account.

Thank you all for that. And maybe the pencil. Opinions on which iPad she should get and should she get the pencil too? Thanks. I thought I'd toss this one to you, Jason, because my thought is you're a teacher. Have laptop. Yeah. Yeah, kind of. It's like with as much stuff as you want to do.

The iPad is great, but you are going to be hamstrung in many things. Like I mentioned before, when I got the magic case for my iPad Pro, I've got the 12.9. And it's fantastic. It is almost as good as a laptop. Almost.

But it's not a laptop. It's not a laptop. And it's going to run you basically a ton of money. If you are going to go iPad, I always recommend getting the iPad Pros. They have a longer shelf life. Although right now there's a big problem. They're supposed to have new ones coming out soon, but the chip shortage has put the kibosh on that.

So we don't know when we're going to get the new Pros. So it might be worthwhile to hold off for now. And I got to say, the best laptop I think I've ever had is the M1 Air. I have that thing loaded up and it is faster than my 16-inch, $4,000 MacBook Pro, which drives me crazy.

It's tiny. It is actually lighter than my iPad Pro and the Magic case. The one thing I do have to say, though, is if you do get an iPad Pro, anything that supports the Apple Pencil 2, absolutely get one. The Pencil 2 is just awesome. I love that thing so much.

But yeah, I mean, it's tough right now just because you can't get the new iPads that are supposed to be coming out. But if you don't need it right away, then just hold off and wait for the cycle to finish to see if they come out soon because WWDC is coming up soon. So they might have some announcements around then.

But if all else fails, man, I got to say the Airs are awesome. They're just flat out awesome. Yeah. I mean, I just think especially with the current climate, with the teaching at home, with all the stuff that your wife probably has to do that she never had to do before, you're going to want an actual laptop.

Yeah. I don't think that you're going to want to switch to an iPad at this point. Like Jason said, they're great. I even tried to make the switch at one point to working almost exclusively off an iPad and I just couldn't do it. I like my laptop and the flexibility and the ability to do anything, which you're 90% there with an iPad, but that 10% could be a problem.

Yeah. And I mean, the hybrid solution, I think, is what works for me. I've got the laptops for when I need laptop-y stuff and I have the iPad for when I can do iPad-y stuff, you know, having both is really just the best way to go. But if that's, you know, cost prohibitive, I understand.

But, you know, maybe an Air and a cheaper iPad, just get one of the normal iPads. By the way, all IT departments now need to put laptop-y stuff on their business cards. Laptop-y stuff. That's what they do. We do laptop-y stuff. So I saw this and I thought this was just too much fun.

Flume, which I always thought, I thought that was like an early cryptocurrency with Whoopi Goldberg for some reason when I heard the word Flume. I remember, wasn't Flume one of the early Instagram apps, third-party Instagram apps? Yeah, there's that. It's spelled differently though, I think.

Yeah, and it doesn't work anymore. I paid for the premium and then the guy just absconded with my money. It doesn't work anymore. Jerk. Oh, pro tip, by the way, if you do need to use Instagram from your laptop and you don't have Flume and it doesn't work anymore, most browsers now, you can go set it to, set the user agent to mobile and then you get the full-on mobile experience on Instagram so you can upload directly from your web browser on your laptop.

So, pro tip there. Completely off topic. Should be why Flume isn't around anymore. Yeah, exactly. Completely off topic for what I was getting to is the Google Flume, which is just basically a little Android toy that you can basically point at the ground and it will show you what is on the other side of the earth from you. I thought that was fun.

It's neat. It is neat. I'm with you. It's neat. Yeah, I was tempted to dust off the old Android phone if I can find it and pop it on there to see how it works, but that would require work. That's not going to happen. Android-y stuff. Android-y stuff. I was on Instagram this week and I saw an ad for Doodly.

Doodly-doodly-doo. And I thought this was the stupidest thing I ever saw, so I had to put it in here. Well, now that I've clicked on the link, I'm sure I will only be seeing ads for this for a while now, too. So, thanks. Yeah, basically, you know, if you're doing those videos of hand-drawing sketches that you see people do, well, this is basically fake hands that pretend to do the drawing.

You do the drawing and it follows a path and makes the hand look like it's actually doing the drawing. I don't know why I thought this was funny. It's so stupid. I'm just going to say, at this point in time in the world's history and society, and particularly in the tech industry, if your byline is whatever it is, here it is, Doodly is the first and only software, there's probably a reason you're the only one.

Yeah. Nobody needs this. I know. I know. I mean, do you really need the hand? No. Do you really need the hand? No. No, you don't. It's just fucked up. And Barrett sent in this link. The FCC wants you to test your internet speeds with its new app.

Now that the FCC is no longer run by an evil idiot, I'm okay with this. They basically want you to use their version of Ookla. I don't know why they just don't license the data from them. Yeah. To run a speed test so they can collect a map to see where they need to help out with increasing high broadband situations.

Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I will get it and I will probably use it. Just to throw my data in there. We like the FCC right now. Temporarily. Temporarily. Yeah. And Morton also wrote in, if you're tired of all the drones around, you'll probably want the Skywall Patrol drone gun. The process can be automated too.

Link in the show notes. It's a gun. It's a net gun. It's what we always said. Yep. It's a t-shirt gun with a net. If you're too lazy to train eagles. Exactly. It is a t-shirt gun with a net in it, which is what we said how many years ago that just somebody finally kickstarted it and made it work.

Yep. This was my last one and it's fun. Google Photos will now let you copy text out of a photo and put it in text and take it out of Google Photos. I did this the other day. That's kind of cool. Dude, it's great.

I had some stuff that had some notes on it and it said, would copy text. I'm like, what? So I click on it and then I did this before and then I saw an article over at The Verge that was talking about it. So the link will be in the show notes. But yeah, if you have your stuff in Google Photos in the browser, you can go find your photos, click on it, hit copy text and it'll pop it out for you.

It is so cool. It's, you know, like Evernote used to be able to do that, but you could only search for it. It wouldn't let you copy it out. That was the big problem with Evernote. That's one of the many millions of problems with Evernote. Yeah. What happened to those guys? They tanked pretty bad.

But yeah. I'm sure they're still around. Some people just, they're crazy for it. They put their whole life in it. So yeah. All seven people probably not keeping it afloat, but yeah, definitely check this out. If you use Google Photos, it's pretty cool. I listened to a short story this week called Saturn's Monsters over at Audible, and it's a freebie, which I'm glad for because it wasn't that great.

It's a short story by Thomas Carpenter, who I'd never heard of before. So it's, yes, three and a half hours. If you are an Audible subscriber, you can get it for free. I just don't think it was all that good.

So your mileage may vary. And then I got, consider this, Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different by Chuck Palahniuk. This was a great book. Fight Club came out. End of book. This was a great book. I thoroughly enjoyed this one because I like Chuck quite a bit.

Not so much as books. Books kind of, I still have nightmares about most of his books. Yeah, I was about to say, since we've been talking about like John Oliver and the sadness porn, like I really was into him at a certain point in my life. I find his books very difficult to read now.

Oh, I can't. There's no way. Because I know what he does. I know his shtick. But this is a book on writing, basically. So it's a book on writing and creativity. And those I like. You know, I like those a lot. So this book was really good for that. And it's not too long. It was...

That's cool. Yeah. My gold standard for those types of books is the Stephen King one on writing. This is up there. This is up there with it. Yeah, this is definitely my... It's right after on writing. I think this is knocked bird by bird out of the number two spot on books on writing that I love. Cool. And we're getting a new book by Neil Stevenson.

Great. Termination Shock. Now, I saw this as I was browsing through Amazon. And I appreciate the ability to pre-order a book, but not, oh, I don't know, almost an entire year ahead of time. Hey, man, he's doing better than William Gibson. William Gibson's last book, we had 18 months of pre-order time.

That's true. That's true. So I'm looking forward to this. This one seems to be a standalone, old school style, sci-fi sort of thing. I'm not going to have to brush off my old English to be able to understand anything and create a big old, you know, homeland style map of characters in my room.

So... Do you see how many pages it was? Oh, it's big. 897. That's okay. After his last couple novels, I'm like, I'm going to let you do this one, because I... Yeah, I did the last two first, and I'm not happy I did. I've liked his last few books. Yes, they're very long.

I'm convinced that his editor is blind. Oh, he doesn't have an editor. No, there is no editor. No, he definitely doesn't. No, you read the Dodo book and you liked it? He has an ejector, not an editor. You like that Dodo book? No, not the Dodo one, but the other ones. Okay. Everything else he's put out. The Dodo one was a co-author, so I can't entirely blame him.

Security? Ha! And we're back with Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast, co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy and surveillance and privacy.

And finally, he's the co-host of Recorded Future, where he takes you inside the world of cyber threat intelligence. Welcome, Dave. Thank you. Good to be back. So, a little breaking news real quick here. I saw this, and listeners of the show, long-time listeners will know that I had a period where I was into the White Claw.

It's so basic. I'm not proud of it. I'm not proud of that time in my life. It was a sad moment during the pandemic, and yes, it happened. It happened. I am man enough to say that I have gotten past it, and I no longer drink the White Claw, but I might now, because they just released, oh, God, White Claw Surge.

Oh, God. They really should have just called it White Claw Pandemic. Exactly. I think it would have done quite well. Yeah, COVID juice. Welcome to have some COVID juice. So, they made it more boozy. They threw in a little bit, 3% more alcohol, and they made it bigger.

So, it's now 16 ounces instead of... This is not what the world needed coming out of this. That's what we needed going into it, though. Well, it would have been helpful going into it, but I mean, there's a lot of talk about how we're heading towards a roaring 20s again, and boy, is this rocket fuel. Yep.

Yep. I've never had White Claw. What is it? The thing about them is they go down real easy. Real easy. Next thing you know, you start sitting at home watching a baseball game, drinking a few White Claws.

Next thing you know, your car is up on blocks. You're in Alabama. You've lost a few teeth. And friends. Yeah. See, that's how I see Bud Light Lime being formulated for, chemically. In other words, it's designed to be consumed very quickly, very easily.

Oh, White Claw has mastered the formula. Okay. Yeah. It's quite pleasant, but it is very... You know, 23-year-old girls are going to die from this higher alcohol content. Yes. It sneaks up on you, basically?

It doesn't just sneak up on you. It smacks you over the... It is like a Looney Tunes cartoon. The anvil hits you. The anvil falls from the sky. Uh-huh. My frying pan. Yep. With your face imprinted in it. I see this as a feature, not a bug.

I do. Well, of course you do. Yes. I drink for effectiveness, not for pleasure. I am... It's just a more efficient version. The 8% alcohol content and the 16-ounce can is a recipe for some disasters that I'm sure are going to happen, but it is an effective marketing technique because now I'm going to have to try them.

Oh, me too. Absolutely. Yeah. I'll go pick up some. Yes. The new flavors are blood orange and cranberry. I love a good blood orange. Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, you're going to need it because... Welcome to Black Mirror. I saw Twitter's going just crazy right now.

Because there's a video circulating of the NYPD catching a villain and walking out of a building and out after they walk out, walks the robot dog from Boston Dynamics, all bedecked out in blue and black. And of course, everybody's saying, welcome to Black Mirror.

It's amazing the visceral response the brain and body give on seeing that. It's just something in us knows that that is wrong and not good. Yes. Yeah. And it's funny because the police who are walking along with it have their chests puffed out and are very proud of this little, to borrow a phrase, technological terror that they've developed here.

I saw a response to this where someone who I suppose knows about these sorts of things posted a picture of the, on the butt end of these little dogs, there's a little control panel and this guy said, second button from the left. That's the one that just puts it in, just totally disables it.

So if you come across one of these things, press the second button on the left. And run like hell. Whilst it rips your arm out of its socket. Yeah. Yeah. That's what he said. Press the second button on the left, flip it over, tear out the battery and run away. Now, I have to ask Dave, the person who gave you this advice, is he a really good friend of yours or somebody who might just wanted to punk you?

Because, you know, you could go into... Just, look, came by on the Twitter feed, so it must be true. That's all I know. So that button might just be for Berserker mode. It might be the self-destruct button for all I know. True. I don't know. But, yeah.

To borrow a story from another segment of the show, maybe it's the open butthole button. There you go. Why? What I want to know is why. Why does the NYPD need a robot dog? Why... Why have police departments scaled up and bought military equipment over the years?

Because they're dudes. They knock back their white claws and think this shit looks awesome. Oh, by the way, the new white claw surge is in NYPD blue. So, you're all set. They are warrior cops. Yeah, you know, I'm no fan of the defund the police movement, but I do think that we should demilitarize the police.

So, that's where I am at. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, we certainly don't want to arm them with freaking robots. I'm sorry. Although, we might have a better track record than the actual meat police right now. Yeah, the robot dog takes off the body camera, too. That's true. Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's been an interesting week in cybersecurity, to say the least. I want to start off with this story that you guys have probably heard of. There was another incident at the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran.

This place is famous for being the location of the Stuxnet attack way back when, where the... Oh, what do you call them? Where we ushered in the wonderful world of cyber warfare. That's right. That's right. The centrifuges.

Yes. Yes, they spun them. The centrifuges were disabled and damaged. And there's been another incident there right after Iran spun up their shiny new centrifuges that they claim are being used to enrich uranium for electricity, for power plants, and many other people in the world believe are part of a nuclear weapons program.

Not long after they spun them up, they had what is being described as a power outage by some. And reports are that it caused damage to their new centrifuges. There's a lot of speculation right now.

Not sure if it was a cyber attack. Not sure if it was a physical attack. Could have been a bomb. Right now, the reporting seems to come down on that it was a cyber attack that caused physical damage, much like Stuxnet did. Is there a possibility that Stuxnet is a ghost in the machine?

I doubt it. That they may not have cleared out all the traces? I doubt it. Yeah. I doubt it. Stuxnet was built specifically for that model and that generation of centrifuges. These are new centrifuges, so probably not. But it would be a great story if it was. Right.

Somebody, what's this button do? So the Israelis sort of have unofficially, officially taken credit for this. The Israeli media is saying that, yeah, it was probably us, but it's all sort of cloak and dagger at this point and lots of speculation.

The Iranians, of course, have vowed swift and significant retribution against the Israelis and that they should be looking over their shoulders. So good times. Probably could see – who knows what sort of escalation we'll see here, but I don't know.

I wouldn't be in the centrifuge business if I were a neighboring nation to Israel at this point. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean – Fucked in Israelis. I was going to say, you know, the Israelis basically, they're always looking over their shoulders, so not much of a change for them there.

Exactly. They're like, yeah. Yeah. It must be Tuesday. Right. They have a big target on their map. Yeah, that they do. So that's a scary thought because this stuff can escalate pretty quickly. Yeah. And from – I remember reading in that book, which I can't remember – this is how the world ends, I believe.

Mm-hmm. You know, containment on these sorts of cyber tools and cyber attacks is not guaranteed. You have to work very, very hard to try to contain things to just what you want to hit. Yeah. Just look at not pet you. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean this, I think, is all indications and, you know, we've been hearing from tipsters about what it probably is, what it could be, what it definitely wasn't and all that sort of thing. It seems to be a targeted, contained kind of thing. Like, you know, they were going after this one thing and that's what the one thing they went after.

And, of course, a system like this would be isolated. But you're right. I mean they didn't intend for not pet you to make its way around the world and it did. So I suppose we may be lucky in that measure. It's been a while, but didn't Stuxnet get out too? I don't recall that.

I don't recall that. I remember it did go past where they thought it would, but they were able to basically defang it from what I remember correctly in the book. Yeah. I couldn't get wrong about that. I did think it wasn't a big deal that it got out because it was so specific to Natanz. But, yeah, but I do believe it did get out of the building.

Yeah. I am recalling some of that now. It was like it was designed so you would have had to have basically the exact same setup. You had to have the same centrifuges, the same number of centrifuges, the same ones online at the same time. Yeah, the controllers and all that stuff. I'm holding a copy of Countdown to Zero Day, which is Kim Zetter's book about Stuxnet.

It's kind of the go-to book on Stuxnet. So if you want to read up on that, that's the one I would highly recommend. It's a good read. And I guess, Dave, you don't get to turn your phone off this weekend. I do not. No, I do not. I do not.

No. I mean, although we're not really in the breaking news beat, so it's not like I have to rush to the studio and report on breaking news. But I do have to keep up on things. So, yeah, there's that. Yep. Well, in this week in Breach Fatigue, we've got LinkedIn is now in the news with data from 500 million users.

Yay. All right. Now I can get all the data from all the headhunters that keep writing me that have nothing to do with anything that I've ever done in my entire life, career-wise. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah, 500 million users from Scraped Data. Yeah. Standing par for the course.

Yep. Yep. You know, I've never been reached – I've never been contacted by any headhunter via LinkedIn, which I suppose there's not a whole lot of demand for full-time professional podcasters. No shit. Jason, have you ever been – have you – yeah, exactly. I mean, it's not like I'm a security engineer or anything.

But, Jason, have anyone ever reached out to you on the podcasting front? Not on the podcasting front. When I was a programmer, I got hit up all the time. Yeah. Yeah, the ones that really wanted me, which I'm kind of glad I didn't take at this point, the Yahoo homepage team wanted me for like two years.

They kept hitting me every week. I'm like, I don't want to do the Yahoo homepage because I know people at Yahoo and they're miserable. So, thank you. Yeah. But, yeah, even since then, since I have programming in my history, they still think I'm a programmer even though I retired almost a decade ago.

I see. People don't actually read your resume. They look for the liner notes and say, oh, well, programmer, let's talk to him. Right. But podcasting, which is front and center, nada. I suppose it's a – I mean it's a backhanded compliment in a way that we don't have to deal with that.

But it shows you the respect we have in the wider world, right? I'd kind of like to deal with that. I really would. You want to have a little bidding war going on for your services? Exactly. I could use that right about now. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. But speaking of voice services, Clubhouse has also been scraped for 1.3 million users, which is probably everybody at this point.

Didn't take long. Didn't take that long. Well, you know, you're front and center in the news. Yeah. You're bored at home as a hacker. What are you going to do? Well, and I think a lot of these breaches, like the Facebook breach that we talked about last week.

There's a good article over at Wired called What Really Costs Facebook's 500 Million User Data Leak. And what's really funny is the paragraph that I put in here. It's like one source of the confusion was that Facebook has had any number of breaches and exposures from which this data could have originated. And it's like, oh, yeah, which one was it?

And what's clever about it is what this one is seemingly being attributed to was somebody basically creating an address book with every phone number in it, which is smart. That's, you know, and I didn't even think about that. I don't know why, because I figured I guess people would, I don't know, program around that.

You know, if somebody has over like, you know, a thousand contacts, maybe, I don't know, flag it. But I guess you could do that. And that's probably what happened over at Clubhouse, too, since everything is tied to your address book. Yeah, that's an interesting approach.

I hadn't thought about that. And I wonder, I mean, it kind of, it feeds on a cultural vulnerability that Facebook has, which is more data is better. So you can see how they might not have a prohibition against really large phone books, right? They would say, ooh, ah, ooh, bigger is better.

This is great for us. But that's interesting. The set of every phone number. Hmm, I'll have to think about that. I did hear that the Clubhouse one, they're claiming it was just, anybody could do it through their API, that it wasn't.

Oh. Because these are scraping things, not actual hacks or breaches. Ah, so it's a feature. Publicly facing. Yeah, it's a feature. In a way. In a way. Yeah. In a way. It's not an unintended functionality, I suppose.

Right. Well, in other interesting news, we had, the feds have charged a man with planning to blow up an Amazon data center. Now, they are also in the news. Big, big thing, big targets. And people are now apparently trying to go after them. He was trying to blow up the one in Virginia.

And that was a Texas resident who headed over that way. That's the big one, too. He probably didn't have to go quite so far. But, yeah, he wanted to kill the internet and the federal institutions that he believed were part of the Ogliarchie in the U.S. So, what better way to do that? As we were just talking about a little bit earlier in the show, there's not too many places you can go to host things now.

So, this is an unintended consequence of the consolidation of the industry. Mm-hmm. Yeah, he claimed that he wanted to take 70% of the internet down, and he thought by blowing up this data center, he would achieve that.

He'd be pretty close, actually. When that data center went down before, I mean, everything goes down. That's one of the main AWS data centers. I mean, there was a big storm that happened a couple years ago, and that's, you know, this was years ago. That's when Netflix went down for a long time.

Our internet is not as robust as it once was. But, Brian, it's in the cloud. It's interesting. Yeah, but all the clouds are in one place. Well, remember there was – over in Europe, there was that fire in a data center a couple weeks ago.

And I think most people think that if you put something in the cloud, that that means it's automatically distributed around the world and backup copies are made and it's – and all that. And I think to a certain degree, that is true. I wonder why people would think that. Could it be their marketing?

Could it be because they tell us that that's what happens? Right, but I'm curious. What I have not seen any reports on is what would actually happen if that data center were to be taken offline at this point.

And they could be. They're not saying that because it would be a bad thing. It would be extremely bad, yes. Yeah. Allegedly, this guy was – wait for it – at the Capitol riot on the 6th. Surprise, surprise, surprise. Have we not picked up all these guys yet? Well, we did now.

No, I'm – well, one more down. Yeah, I've been seeing lots of the pictures of the FBI still looking for folks to ID pictures. This guy was caught because he tried to buy some C4 explosive and he ended up trying to buy it from an FBI undercover person.

So he went and he bought the explosive and the FBI person demonstrated for him how to use it, how to wire it up, how to detonate it. And then when he went to drive away with it, they arrested him. It would have been better if they actually gave him some C4 and just blew it up. What's he?

I'm going to stand over here. You just stay right there. Justice has been served. I am the law. When I say go, press this red button. Yeah. Yeah. So it's scary stuff. I mean domestic terrorism, it's a real thing and this demonstrates – I mean think how lucky we were that this Yahoo, who I'm sure is a fine gentleman and whose family loves him very much, didn't get away with this.

This Yahoo was just looking for answers. Right. Right. Damn. To him. No, the domestic terrorism is serious. I saw somebody was posting it on Facebook. There's a chart of the rise of domestic terrorism and how it's skyrocketed in the last 10 years.

It's – we got some problems here in our country. Yeah. Go figure. They're mostly middle-aged white guys. Oh, wait. They're all middle-aged white guys and every now and again, they're mom. Well, there you have it. Well, this last story here for this week I put in here, evidently there's a problem in the Netherlands where Dutch supermarkets are running out of cheese.

Now, this is worrisome. Now, you know, you can try to blow up my AWS center, but do not fuck with my Gouda. Yeah, exactly. We were – I mean it was bad enough that we were out of toilet paper for a while at the outset of COVID.

But no, evidently they're running out of cheese because a distribution company, Bakker Logistik, got hit by ransomware and so they were unable to fulfill their deliveries. They couldn't receive orders. They couldn't send things out.

And so the cupboards are bare. The shelves are empty. There is no cheese to be had. Lots of people going around the Netherlands saying it's not much of a cheese shop, is it? I was thinking about Wallace and Gromit and poor Wallace not having any cheese.

But yeah, this is when you – I mean come on. Is the humanity, is there no – Yes, oh, the humanity. Attacking hospitals and – right. But no, your cheese supply, that's a bridge too far. Did you know that we as a country have a strategic cheese reserve? Yes, we do.

You know, I did know that. I did know that. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. Government cheese. Yeah. See, this is what happens when lactose intolerant bandits get a hold of ransomware. Actually, you know, I saw not long ago – I can't remember if we talked about this, but I have a little – I like to watch – oh, I'm going to so regret admitting this.

I like to watch – I like to watch videos of people exploring abandoned mines. And there was – like in the old west and things.

There are old gold mines and things like that. And some of them are fascinating. And there was one I saw recently where they went in a mine and the mine was full of provisions that had been tucked away in this mine by the government in case of a nuclear war. And they were still in there.

There were still tins full of crackers and cheese and water. And in the days when nuclear war was a possibility, that was something the government was doing. And I thought that was fascinating. And I cannot believe that I actually learned something this week that ties in directly with that, which is just shocking to me because I did not expect to talk about mines.

But I did hear that there is a father-son duo who go around exploring mines to try to find old pairs of jeans. Oh, yes. Because jeans were initially made for miners and they often took extra pairs down with them or if there was a leak or something, they would tie their jeans around the pipes because they were great material for it.

And there's all these, like, 100-year-old pairs of jeans down in these shafts that are worth incredibly large amounts of money. Crazy. It's true. On today's mine talk. Every now and then they come across clothing. They come across old newspapers. No, and miners' graffiti. You know, there's stuff.

Now, if you really want the old mines, you've got to go to Europe because they've got some history that goes back farther than 200 years. So, yeah. So next week on mine talk. Now, it's interesting.

It's fun. I just find it fascinating, I guess, because I'm the kid who, you know, when I was, I don't know, 10 years old, I used to crawl around in all of the drainage pipes in the neighborhood. So I could get from one side of the neighborhood to the other without anybody seeing me. I don't know.

I'm weird that way. I would love to read an autobiography, Dave. From crawling around in shafts to music man to cybersecurity expert extraordinaire, the story of Bittner. Yeah. The true fur.

I've lived an interesting life so far and done many things, tried many things. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe someday. And finally, Ken wrote in and he said, in a recent episode, he discussed the practice of snatching and ransoming domain names.

An example just happened to get mentioned in the Hacker newsletter today. This is good for a chuckle. And as you are probably aware, we're getting a Space Jam 2 because one was not enough. And they did not secure the domain name rights, unfortunately, and it is quite hilarious.

Mm-hmm. Yes. I'm tempted to buy some of this jam. This is one of the greatest things I've ever seen. It really, really is. If jam isn't your jam but still likes SpaceJam2.com, you can buy our website for a nominal fee.

Buy our website. We're looking at best offers with proceeds going to charity. If you'd rather deal with us directly, email us at blah, blah, blah. And you can add it to the cart for the tune of $1 million. Nice. Nice. Very good. Before we go, I want to give a shout-out to the Sticky Pickles podcast, which I was a guest on recently.

It's a podcast created by Carol Terrio, who is often a correspondent on some of our shows. She lives over in the UK. She's actually a Canadian living in the UK, cybersecurity expert herself. But she has a project called Sticky Pickles, and it's all about what happens if you get – find yourself in a sticky pickle, what would you do?

So I would call it Cringe Humor, and I was a guest on that show. So if that's your sort of thing, check it out. I'd like to see them get a little bump in their numbers. Very cool. I could have swore you said the host was Denny Terrio.

And I was like, oh, that dance thing is coming back. Yeah, yeah. Oh, boy. Again, like I said, I want to read that biography. Yeah, I got my solid gold dancer outfit on right now, the gold lame. It's lovely.

That poor man could not afford the top three buttons on any shirt. Or chest hair wax. Yeah. Good times, good times. All right, guys. That's what we got. Talk to you next time. Closing shout-outs.

Over at Patreon, we've got nobody. We've got crickets. Chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp. Just a quick reminder, if you do follow us over on Patreon, you do get the show early with no ads. Just saying. It's a plus. It is a plus. And in high definition, too. Make it even bigger.

Ooh. Listen to our dulcet tones. Over at PayPal, we've got Ralph, Mark, Michael, Sloan, Andrew, Miles, Linda, Natalie, Andrew, Breed, and Michael. Thank you all so much. Thank you. And no iTunes reviews this week, either. Nope. No iTunes reviews.

Sad Christmas. But what's also sad is the Arclight here in Los Angeles. And it's gone. They're not coming back. All Arclight theaters, all Pacific theaters. Yeah. They are gone. So we'll be stuck with AMC. You and I spent a memorable, felt like 24 hours at the Arclight once, watching the two extended versions of Lord of the Rings before the world premiere of the third one.

Yeah. I'll always remember that. Lots of, I saw a ton of movies at the Arclight Hollywood when I was younger. Oh, yeah. So sad to see it go. I lived like, you know, a quarter mile from there. So that was the go-to, especially when they opened the bar up at night and you could go and drink in the movies. Yes, the bar. It was the first theater I'd ever gotten boozed up at, legally, I might add.

Yeah, legally. Exactly. Exactly. Those Bloody Marys, man. We had so many Bloody Marys during that Lord of the Rings fest. So many bathroom runs. Yes. Oh, that will truly be missed. Truly be missed. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister.

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