504: Data Gone Bye

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. We had a week off. Wasn't that lovely? Spring break. The funny part about it is it was planned, but even if it wasn't planned, it was going to happen no matter what, which I will talk about more in security later on in the show.

You did a bitner with your machines, I understand. Oh, God. Well, I didn't exactly have the most fun break I spent. I was basically a pincushion because I had the time off. Well, I had planned on getting the shot anyways. I got my second vaccine, which knocked me on my butt for a day.

You had your second shot as well during the time off that we had. So we basically lost two days anyways. So it's probably for the best we took the week off. Yeah, no doubt. And I am coming up. May 1st is going to be my going out day because that is the day.

You're coming out of the closet, Jason? I am. I'm coming out of the closet and I'm going to the polo lounge. That's where I'm going. I've been inside for over a year and I am going to go have me some caviar and they have this amazing truffle eggs benedict. Oh, it is going to be glorious. It is going to be glorious. Reservations are made. That's all I got to say.

Nice. Very nice. My wife has planned a trip. I was expecting to spend a second COVID birthday, but my wife has planned a trip out to Ojai for my birthday mid-May and we will be dining and enjoying a night in a hotel room without a kid.

So that's going to be very fancy. Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's hoping. I'm a married man, so you take what you get. And yeah, so one of the first things I plan on doing just will be that, but I'll be fully vaccinated before that.

And I don't know if I'm ready to just sit in a bar yet, but I'll certainly go and sit outdoors at my old local and have a beer, which I'm very much looking forward to as soon as I'm at my 94% peak threshold. Exactly. That's why the polo lounge is perfect because it's outdoor dining.

Yeah. Very nice. I am fine with it. I don't know when I'm going to be comfortable doing indoor. I just don't. We'll see. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, California is doing very well at the moment. So, you know, but I'm a full supporter of the idea of doing COVID and vaccine passports. I would like to know that everybody at an establishment has been fully vaccinated in terms of not just guests, but people that work there. It'd be nice.

Yeah, it would be nice. But yeah, good luck. Good luck. Good luck with that. Yeah. Considering millions of people aren't even getting their second shot. What the hell, people?

I know. I know. That isn't the only prick I got during our break. I had filed my paperwork for Canadian residency nearly a year ago now, shortly after COVID started. I figured, well, I need to just get this done so we can get out of there. And typical, you know, bureaucracy everywhere. It just sat in an office for about six to seven months while people that had filed after me were getting their notifications that they had been approved or whatnot.

And a couple, about two weeks ago, they finally seemed to have found my application. They must have pushed the chair out of the way and found the crack that it fell into. And they started moving pretty quickly. So I got the, you need to go get your physical and get yourself tested and all that sort of stuff. So I went off and did that and I got the results from that today.

So it's kind of nice. Not that I had done anything that would have gotten me HIV in the last year or so. But I don't have HIV. So that's good. No tuberculosis. There's some comfort in the fact that, you know, they did a full like lung x-ray and all that sort of stuff. So no, I definitely never got COVID. My lungs are totally fine.

I'm not some long hauler that's going to be, you know, diminished breath oxygen capacity or anything. I feel somewhat comforted at going into this knowing I'm pretty damn healthy. So, you know, just hold on until next Wednesday when I'm at 94% and I might get out of this alive, Jason.

Maybe. Not sane, but alive. Yeah. Trust me, nobody gets out of anything alive. On a long enough timeline. I'm surprised that they make you go through all those hoops just to go to Canada. You know, that whole free healthcare thing. They don't want people coming with...

Good point. You know, they do look into these sorts of... I don't think... I don't... I'm not necessarily sure what exactly would stop you from coming in, but they do like to know pre-existing conditions. Huh. Interesting. Interesting. Well, in follow-up, we have a pre-existing condition.

And it's called being a douchebag. Yes. Yes. We talked about Travis Kalanick's new cloud kitchen startup on the previous episode and how he's just pissing off all the neighbors. Well, apparently he's pissing off all the employees too because everybody's hitting the road. Yeah. Hundreds of employees have left. Not just a few. Hundreds.

Dude cheetah. Dude cheetah. Same spots. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. That's, you know, like I said, pre-existing condition. He's a pre-existing douchebag. I like this headline where they talk about, it's ruled by a temple of bros. Worst Sisters of Mercy song ever.

Oh, man. And well, it turns out that they're not leaving cloud kitchen to go to Uber and Lyft because, yeah, still nobody's going back. Nobody's going back. Yeah. You know, I've seen an uptick in the Ubers and Lyfts driving around. I've seen some people getting into them, but nowhere near what it used to be.

Yeah. People are still staying at home. They kind of got the, you know, they got the Zoom bug. I'm not sure that they are in L.A. I've got to say, I've driven around. Traffic's pretty bad. Traffic's pretty bad. It's really bad. And you know what else is really bad?

Okay. So I live in Santa Monica. Venice is basically 50-50. People who are multimillionaires, 50% completely homeless. So I'm used to there being homeless around, sadly, and it's a problem and it's needed to be fixed in this area for a long time.

I drove a little bit. We went and had a socially distanced backyard visit with some friends out in the valley. And then I drove from the valley all the way down to Orange County to go see my mom, as I usually do on weekends. I haven't driven through that part of L.A. in such a long time.

I actually got upset. I don't know what the fuck our mayor has been doing. I don't know what's happening. There are tents along the entire freeway. Oh, yeah. In all of Los Angeles. Oh, dude, have you seen Sunset Boulevard? No. Oh, it's a tent city. Sunset Boulevard looks like Skid Row now.

It's ridiculous. It's just sad and disturbing. I can't wait to get the fuck out of the city. No, man. Yeah. Take a trip to Hollywood back in our old stomping grounds. It is tent city all the way down Sunset. It is like you see people getting out, like, you know, no shirt, brown and dirty and filthy, stretching pouring water over their head to start their day.

It's really – I mean, and definitely keep your windows rolled up. I'm just telling you. It stinks. But, Jason, if not for the grace of God, so be us. I mean, all these people, 99% of them were just one paycheck away and COVID happened and there is no safety net here.

Nope. Nope. But they are getting tiny houses now. I saw that. Yep. Tiny houses. And I saw this one in a little bit of follow-up as well. Toyota subsidiary acquires Lyft self-driving division for $550 million. Still 20 years away.

Yes. Yes. And another taxi company is dumping their self-driving car unit because maybe someone with a brain over there finally figured out that they're not going to figure it out. You know, you can hire a few scientists, but you're not going to do it. And, you know, I keep thinking about this and it's always been ridiculous and I've said it's ridiculous when Uber started their self-driving car division, which they ended up selling as well.

You know, this is like the stewardess union deciding they're going to put all their tips together and develop a supersonic jet as a side project. It's like it makes no sense. You're a taxi company and you want to build some of the most impressive tech ever made by the hand of man.

Go fuck yourself. It's ridiculous. And as I've said from day one, as soon as we started talking about autonomous vehicles, it's got to be all or nothing. You can't mix the two. You can't have Joe six-pack driving around drinking his six-pack with a bunch of automated vehicles. And we're going to have to do complete infrastructure renewal.

You're going to have to rebuild all the roads as we keep seeing with these things because if somebody slaps a stop sign sticker somewhere, your car is stopping. Yeah. And more than that very soon. And we did have a little bit of follow-up and I know you've been talking about this a bit on the Discord channel. But Jacob writes in, hey, Grumps, decided to try some chia mining with a five-gigabyte hard drive I had laying around.

Taking me a while to plot everything on it. But I was wondering how it's going for Jason. Also heading to San Diego next week and wondering if you guys have one place that I must visit while I'm there. Nowhere. Still in the pandemic. No, Jacob actually did go and it has opened up quite a bit down in San Diego and he's had a great time.

Actually had a great time. I hope he went to the zoo. That was my go-to. I said go to the zoo. Go to the zoo. Go see Stacy. Our friend Stacy. And he did a little clarification. It's not a five-gigabyte hard drive. It's a five-terabyte hard drive that he started with, which isn't going to get you a whole lot nowadays.

My current farm is at 27 terabytes. I've got 28 terabytes arrived yesterday. I just upgraded my Synology, which now has another 24 terabytes in it. There's a lot of hard drives around here, man.

You've become a bit bro. I am. I am. I am. I definitely am becoming a bit bro. Good luck. Well, I got a... I'm at 18 chia now. I'm at 18, so... Which means what? The futures markets are saying that it's going to debut between $1,000 and $8,000, which means it'll be 20 bucks.

All right. So I'm just... I mean, I need something to do. I'm fucking bored. You know? I'm just bored. So I'm like, I got hard drives. Why not? And then I kind of got a little... You know, went down the rabbit hole with it. And every single machine I have here in the house is plotting when I'm not using it.

And next Saturday, when you've gone to the polo club and you come back a little bit drunky-wonky, that's all going in the trash. No, it's not. No, it's not. Stop it. We'll talk about it later. In the news... We've got a new section, which I'm going to call this week on Elon Stop Fucking Around So The Stock Price Goes Back Up Corner.

That's going to be today. I'm personally waiting to buy a shit ton of Tesla stock after Saturday when it drops because of Saturday Night Live. Well, you can actually start today because it dropped 30 bucks this morning because, you know, the earnings announcements today. Right. But so the big news has been this Tesla crash where the law enforcement is saying...

Not the stock, mind you. No, no, no. Not the stock. The actual car crash that has law enforcement saying, yeah, nobody was driving this car. It must have been the autopilot. And Tesla coming back saying, it wasn't the autopilot. I guarantee it. Two reasons. His seatbelt was undone, which means the autopilot system wouldn't engage anyway.

Also, you know, the guy didn't pay for it. As we know, anything with subscription car services nowadays, you can't turn it on unless you pay for it, unless you get the subscription to the autopilot system, which is the new rub that has come out.

You know, they've been talking with the highway transportation safety guys, Tesla has. The cops took the SD card from the car so they don't have access to that. But, you know, Elon Musk is saying, guys, guys, he didn't pay for it. He didn't have it. Somebody was driving that car.

There's no other way for it to get where it was going. Well, that seems pretty straightforward then. I haven't really been following it because I know you put about 7,000 news stories in this article. I figured you'd tell me all about it. But, I mean, I was just thinking, how are they even arguing whether somebody was in the car or not?

Because I know with my BMW, if I just put my phone on the passenger seat, it starts dinging saying I need to put the seatbelt on. I know people want to claim that there's AI in everything, but my phone is not a person yet. No, it's not. And it certainly knows that the phone is sitting on the seat.

You're telling me they don't know if somebody was in this car or not? Bullshit. Brian, they do not have ass detection technology. They do not have ass detection technology. Well, my BMW has it. Get on it, Tesla. What they have is they can tell if you're gripping the wheel and if your seatbelt is clicked. But there is no ass detection technology.

And we know that because... That must be part of the subscription package that's coming. Yes, because Consumer Reports actually did trick the autopilot system into turning on by locking the seatbelt and putting some weights on the steering wheel and blah, blah, blah. Done. But there was no faux ass required.

And now, you and I have been talking for a long time about what they call their autopilot system and how words matter. Yes, they do. It should never be called autopilot because it just makes people idiots and think that they can do it. And Tesla has finally admitted that their full self-driving technology is only at level two.

Okay. Yeah. You know what that means? It means it's not an autopilot. It's not an autopilot because there are six levels of driving automation and they're only at two, which is partial automation. So they've basically just been lying to everybody and getting people confused. So hopefully somebody will change that.

I've got a link to the six levels of vehicle autonomy explained in the show notes. So you can check that out. It's at synopsis.com, which is a great URL. I got to give them that. And this is a fun one. Hyundai is investing in tele-operation startup Autopia as part of a $9 million round.

And now what this is, it's further proof that self-driving car AI is still just going to be people. Yes. They're just not going to be in the car with you. Great, great, great. What a brave, stupid new world. Oh, yes, yes, yes.

And over at Futurism, we've got an article about a Tesla that keeps slamming on the brakes when it sees a stop sign on a billboard. Now, I'm pretty sure if you go back to episode four of this show, I'm like, we're going to start a fashion line that just puts stop signs on everything. So when you're walking down the street, one of these self-driving cars will not run you over.

I wish I had a Tesla so I could, like, you know, play with it and see if I can make these shirts. But sadly, sadly, sadly, I don't. And of course, yes, in true Elon news, he's just going to host SNL because why the fuck not? Right. Well, I've got some Bitbro news for you, Jason.

So you may want to hold the chia horses a bit, be a little bit worried about it. Of course, who am I to talk as soon as I sold my Bitcoin a little while back and made a bit of money and then I decided to take that money and buy some Ethereum and Filecoin. So I'm in the Bitbro category with you these days.

But we need to be careful. Turkish prosecutors on Thursday launched an investigation after the Istanbul-based founder of a cryptocurrency exchange, Theodex, fled the country with a reported $2 billion in investors' assets. Nope. Nope. Yep.

They've released a photo of Theodex founder Farouk Fatih Ozer going through passport control at Istanbul Airport on his way to an unspecified location. No idea if they spotted the thumb drive containing your $2 billion or not on him. But there he went.

The exchange went dark after running a promotional campaign that sold Dogecoins at one-fourth the price at which they were trading on other exchanges. Remember that whole thing? If it's too good to be true, it is? Oh, yeah. There you go. So he basically said, we'll give you all these at one-fourth the price.

Just kidding. I'm taking your money and fucking off. Nice. Nice. And he didn't care if he was getting on camera because he's probably got a whole new identity now. He said, straight to the cosmetic surgeon and true Bond villain. Yeah. That's crazy.

$2 billion. Barrett said in a link with the caption here, Venmo introduces money laundering as a service. Yes. Venmo is getting on board because what's the Coinbase is the big one that went public and made a ton of money. Venmo is basically going to take the wind out of their sails and say, well, you could do crypto with us now as well, which is – they've got more than 70 million customers already on Venmo.

So it's – now the millennials can get in on the game pretty easy or I guess Gen Z. We've got to stop talking millennials. The time has marched on, Jason. I know. I know. When we started this show, everybody's like, you're not old. Now we are. Now we are. Yeah, we are. I just like it – Venmo is owned by PayPal and PayPal came out with crypto like a month ago now that you could buy by crypto through PayPal.

But I guess it's kind of like – oh, I guess it's the same thing as social networks. It's like, OK, nobody cares about Facebook anymore because all the old people are there. So nobody cares about PayPal because that's where the old people are. Everybody has to go to TikTok or Venmo in this case to get their crypto on.

Yeah, and the Bitcoin and crypto markets plummeted earlier this week as a U.S. Treasury rumor has spread, basically saying the U.S. Treasury may soon accuse a number of financial institutions of using digital assets to launder money. Of course, that's what they're for. Yeah. The popular Twitter account, FXHedge, was first to cover the potential move from the agency, sending an alert out to 1,000 – 122,000.

122,000. It's fucking early this morning. I'm out of practice. Followers and minutes after the tweet was published, the crypto markets plunged into deep red territory with Bitcoin dropping from 59,000 to a low of 52,800. It's since come quite a ways back up.

But if you think that the U.S. Treasury is not going to take moves against cryptocurrency, you are a self-driving car. See, that's why I like Chia because Chia is coming out of the gate with ties to – hoping to be able to use it with government agencies and things like that because we don't have this.

I mean, you know, I don't see the problem if the governments are able to get their grubby little fingers in there. As long as they know how much money you're making and how much they can tax you, they will be mostly okay with this. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. You know, here's the deal.

I'm just playing right now, so it's just fun. Some people who are not playing, good old Alphabet. We talked about this a while ago back in 2019 when Alphabet subsidiary Wing launched in Christiansburg, Virginia.

This was the test pilot for home delivery via drone through Wing. Now, it's been there for a while now, and there's like 22,000 people in the town. And they did a study, which, frankly, I was shocked when I saw this.

So, opinions on the idea of drone delivery. And it goes from like a great deal to dislike a great deal. Well, like a great deal is 53%. Like a moderate amount, 26%. Like a little, 8%. Neither like nor dislike, only 6%.

Dislike a little, only 1%. Dislike a moderate amount, 2%. And dislike a great deal, Brian percent. I mean, 4%. I'm not too surprised by this. I think it's, put this in an urban market and we'll see.

You know, run this pilot here in Santa Monica and you're going to get dislike 100%. Well, because it's going to interfere with everybody's selfie drones. Exactly. That's your problem there. How am I supposed to do my TikTok drone videos if I can't fly? Because Amazon's drones are flying all over the place.

Plus the noise and all that sort of thing. You know, this is novel for a town like that. They probably don't have Amazon trucks rolling up and down doing same day delivery. So, they're getting their burgers faster and whatever. And I can see this being, I can see the future of drone delivery going very well in rural areas.

I don't see it doing well in cities. So, not surprised. Well, I mean, let's see where they're at. Yeah, they're kind of, whoa, they're way in the middle of nowhere. Yes, I looked, Jason. Well, Roanoke's not too small. So, they're by Roanoke, Virginia.

In a total rarity, I actually did a little prep and research. I'll be damned. I know. Who are you? God, give you a couple days off and you actually show up and do work. Damn. And Vincent wrote in some Facebook news. Me getting Jason and Brian to curse more bitch, bitch, bitch.

And this is Facebook takes down the official page for a French town called Bichet. Mmm, Bichet. Bichet, spelled bitch with an E at the end. So, yeah, unsurprisingly, the Facebook AI obviously keeps taking down this page because it says bitch.

So, there you go. They have a new page named after the town's postcode, Marie57230, which just rolls off the tongue, as you can see. Yes. Tried to reach – and here's the only notable thing about this because this is the experience that we all have. I tried to reach out to Facebook in every possible way through different forms, but there's nothing I could do, she said, adding she had already had issues when I first created the page.

Yep. Well, that's Facebook for you. If something gets done, you cannot reach out to them. There's nothing to be done. There's nowhere to complain to. There is nothing that you can possibly do. And, of course, this spokesperson for Facebook confirmed to Sky News that the page was removed in error and has since been swiftly restored this morning when we became aware of the issue, God knows how.

Because it actually ended up in the news because it's funny. That's how they became aware of it. Yep. Yep. You need a PR agent for your Facebook complaints nowadays. If it's not on the local news, it didn't happen. Exactly. And the lesson of the day, kids, is do not fuck with Cloudflare.

I love this so much. Project Django is back. Now, a while ago, they had a patent troll sue them, right? Is The Rock in this one, too? I don't believe The Rock's in this one. All right. Well, that was Django.

Never mind. Oh, yeah. What was that? No. Jumanji. Jumanji. Oh, Jumanji. Sorry. Yeah. Django. I was thinking Django, the one with the blocks, but no. Or the Quentin Tarantino movie. Could be any of those. Either way. Or the new Mandalorian movie, Django Fett.

Yes, that's right. So anyway, back to the story. Back in 2017, they were sued by a patent troll called Blackbird Technologies. So what they did was they started Project Django that says, hey, let's crowdsource the destruction of these people. So they put up some money and said, hey, everybody in the world, go out and figure out where there's prior art on all of their patents.

And they did. They found prior art on 31 of the patents that Blackbird had that they were suing people over. So good on you, Cloudflare. Well, now they're getting sued again by another patent troll called Sable Networks. Another one again.

So they were just rolling out the cash and saying, hey, have Adam, have Adam, which is great. It's like they're not backing down. They're not they're not going to you know, they've got money. They don't have to do the the bend over and take it like Adam Carolla.

Anyway. Yeah. So there you have it. Don't fuck with Cloudflare. There you go.

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Media candy. So I had a couple of friends telling me I absolutely have to watch this movie Captain Fantastic. It's been out for a while. I didn't see it when it first came out. Really good. Is it fantastic? Yeah, well, it's really good.

I wouldn't say it's fantastic. Okay. It's got Viggo Mortensen and you know, he basically raises his family off the grid, but the wife gets cancer, spoiler alert, and he has to go back into regular society to go, you know, funeral and all that sort of stuff and how he basically comes to terms with maybe I went a little too far on the off the grid stuff.

Made me think of you a little bit. And because you used to dabble with such things. But I have never gone off the grid, Brian. I may have I may have close. The closest I got was deleting my Twitter account. Come on. You've never even been off Wi-Fi. I know. I know. But yeah, it was a good movie.

I really enjoyed it. So worth watching. And I should have caught it when it first came out. It was pretty good. And you and I have been texting a little bit about the news that Downton Abbey 2 will be hitting theaters in December with the original cast returning. Yes. So we're getting a new movie. And you and I had talked about, you know, the main reason that we watched it is what's the actress's name?

Maggie Smith. Maggie Smith. And you were like, well, it's not going to be the same since she's dead. Spoiler alert. No, she didn't die. I rewatched the entire series. We've been my wife has needed like early pandemic or early Trump years. She needed the West Wing to get through it.

Pandemic years. She needed Downton Abbey to get through it. So we watched the entire series. And last night we finished the first movie, Did Not Die. I thought her funeral was at the end of the first movie. No. What? Nope. You remember it incorrectly, Jason. Oh, my God.

She has a big talk with Mary about how she's, you know, she had some bad news and she's probably bad health news and she may not last long. She does not know how much longer she will last, but she did not die. So she will be back in the second movie. Oh, I swear to God, this is a Berenstain Bears moment.

I have been shazam. You might have read the script for Downton Abbey too, and that could be how this one ends. Oh, my God. I swear to God, in my head, there is a fucking funeral. Nope. Wow. Yep. Berenstain Bears. Total Berenstain Bears. I couldn't wait to tell you this morning.

Mandala effect in full effect. Wow. Okay. There you go. And I've got to say, having rewatched the series, I certainly did enjoy rewatching it. But what I really noticed is everybody is awful. Oh, they're a bunch of shit. They're awful people.

Yeah, they're a bunch of shit. Oh, my God. Yeah. Okay. Good times. Good times, indeed. So she'll be back, and yeah, we get to see her one more time, I'm sure. Okay. Maybe two. Who knows? Maybe two. Who knows? And I saw a trailer for a coming movie called The Space Between.

A young mailroom worker develops an unlikely friendship with a washed-up rock star after traveling to his home to force him out of his contract. This looks good. Okay. I'll check it out. Yeah. I'm excited about it. I like the premise. Kelsey Grammer is the washed-up rock star doing a very Beach Boys, Brian Wilson kind of impression.

And I like the premise, too. It's very funny. So we'll see. I have a feeling it's going to be a feel-good type thing, which is sad. I wish they just went crazy with it, but we'll see. Okay. I could use feel-good, though, honestly. Really good. Yeah, me too. Me too. And I've talked a bit in the past about the YouTube and kids' YouTube and my kid and all that sort of stuff, and there's a really good long-form article called Raised by YouTube in the Atlantic.

The TLDR on this is I am done letting my kid watch YouTube except for carefully selected and previewed items again. That's it. No way. This totally gets into basically the content farms that are out there, basically just watching the algorithm and seeing when the kid's eyeballs move away and then put something very happy and colorful that runs across the screen to get your kid's eyeball right back on it.

This shit is fucked up. Yeah. That's the way it goes, man. That's the way it goes. Hey, but they're coming out with Instagram for kids. Yeah. I saw a great movie over on Netflix called Why Did You Kill Me? Now, the star of this movie is MySpace.

I was watching this, and I had such a nostalgia boner for really bad 90s and 2000 era interfaces. I'm like, that's the way it used to be, and I liked it, damn it. None of this Ajax-y crap.

You hated MySpace at the time. Huh? You hated MySpace at the time. I never liked MySpace, but I was just looking at the blocky, you know, they used tables for the interface, obviously. It was just like, it was old school. I loved it. It did take a really wacky, crazy turn in the middle, but it's a great movie on using old school social media to catch murderers.

So, that was good. Mortal Kombat 2021. I will preface this by saying, if you've never played a game of Mortal Kombat, you will have no fucking clue what's going on in this movie. As an avid Mortal Kombat lover and player for God knows how long, 35 years or 30 years about there somewhere now.

It was fantastic. I loved it. I absolutely loved it. They've redeemed themselves. The soundtrack was not as good as the old original movie, but that one was going to be hard to beat anyway. But yeah, it was a fun movie. I really liked it, and I hope they keep going with them.

For sure. Then I watched Nobody with Bob Odenkirk. This is hands down the best movie I've seen in probably three or four years. I've heard a lot about it. I've heard it's a modern-day falling-down type thing. Nope. Nope? Okay, good. Nope. All right. Not really.

Not really. Here's the thing. It is, in the action sequences, it is very John Wickian, very good. I mean, spectacular action sequences. But it is also one of the funniest movies I've seen in a very long time.

Bob Odenkirk has some of the most incredible timing. I mean, it's Bob Odenkirk. Of course he does, right? Yeah. And you turn him into an action star along with it. I swear to God. I mean, we were just falling off the couch laughing. It was so damn good.

All right. Excellent. I clicked on the link, and we'll look at that. I can go see it in the theater. You can go see it in the theater? Thank you. Or in your home. Or in your home, yes. But here's another fun part. Do you notice they have a .movie TLD now? Yes, I did see that. I thought, oh my God, they finally got a .movie TLD.

And I went to go check it out to see if I could get, you know, some funny .movie TLDs. Yeah, they're expensive. Yeah. They're 400 bucks. I, you know, joke's a joke. Not worth the joke. No, joke's a joke, but not really worth that. Yeah. And some good news.

$7.99? That's a good joke. $7.99. I'm all over that. Yep. And some news for you. LeVar Burton will be hosting Jeopardy from July 26th to July 30th, which is pretty awesome. Yeah, that is pretty awesome. It's pathetic that it took basically a fan petition to make it happen.

Yeah. Somehow the producers of Jeopardy were not aware of the fact that everybody thought that he was going to take over as host someday. Yeah. You have to put LeVar Burton in there. I mean, if you even want hope. Now, I'm not even talking about millennials or Gen Z, but if you even want Gen X to start watching this, as we're now becoming the old people, you better put LeVar Burton in, because otherwise this show is not going to last.

Have any of the temp hosts been any good? I haven't actually been watching, so I can't tell you. I will watch when LeVar Burton does. I've seen a couple of clips. The football player, I can't remember his name, seemed pretty funny and actually pretty decent at it. And, of course, there was an uproar when bullshit dipshit Doc Oz hosted it.

Oh, God. Because they were just like, how can you have a guy who peddles in lies and bullshit host a show about facts? I know. Seriously. Yeah. Oh, God. And what was that one dude, the winner guy, winner, winner, chicken dinner? Ken Jennings. Yeah, well, he got Bean canceled, so.

Yeah. So. Oh, well. Anyway. I found this one and I thought it was just hilarious. Hulu Plus attracted many of its first 2 million subscribers from pirate sites. Right. This is genius. This guy, Jay Rockman, who used to work in Hulu marketing, back when Hulu Plus was coming online, he was, you know, trying to get it marketed out there.

And there were tons and tons of BitTorrent sites, you know, back then. And they were getting huge traffic. So he's like, hey, instead of suing the shit out of these guys, how about we do an ad swap? Like, I love you. He gave them a 50 cent CPM, which is, you know, pretty low.

But I guess, and no, it's not too bad. I was thinking more, you compare that with podcast CPMs. Right. But a 50 cent CPM and sometimes an affiliate fee. He gave them a fucking affiliate fee. Like, and that's how they got like their first 2 million paid Hulu Plus subscribers.

I'm like, that's some marketing genius right there. That guy needs a raise. Yep. Yep. Ah, good stuff. Matthew writes in, two streaming services, formal cable companies are going to merge to become one. ViaSat says they are big in Sweden and Canal Digital, which is French, are becoming Alente.

I thought this was interesting. Finally, someone falls, even if they are two of the smaller ones. Does this tie into what Plex is doing? I don't think Plex has enough clout or money to convince a bunch of streaming cable company giants to merge. Merging is just what happens now.

Yep. And they've only got $50 million in investment, Plex. So I don't see. Yeah. No. Yeah. I don't think they're a player here. No, that's like about four hours worth of lawyers in a big deal like that. Come on. Exactly. And Runcat wrote in, said, since I was an early 80s KROQ listener, I found this station quite enjoyable.

I know there are many others as well. And this is a musicantenna.com, which has a 80s new wave streaming station. It's good. I actually gave it a shot because as we know, you know, first wave on Sirius XM is basically playlisted bullshit. If you want to hear the same 10 songs you heard the entire time in the 80s, that's where you go.

I suppose there's some nostalgia if you grew up in Southern California, the hearing Richard Blade because he's over there. I far prefer KROQ's actual one, which is KROQ HD2, which basically is a little bit more eclectic and has a bunch of the old DJs from the 80s on KROQ on it.

But I did give this one a go. It is by far the most eclectic of the bunch. There are some songs that I have not heard since the 80s that I heard listening to it for just an hour or two. Yeah. Deep cuts. Yeah. Deep cuts. Yeah, I listened to it for like a half an hour when I was cleaning the garage. It's a pretty good station, I got to say.

Yeah, I liked it. Ups and doodads. I have finally upgraded my Apple Watch from a 3 to a 6. I finally got all my monies from trading in my old iPhone 7, your old iPhone 8. And they even let me basically put the cost of a trade-in of my old Watch 3 to the Watch 6 price, which is nice.

So it ended up costing me like 20 bucks to get a Watch 6. It's not exactly a game changer. I probably should have waited until the next one that will reportedly do blood pressure readings as well. The EKG thing is nice, but I don't have any issues there. Blood oxygen monitoring would have been great in the early days of the pandemic when we're all freaking out about such things.

But in and of itself, not really worth the price of the upgrade. It's a nice watch. I don't feel like I really gained much. It's bigger and it's thinner and it lasts longer. I like it. Yeah, I definitely noticed that. I'm not near end of charge at the end of the night. But I don't do the sleep tracking, so my phone goes on the charger overnight anyways.

Like I said, for me, it wasn't really worth the upgrade. If you have issues with your health, especially with like EKGs and stuff like that, I would buy this in three seconds. But otherwise, you know, for me, I did it. Oh, well. Well, it'll last you a little bit longer.

I mean, my three wasn't even making it through the day. That's why I was amazed. Right. I mean, I don't do sleep tracking either. Mine goes – it sits on my nightstand as soon as I go to bed. Yeah. But maybe you don't get as many – maybe you don't have as much going on on yours as I do, I guess.

Maybe not. Yeah. I'll send you a screen cap on my watch face. I got it dialed in. It's perfect. I've spent a long time figuring out this workflow. I think you can actually share them with me, the complications. I don't think you actually – didn't they add that as a feature? I can't remember.

I don't know. The ability to share complications. Who cares? Who cares? It's like, oh, man, I wonder if I can share this watch face. It's something I have never thought about in my entire life. Yeah. It's a deep cut for the show, Jason. Yeah, it is. I did pick up the bridge dock for the MacBook Pro 16-inch because I was at a desk space in my bedroom and trying to put a 16-inch laptop with a 75-foot-wide curved monitor turned out to be really difficult.

So I picked this thing up. It's not cheap, but it is another piece of tech that you can kill a burglar with if they break in. It is very heavy but very well built. I got to say, $180, I'm not sure it's worth it. For just a dock.

But it is nice if you need the space. And it's basically, you plug it in and it gives you two Thunderbolt ports on the back. So if you still need to use the other ports, you've got cables coming off the top, which is kind of silly looking. But it does get the job done. And there you go.

And this is really sad news for me because while we were gone, Apple announced the new iPad Pro, which looks amazing. And I was like, I'm in. I'm in. I want one. But since I just bought that new Magic Keyboard, I'm like, oh, okay, this should be cool.

I can just, you know, swap them. It's got a big enough hole because I've got the iPad Pro 12 or 13-inch with one camera and the new ones have 700 cameras on them. And I'm like, okay, fine. Well, it turns out, no, you got to buy the new Magic Keyboard because the new iPad is 0.5 fucking millimeters thicker.

0.5 millimeters. You know how small that is? I'm aware. Yes, yes. So I'm like, no, I'm not going to buy another keyboard for 0.5 millimeters. I would like to see how it fits in the older one. You know, maybe I'll sneak into the Apple store and try and sandwich it in and see if it really is a problem because it doesn't seem like it would be.

Watch this space, listeners. I guarantee you within a month, we'll be talking about his new 12.9-inch iPad Pro and the new Magic Keyboard that fits it. If the Chia hits, I'm in. If this Chia pops, then yeah, I'll take it. Although I'm finding that I don't know if I need it now.

Like I went through everything. I'm like, when I saw the, you know, the demonstrations and everything, I'm like, man, I must have that now. You know, I fell for the Kool-Aid. And now that I'm like, oh, well, I can't have it without spending another 350 bucks on the damn keyboard. I'm like, yeah, that kind of soured me on it quite a bit.

And also, if you put it together and you get the loaded iPad with the Magic Keyboard, you're talking to like $2,000. I'm like, uh... Might as well buy a new Air. Fucking great. Yeah. Well, you can buy two. You can buy two Airs. Silly, silly. I put this one in here for you and it's called See a Satellite Tonight.

This Google guy basically used Google Earth or Google Maps so you can figure out where you can be and where to look up to see satellites at night that you can see with a naked eye, unless you live in Los Angeles because there's too much light pollution. Or you live in that town with all the drones.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I took a look at it. It's pretty cool. I just want to pimp again the app that I love that I use with my kid all the time when we get out of LA, Starwalk 2, which has an add-on bundle that tracks all that sort of stuff as well. So you can kind of get all that in there.

So yeah, it's a very cool app. If you have not checked out Starwalk 2 and you're interested in such things, I suggest you do so. It's pretty cool. All right. Well, this one is... Of course they are. Facebook is building its own in-app podcast player coming later this year. Great.

All right. For the olds. Yeah, exactly. And you have to opt in for your show. They're not going to pull the Apple catalog, which right now I can't even get access to our goddamn Apple Connect account, Podcast Connect account, because they completely screwed it up. Well, you know, it takes a...

They are adding the subscription model to that, so I'm sure they're rebuilding it right now. Oh, well, it's supposed to take a couple hours to do this account merge. It's been a week. I still can't get in. And they added this stupid checkbox on accident that said, would you like your feed globally accessible or your RSS feed URL globally accessible?

So in search, when people search it with the API, you get the feedback, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, they unchecked it for everybody. So it's screwing up tons of people's traffic and all this. And I can't get in to see if ours is messed up. So who knows? Who knows? So maybe nobody's going to hear this.

Nobody heard it anyway. Let's be honest. That's true. Come on. That's a good point. And Facebook has launched a new mini player inside the Facebook app that lets you play your Spotify stream, which you could already do because you probably had the Spotify app. I don't get why this is a thing.

Spotify didn't automatically close. They just want to keep you in the app at all times. They want to make sure that your eyeballs are in Facebook and not anywhere else so you can see none of the updates from your friends because it's fucking useless. I know what's there to see anymore. I went and I went and checked it out the other day. It's just nothing.

It's crazy. My love affair with Scott Galloway continues and only deepens, Jason. Okay. I finished reading Post-Corona from Crisis to Opportunity, which is his take on business and the big tech companies and education and everything else and how we are going to come out of this.

The opportunities that are there are coming out of the coronavirus crisis and ways that people can screw it up. Fantastic read. I just, this guy could be the third person on our show. Easy. Oh, easily. Easily. I love this guy. Were there any opportunities that you can think of for us?

Because we could definitely use some. He did not talk about podcasting, sadly. Oh, okay. Great. What about, I mean, washed up tech guys, nothing in there about that? Nope. Nope. Nope. Nothing about that. Okay. We're still screwed. Tent City for us. Yep. Tent City, here we come.

And another cranky old white guy that you and I both love, Anthony Bourdain, a new book has come out, World Travel, an irreverent guide by Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Willever. So Laurie Willever worked with him. I don't know why this book exists. I know what it was supposed to be.

She had one meeting with him before he took his own life, sadly, where they plotted out what the book was going to be about. And because, unfortunately, he passed away, they decided to continue with the book anyways. It's a travel guide-ish. Okay. But all she had to go off of was his body of work.

Now, if he had stayed alive, I'm sure he would have added new anecdotes about all of his cities. He basically, in their one meeting, he picked out all the places he wanted to talk about. So she went back and just pulled old clips and talked about places he went to. And some of these, you know, some of his shows go back almost 20 years.

Mm-hmm. Half these places may not even be open anymore. She did try to do a bit of research about that, saying this place is closed, but here's a place like it. Oh, my God. That's Anthony never went to. Okay. This is stupid. Yeah. This is really stupid. This book should not have existed.

It should have existed in a world in which Anthony Bourdain is still alive. That would have been a great read. Don't waste your time with this. Okay. And another cranky old white guy, Terry Pratchett, that also has passed away. I got an alert from Amazon that the Shakespeare Codex, modern plays by Terry Pratchett, adapted by Stephen Briggs, is coming out.

Based loosely on the science of Discworld 2, Globe, Lords and Ladies, and A Midsummer's Night Dream, the Shakespeare Codex is a new Discworld stage adaptation written to commemorate Terry Pratchett's life and works. And it is basically an unmissable new adventure for Discworld fans now.

Okay. There was a very strong statement by the Pratchett estate that no new stories would ever be written in Discworld in honor of his memory. This feels like towing the line and cheating a little bit by making it a stage adaptation with a new story. Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah. Not too impressed. Stephen must be running out of money. I mean, Stephen was his right-hand man, so, you know, it's probably going to be pretty good, but. Yeah, but still. It's not Terry. Security?

Ha! Dave Bittner is back in the house. 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 as well as surveillance and privacy. And finally, he's the co-host of Recorded Future, where he takes you inside the world of cyber threat intelligence.

And I need oxygen. Well, and I've also recently offered up my counseling services for those who have suffered data loss. So, Jason, why don't you just lay down on the couch here? Oh, Jesus Christ. Let us, let us, let us, let us, and I promise I'm not going to laugh at you the way that you laughed at me.

I will. Let's, let's, let's, let's, please, tell us what happened, Jason. Share your story with the, with the group. Tell us about the pictures of your mother that you lost.

So, last week, or, yeah, last week, it feels like eons ago, I accidentally, I was moving some stuff around and accidentally dragged my cursor one pixel over a folder that was never supposed to be deleted, but, you know, just did the quick command, moved to trash, boom, empty trash.

I noticed it took a little longer than usual, and I'm like 15,000, 14,000, what the, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. So, in my, in my rush to get rid of the crufty folder that I was using to transfer some just logic settings around, I deleted my entire production folder with every client's work in it that I had.

Wow. And, yeah, yeah, that's, that was pretty much, I was like, huh, immediately, immediately ejected the disk, so nothing would overwrite it, took a lot of deep breaths and said, oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit, backups, backups, let's check the backups.

Okay, went to the backups. Yeah, usually every night I back up that hard drive, nah, it was a weekend before and I was moving stuff around. And forgot, just flat out forgot to plug it in, because I have carbon copy cloners set up to whenever they're both plugged in, boom, just auto back it up, no problem, no fuss, no muss.

Right. But. And you're taking the good step of having that backup drive disconnected from the system in case you get infected, that it's, it's air-gapped. That you would think. You would think. Yeah. No, I had just gotten a new bridge dock for my MacBook Pro and was still trying to figure out how to route all my cables.

And I plugged in the bridge dock and got my monitor up and only had one cable for hard drives until I figured out where to plug the other one. So I just kind of sat on the side there. Yeah. I see. Yeah. Just an oversight. Just an oversight. Okay. So then comes the internet.

What can recover immediately deleted files? I'm thinking no problem here. Right? Right? Yeah. I just, I just emptied the trash. Visibility should have been set to zero. Get a little utility, go back in, set it back to one. No, my visibility was set to FU.

It was just gone. Gone. Daddy gone. I got disk drill and tried to use that to pull it back. Disk drill works great. If you've already purchased it and are running it on your hard drives, because it will prevent anything from ever really being deleted until it runs out of space.

You know, it just kind of, it does set visibility to zero and protects your drives from accidental deletion. I had not done that. I have now. You better believe I have now. And it keeps its own logs of all the files secondary to the ones on the drive. Yeah. Yeah. It does all sorts of magic.

And it's 90 bucks. Well worth it at this point. Should have paid it before, but I didn't. So, yeah, that was three days worth of work that was just gone from the backup that I was missing. In that three days, I had a prolific three days of shooting videos, editing client work, and basically just preparing for the week ahead of me.

So, once this all happened, I had to go back and stay up pretty much all night, just editing, trying to get the stuff that had to go out the next day that I was just going to go in and upload to, you know, the hosting providers. Nope. All gone. You know how that goes. Yeah.

I think the lesson, the takeaway here is it happens to the snarkiest of us. Yes, it does. Yes, it does. And as soon as I, as soon as I realized what was happening, I'm like, you motherfucking karma bit in her bitch. I'm sure he's got a voodoo doll somewhere. I'm going to voodoo doll somewhere.

What? Yeah. Just a little Western digital thumb drive that he's sitting there poking pins in. He's like, I'm going to get that to Philippa one of these days. Little old me? What? Oh, no. Quick note to self. Make sure I run backup tonight.

Yeah. You are just as snarky as me, buddy. So you better watch your back. I have, I will tell you what my new backup regimen is. Yeah. So when I, I work on three separate machines. So that's why everything's on a removable hard drive that I move around with the big files because even with a NAS and moving them around the network just takes forever because they're, you know, a couple gigabytes per project.

And it just takes too long to open and save and all that. So I just carry this little Western digital super extreme drive that's, you know, battle hardened, blah, blah, blah. So now when I'm done on my main machines, when I'm editing during the day, I go into my bedroom station where all of the magic used to happen with the, the carbon copy.

That's a long, long, long, long ago. Yeah. There ain't no magic happening in my bedroom now, baby. I was going to say. Yeah. All right. Now you're just bragging. There ain't nothing going on there. So immediately, once I plug my thumb drive in, it copies the entire production drive over to my MacBook Pro.

And if the other, if the other drive is plugged in, it, it copies that at the same time and just clones it to both locations. So there are two locations now because, you know, you always say one is none and two is one. Yeah. Oh, here's the other thing. So I figured out that it was a major, major faux pas to just have a folder of all my work in it.

So that seems like one easy thing to move. So I got rid of everything on that drive. And at the top level of the drive is every single client now in their own folder. So it's much harder to accidentally just grab a folder and dump it in the trash, you know? Right. Right. So I kind of distributed that.

It reminds me of the old days in Mac OS 7 and where quite often people would make the mistake of throwing away the system folder instead of the system file. Yeah. Remember those days? Guilty as charged. Well, you know, when I went through my own thing, disk drill was one of the utilities that I used.

I also used another one called Stellar Data Recovery. And I don't remember off the top of my head which one was more successful. I did get a lot of stuff back through the combination of both of them. I think I let both of them sort of have at it on the drive, you know, over the course of a few overnights.

And I got a lot of stuff back, but none of it was labeled, which was the big pain in the butt. So I can go searching for stuff, but I mean, yeah, most of it, I mean, for all intents and purposes, gone. Yeah. So I keep my logic projects in the folder option instead of the package option.

So what I would get was I had a folder full of what was called orphans with a thousand subfolders that had all of the individual files from the different logic projects all jumbled together and in different folders that were all labeled with the same file names.

Right, right. But almost none of my audio files made it back, especially the one that I really wanted, which was the most annoying client edit that I've done in a long time that I had to redo. Right. Yeah. Well, it probably went faster the second time, though. No, it doesn't work that way, does it?

No, it doesn't really work that way when you're editing audio. If I was coding, I would have optimized the shit out of that code the second time around. I'd be like, oh, yeah, I remember how I did that. Oh, maybe I can make it better this time around. Right. Yeah, audio editing is not writing code, I found out.

Yeah. I'll just – real quick, I'll share my backup routine now on this machine is I'm making use of Time Machine, which – and Time Machine has the ability to alternate destinations. So every other one, it'll do one.

So I have one, which is just – it's a local external drive, and then the other one is a NAS. So it alternates between those two. And then in addition to that, I have my production folders are set to automatically sync to Google Cloud. There you go.

So that's my off-site. Yeah, I have a cloud storage and then a local drive as well. That's my thing. You don't have any clients anymore though. What are you storing up there? I – just family job. Family stuff? Huh? Family stuff, and I am doing some work. Oh, I do have – I thought you were – I thought you said you were laid off for a while or on – was it furlough until this was done?

Things have started to pick up again. Excellent. Well, that's good news. Which is nice. So yes, there's money coming in, which is a plus. Ooh. I suspect my backups are now a bit – an overreaction in the other direction, but that's okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Bit once, twice shy. Well, because we are human, that sort of thing will fade with time, and eventually we will all end up back here telling the same stories again. Like, I can't believe I stopped doing those backups, and here I am. Wouldn't you know it, the week I stopped doing three backups, I get bit.

Yep. That's how it works. I tell you, at about three in the morning, I got, like, super introspective because there was some stuff on there that I lost, and I'm like, does it really matter if I get this stuff back, you know? Over time, I've emptied a lot of dead relatives' photos, you know, photo albums in boxes and thrown them in the trash, not knowing who anyone was or anyone cares.

And I'm like, is anyone really going to care if any of this is gone? I'm like, no, no, no. No, then I'm just like, I wish I could still drink scotch because I would want one right now because I'm feeling very maudlin at the loss of my data. There is a – it's a cleansing process that you go through, I think. The acceptance that – The stage is a grief.

Yeah. Yeah, it's just gone. And I've – yeah, I've been through that myself for sure. Mm-hmm. Yep. All right. Well, let's get into some of these stories then now that we're all feeling nostalgic and wistful for data gone by.

Let's see. Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon's dormant IP addresses sprang to life, which is a very vibrant and emotional headline. It makes me think of that horrible third Matrix movie and the snakes are descending upon the badly raving last bastion of humanity.

Mm-hmm. What is this about? There's a company called Global Resource Systems, LLC, which has basically taken over these millions of IP addresses that were owned by the Pentagon. This country didn't exist until September of last year.

Nobody seems to know who they are, what they are, where they're doing, what they're doing with any of this. The military has basically just said, we're doing this to assess, evaluate, and prevent unauthorized uses of DOD IP address space. And that is about as much information as we've gotten.

Do you know what has happened? Is this nothing? Is this a company that a Trump crony set up? Is this just cash and grift? Is this something nefarious? Or is this just who cares? Well, I asked myself all of those same questions when I saw this story come by because obviously the timing of it seems a bit odd.

And my first reaction, I guess not wanting to give our former president the benefit of the doubt, I assumed that this was some sort of grift, that somehow he had sold off a bunch of IP addresses that belonged to the military to some crony and somebody was making a lot of money.

But it doesn't seem to be that. It seems to be that the DOD made a bunch of their address space public facing and that it may just be that this increases their surface area so they're able to have a better view of the internet as a whole by having these IP ranges open and available to the general internet.

So that's what I make of it so far, but it sure is – it's odd. It is odd and the timing is odd and I feel like we're going to find out more about this. Yeah, I mean it is as if somebody hit a button right when power was being switched over. It's odd.

Yeah. Right. Why would you not wait a week until Biden was president? And I don't know. There may be a perfectly good reason for it, but – It was just on the books. I guess they didn't help themselves. Yeah. They didn't help themselves by the way that they timed it I guess.

Yeah. OK. Well, I'm not going to lose any sleep at night over this then. I wouldn't. I wouldn't. No, stay tuned. Stay tuned. Yeah. I mean all these big agencies have different branches. You know, like the CIA has investment branches and things like that. Everybody has got little companies off to the side.

This was probably supposed to not be noticed by anybody and they just wanted to activate these IP addresses so they could watch what the traffic is out there. And learn from it, you know. See what's going on. Who's pinging all these addresses? Who's – you know, what – The thought that nobody is going to notice 175 million IP addresses is a bit – Well, why wouldn't they?

I mean they're assumed to already be there. So – Right. OK. Right, right. But the fact that it's in a known group, a group of IP addresses that people know who that belongs to and for them to suddenly light up. Yeah. I think yes would draw attention for sure.

Yeah. The hear me dragon block. Right. And it did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just odd. OK. Well, there it is. This is a fun story I thought. Signal Founder Cracks Celebrite phone hacking device finds its full of vulnerabilities.

Now, this is Moxie Marlinspike. There's a name for you. Right. Exactly. I mean is that someone from the Harry Potter universe or what? So apparently a truck was driving by and off of the back fell a Celebrite box.

As it does. What an amazing random happenstance. Wow. Look at that. And so he went to work on it and found out that Celebrite's – let's say security had been found wanting in many, many instances. And from what I could tell – Dave, you'll tell me if I'm wrong on this or expand on it.

But it seems like you could load up your phone with a metric shit ton of vulnerabilities that when Celebrite or if a Celebrite device was sucking the info off your phone would basically own it because they have such terrible security that they're just going to take everything in at face value that none of it is malicious and just gobble it up.

Like they'll suck in the poison pill and swallow it happily. Right. Now let's back up just a little bit and point out that Moxie Marlinspike, whose name I just – I cannot say enough times throughout the day because it makes me happy. He basically set off on this journey because Celebrite had announced that they were going to go after Signal.

So they were saying if you have Signal on your device, that's a new target for us. Yeah, they said they were going to like crack signals encryption. Right. And Mr. Marlinspike said, oh, really? All right. And that's when he had the amazing coincidence of finding one of their devices falling off the truck.

And he went and dug into it. And as you say, what he discovered is that you can put a file on your device and when Celebrite sucks that file into their software, if your file is properly formatted, you own that machine.

The whole machine. And so you can affect how future devices that they scan come up. Right. So the bottom line is this vulnerability puts into question everything that Celebrite pulls out of any device.

Because there's no way to know if the machine that's doing the scanning was previously compromised by a previous device. The other thing that – well, a couple of things that he brought to light.

One was that Celebrite was using some Apple security certificates within their software. I believe some things from iTunes without permission. And so he helpfully pointed out that perhaps Apple may want to take a look at that from a copyright point of view.

And then he also said that from this point on, all versions of Signal are going to have some extra files included with them that are there purely for aesthetic purposes. They do absolutely nothing else. They have no functionality for Signal itself. They're only there because of the beauty of the files and that everyone using Signal should simply ignore them.

Seems reasonable. Yeah. So not only does Moxie Marlin Spike – well, he lives up to his Moxie name, doesn't he? Yes, he does. Yeah. So in the meantime, today Celebrite released a patch.

Shocker. And the folks who follow these sorts of things, I think they spoke to a security researcher who has access to the patch and Celebrite. And they said, yeah, this helps, but it's not a fix. It's a mitigation, but it's not a fix.

So I think Celebrite leaves this with egg on their face. And if I were a law enforcement organization using Celebrite, it makes everything questionable now. So they're going to have to come up with a way to fix this.

And we'll see if Apple comes after them either publicly or behind the scenes and says, hey, knock it off. As I was reading this, I had this image in my head of the typical hacker with the hoodie on and Moxie's sitting there hacking away on it. And then the screen just goes bright, his eyes go wide, and he goes, my God, it's full of vulns.

His jaw drops and he takes to the internet to go after his sworn enemy. That's great. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. People seem to be taking a certain amount of pleasure in these, yeah, the swagger with which Moxie went after these folks.

So there's that. The balls on that guy, I tell you. You know, this next story I put in here, I got an email from a listener who thought that he might be going crazy because his ring doorbell was never recording Amazon delivery drivers.

Mm-hmm. And I read his accounting of it. And this is someone who is – this is someone who understands security and kind of knows his stuff. Well, obviously they have the Amazon Basics Invisibility cloak. Duh. Well, as I'm reading through this, I'm thinking to myself, is this the new version of my phone is listening to me?

Right. Right? Could this be that? So I did a little bit of digging around. I included a link here to the Ring community page, the Ring doorbells. And sure enough, this is pretty widespread where Ring doorbells are picking up everybody but delivery people and not just Amazon delivery people.

Sometimes U.S. Postal Service people, sometimes FedEx people. Someone pointed out that they had a non-Ring brand security camera hanging off of their garage and it went dark whenever the Amazon delivery person came.

My guess here is that the delivery people have discovered that for the low, low price of however many dollars a Wi-Fi jammer costs, which is probably around $10, they're invisible when they're walking up to people's porches and dropping off packages.

And there's good reason for that. I mean, it saves them some of the potential liability of customers bitching and moaning about, you know, you dropped my package or you tossed it over the fence or whatever. So I suspect that's what's going on here.

Did you guys – did you read any of this? What's your take? I would also like to say $10 and a felony because owning a Wi-Fi jammer is a felony. Well, I mean, there's that. It is. But who amongst us? I bought a Wi-Fi jammer in Bangkok not knowing the fact that it was a felony and brought it home and found out what the actual legalities of having that in my luggage was coming through customs and lost about five years of my life going, oh, my God, and immediately disposed of it.

But – so I have a Ring camera on my house, on my front door. Oh, so we can test this. No need. No need to test it, Dave. Oh, okay. You want to know why? Yes. People are absolutely correct. Absolutely correct. I can show you many, many videos that have either – even yesterday, the post office guy came up with surprisingly an Amazon delivery that they had outsourced, left it on my porch.

And then next thing I know, like maybe an hour later, I get a little notice from Amazon, say, your package has been delivered. I'm like, oh, that's weird because I usually get a Ring notification if somebody comes to the door. Right. Open the door. The next thing I get is a Ring notification of me walking out the door and picking up my package that is right there in front of the camera.

This has happened, I'd say, I'd say, you know, over the past couple weeks, almost every time there's a delivery, except for the post office guy. The post office guy is always there. Now, I had a theory about this that could explain a lot of this away.

Remember when I used to explain how the Ring cameras were garbage? That's – oh, shit, every episode we talked about the Ring cameras. What they would do is – I don't remember that, Jason. So if you go with the default settings on the Ring cameras, something triggers the motion.

It will record 30 seconds and then wait five minutes for something to pick back up, right? It just resets and waits five minutes. So you see the criminal coming up and then the crime is gone and the getaway car is gone is how it works. And you can tweak that in the settings, but on my front door doorbell, I never did that.

I only did it on the outside security cameras for the garage and the studio and all that stuff, not the front door because I didn't think it mattered because the only times it gets signaled is when somebody comes up or a garbage truck goes by. Regular trucks don't trigger it. But for most people, what might happen is the Amazon delivery driver goes by, parks out of frame.

That has already triggered the 30 seconds recording. So it's recording after – it's triggered by the Amazon truck, goes out of frame. Amazon guy is picking up the packages. The 30 seconds ends before anybody comes into frame. The five minutes start before the recycle, the guy comes up to the door, puts the package down, leaves, and then boom, voila, there is a package.

So I think it might be just a flaw in the way that it's doing the triggering and the recording of video. That's – I mean, that's just a theory I have. I can't prove it. But I can tell you right now that when these guys come to my door, there is no record of them ever showing up. This is like some X-Files shit. Packages just appear.

And they're not – they're taking their time because they're taking a picture of the package on my front doorstep with the ring camera firmly in view. Right. Of them taking a photo, but the ring camera does not pick them up. So. Now, okay.

So you are, as we all know, the camera guy. Yes. Could we test this by having you set up a second Wi-Fi-enabled camera that's not a ring camera to also keep an eye on your front door so we can see if that camera gets blanked out as well?

Oh, you know I'm already over that shit. I'm all over it. No. Now that I know that this is a thing, yeah, I'm setting up multiple cameras. I'm setting up multiple cameras from different vendors to point out my front door. All right. Very good. Yep. I got an – You'll have to set up a website.

He's on it. Now I got an Amcrest camera. So that's one of the lovely Chinese-made cameras that everybody makes fun of before that's been in a box. It's ready to go. Plug that bad boy in. I'm going to point it from one side of the house looking at the front door. I've got a Logitech circle camera that I'm going to go from the other side of the front yard so we can see if anything happens with those.

And then I'll just – those two cameras are recording all the time. So if anything happens and they blip out, then we'll definitely know something's going funky. And here's the fun part. The Amcrest records to an SD card. The Logitech records to the cloud. And then in the middle will be the ring.

So we've got three different actual cameras with three different storage devices going on. I love it. So we should be able to – I love it. Scientifically test this. I love this. Yeah. I love this plan. I will say that follow-up is not exactly our forte, but let's try to – Oh, this one.

I'm in, man. I'm totally in on this one. Come on. This is in my wheelhouse. If they were using some kind of Wi-Fi jamming, you would notice that in the entire house your internet would go down for the 30 seconds that they were doing their jamming, right?

Wouldn't you think? You'd think. You'd think. But some people might not notice it. They'd be like, oh, okay, reload, reload. Oh, it's backup. Never mind. And they never think about it again because your home Wi-Fi goes down all the time. Yeah. Yeah.

The other thing I was thinking was to have a software-defined radio rig, just looking at that part of the spectrum, you could time align it with to see if there's some sort of broadband sort of spark gap generator over that band of frequencies just spike when the delivery folks come.

Perhaps I'm overthinking it. I know we're tech guys, but have we considered just asking one of them? I can't tell when they're here, so they disappear before I can get a hold of them. All I see is they're out on the street all the time.

Just ask a dude. Yeah. Yeah. You think they're going to give up that secret to us? Well, okay. Torture might be required. That's our new podcast. Just ask a dude. Yeah. Right.

Exactly. I'm just saying there might be a simpler way to get to the bottom of this, but you two go ahead. Well, Brian, Brian, where's the fun in that? Let's divide and conquer. You go ask them, and I'll set up the cameras like I'm in the fucking Lone Gunman, which is what I do. You're the social guy.

You go talk. I'm going to sit here and figure it out. Okay. You're probably the guy when you're lost, you go ask for directions, too, right? Am I right? Silly me. Silly me. I know. Patreon.com slash GOG. We're going to need to buy a van. Right. Right.

All right. Well, the game is afoot. All right. Speaking of people that have written in and asked questions, and hopefully this will not involve a van. Hi, Jason and Brian. This is from Miles. I recently learned about a security incident with a company called Park Mobile where there was a third-party vulnerability.

Go figure. In the notification sent out, they noted the following. Encrypted passwords were accessed, but not the encryption keys required to read them. We protect user passwords by encrypting them with advanced hashing and salting technologies. From what I read, they note the passwords are encrypted and that the keys were not accessed, but then go on to note advanced hashing and salting technologies.

From what I recall, hashing and salting, except older algorithms, are one way and cannot be decrypted with a key. Am I missing something here? I don't think so. I think you just got a word salad email covering their butts. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. Hashing and salting is a one way.

It's basically a one way to encrypt. So you can, you know, rehash, result and get it. But you can't, you can never read the original text of it anymore. Yeah. So they just, yeah, they kind of, yeah, word salad. But yeah, they can't, they can't decrypt it and nobody can, there are no keys to decrypt it.

So that's why they, that's why the thieves did not get the encryption keys required to read them because it doesn't exist. Yes. There you go. And finally, speaking of vans, Andy sent this in for specifically you, Dave, Star Wars Stormtroopers on the move. I believe we have our outfits for now tracking down these Amazon guys.

Right. Yes. I love this. Jason had sent this to me previously and I love everything about this. This is just, if I had a van, this would be on the back of my van. This is great. So you should check it out. It's a, it's a, it's worth a, it's worth a smile.

Yes, it'll, it'll be in the show notes at gog.show slash 504 and it is a tick tock. And sad shout out this week to Daniel Kaminsky, one of the great security researchers who has died at the age of 42. Way too young.

Yep. Yep. Very well respected across the industry and evidently was a very kind and generous person, you know, funded people's trips to hacker conferences when they couldn't do so. Themselves and, and didn't look for any credit or attention or anything like that, but also was a, a very capable hacker in his own right.

And really, you know, made, made a difference in the community. And as you say, gone way too soon. Yeah. And saved DNS for the most part. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now you will be Miss Daniel. Sad times. Well, on that happy note, talk to you guys next week.

When I come back with my results of my, my stakeout. I hope I don't have to fucking bail you out this week. That's all I have to say. I'm in my own yard. Why would you have to bail me out? I'm Jason. I know you, Jason. I know you. Dave's the one that wants to drive around with a triangulation van.

Come on. Right. No, no, no. Next thing you know, you've got a pit dug out in your front yard full of spikes at the bottom of it. It's camouflaged and you got it. It's full of FedEx delivery guys. The Amazon guy was supposed to bring my lava, but I can't see him. I don't know if he showed up or not.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. We know how this is going to end. We just want to watch it happen. Well, fortunately, it will be recorded on camera. There you go. Yep. Yep. That's what happened, officer. But then you'll forget to back up the. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Over at Patreon, we've got Jeremy and Kayfabe Friend. What a great name. Love that. Yep. And at PayPal, we have Raj, Adam, Logan, Nathaniel, Michelle, John, Andre, Tom, Michael, Joseph, Charlie, Andrew, Thomas, Mark, John, Tom, and Rick, who says, love your show.

Funny to get updated on the empty cheese shelves by your show. Think they paid or finally restored their backups. We're now recovering from our cheese crisis over here. Keep up the good work. Nice. Over at Podchaser, Mike M. gave us five stars. I began listening to these guys because of Jason's connection to the Jordan Harbinger show and because his advice helped me secure my email account from constant hacking.

If you've ever complained about Facebook, have strong opinions on Star Trek and Star Wars, or are a fan of technology, then this is a podcast for you. They're informative, funny, and always enjoyable to listen to. Thank you very much, Mike M. Thank you. And over at Podcast Addict, Where Is Q? gave us a five-star rating as well.

Love this podcast. Seeing new episodes posted on Wednesdays are a highlight of the week. I've introduced my wife to the show who enjoyed it but has yet to commit to regular listening. Can't recommend it enough. Commit. Commit. Commit. And I got a shout-out for a new project I'm working on. I am now, Brian, I signed a contract that says I am now technically an influencer.

I shit you not. That's right. That's right, baby. Wow. Words matter, as I like to say. I am going to be doing a show every week over at Adorama XP on Twitch. So if you are a Twitch watcher, go ahead and sign up now, and you can come see me on Wednesdays.

I will be on there from, was it 5 o'clock p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern? That's how that works. Yeah, for a couple hours, talking about audio podcasting and whatever else they'll let me talk about. So that's every week on Wednesdays for at least the next three months until they figure out if they want to keep me or not.

I'm looking forward to Hot Chia Talk. Hot Chia Talk. That's right. Until next time, I'm Brian Shilmes. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoyed the show, please consider visiting gog.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on, and we'll love you forever. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 504.

From there, you can find all the links that we talked about in this episode. And you can also 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 please, if you don't already follow us in your podcast player of choice, go to gog.show slash follow, which you can also send your friends to, by the way, where you can find convenient links to every podcast player so you can get the show as soon as it drops.

Stay grumpy.

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