506: Category 5 Super-Karen

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. You stopped doing the GOG thing? I'm just too tired, man. You know how much effort that takes to wake that up this early in the morning? Yeah, yeah. They did not do Yo! MTV raps at 8 a.m. I guarantee you that.

No, they did not. They did not for sure. But I do have a little follow-up to start with. My live stream was last Wednesday on Adorama XP. I saw some positive feedback. Man, I tell you what, we got it easy. Podcasting is so much easier than doing the live stream.

My throat was sore for, you know, two days because you just talk for two hours straight because there's no chat back and forth. There's a chat room. So you're always shucking and jiving. I'm running two computers, multiple microphones, a video switcher, an audio interface, doing demos, and trying to read the chat and keep up at the same time.

But see, you're trying to be professional. Don't most people just hold up their phone? I guess so. But I know. I was trying to make it hard on yourself. I was trying to make a good first impression. So I'm going to be back again this Wednesday, 8 to 10.

Okay. I told you it's early. But I got to say, it was fun. It was a lot of work, but it was fun. And I couldn't have done it without Seth Miranda. He was my Twitch Sherpa and hopefully will continue to be. He taught me a bunch of stuff with OBS and Twitch and all that stuff.

So a huge thank you to Seth. His stuff will be linked in the show notes. So check them out. Awesome. We got a bit of follow-up from somebody who actually lives somewhere where we talked about something. We were talking about the drone delivery testing going on in Christianburg, Virginia.

And Pete lives there. All right. So he wrote in. Well, he lives close by. Well, I'll let him explain. Hey, guys. I listened to your episode where you mentioned the drone deliveries. I live close to Christianburg, not actually in town, but out in the country. I do see the drones flying overhead when I shop there. Everybody treats it as a novelty. Ooh, is that one of those drones?

I don't know anybody who actually lives in the delivery area. I don't really see it as being practical for our area. The middle school was using it to deliver books during lockdown, but the librarian wished that the delivery area was larger so she could reach more of her students. We were just too spread out. Population density is too low. So distances are too far and demand too low.

I think they're using Christianburg as a test area. Anyway, stay grumpy. Yeah, that makes sense. You would want to test somewhere where there was not high population density in case one fell out of the sky. Yeah, true that, true that. It would be better if, you know, they could get more books to kids, which I thought that's a great use case.

If only we didn't have some sort of technology, say, oh, I don't know, a bookmobile. A bookmobile. That we have had since I was a child. It's COVID. It's COVID. Right. So, you know, COVID air, C-19 air delivery, right, coming right up. Do you remember on the bookmobiles, I used to love this, man, you'd get that little newsprint flyer when you were in class and you had to fill everything out, pick out the books you want and then do all the totals and go home and beg, borrow and steal the money.

Go in, give it to the teacher because you had to like, you had like two days to fill it out and give it to the teacher. And then you'd forget about it and then like two, three weeks later, the bookmobile would come up and you'd go get your order and it was like a stack of paperbacks, like, you know, Benicula and Judy Blume books and all that crap.

That was so much fun. I miss that. Yeah. And what do I do for my kid? I order my book on Amazon and it arrives within 12 hours. Yeah. Kids these days, let me tell you. I know. It was that part where you forgot that you actually put in the order and then it shows up.

Because it took so long in between. Yes. Yeah. That was so much fun. The next school year, your books will arrive. Exactly. The way it used to work. Also a bit of follow-up over the battle over net neutrality. Our old friend Ajit Pai, we talked about this during 2017 when the FCC opened up their public comments and they received 22 million.

And of course that, you know, we were looking at it at the time and it was full of like obvious bullshittery was going on. Dead people. And yes, they've looked even further into this now and they found the comments were of course riddled with fraud. One New Yorker who commented in favor of the appeal turned out to be dead. Yep. A single 19-year-old college student apparently filed 7.7 million comments against the repeal.

Oh, great. And a broadband industry group spent millions to submit more than 8.5 million fake comments supporting the decision. So yes, a lot of these were from lead generation firms, companies intended to help policy campaigns drum up public support and comments. They found that three of these firms fraudulently submitted comments themselves and net neutrality wasn't their only target.

They also, I'm assuming they used bots, so they also unleashed their bots at 100 other advocacy campaigns, including the EPA, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, and various federal and state legislators. So, awesome. Great. Yeah, people are kind of pissed about this.

This report included comments from people whose names were used without their permission. We knew that was happening as well. One express discussed that somebody stole their identity and used it to push a viewpoint that they did not hold, and one other victim may have summed it up best. These are the kinds of actions that make the population lose faith in the system.

No shit, Sherlock. Yeah. But we did find a use for GPT-3. That's true. Yep. We always wondered where all those millions of words were going a day. Now we know. Now we know. To the FCC comment system. Yep. And over on Twitter, Travis sent this in.

He says, don't throw your shoulders out from patting yourselves on the back for being right again. Oh, man. I've been sitting on a heating pad all week, Travis. I know. Yeah, this is a link from The Motley Fool. More quarterly losses from Uber and Lyft suggest the current ride-hailing model just doesn't work.

What? Again, file under no shit, Sherlock. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. I love just this last line. It's past time for investors to ask what the plausible path to profitability looks like for these companies. There isn't one. There isn't one.

If they can't make money juicing the system as they are now, which is lying, cheating, stealing, and basically having indentured servitude instead of employees, then they're not going to make money. It's a Ponzi scheme. It's absolutely a Ponzi scheme right now because they need more investors to pay for the losses and you're going to run out of people to invest.

Let us not forget, what is their product, Jason? It is just an app. Yeah. That's it. Yep. Yep. And I don't know how to spell or pronounce this woman's name. You probably do. Emily Ratajowski? Ratajowski?

I don't know. She's beautiful. I know that. Yes. Yes. Hubba hubba. Yeah. Hubba hubba. Yeah. Well, she's selling an NFT. Of course she is. Because she's not already rich. Yes, I know. The Verge likes to point out on this one, how many layers of copyright infringement are in Emily Rajaduki's new NFT?

I think I'm going to sell an NFT of the screenshot of Pinterest's homepage. Maybe I can win. No doubt. It starts off by saying, there's the NFT. An NFT contains essentially just a link, but the terms of sale imply ownership of whatever the NFT links to.

Rajaduki can definitely sell a link. Is she really selling the underlying image? Are all NFTs a sham? Further study is needed. And it goes on to list many, many copyright infringements that are going on in this NFT. And then it goes, the final point is, maybe none of this matters anyway, because again, what even is an NFT?

It's interesting that they say that, because I still do follow a friend of the show, Sean Bonner, on Twitter. And they have apparently been getting deeply philosophical about what NFTs are. And it literally is blowing my mind. It's taken every fiber of my being not to jump into the debate, because then they're like, you know, the thing that we have to realize is we're not so much selling the image, we're selling the token, to which I wanted to scream, well, who the fuck wants a token?

That's not what you're selling. I know, I know. I'm telling you. I don't know what you're selling. You don't know what you're selling. You're full of shit. Philosophers for decades will be trying to unravel the mental dumb fuckery that everybody is trying to do to make these things real in their head so they can cash in.

It is insane, the mental gymnastics that I see taking place right now on Twitter about these things. No, it's fantastic. It's just fun to watch at this point. I'm like, okay, you know, juice as much money as you can out of the system. If you're listening to the show and you're thinking about buying an NFT, send us the money instead.

I will make you an NFT. We will make you a link to our show art. And we will tell you that we are selling the link and not the art or a token or anything like that. Just send us your money and we will give you an NFT of us. Yes, please, please.

Pretty pleased with sugar on top. But if you're if you are minting NFTs and selling them, by all means, go with God. Just don't don't peddle it to our our constituency, please. Yes. So this just in autopilot couldn't have been engaged during fatal Tesla crash, says the NTSB.

All right. There we have it. There we have it. It is impossible for that system to turn on because there were no lines in the road. But also now they have video footage of the driver and the passenger getting in the car in a whopping 550 feet later. They run into a tree. So pilot error.

Well, why did we go like two weeks back and forth about whether the autopilot was on or whether anybody was in the car or not when there's a fucking video? Apparently, it took him a while to find the video. But OK. Yeah. Musk for the win on this one. Fatality. Musk had a lot of wins, but we'll get into that in the news.

Yes, we will. Here we go. In the news.

So, yeah, all the bit bros and the doge dorks were glued to their couches. That's a new one. I haven't heard doge dorks before. I might have coined that one myself. I might have minted it myself. I was going to say, did you mint that one? Is it on the blockchain now? Yeah, so they were all glued to their mother's couch watching Saturday Night Live on Saturday night, which probably had, I didn't check this, but I'm guessing probably had the highest live ratings that it's had in years.

Third most popular of the season. Oh, OK. Wow. That's surprising. Chappelle beat him. Chappelle beat him. Oh, well, that makes sense. An actual comedian on a comedy show. He's actually entertaining. So, yes, Musk was on and everybody was waiting and the whole week was full of people snapping up Dogecoin, which drove Dogecoin's cost way up prior to the show.

And then as soon as the show started, it tanked. Yeah, that's the way it went. And I think Professor Galloway said it best was, if you haven't unloaded your Doge by the time that the new segment started, it's way too late. And it turns out that was pretty much when it hit the shitter.

Yes, the hodlers stopped hodling. At 12.22 a.m., the stock trading app Robinhood tweeted that its platform was having trouble with cryptocurrency, suggesting a stampede or basically a runaway. Everybody sold that had it and made money. And if you're stuck holding it, good luck.

Although, you are going to get a second chance here. Yeah, yeah. Have you watched it? Have you watched any of it? No. I watched the Twitter reaction. See, I watched the Twitter reaction and the people that I follow hated it. They thought it was terrible and that Elon was shit and should be burned at the stake.

And so my roommate and I popped a cocktail on Sunday and watched the rerun. And we both laughed and we both enjoyed it because I don't know if you've watched SNL at all in the past like three years. It's terrible. I haven't watched SNL in like 10 years, to be honest. No, it's terrible.

And I mean, I did like the Bill Burr episode and the Dave Chappelle episode this season were good just because of them. But most episodes are terrible. So this was actually probably, in the quality of the show, the third best episode of the season. I thought Elon was, you know, Elon.

And it was pretty good. I mean, I thought it was funny. Well, apparently my Twitter, the people I follow on Twitter are more savvy than the people you follow on Twitter because that was the vibe I got as well. Everybody said he actually did quite a good job. Yeah. Given his limitations, they wrote to it and he performed up to standards.

And there was a pre-film segment that Pete Davidson was the star of. I mean, absolutely. It was funny as hell. He's growing. He's totally grown on me. I like him a lot. He's going to be playing Joey Ramone in the Ramones biopic soon. Yeah, I saw that. I saw that. Anyway, I thought he did a good job.

Yeah. That's what people seem to be saying. So if you're sitting there super sad because you're Dogecoin tanked, you will get one more shot here. Here comes another publicity stunt. SpaceX will be launching a Dogecoin-funded moon satellite. Now, we have to check in and see if they're still doing that. Hopefully, they sold their Dogecoin to fund things because if they held on to it, it's going to be a little teeny-weeny-weeny satellite, I think.

So yeah, he's following up his Saturday Night Live stint with another more practical pitch for Dogecoin. Canadian engineering firm Geometric Energy Corporation has struck a deal with SpaceX to launch its Doge-1 CubeSat to the moon in the first quarter of 2022. As the name implies, it's entirely funded by Dogecoin.

Yay. How does that actually work? I don't get it. I mean, what does that mean? I'm assuming that they had Dogecoin at some point and then they sold it when it was super high and they're using the proceeds. And let's say, as again, Scott Galloway, Professor Galloway pointed out, at one point, the Dogecoin was worth more than Moderna, the company.

So there was a lot of money going on in there for a while. I just love this commercial sales VP, Tom Ochenero, said the mission would demonstrate the viability of crypto beyond Earth. No, it won't. A foundation for interplanetary commerce.

What a load of shit. Bullshit. Oh my God. So yes, obviously everybody is seeing through this and this is just a publicity play here and Doge1 is one large tech trend mashup. But you never know. Maybe your Doge will go up a notch on news of this.

But if you're still hodling, you're a loser. Well, it all depends on if they put a bunch of NFTs on Doge1. They should put the Rejajatsky NFT on there. Just the link. A printed out piece of paper with the link. Print the link around the hole.

That'd be great. That'd be awesome. Oh, and other things that don't make any sense. Well, this actually does make sense. 40 state attorneys general sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg urging Facebook to abandon plans to build an Instagram app for kids under 13. Yes, let's take the app that has been shown and proven to actually depress the shit out of teenagers and give it to them for even under.

Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, let's just fucking break them out of the womb. Oh, unbelievable. I would never, ever, not in a million years, let my kid have this. Yeah, no doubt. I do like that they have cited Facebook's poor track record of protecting kids online. And adults, I might add.

Yes. Yeah. Hopefully this will get, yeah, killed in the womb. Hopefully. The tide seems to be turning against Facebook, I've got to say. I mean, I'm, you know, there is no good publicity coming out about Facebook anymore. Mm-mm. So, but Signal trolled them, and I thought this was genius.

Signal tried to run the most honest campaign ad ever on Facebook and immediately got banned. So, they basically used Instagram's ad tech tools and Facebook's ad tech tools, obviously. You get the infinite array of data points collected by Facebook's herd of properties. And I urge you, if you're on the fence about Facebook, go in and start the process to place an ad.

And you will be terrified at the amount of data and how granular you can get. All right. So, Signal created super targeted ads that were branded with the exact targeting specs that they used. If an ad was targeted towards K-pop fans, it said so.

If the ad was targeted towards a single person, the ad said so. Hey, single guy. And all that sort of stuff. It's awesome. I highly encourage everybody to go check out the link in the show notes and go see some of the actual ads that they ran. And Facebook said, hang on a second. No. You can't show this sort of transparency in our system.

What? Exactly. And Signal's blog post said that the ad account used to run these ads was shut down before the ads could even reach their target audiences. Facebook is denying that, of course, and saying that they're just doing a PR stunt here. You know, this is a stunt by Signal who have never even actually tried to run these ads.

And we didn't shut their ad account down either. If Signal had tried to run the ads, a couple of them would have been rejected because our advertising policy prohibits ads that assert that you have a specific medical condition or sexual orientation. Although we don't seem to... We don't prohibit collecting that data, do we?

No, we don't. But of course, running the ads was never their goal. It was about getting publicity. And Signal in turn said, we absolutely did try to run those ads. Those ads were rejected and Facebook disabled our ad account. These are real screenshots as Facebook should know. Nice. Yes.

And Facebook should be worried at this point because apparently the iOS 14.5 update has actually stopped people from letting Facebook track them. Only 4% of US iPhone users have agreed to app tracking after the update. That opt-in rate climbed to 12% worldwide, but it's clear that most people are turning down requests when they receive prompts.

This was a pretty comprehensive study. It followed about 2.5 million daily active users in the US and 5.3 worldwide. So this made me think, Jason, that we have spent all of our time on the show pulling our hair and thinking people just don't care about their privacy. Turns out people are just fucking lazy.

They're too lazy to go into settings and sort shit out. But if you put it front and center in front of them, they'll say, hey, yeah, I'll take the privacy. Thank you. Yep. And here's the other thing. It doesn't work. I turned off the tracking on Instagram. I can go to my browser.

I can Google something. And then I will get ads for it on Instagram, even though I have the tracking turned off. So it doesn't matter. We talked about this last week. They're getting data points from so many other places. Yeah. That's why we know it's not listening to the words that are coming out of your mouth.

They don't have to. Actually, this may be the one thing that has come out of this Apple iOS update, is we now can officially put to rest the fact that they're not listening to you. Exactly. Well, they might be on Android. Who the fuck knows? It's Android. That's true.

And Barrett wrote in with a pretty funny little comment. But basically, the link was, Twitter begins to show prompts before people send mean replies. Yes, they are using an AI to review your tweet before you send it. Want to review this before tweeting? The prompt asked in a sample provided by the company.

And you will have three options. Tweet as is, edit, or delete. And so they're basically running your tweet before it gets sent through a word filter to see if you're pissed off. Yeah. Or drunk. And nobody's going to care. Well, it does seem to be effective.

And tests have found that if prompted, 34% of people revised their initial reply or did not reply at all. So maybe stop some hate. We'll see. They revised their reply. So fuck you could have turned into double fuck you, you raging piece of shit. They're like, oh, you know what?

That actually wasn't mean enough. Let me prompt. I've been prompted. Let me take a minute to formulate a response. Hmm. Yeah. There we go. And no sex sent in a pretty terrifying leak, leak, link about better, not forget to pay your subscription.

And we've talked a little bit. We've talked a little bit in the past about how the car companies are slowly wheedling their way towards subscriptions because the most profitable thing for any company to do is to basically have a bundle and a recurring revenue. And a motorcycle airbag vest has gone ahead and a motorcycle airbag vest has gone ahead and done it. It's got two components, really.

There's the vest itself. And then there's a module which makes the vest actually work. Both are about $400. So you can purchase outright the vest for $400 and then the module for another $400 and then you just own it. Or if you would rather not spend a full $800 and just spend $400, you can spend $12 per month or $120 per year to make the vest actually work.

Okay. And if you don't pay, you die. You die. Basically. That's exactly it. So like – and they actually have a relatively valid reason to kind of do this. They said that basically, you know, maybe you don't ride all year and you don't want to pay for all of this stuff.

So you could just pay for the month that you're going to ride or the two months that you're going to ride. Or you could just sell it as a product, which I guess they do, and you should probably purchase it. Yeah. Yeah. Just – I mean, it's a motorcycle. Motorcycles are money pits anyway.

I mean, I had one for like, what, a year? And the thing – every time you turn around, you got to buy some damn thing for it. I mean, they're boats. They're just like boats, you know? Yes. So $800 for a vest that will, you know, stop you from dying. Not really that much of a capital outlay, I'm thinking.

Much cheaper than the health insurance. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, seriously, I would have bought this if I was still riding, but I'm not. Yep. And you would have bought it outright, not the subscription-based model. Oh, yeah. No shit. Absolutely. I'd like – would you absolutely want to not die? I'd hate to be like screaming down the street at like 90 miles an hour going, oh, shit.

Did I change my credit card? I know. God, I hope that processed. Oh, my God. Oh, here's an even better one. You're driving down the street. You get a ding on your phone, and you pull it up saying credit card was declined. And then you crash. You crash.

Because you're checking your phone on your motorcycle. Yep. Oh, to tell you that you are going to die. That's – we could make a movie about that. Anyway, this was a hat tip to Highlander. This continues to be a big problem, criminals using the internet for criminal purposes.

This is an older story called A Vast Web of Vengeance. It came out in January 30th, 2021 by Kashmir Hill, who we've been following for a while in the New York Times. This is a Toronto-based Super Karen who has put thousands and thousands of hateful articles about people on the internet.

She should have worked for the people who are trying to take down the net neutrality thing. She might have had a job. But she was using revenge sites and customer review sites to get this stuff up there. And it's a chilling read, and there's nothing these people could really do about it.

And it's to the point where – I mean she was living on the streets. They hired a private detective to follow her around. She was doing most of this from a library in Toronto. When it got to the point – the things that she was saying and the damage that she was causing, I don't know about you, but I would have thrown the lawyers away and actually had some vengeance on this woman.

I mean I wanted to go find her and throw her in front of a bust, and I just read the article. I wasn't even affected by it. Well, look, this existed pre-technology. Technology certainly makes it a lot easier and all that sort of stuff. But if somebody is bound and determined to ruin your life, they're going to fucking do it.

Yeah, but this is like – I mean it's so easy. It's just so easy. And we know this. We know this. But it's like these kind of stories really bring it to light, and it's just like, man, I just – you know, sometimes a little stick doesn't hurt is all I'm saying.

Well, yeah. I do hope this woman ends up in jail for a long, long, long, long life. Actually, I think she needs to be in a mental institution personally. Yeah, it seems to be. And it's Toronto. Free health care. Grab the bitch and throw her in a bucket somewhere. Anyway, you know what? This whole thing could have been avoided if she just had the Twitter filter.

That's true. She would have thought about it.

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Media candy. Paul writes in and says, good day, Jason and Brian. I love your show. As I haven't heard this movie mentioned, I thought I would pass it on. I have an 11-year-old and 13-year-old daughter, so trying to find a movie they will both watch is almost impossible. Anyway, the other night, Mitchell vs. the Machines was recommended on Netflix, and as luck would have it, both girls agreed to give it a go.

It had all of us in stitches. It's a cartoon, it's a kid's movie, but it has a techie, I'm assuming he meant feel, to them, that I believe suits the attitude of your show. Keep up the great work, in kind regards. A lot of people have been talking about this on our Discord and some other places. It's supposed to be very good. So I will have to give it a watch to see if it's appropriate for a four-year-old before I actually let my kids see it.

But I will take a look at it. I will probably watch some of it tonight. Speaking of stuff good for a four-year-old, there's a relatively new show on Nick Jr. called Santiago and the Seas. It's very good. So if you're looking for something for somebody of that age range, I can recommend that.

And yeah, there you go. Oh, one other thing I did want to mention. I didn't put this in the show notes. I haven't talked about Lefzitz much on the show in a while because I kind of stopped reading him. But I picked it up a little bit as we're coming out of the pandemic because he's got some pretty good insight into the music industry and what's going on.

More people talk to him than talk to me. And he confirmed something that I've been saying for quite some time. Concerts have gone on sale. Some concerts have even already happened. Some tours have been scheduled. But he is pointing out that this is the music business. And as he states, Live Nation is a public company.

And just like Norwegian cruise lines, Live Nation cannot put its entire business in jeopardy. Bottom line, if you want to go to the show, you're going to have to show proof of vaccination. Definitely. No matter what Florida says. Because lawyers. Because insurance. There is no way in hell shows are going to happen without there being some coverage for these people so that if you go to a show and you get COVID, you don't sue.

Okay. Throw a link to that in the show notes. I've been, you know, Lefzitz is like 50% for me. Sometimes he's right. Sometimes he's wrong. But he always annoys. I just don't like the guy. He's consistent that way. Yeah, he is consistently annoying. But he does have a lot of insight into the business.

I do have to say that after last episode, I did go back and start to rewatch Ted Lasso again. Uh-huh. Just as good the second time. Just as good the second time. What was that comment on Discord about it? It was like, shut up about this show, Brian. I hate sports. Shut up about this show, Brian. I hate sports.

My God, this is a good show. Yeah. Tops and doodads. So I've had my vinyl collection up on Discogs for sale for years now. And I've cleared out an awful lot of it. And I only have a little bit left.

And Mother's Day is coming around. And my wife casually mentions to me about two months ago, you know what I'd like? A record player. Bitch, I got rid of my records. No! Now I'm... I was a little frustrated.

Now that you have a house that you can keep them all in, nice and displayed. I mean, okay. So I'm not entirely heartbroken because a lot of the... Obviously, these are records that I bought in the 80s and 90s. It's very low quality, right?

So all the records that they're producing now are the heavier gram vinyl. So they sound a lot better. They last longer. But still, the point being, I literally got rid of my entire vinyl collection. And now I bought my wife a record player. I picked up the Audio-Technica Direct Drive Turntable Analog Wireless and USB ATLP 120XBT USB.

And it is pretty cool. The nice part about it is I can plug it in. It can be, like, nicely displayed somewhere. It doesn't have to connect to anything because it connects wirelessly. I'm playing it on my Amazon Alexa speakers, and it sounds wonderful. Cool. It's pretty cool.

It's a nice little showpiece thing. Cool. That's about it, really. Well, you can plug it into USB and rip the vinyl, too, if you have to. But you don't have any left. That is true. But, of course, all that's on Spotify. Well, if you had, like, you know, some albums with deep cuts that don't show up on Spotify, like half of the good albums that I'm finding, it's nice to be able to make your own.

I have to say the really funny thing, though, is we set it up and I got her favorite albums, Oasis's Definitely Maybe. So I picked that up, too. And a very nice, you know, gateful, deluxe, whatever edition. And we're playing it, and my kid goes, you can't pause it?

No skip to the next track? I'm like, no, kid. And he's, you can't tell it to do what I want? No. No. No. The way the world used to work, kid. Get used to it. Yeah. And we have a bit of news about Microsoft's development of Windows 10X, which was kind of meant to be as a kind of mobile iOS sort of thing, a stopgap between the next version, full version of Windows.

And they started on it and then went, nah, we're not going to do it. I've never even heard of it. So that is not coming. I've never heard of it. Well, you never will now. Windows 10X will probably never see the light of day, and they will just keep on working into Windows 10X proper. Windows will now go to 11.

So I got the B-Link SEI 8 Mini PC Windows 10 Pro 8th Generation Intel i5-8259U processor 16GB DDR4 512GB SSD Gigabit Ethernet 4K HD Dual HDMI Wi-Fi 6 BT 5.0 Fan Support Auto Power On from Amazon.

So I don't even know what that is. After all of that, I'm not sure what this is. It is a PC. It's a mini PC that's about the size of an Apple TV and comes with Windows 10 Pro, Intel i5 processor, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB SSD, which I just kind of said.

Plus support auto power on. And, yes, you can plug in a smaller hard drive so you can have a bigger one. Like, you know, this one, the SSD on here is on a stick because I was getting it to – basically, I got this as a miner for – or a plotter for my Chia coin.

And also to run the farm because I'm running the farm on a very nice Mac Mini right now that I would like back. I'd like all my computers back. So I got this thing to run the farm. It's 500 bucks. So for a PC that's, you know, not too bad for 500 bucks, it's cheaper than getting another Mac Mini.

So I thought I'd give it a shot. And it seems to work pretty good. You know, it's – for – you know, if I had to get a PC for somebody who wasn't like, you know, a gamer or anything and just needed it for, you know, the standard web browsing and email and docs and stuff like that, I would totally get one of these.

It's tiny. You just put it out of the way, slap a keyboard and a monitor and a mouse on it, and you're good to go. For the love of God, Jason, can you please just order a Chia Pet and put it on top of this thing? I got it now. Now that you said it. That's the perfect size for it. Now that you said it, yeah, I think I'm going to have to.

That's got to be your photo. Yeah. You got to do that. Yeah. And I saw a really interesting long-form article, again, talking about music formats gone by, how Sony paved the way for modern music production. And this is all about that digital audio tape, which was the shiznit back in the day.

I remember saving money in college to get a DAT because it was the best quality and I was doing music production. And that's kind of what this gets into. It's a really interesting article about how without DAT, there may not have been electronic music as it came out. So very interesting article.

If you're into old-school music production and the history behind it, I'd highly recommend reading this. Pretty cool. Yeah. Old-school music piracy, too, because I remember a friend of the show, MXV. He had tons of DATs. He would take his DAT player to concerts and plug it into the soundboard and get perfect copies of them.

Yes. That's nice. Yeah. Well done. Try and get a DAT player that works nowadays, though. Very difficult. Yeah, I know. Very, very difficult. I still have some DAT tapes in the box somewhere, but no DAT player. Send them to Mike. I think he found a working one to digitize all of his shows. At the library.

I have finished Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. All right. It is fix-it porn, just like you would expect. I heard it was the Martian D. It is the Martian, but for sure. Here's the funny thing about listening to audiobooks.

Now, you get, you know, readers who do a wide swath of audiobooks, and you start to equate the books that you're listening to right now with the books you've heard in the past. And this book was read by the same guy that read the Bob-a-verse series.

Okay. That might get confusing in the head. It was. It was really confusing. But I have to say, all the jokes landed harder in this book because I thought they were written for Bob and not this guy in the book. I have the protagonist in my head being Bob, but it's not Bob.

It's a guy. I liked it. I really enjoyed it. I don't know, if you're not into the fix-it porn type of thing, it might not be for you because there's a lot of it. There's a lot of it, you know. I think Adam Savage has locked himself in a closet with some hand cream and tissues and won't come out for another year, but it's on that level.

It's kind of like, you know, how I mentioned in Cory Doctorow's last book, how he started off doing the same thing, but just talking about computers and how to set up a computer. Just to do this thing to move the storyline along. Right. This is kind of like that, but really entertaining.

Okay. Like, Cory's was just mind-numbingly boring. This guy makes it fun. All right. I mean, I'm up for reading it. I really enjoyed The Martian. I think you should. This really does have the same kind of feel to it. It is definitely different. It's still in space, which is great. Different problems, different scenarios, and a lot of different plot twists, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

So, you know, it's not The Martian, but it is just a hair under for me. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Cool. Definitely going to read it as soon as I finish the very long book I'm currently doing. Dave Bittner is back.

Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast and a co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans, with Joe Kerrigan, co-host of The Caveat Show with Ben. The Caveat Show. I'm trying to ad-lib. You now have The Caveat Show 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. Hello. Breaker 5-Niner, Breaker 5-Niner. So, apparently, the ham community came out in full force to support you, Dave.

Imagine that. I called it, right? Yep. I called it. You did. I called it. One, we got a message from Rook, who says he was a manager at Radio Shack and a current ham radio operator. They never tested at Radio Shack, but Dave was describing a bunny hunt, and we ham users were instrumental in organizing search and rescue for Mount St. Helens and other disasters.

Yeah, absolutely. Hams, I mean, hams literally save the day. When there's natural disasters, they step up, and they get made fun of a lot. But when bad things are happening, they, you know, they are— It's kind of like Robin in Batman and Robin.

We laugh at him, but he does step up. Yeah. I mean, they're kind of critical infrastructure in a way that—I mean, and they have a long, proud tradition of doing so. So, thank you. Thank you for your service. And Ben Thornton writes, I'm one of those ham folks that you guys were chatting about in the Hamming It Up episode many years ago.

Okay, so I'm a bit older. I participated in many so-called hidden transmitter hunts, which we now know are bunny hunts, with the fancy homemade direction-finding gear. This was often followed by a gathering at a nearby restaurant for some post-event banter. Right, right. No girls allowed.

Well, I mean, they're invited. It's just they tend to run the other direction. Sure. I mean, it's an open invitation. They're the bunnies you're hunting for, probably. Right. Yeah. Lately, I've managed to get myself bitten by the FPV drone flying bug, and I have now learned what it really means to spend money on a hobby.

Ain't that the truth? More notably, I've been pleasantly surprised that many of my fellow drone pilots have gotten their technician class ham licenses so that they can be legal when using some of the ham frequencies to transmit their video feeds to their goggles. I thought that was pretty cool.

That is cool. I bet that brings all the bunnies to the yard. You can just, hey, but if they run away, you send your drone after them. Right. That sound or his panties dropping all over the world. In turn, FPV drones with GoPro cameras can be used for the aerial photography of the more exotic ham radio field day operations.

This is an example of one hobby's symbiotic relationship with others by borrowing each other's tech. It's a win-win. Thank you, Ben. It is indeed. And back when I was a video guy, I used to enjoy going to the ham fests because it was a great place to buy all sorts of connectors and cables, and you never knew what you were going to find at a ham fest.

It used video equipment and all sorts of things. So I always enjoyed the – there is definitely a spiritual connection with the ham radio operators and the other technical geeks who are into all that old-school electronics stuff.

What happens when the ham fest gets up with the cheese fest? Is it bring your own buns? Well, I will tell you. There was one year when I went to NAB, which is the National Association of Broadcasters Convention. It's a big trade show in Las Vegas.

I think it's second to – CES. Yeah, CES in terms of size. And we happened to be there at the same time that the AVN Awards were there. They always ran in concert. Actually, we were probably on other sides of the same room because I used to go to the whole AVN Adult Expo.

So me and a bunch of my fellow geeks are on our way to one of the hotels, one of the halls where they're having some sort of Final Cut Pro super meet. And on our way there, we're passing by a different hall that is being used for the AVN Awards.

And coming the other way down the hallway are – I'm not – I'm exaggerating. There are women in their underwear, barely their underwear coming out of this event. And of course, it's the culture clash that you imagine it is.

It's all of these TV geeks going in one direction, beautiful, barely-clad women from the AVN Awards, and they're just staring each other down. They use that as B-roll footage for Revenge of the Nerds. Right, exactly.

That's exactly what it was. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. By the way, Jason, you mentioned you got your software-defined radio kit? I did. I did, but unfortunately, I've been sick for several days, so I haven't really had a chance to plug it in yet.

It's sitting there on the desk, but I'm getting back in the saddle, so hopefully later this week I'll plug it in. How about you? Have you been experimenting? I do. I dabble. I do dabble. But I'll wait for you to get yours up and running. We can have a good talk about it. Is there any developments with the Ring camera situation?

Any new data there? Nope. Everything is five-by-five. Every delivery has been on both cameras, so I have to say that this one's busted. Okay. All right. Fair enough. I can live with that. All right.

Well, let's move on to more geeky stuff. We had May the 4th, and the new series drops, Star Wars The Bad Batch. Dave, did you watch it? I have watched the first episode, and I enjoyed it very much. I have watched two. I found it enjoyable. Apparently, there's already a brewing problem in that when Disney first purchased the Star Wars universe, they wiped all the extended universe and said that wasn't canon.

And they promised that everything that they would release would be canon in the same universe and all that. And apparently, The Bad Batch is already retconning some of the comic books. So there's some very angry nerds out there. But whatever. I thought it was enjoyable. I've got an issue with getting into the animated stuff that I don't know if I'm going to get over.

And it could be partially because my kid is of an age where all he watches are animated things, so I've had animation up the ass. Right. And I just can't – I can't make a leap from Paw Patrol to adult animation. Right. That was a segment at the AVN Awards, by the way.

Yeah, I'm sure it was. Yeah, coincidentally, both of them were named Paw Patrol. I don't know. Oh, boy. Yeah, so I found it good, but I found myself comparing it to a metric of what if this were real people and if this were a Mandalorian real person show and how much better it would be.

So that's where I was with that. I would agree with that. I enjoyed it. I would say it felt like Star Wars, but it did feel a little dumbed down. Yeah. And I don't know how I feel about all of – and I know this is – this horse has left the barn, but I don't know how I feel about all of the clones being Australian.

Yes, they are Australian for some reason. Yeah. I thought some of the writing is a little bit clunky, but I enjoyed it. It feels like Star Wars to me. It's a fun – one of the things I like about these sorts of shows is that they allow us to go on these little side adventures that aren't worthy of their own movie.

But they give us a taste of the Star Wars universe, things we've wondered about, and so we get to see them in shows like this. And that's fun. And what I thoroughly enjoyed, though, were some of the other releases that they put up there, the Star Wars biomes and the vehicle fly-throughs, which just tickled my geeky heart.

What are those, by the way? I don't know what those are. Biomes is just fly-throughs, like, you know, faked drone footage. Obviously, faked is not going to be real because, you know, Tatooine does not exist. But drone flyovers of the various planets in the Star Wars – oh, I almost said Star Trek.

Jesus, man. The pitchforks would have fucking come out. Bite your tongue. In the Star Wars universe. So that was very cool. I mean, it's like – you know, it's like the Apple TV screensaver except for dorks. It's awesome. Is this like an extras thing on the Bad Batch or how do you get to this?

No, these are just part of Disney+. Okay. They were just – they're just in there. And then they're also doing a series of vehicle fly-throughs. They started with two. One was the Millennium Falcon and another was a Star Destroyer. We're going to continue to get more. And they're very, very cool. I mean, I thoroughly enjoyed them. Yeah.

I particularly like the biomes ones. And what I like about them is that some of them take place during things that you know about from the Star Wars universe. Yes. You actually see battles going on on the planet. Right. And you're just off at a distance, you know.

So it's this peaceful view of this planet and off in the distance, very small. There's Imperial walkers that are going across the planet and fighting. And they see the rebel base off in the distance and you know what's about to happen. Yeah. It's pretty cool.

I agree. It's a simple idea, well executed. Yeah, exactly. I was surprised we didn't see Endor perhaps for a future episode. Perhaps. Yeah. They must be saving some. Nobody likes the Ewoks. Come on. Let's be serious. Yeah, but they'd be so far in the distance.

From a distance. So I want to dive in and watch this. And then I always get confused on, you know, what's canon, what's not, what's – who, when, what, where, why are we watching this? Because The Mandalorian, I was confused up until like the second to last episode.

I didn't know when it was happening. I thought it happened later in the future. So it – I went and I found a Star Wars timeline. This is StarWarsCanonTimeline.com. And it's – unfortunately, it's a WordPress site. So you can see all of the different media in chronological order.

So you can see what you're watching, where it fits in the timeline, but you can't reverse sort it. So you're always starting at the latest or the oldest stuff and you have to kind of paginate through and all this stuff. So I'm like, okay, can I just sort by time and show me the list? Yes, I'm looking at like two pages of The High Republic of which I have paid zero attention.

Yeah. Yeah. This is one of those things where it's like if I had – if I knew I was going to live forever and I had like, you know, some downtime, I would go through it and start at the beginning. But, you know, time's wasting. And I also checked out Wikipedia. I like Wikipedia.

Yeah. Wikipedia is great. I did send the Star Wars canon timeline to my son Jack who is my viewing companion for things like The Bad Batch. And actually we're making our way through Clone Wars as well right now. But his response to me was, so many books.

So many books. The one thing on Wikipedia that's kind of fun is that there's On This Day. So on May 11th, Terrence McGovern is born. A bunch of things are born. Yes. Born and released.

A lot of people dies and published and there's YouTube stuff. There's a lot of stuff that happened on this day on May 11th in the Star Wars galaxy. The Star Wars galaxy is vast, particularly if you do get into what is no longer considered canon. I mean, I was – I was – you know, in my high school years, I think I read, oh, two to three hundred Star Wars books that were all within that period and all went away.

Because, I mean, some of it was quite silly. But, you know, it was what it was. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. All right. Should we talk about the real world? Why not? We gotta. Okay. So details of the industry hobbling colonial pipeline cyber attack are starting to emerge.

It appears to be a group called DarkSide, which stole almost 100 gigabytes of data in two hours on May 6th as part of a double extortion scheme. Yes. Where intruders threaten to leak both company data and lock them out of their own information. We do not know if they've paid a ransom yet.

I do have a question for you, Dave. Do you think this is the – in terms of regular, normal human beings affected, do you think this is the biggest cyber attack that has happened that at least we are aware of? Yes. I think so. Unquestionably. Largest on U.S. soil for sure.

And, yeah, this is a biggie. Yeah. Gas prices up basically everywhere. Could be. We have the East Coast fuel supply, including airports, which could restrict travel. But they've apologized, Brian. This is my neck of the woods that it does affect. So we'll see.

I haven't seen any effects so far, but, you know, there's an airport near here and we'll see what it does to gas prices. I like – Graham Clewley on his website today, I think the headline was something like, you know, the dark side – the people who run dark side are surely shitting their pants right now.

Oh, God, yes. They are cashing in and heading to the hills. Well, they did come out and say that this is not politically motivated or anything like that. It was pure money grab, right? So they're already trying to say, you don't have to send the army after us. We just wanted money. Oh, but we do.

So there's an important point here that I think is not being – not clear in a lot of the coverage, and that is that dark side, they run an affiliate model. Yes. Hacking as a service, right? Right. It's ransomware as a service. So what likely happened here is that one of dark side's affiliates just did some kind of a spray and pray attack and they hit this pipeline.

And now everybody is in trouble. So this is like your McDonald's and one of your franchises goes rogue. God damn it, Bob. Right, right.

But yeah, when you have the attention of the president of the United States and he's commenting on it bad – when you take down the primary oil pipeline for the entire eastern – southeastern section of the United States, this is surely going to bring the hammer down on you.

Even in places like Russia where the hammer rarely comes down, at the very least, they're going to get a, hey, knock it off. And at the very worst, other bad things could happen to them that happen in folks in that neck of the woods.

So we'll see. We shall see. And we've also learned this week that it's already possible to hack air tags. I love this. I'm in. I want some air tags now. 9to5Mac is reporting that security researcher Thomas Roth has already cracked the microcontroller for Apple's item tracker, dumping its firmware and discovering you can re-flash it for your own purposes.

Whoopsies. I saw someone using it to rickroll already. Nice. Nice. Yeah. I mean, we can laugh about this one. The bigger threat, of course, about the air tags is the privacy concerns. And if you do not have – you're okay if you've got an iPhone because an iPhone will tell you if one's on you and following you around.

If you've got an Android, you're fucked. Yeah. Well, but it starts beeping after a certain amount of time. So if it doesn't come within range of its home devices, it starts beeping after I think three days is what it is right now.

I don't know if that's going to do much. I don't know about you guys, but certainly in my college years and shortly thereafter, I've been in plenty of people's houses that just had their fire alarms beeping away because they needed a new battery. And they seem to not care or notice. I think that's true. Or husbands everywhere are buying their wives' Android phones for their birthdays.

Yeah. I mean, I guess the point is Apple kind of knows that this is a potential use and they're trying to – They're doing the best they can with it. I think they're trying in good faith to do the best that they can. I will say I was listening to the ATP podcast, one of their most recent episodes, I think.

Traitor. And they were talking about – You traitor. Listening to the enemy. I didn't – I was not aware we were at war. I seem to have hit a nerve. What? Next you're going to tell me you're listening to Reply All? Well, I'm going to get in touch with Darkseid and see if they can do something about this.

But they were complaining about how it's really hard to attach this thing to anything because of the shape of it. It's bulbous. It has no flat surfaces. Yeah, I've seen people drilling holes in it and there's like YouTube videos about like if you go – you have to measure five millimeters over this way and ten millimeters down and you can put a hole through it right there so you can attach it to something.

Right, right. Whereas its competitors are designed to go on a keychain without having to go inside of something else. By miraculously putting a hole in it. Right. Imagine that. Yes, I mean they have hole technology. Well, that was part of the point they were making.

When Johnny left Apple, I just don't know what's happening. Did you think to put a fucking hole in it? Right. Design is how it works. That's what Steve Jobs said. But yeah, as I think they pointed out over on ATP, it's as if this device is designed to sell you another thing.

It would be that a $10 little plastic case around it or a $500 leather one. Yes. Oh, have they never ever seen the iPhone? I mean that is designed to buy a case, a screen protector. Everything that they make is designed to buy a case, you know, or sell a case.

Yeah. I mean that's true. That's true. I like to live on the edge. No case. Brian goes commando. That's right. Yeah. I actually do too. I go the other way. I don't put a case on my iPhone. Oh, I can't live with that kind of anxiety. Are you kidding me? The Gorilla Glass or whatever they're using these days has gotten so good.

Yeah. No. It's not like five to six versions ago where if you sneezed at it, the fucking thing shattered. Well, and AppleCare Plus has also come a long way too. So you just pay your $9.99 a month tithing to the Apple gods. Your pound of flesh. Exactly. And then you can basically throw it, you know, on the ground and stomp on it when you walk into the Apple store and say, give me another one.

They frown on that, folks. Don't do that. And that's why everyone at the local Apple store loves to see Jason coming in. Here he comes with a sledgehammer again. I've got to deal with this guy again. Like every time, yeah, it's like every time the battery runs out, he throws it on the ground and stomps on it and walks in.

The bonfire of laptops in front of the Apple store. Right. Give me a new one. Yes. Yes. Jason, here you go. Yes, sir. Well, you should have made Angry Birds load faster. Now I'm angry. Here we go. Right. Right. What do you mean we don't have any more iPhones to sell in here?

There's a stack right over there. That's the Jason stack. We always keep them handy. He just comes in. It's usually in mid-afternoon. He comes in. He grabs his new one and off he goes. He's a little hangry when he misses lunch and then there goes the new one. Right. Absolutely.

All right. All right. Well. You peed it off. I guess we'll do this again next week, guys. I guess we will. All right. May the force be with you. Always. And also with you.

Closing shout outs. A sad shout out this week. We lost Tawny Katane. She died at age 59. She was a- White snake video, right? The white snake girl. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. She was in Bachelor Party as well, which was an old funny movie with Tom Hanks.

Oh, God. That was a great movie. Yeah. It was back then. I don't know if that's got legs. I might have to- We might have to revisit that one. It probably needs a few disclaimers at the beginning. Oh, it needs a lot of disclaimers at the beginning. Some trigger warnings. Yeah. The one thing I- Because I never heard the term before and I was always confused because I was pretty young when I saw that.

As we all were. Yes. Yeah. They just kept talking about laying that pipe and I just- I'm like, huh? What? What? I didn't get it for quite some time. Oh, Jesus. Oh. It's one of those. Right. Yeah. So, fare thee well, Tawny. We will always have the white snake video. Mm-hmm.

And over at Patreon, we've got Rick, Andrew, Nagold, 0123, and JW. And he says, a couple months back, you guys mentioned chia farming. Thanks a bunch for that. Managed to farm multiple chia before it hit exchanges yesterday. To suffice it to say, I made back my initial farming investment times 15.

Gonna sell half and keep half is free roll. Party time. Love the podcast. Gonna use a leaf of chia to patron you all. And he did. Thank you. Thank you. And you also are required now to get a chia pet and put it on top of the machine that is doing the farming. I want pictures and we need to come up with a hashtag.

Okay. Yes, he does. Yeah. I've done some back of the napkin calculations. And from the people who listened to me when I first mentioned it, I think our total gross profit is around $75,000 now. So if you were to listen, I...

Patreon.com slash GOG. I'm saying, share the wealth. You know, where's our taste? Give us a taste. JW, you know, you did good, but you know, it's still going up. So I'm saying, you got to do what you got to do, man. That's right. And Jared wrote us over there.

So I'm starting to think that I must live in an alternate universe or something. I've yet to have any issues with the Apple podcast app. That's how I've been listening to y'all since I switched back to an iPhone years ago. What exactly don't y'all like it? Is it maybe because I'm just a listener and not a creator? No, it was missing a ton of episodes.

They have since fixed some of it. It seems like all of our episodes are back, but their titles are still screwed up. The descriptions are all jacked up. They screwed the pooch on this basically because they went from – you used to be able to, when you opened the Apple podcast app, it would talk to us, get our RSS feed, and it would build our library based on the RSS feed directly from us.

Apple decided in the interim to say, no, we don't want to do that anymore. They're going to go out and basically scrape all the RSS feeds and build a massive database that you then ping from your Apple podcast app. Except they really suck at RSS scraping, and they completely botched their spider, something that I think any competent programmer has done a million times over.

But this is – the Apple podcast division is the mailroom. That is where you start or where you end your career at Apple. So it is – it's either fresh talent or don't give a fuck talent. And I'm thinking on this one, don't give a fuck talent. So they're working their way through it.

But yeah, sorry. It's out of our hands. If you want consistent results, check another podcast player. There you go. And over at PayPal, we've got donations from Andrew, Breed, Mark, Michael, Ralph, Stephen, Stephen, Stephen, Stephen, Stephen, Stephen, Miles, and Sloan.

And over at iTunes, hey, we got some reviews this week. Ninja0211 says, best part of my commute. Long-time listener, first-time reviewer. I've been listening to these two grumps for a little over a year after hearing about them on the Cyber Wire, and it's almost scary how right they are. Every Wednesday, I look forward to my commute home since I can generally listen to the entirety of the episode uninterrupted.

The security segment with Dave is always entertaining, and finding out about Dave's furry tendencies justified him being my spirit animal. Keep it up, grumps. You're keeping me sane through this pandemic. Well, thank you, Ninja. Thank you. And we also got a five-star rating from TheRealSMY. Yes, I was one of the three that laughed at CQ when I got the ape masks.

Good episode, guys. Closing shout-outs, Jason CCC. I took this as a personal request to leave a review, so I have. Consistently good show that is both educating and entertaining. Thank you, and stay grumpy. Thank you. And we have a review from Stuart over at Podchaser, which is a five stars and five paragraphs long.

So if you are on Podchaser, feel free to read that review because we don't have an hour. Way to punt that one. We don't have an hour. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy 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 506. And there you can find all the links we talked about in this episode. You can also head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head up to GOG.show slash review and toss us a five-star and snarky review.

And if you don't already follow us in your podcast player of choice, just go to GOG.show slash follow, where you can find convenient links to every podcast player so you can get the show as soon as it drops, except for Apple Podcasts. And if you know someone who has too much hope in their hearts and a spring in their step, then definitely tell them about the show. Misery Loves Company.

Stay grumpy.

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