507: DoppelBittner

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. What's up? Eight in the morning. What do you want to be up? It is eight in the morning and I'm froggy and coffeed as per usual. So I'll try to keep that to a minimum. I'm exhausted. I had a weekend. What'd you do? All kinds of stuff, man. It's, you know, we're open, baby.

Oh, yeah, we're totally open. Not that I'm fantastically comfortable with it or anything, but, you know, we went to Huntington Gardens all outdoors, you know, kept masks on over the weekend. That was nice. We went and saw my cousin-in-law, sat outside her place, let the kids all play together. You know, that was nice. And then I stayed in a hotel for the first time.

What? Yeah. Well, it was my birthday weekend. So the wife... Happy birthday. Thank you. I did not hear it from you. That's your birthday present. You didn't hear from me.

Yeah. So we went out to Ojai and stayed at the Ojai Valley Inn Resort. So because they had the convenient, you know, they have like villas. So you can like drive up and they had contactless check-in and all that. So we, you know, were never in an elevator or anything like that. So it was very nice and very comfortable. Dined outdoors for the first time in a year and four months or whatever.

It was pretty crazy. It feels weird, doesn't it? Yeah. It feels really weird. The first step I think I did to, you know, we're coming out of this life was I stopped wearing masks on my bike rides, but this was a whole new level. Like this weekend I was around more people than I've seen in a year and whatever. And it's a little post-traumatic stress syndrome going on. There's no doubt about it.

Yeah. We did like two weeks ago to celebrate the Maxination. We went to the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel and that was inside, outside half hybrid. Right. And we were with people we know. Everybody was vaccinated and, you know, that was kind of our big coming out party. And I knew everybody.

Yeah. And then this weekend we went to the Bel Air Hotel and had lunch with people I'd never met before. Ooh, that's risky. Well, we were all vaccinated. Everybody's vaccinated. And, you know, two weeks long plus. But it was weird meeting new people. You lose so many social skills. And that was half the conversation. It's like, this is weird. Like, I don't know where to look. I don't know what's going on. And everybody felt it. But it was fun. It was nice to get out. But it was definitely weird.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So, kind of dipping the toe out there, but still doing it as safely as possible. Basically, I'm following what the CDC recommended we could do like six months ago. Mm-hmm. So, that's where I'm at. All right. All right. Good times. So, it looks like we got a little follow-up.

Mm-hmm. Jay wrote in, said, did grumpy old geeks get hacked? I was listening along and before I knew it, a strange man was reading an ad for Blue Yeti saying it was the microphoto choice if you want to do podcasting. Okay, okay. So, not hacked. Is this part of some new podcast ad system, as I assume what he meant? What a perfect ad to kick it off with. It's all part of our master plan to stop everybody else from podcasting so people will actually listen to us.

We want everybody to have the worst mic possible, so we run ads for Blue Yeti and we take their money, all like 0.002 cents worth for that read. Yeah. I'm looking into this because that's a problem, honestly. Yeah. We were given a list of things that we could check off on which were okay for ads and which weren't, but, yeah, considering, you know, we shit on their mic all the time.

Although, I guess it is kind of, you know, poetic justice that we get paid. Yes, that's true. But it might confuse the audience, I'm guessing. So, we're going to have that removed. So, sorry about that, Jay. I'm definitely looking into it. Yeah, I get lists every week of things that we will do and we won't do.

And I always go through them because I know what our boundaries are. I'll do anything for love. Just not money. Just not Blue Yeti. Yep. And Jeremy wrote in regarding the Chia mining PC name. If the Chia pet is sitting on top of a mini PC, doesn't that make it a Chia pedestal?

Yeah, it would have been funny if it was, if we were still in the petabyte space. Sadly, we're in the exabyte space now, which makes me sad. Makes me sad. There's literally, there's six exabytes of hard drive space on the Chia network now. And it's going up by like half an exabyte a day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Barrett wrote in with an article about that. Chia is leading to a hard drive shortage. So, so this is from the, there's, there's no free lunch files. Yeah. The green Bitcoin alternative is leading to hard disk shortages because you're chunking through hard drives and people are buying them up like no tomorrow.

Just like people bought up all the hardcore graphics cards to mine their Bitcoins. This is, this is just turning me off more and more and more to all these stupid cryptocurrencies. It's, it's, it's just a, it's like where everybody is just like building up their farts and hoping that Elon Musk decides to up farts on Twitter so their farts are fucking worth something.

In the meantime, we're using more power than Argentina and we're destroying hard drives left, right, and center. Well, you're only destroying the SSDs. The main hard drives, those don't, those are just normal. Those don't get burnt out or anything. Oh, okay. So it doesn't count. Just the little plotters do. And, and, you know, they'll last for about six months or so, but, um, cause you're just, yeah, you're just writing to them a lot, but yes, we are all in the chia space, fingers crossed, waiting for Elon to say something.

Cause then we can all just get the hell out. Well, he kind of did say something and we'll get to that. Uh, so, um, just another little bit of followup on the, uh, the chia pedestal. Uh, I did buy a chia pet for the farm. I got the, uh, Amazon exclusive Star Wars, the child chia pet floating edition with stand, a.k.a. Baby Yoda with seed packet, decorative pottery, planter, easy to do and fun to grow.

I will point out if it's the floating edition, why does it have a stand? In the news. So the floating chia pet is just about as good as self-driving cars from Tesla.

Cause they both mean about the same thing. The California DMV is now probing whether Tesla violates state regulations with self-driving claims, which have we, Brian, how long have we said that? Words matter. And if you call it self-driving, that means every fucking hopped up, uh, you know, Bitcoin fucking billionaire bro that bought themselves a Tesla.

And it's got some hot chick in the car is going to hit the, check this out, baby. Let's go make out. It's got autopilot. Yeah. I think, I think we should call these people who, uh, who do this with Tesla's, uh, electro bros. The electro bros. Uh, so yeah, they, they're saying that, you know, you pay $10,000, you get the quote unquote full self-driving package, which it is not.

It is not fully self-driving. It changes lanes, stops at stop signs, traffic lights. Uh, hopefully. Orange cones. Orange cones. We'll get to that one later, too. Red t-shirts. Uh, so, uh, yeah, the DMV is investigating. And, uh, if they find the Tesla is misleading customers, potential penalties include suspension or revocation of DMV autonomous vehicle deployment permits, permits, and manufacturer and dealer licenses.

Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Yeah. I wish I'd have sold my stock. This is not good. Uh, you know, it is what it is. Uh, I, I, they've still got such a lead on this stuff. I do, I mean, he's even, the thought must even actually address this, or at least Tesla addressed this.

It's time to change the language on this, people. It's, it just is. You can't, you're, it's false advertising at this point. And in case anybody thought I was being sexist by saying the whole, like, it's the bit bro with the, with the chick in the car. I will point out, in this article, social media are rife with video showing drivers, mostly young men, overcoming Tesla's easily defeated driver.

Because it's young men that do this stupid shit. Yeah, yeah, guys are dumb. We all know that. Come on. Yeah, we all know that, so. That's just common sense. That's not sexist. And in more, uh, bit bro noise, uh, crypto exchange Binance is facing U.S. money laundering probe. Oh, who would have thunk that?

Who would have thunk that? Considering every single ransomware goes straight to cryptocurrency, why are we surprised by this? And of course, as we've been talking about since all this stuff came out, what a great way to launder money. NFT. Well, now it's NFTs, yes. Yeah. That's the new way to do it.

Buy some bullshit, uh, art. Which is just a link. Just a link. To a file on a web server that you own. But you don't own the web server. But you don't. And you don't own the link. And everybody else can get the file. Yep, but, yeah, okay, sure.

Yeah, it's a thing. It's real, sure. Yeah. So they're getting into this because, of course, you know, again, these companies have paid, they've given a nod and a wink to all this stuff as well. Because, you know, it's a bit, Binance has not been able, been available in the U.S.

Because the U.S. is like, what are you talking about here? No, no, no, no. We have, like, laws and rules and stuff that one is supposed to follow. And, of course, they advertised that Americans should use a VPN to hide their location when seeking access to its exchange. Yes. Nod, nod, wink, wink.

Yeah. Nod, nod, wink, wink. Yeah, there you go. Is that a bad thing, Brian? Um, using a VPN? Not if you go to GOG.show slash VPN. Of course not. Of course not. That is totally fine. No, you know, it is, well, no, it's not, but buyer beware, right?

Like, you want to go put your money in there? Okay, good luck with that. Just not the illegal stuff and, you know, you've got to pay taxes on your earnings and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, that's why Coinbase, you know, Coinbase does that stuff, reports that kind of shit.

So, yeah, but, you know, people who have, I don't know, lots of Chia have to find alternatives right now to move their money around. So, you have to have some way to kind of get it from one coin to another to another to kind of repatriate it into your pocket. So, I know a lot of people that do this kind of thing, and it is sketchy.

It is very, very sketchy. Most people get through and get their money out after jumping through many hoops, and some don't. Some just don't. Well, I mean, just last week we were talking about a guy that was running an exchange that basically just took all the money and ran. Yeah, the turkey guy, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And there's a good article over on Slate about how Bitcoin and Dogecoin are basically at Elon Musk's mercy, and this is a problem. It's unusual for a single person to be able to so effectively influence the price of a certain cryptocurrency, and he has been doing that.

He's gaming the system, as we all know. And, of course, the real BitPros, the solid ones, the respectable ones, the Sun Tye ones are saying, this was all about decentralization. That was the key breakthrough about Bitcoin, and this goes against all of it, except for the fact that it's kind of baked into the fucking system that it can be juiced this easily, right?

Yeah, it always has been. It always has been. Years we've been saying that. New people who did it. You know, these cabals of whales would get together, and they would buy and sell to, you know, inflate or deflate the price as needed. Yeah. You know, somebody came into a bunch of money.

Everybody's like, okay, we're going to drop the price again so Joe can get in on the scam and then bring it back up, and then he sells, and then just the cycle keeps repeating. And in case you're not remembering the timeline on this, let's take a brief look down memory lane, and we're only talking a couple months here.

Musk buys a whole bunch of Bitcoin through Tesla. Oh, look at that. We're going to accept Bitcoin. Bitcoin goes through the roof. Hmm, it's almost earnings report time. Tesla isn't quite going to make it. They sell a shit ton of the juiced Bitcoin, which makes up the windfall, which gets them over earnings.

And then he starts talking about how Bitcoin sucks and Bitcoin falls. Yep. Do you think he's about to buy a whole bunch more? Perhaps. Could be. Could be. But here's the thing. You know, I was reading an article this morning about how, like, is this illegal for him to do what he's doing?

And he is really, really, really on the razor's edge right now. He's walking the line. He is really on the razor's edge. Because it's kind of the same thing that John McAfee got busted for. Mm-hmm. You know, it's market manipulation, but with the intent to make money.

In unregulated markets. Lucky him. Well, the thing is, it's like you can't – there are certain things you can't say. You have to use your words properly. If you don't use your words properly, then you can get in trouble. Like, John McAfee was like, I do not own any of this. Go buy a bunch of it. And then in his Twitter DMs, he's like, how much did we get?

How much did we get? Okay, sell, sell, sell. Because he thought Twitter DMs, for some reason, were secure. So much for McAfee's legacy in secure software. Dumbass. Yeah. Yeah. And then Barrett wrote in with – see, the problem with these articles is they're out of date, like, after publishing.

So he sent an article from The Telegraph about Chia, the green cryptocurrency, which we know it isn't green anymore, has bounced up on Elon Musk's greenish Bitcoin U-turn. Because, you know, he then hyped it a little bit and Bitcoin went down, so Chia went up.

But now I believe he said something about Chia is fine, but we could do better. And now, you know, everybody is going, okay, so he's going to come out with his own coin now. We'll see. I mean, he's also working with the Dogecoin guys to try and bump that up.

So it's – it's just a mess. Dude's supposed to be running two companies. Yeah, well, he's got to finance that trip to the moon. He has a brand new kid. Like, I've been juggling trying to just fucking exist and have a kid and, you know, do a podcast.

I don't know what – he's letting the ball drop on something. Is it the kid? Is it Tesla? Well, it's obviously Tesla right now. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways. Well, he can afford nannies with all that fine Dogecoin and Bitcoin windfall, you know? Yes, but one is supposed to hang out with one's kid sometime.

Yeah. Yeah. That's true. I saw Downton Abbey. They see him for like a half an hour during tea time. Exactly. That's it. Oh, I have a child? Oh, get it away from me. It's time for my tea. Yeah. And Vincent sent in his normal, you know, 10 paragraphs, but I did pull this one.

Facebook, oh, Facebook, play me a song, please, my dear Facebook. And this talks about some of the stuff we've talked about before. This is over in Ireland, though. Facebook moderators facing toxic content told to take up karaoke and painting. So they are having a committee over there about some of the people that are working for Facebook.

They are, well, not working for Facebook because they're, you know, kept at hand's length, of course, or arm's length. They've all had to sign nondisclosure agreements. They're technically the contractors and all that sort of stuff. And they're watching all this horrible stuff that we've talked about. And the manager told them that they should limit their exposure to two hours maximum a day.

But that's their job. Yeah. How do you do that? I'm like, okay, if you want to pay me for eight and I'll only work two. Sweet. Shit, I'll take that job. Yeah. Count me in. Yeah. So that instead of getting clinical mental health care support, they've been given wellness coaches and we know what those are.

They're bullshit artists. Yeah. Yeah. So that's going great. In other Facebook news, we have Facebook users have bypassed misinformation rules by putting up anti-vaccine profile frames. Wait, what? Well, Facebook has been doing a not great but somewhat decent job of stopping anti-vax posts by at least putting up a little thing saying that this is probably not correct.

And here's a link to correct information. But the small amount of individuals that are gaming the system and flooding Facebook with anti-vax stuff to sow discord and, you know, screw everything up have found out that these filters don't include the frames that you can put around your profile picture. Which you'd think would be pretty easy to filter to.

Okay. You know. And what I loved about this article is that Engadget reached out to Facebook to talk to them about it and pointed out too specifically. And Facebook removed the two they talked about. But the other ones are all still up there. Nice. So that's great.

Yeah. Another example of how we get to be the Facebook police because Facebook won't police themselves. Mm-hmm. Oh, here's a simple solution. Don't use Facebook. Yeah. There's that. Yeah. It's getting easier and easier, isn't it? Yep. It is. It really is. I was bouncing around some of the backwaters of the internet this morning.

And there are serious rumblings right now that Instagram is actually working on an NFT marketplace. Of course they are. Yep. They have been approaching digital artists to try and get them into the community so they can launch this thing. Look, if they can charge you $1.50 to hit a button on any of your Instagram posts to make it into an NFT that will never sell to anyone, why wouldn't they?

Ka-ching. Yeah. And they're just providing a service. Yep. And the funny part is I found this through Bruce Sterling. He posted a thread. He's like, oh, NFT people whining about their, you know, their quote-unquote investments like failing and going to zero.

And it was just this whole long thread about, you know, it's the same thing we talked about, the mental gymnastics and how they're trying to, in their head, rationalize the fact that, oh, wait, sometimes things go down in value. Yes. But it was ridiculous. Hey, look, if your $50,000 NFT purchase is tanked and only worth 50 cents now, at least on the plus side, you're not on the hook for the taxes anymore.

That's true. That's true. Although, were they ever going to be? Well, they were supposed to have been. Supposed to be. But remember, a lot of people do not live in the United States. Yes. So, I mean, look at those NFTs came out of what, Singapore, I believe? That's where that virtual, that virtual QuickTime VR walkthrough museum is.

Did you ever look at that thing? Yeah, that thing's awesome. Oh, God. Like, we did a better job in, like, what was it, 1997 with Star Trek with actual QuickTime VR. No, it wasn't QTVR. It was WebVR.

Yes, WebVR. I remember that. Something like that. One of the plug-ins that you could use in Netscape to actually do VR walkthroughs. This entire show could be, we did a better job with. Yeah, no shit. Speaking of that. Been there, done that better. Done that better.

I talked about my experience using YouTube Kids a while back with my kid and how I ditched it and just went to straight up YouTube and monitored them because YouTube Kids was horrific. It's supposed to be a colorful, stripped-down version of YouTube, full of animations, bright colors, and cartoon avatars with, you know, vetted content.

Unfortunately, of course, stuff sneaks through the crack. There's still an algorithm. In fact, the biggest problem I had with YouTube Kids is, again, there is, it's autoplay constantly. So it just rolls from video to video to video. Your kid doesn't get to pick the next video. It's an algorithm.

So you get to see what YouTube wants you to see. It's fucking horrible. And Congress is finally looking into it and saying, what the fuck, people? You are basically just hooking these kids on drugs and feeding them what you want them to see. And, of course, bad stuff slips through the cracks, too.

So it's just like being forced, you know, it's like Clockwork Orange. You're pinning your kid's eyes open and just forcing them to watch shit. And it's pretty bad. So they're looking into it now. And they did ask, like, why can't you just turn off autoplay? Autoplay you can turn off on regular YouTube. Seems simple enough.

What you and I would have done. Yep. But they said, in the coming months, users will be able to control the autoplay feature in YouTube Kids. Because it'll take months to add the fucking flag to it. Oh, my God. That takes, it's already there. You know it's already there.

So all they have to do is turn it on in the UI. Come on. Yep. The bullshit that these people are spewing and that people are actually believing is – it's unbelievable. It really is. It's absolutely unbelievable. I mean, I bet you can't wait for that Instagram Kids to come out.

I think that's going to get quashed. I think so, too. I think – what was it, 45 attorneys – attorney generals? Attorneys general said, no, don't do this. Attorneys general, yes. Because English is weird, kids. It is. And that's one of the ones where it's like, I know it's attorneys general, but I always think that – It doesn't sound right.

It's what you don't – because I know it's like, oh, that's not what people usually say. And then I always flip it back the other way because I have it in my – it's – language is hard. Yes. Hard. And Charles writes in, fuck. In-car ads using vehicle forward-facing cameras to process billboards and serve them onto the vehicle's infotainment screen.

Thanks, Ford. So they patented a system that will use – because all the cars have cameras now – that will use the vehicle's cameras that are facing forward to catch the billboard and then give enhanced content on your infotainment display as inescapable in-vehicle advertisements.

So you pass a billboard for Taco Bell and it'll pop up a nearest Taco Bell is here. Get 29 cents off of Mexamelt. Do they still do Mexamelt? I don't know. I don't know. I just know the Taco Bell got rid of the seven-layer burrito during the pandemic. And that, for me, was the worst casualty of the pandemic.

I know I sound like Gwyneth Paltrow there. Not the 500,000 people that have died. Yeah, not my several friends that have died from it. It's the – yeah, it's the seven-layer burrito. Here's the thing about this. Okay, it's a patent.

People patent this crap all the time. You know what I would like to see a patent for? If we're going to be using all of these cars in-camera systems, they're all going to be networked. Privacy is dead. Get over it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Why can't we use this for things like, I don't know, amber alerts?

You know? Wouldn't that be a better use case instead of 15 cents off a chalupa? So if – But there's no money to be made there, Jason. I know. I know. The public goods saving lives. You know, things like that. Have you looked around America recently?

I guess you can't monetize that shit, can you? Nope. Can't monetize it. No, I got it. This amber alert brought to you by Pizza Hut. There you go. Catch the bad guy and get a free pizza. Get a free pizza. Exactly. That's how you do it. Well, I think the real usage for this is it's going to be the subscription model, right?

So if you don't want to get all these ads in your infotainment screen, you pay up every month. If this actually rolls out in Fords, I will not be buying another Ford. No, definitely not. No. And the article that we've talked – kind of alluded to a little bit earlier about safety cones.

This is Waymo, not Tesla, but there you go. And I just love the beginning – opening sentence of this article. Programming a computer to understand and navigate roads designed for human drivers is hard. Just ask Elon Musk. Or have listened to our show for a long time, which is why this is always 20 years away.

So there is a 35-minute video from Joel Johnson via Autoblog, who is a YouTuber who shares clips of his trips with Waymo1 in Arizona. What a fascinating channel that must be. Did you watch the video? I did. It was like, oh, God. Come on.

I'm scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing. I get to – I know. 12 minutes into the video. Yeah. Johnson's car wants to turn right onto a multi-lane street, but unfortunately for Waymo driver, the rightmost lane was closed with construction cones marking the obstruction. As anybody that lives in any city knows, this is normal.

This happens everywhere. The car stalls, unsure of what to do next. A Waymo representative contacts Johnson to tell him roadside assistance is on the way. Before help arrives, the car suddenly moves to complete the turn, only to stop in between both lanes. I want – I want Louis Black to voice the car's internal monologue and just go, him it in.

Fuck! Just stop. It then backs up a few feet, blocking the whole lane instead of just half of it. Yeah. And then a construction worker comes by to collect the cones that had confused the driver to begin with, and right before support arrives, the car darts away from the situation, only to encounter more cones and send out another call for help.

Yeah, this is ready for primetime. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I think there's something to be said, though, for – I think we could make a show. We've got to call Louis Black and just have him be the voice of AI. I think it would be amazing. Yeah. Now, that's a YouTube channel I'd subscribe to.

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Well, if you turn the TV on today, all you can see is Warner Media and Discovery are merging. All right. I guess that means Discovery Plus wasn't doing that great in and of itself. Well, AT&T is not doing that great, and they've got to write down like $140 billion in debt.

So, this is going to – this deal is going to give them like another $45 billion to kind of throw to the coffers. Or it's $125 billion. I don't know. It's in the – it's real money that AT&T owes. So, the good thing about this is there might be some consolidation on the channels, something less to subscribe to.

But that's what they're saying is going to be the case. If that's actually going to come to fruition, who the hell knows? Because these big mergers like this just turn both companies into just a fuster cluck for years. Yeah. I mean, all of a sudden, nobody knows how to do anything. Mm-hmm.

And it just becomes endless conference calls. So – Yeah. Yeah. It's like, can we put up a new episode of The Kitchen yet? No, we're only keeping the five-year-old ones. Okay. Mm-hmm. All right. That's what we're going to do? Great. Okay. Thanks. Why is Guy Fieri so young on my new paid subscription? Yet so stretched out and even fatter because you've decided to not process the non-HD videos correctly.

Yeah. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, whatever it is. It's rich people getting richer. It gives a shit. I mean, Warner Media, just disaster after disaster after disaster of acquisitions. They can never do anything right. I know a lot of people that actually really enjoy Discovery+, and I'm terrified.

It's just going to destroy it. Yeah. I hope it doesn't because I actually – that's the one that I watch the most. Yeah. I know. I literally watch that one the most out of all of the streaming services that I have. And we got into it last night just talking about we should have our cable channel pay for some of these because we can get some of these.

And I'm just like, you know how complicated it is to call the cable company? And it's so easy to just get it for a while and unsubscribe. That's why I like the Apple TV version because you can just unsubscribe in one click. Yeah. It's super easy. It's super easy. So, yeah. My Showtime and Starz is hitting the road now because there ain't nothing on those.

I'm getting ready to buy Showtime for Dexter. When's that coming back? It's September or something like that. So, I'll buy it for the two-month run that it takes to get through the next 10 episodes. Yeah. But in between now and then, I can save like $40. Oh, yeah. Why would you have it now? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the brave new world, right? The subscribe, unsubscribe, subscribe, unsubscribe. And just like the gym model, they're betting on people not unsubscribing. So, yeah. I literally have a calendar now of what shows that I have to watch on and on what platform because it is so hard to remember what's where because it takes so long to get through the menus.

And God, just Hulu still. Look, like I've said, I've set up an entire calendar, you know, a separate calendar for my Apple calendar that is basically just subscribe and unsubscribe dates. Yeah. Mine's not even that. I need to put that into the calendar. Yeah. Because that's part of it, too.

I need to – that is going to be way more complicated than my actual calendar, which is messed up, you know? I know. But, yeah, it's like, okay, what's starting when? I can't get notifications because notifications don't work. What obscure channel is this on Epix? Who the fuck – where am I going to get Epix?

Oh, God. It's a mess. Yeah. Maybe this will clean it up just a little bit. There you go. We'll see. I listened to two podcasts this week that I had not listened to before. One is brand new. I listened to Gates McFadden Investigates. Who do you think you are? And Gates McFadden is, of course, Dr. Crusher from Star Trek TNG.

And she will be talking to basically everybody that was ever on Star Trek ever. I mean, they don't say that specifically. They say that she'll sit down with close friends and former co-stars. But if she wants people to listen to her podcast, it's only going to be Star Trek people. And it started with Star Trek people. Jonathan Frakes. Jonathan Frakes, right?

Yeah. First one? Yeah. And I like Gates McFadden a lot. I like Jonathan Frakes a lot. It was great to listen to them talk. Very little Star Trek. Okay. Which is, of course, why people are showing up. I don't know. I kind of like the behind. Jonathan Frakes especially because he's had such an interesting and varied career.

Yes, but I'm coming there to hear back stories from Star Trek, damn it. Okay. Okay. So it's a pass for you. No, I'll keep listening. You know, it was the first one. It was obviously, this thing's been in the can for like six months. You could tell because they were talking about like early pandemic stuff.

So this has been sitting around for quite some time. So we'll see. I will skip the Brent Spiner episode. That guy's a weirdo. That guy's so weird. I love him. You do? He's awesome weird. That's what I love about him. Okay. I also listen to the Sarah Silverman podcast because I've always loved Sarah Silverman and I've never listened to her podcast.

It is exactly what you'd expect it to be. It's, you know, liberal porn, but very funny liberal porn. So it's great. Okay. Okay. I will not continue to listen to it. One was enough. Okay. That's what I was wondering. Yeah. I will save my Sarah Silverman comedy for actual polished comedy shows.

Yeah. Okay. Sounds good. Sounds good. The Nevers wrapped up their first chunk of episodes this weekend. Well, that happened. That doesn't sound like a rigging endorsement. It is, actually. It's just the show completely flipped on its head and turned into a different show altogether.

Okay. Did it feel like it was part of the plan or halfway through panic? No, it was part of the plan from the get-go. Okay. It was definitely part of the plan. This has been, this whole thing is scripted out and it's very intricate and I'm watching it and I'm like, hmm.

I'm even getting goosebumps just thinking about it. I really enjoyed it. Okay. I am really excited for the next chunk of episodes. Unfortunately, I don't know if, what's his name is still going to be around for it. Buffy guy, what's his name?

Joss Whedon, since he is on the outs with everybody. So, I don't know if he's going to be part of the next season. I hope he is, you know, because this is definitely a Joss Whedon joint. I mean, you know that, I mean, the jokes are just classic Whedon.

So, but I loved the twist. And the main character is Laura Donnelly. I've never seen her in anything before. I went back and I looked through her IMDB and her Wikipedia, link to Wikipedia will be in the show notes.

I swear to God, I have seen her in a million different things. But I haven't. I've never seen any one of the shows that she's been in. None whatsoever. But I swear to God, I know this woman from somewhere. I mean, she does look like an ex of mine from a long time ago, like spitting image.

But this, I swear I've seen her in something. But she's great in the show. I really enjoy her. But it's just, it's one of those things that's driving me crazy because I'm like, who's she a lookalike for? Because I've literally never seen a thing she's ever done in my life.

Except for this. And she's fantastic. But yeah, I think it's all going to come down to what they do for the second half of the first season. Or if it's just another season, I don't know how they're going to work this because it was only like six episodes. So I'm guessing it's like the, you know, the mid break, the pandemic break.

See, this sounds like a textbook example of a show that I should probably wait and see on. Probably. Probably. But I loved it. I loved it. I really hope they bring it back. And keep the same staff. But that's up in the air. Thanks, Joss. Apps and doodads.

A friend of mine posted about a site, ProCon.org. And I checked it out. And it is a great source for basic pros and cons. Just the facts, ma'am, on various issues. And obviously thorny issues. So if you have questions about things that you don't feel comfortable posting publicly because you look like an idiot.

Or talking to friends about this is a good site to go to, to get the basic pros and cons of any issue. And it obviously hasn't been redesigned since, like, 1995. So it's good for a back-to-the-future kind of look. Yeah, it's kind of old. They have not touched the design forever.

Content is new, though. So, you know, it's worth it. It's a good site. It's a Snopes on steroids. Yeah, I kind of dug it. I didn't spend too much time with it. But I grabbed a couple of them and went through them. And I'm like, oh, this is pretty well thought out, for sure. Yeah, it really is. And Bob Bagadonuts wrote in.

Hey, Bob. Hey, Bob. You got Bobby Bagadonuts. He logged into Lincoln today. And it asked me if I wanted to add my pronoun to my name. Really? Really? Thought you'd appreciate this article, too. And this is a, you know, kind of a right-wing onion site, Babylon Bee.

Instead of traditional warfare, Chinese military will now be trained to shout wrong pronouns in American troops. I don't know, Bob. None of this doesn't bother me. You can just click no. I think this falls squarely in the category. If it bothers you so much, perhaps you should look into yourself.

Also, conservatives are kind of shit at jokes. They're totally shit at jokes. I find it annoying, but not so annoying. That it, I really give a shit. I find the never-ending cookie notices on every site far more annoying than this. Oh, God, yes. That is the worst.

That is way worse. And look, if somebody wants to call themselves something, just fucking call them that. What's the big deal? Who gives a shit? Because, you know, my pronouns are fucking master and commander. Call me that every time. I'm fine with it. Replace commander with something else, and I think you got something.

Hey, hey, watch it. I picked up a couple air tags. I knew you would. I wanted to try them out to see what the hubbub was about and, you know, all this privacy concerns about what works with it, what doesn't work with it, blah, blah, blah.

I just got two of them to try out because one of them, actually, I'm going to use in my backpack just in case I lose my backpack because I'm always paranoid when I go out if I'm going to leave my backpack somewhere. Right. So I thought it might actually be fairly useful. And the other one I'm going to try some experiments with. Experiments.

They're bigger than I thought. They're thicker than I thought for sure. And I got – I didn't go for the Apple keychain. I got, like, some little silicone $7 doohickey from Amazon that works just fine. Right. Which I'll probably never use because I'm going to sew the thing into my backpack so you can't find it.

The only downside of that is when you steal somebody's backpack, a lot of times people just take the stuff out of the backpack and leave the backpack. Yeah. My backpack is in a trash can somewhere. Yep. Gets me closer to the target. Stay on target. I could glue it to the top of my laptop, but I guess I could pry that off too.

And the other one I was going to put under the seat of my bike. But then again, most thieves take the seat off. Yes. Steal the bike. So, yeah, I don't know. I just – I want to play with them. I might do one of the hacks where you flash the firmware and put on your codes because why not?

Why not? Just $25. I can play around with it, you know? And Jeff Y. from Twitter sent in this gem this morning. The no phone original cell phone at Amazon for $16. Mm-hmm. Did you actually look at the product description?

I did. It's pretty funny. It's funny. It's really funny. It's a fake phone. It's literally a piece of plastic. Yes. And they've sold over 12,000 of them. No screen, no data plan, no battery, no charger, no phone. Yep. With a thin, light, and completely wireless design, the no phone acts as a surrogate to any smart mobile device, enabling you to always have a rectangle of smooth, cold plastic to clutch without foregoing any potential engagement with your direct environment.

Packer-resistant, toilet bowl-resistant, breakthrough, no camera, and eternal battery life. What I love the most about this is the Amazon algorithm to make you buy more things automatically pairs it with a phone holder. Bed gooseneck mount. So you can get a bed gooseneck mount for your piece of plastic.

I know. I think Sean Bonner needs one of these. Out of anybody I know that's addicted to their phone, that's one guy that needs one of these. Definitely. But the genius just doesn't stop there, though. They have the no phone air, which is literally a bag of air that you can...

This one I am unable to buy, so Amazon has decided to pull this. I found other buying options. It's like $7 for a bag of air. That's amazing. Again, the descriptions are pretty good. It's funny stuff.

Yeah. Oh, where was it? No headphone jack. The no phone air was the first phone in the world to remove the headphone jack. Why? Three words. Courage. Courage. Courage. The no phone air weighs just zero ounces, making it incredibly easy to carry and lose.

Thank you, Jeff. Why? This was a great one. At the library. I finally finished. On this day in history, Shit Went Down by James Fell.

Gotta go. It was great. This is one of my favorite books I've read in the last year. Basically, he finds out something interesting that happened in history on every single day of the year. And he just writes a short, very short, like two, three pages tops, synopsis of it in his own very interesting style, which involves a lot of cuss words and fuck trumps and everything like that.

So it was hilarious, highly enjoyable. I'm happy to hear he's already done a second one because, you know, quarantine and lockdown. So he's sat at home writing all these and he's been putting them up on Facebook for a while. So you've been able to get a lot of them for free. And then he's tried everything else.

He did Patreon. Now he's over on Substack, you know, trying to make a living. But so I bought his book because I haven't read all of them. And it's nice to have them all in one place. And oh, my God, it's damn funny, man. It sounds like a perfect bathroom book. It is perfect for that. I read or sorry, I listened to The Egg and Other Stories by Andy Weir.

Is an egg stuck in space? I forgot the egg story yet. I fell asleep halfway through because I was listening to it when I went to bed. But I got through the first three stories. It's only an hour and like a few minutes long. They're very short stories. They're very clever, though. And one of the reasons I really like short stories is like, OK, self-contained, boom, no universe building, just a clever premise, well done writing, and boom, in and out.

They're great. They're absolutely great. I don't know if it's on Kindle. If it is, pick it up because I liked them. I liked them a lot. And it was, yeah, there was no fix-it porn as far as I can tell. This was just, these are just really cool, funny stories, sci-fi-ish stories.

I'm a little disappointed that The Egg isn't just a retelling of Humpty Dumpty and he had to fix himself. I'm not going to lie. Might be. Might be. I don't know. I haven't got, like I said, I haven't gotten to that one yet, so. I also read Effortless by Greg McKeown. All right.

He also wrote another book, I think, called Essentialism. It's one of those selfie-helpy books. I like Greg. I've interviewed him on a couple other shows, or I produced the interviews with him on other shows, so I talked to him. And I like his style. This is a short book, and it's about how, basically, you need to just look at why you make things so complicated and stop doing that.

So, it could have been a much shorter book by just saying, hey, look at why you make things so complicated and stop doing that. Yes. That could have been the book. Most self-help books can be one page. Knock it off. Yeah. So, I enjoyed it, just because I like Greg. But your mileage may vary if you're into that kind of thing.

Security? Ha! Once again, this fine Tuesday morning, we are joined by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast, co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy, 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. Welcome to the show, Dave. Thanks. Thanks a lot. This is the NPR episode? I was going to say, exactly. That's what it sounded like. We need some soft chimes in the background. It's really nice to be here.

Thank you all for having me. I appreciate it. Very first AM talk podcast. Right. Before we begin, I have to, something I mentioned earlier in the show, and it was driving me nuts. We said something like WebVR or whatever for the thing. It's VRML.

VRML was the acronym I was looking for. Virtual Reality Markup Language. Yes, VRML. There you go. I just remember the Microsoft edition that threw their hat into the ring there that I actually, Microsoft contracted me to develop something for, and I ended up going to SIGGRAPH with.

It was Microsoft Chrome Effects. I remember that. Oh, yeah. I remember that. Yeah. Did you guys, did you talk about QuickTime VR at all? Yes, a little bit. It was a brief aside, as most of the show is. I did quite a bit of work with that back in the day. We only did one QuickTime VR project, and that was Titanic.

We did a walkthrough of the ship. But VRML was a walkthrough of another ship, which was the Enterprise. Oh, nice. Yep. Nice. That's cool. Yep. So, I found this, and my friend Mike MXV, friend of the show, he finally could unveil what he had been working on for the past several months, and it turns out it was the Mandalorian pinball machine.

And I thought you guys might get a kick out of that. Yep. Yeah. What was he doing on it? He's one of the designers and testers and stuff like that. Wow. He's been working at Stern for ages, so he makes pinball machines. That's cool. The video game industry burnt him out. Go back to Grumpy Old Geeks episode like 13 or 14 to hear his story about the sweatshop industry, also known as the game industry.

But, yeah, I worked on the Mandalorian pinball machine, and it looks pretty good. It looks pretty good. It does. I've got to say. Yeah, it does. I have to say, I'm very happy that we still have pinball machines. Yeah. Because I think it's that nice blend of the electronic and the physical, and they're fun to play.

They make a lot of noise, and these days, they pretty much have video games built into them as well. Yeah, they do. Yeah. And I can't imagine the level of sophistication that they have compared to the early days, but I'm just happy that they've been able to survive, that they're still a thing, and we're still getting exciting pinball machines like this Mandalorian machine.

I saw this as well, and I sent it to my son, and we were like, okay, so where can we go play it? Where? Straw Hat Pizza. Oh, they've been out of business for 30 years. Yeah. There's a place near us called Crab Town, USA, which is two-thirds of the building is a seafood restaurant where mostly they, in the summertime, they serve steamed crabs, which, of course, is a Maryland thing.

But then about a third of the restaurant is an old-school video arcade, and it's just full of all the old games. And they have a handful of new ones, but it's mostly the old ones, and they're all 25 cents a piece. And so we'll take the family and friends over there, have a nice dinner, and then spend an hour or so just playing all the classics.

And it's a lot of fun. Every town needs one of those, you know? Yeah. They should have called it Quarters and Crabs. Good one. I'll mention that next time I'm there. It's a whole different type of... Oh, peep show. Yeah. Oh, okay.

The peep show down the road already got that one. It's a whole different type of establishment, Jason. You know, I'm unable to separate pinball in my mind from silver spoons, which then leads me to think about Ricky Schroeder, particularly in his most recent years. So for me, it's just not a pleasant thought.

Yeah. I actually own a pinball machine. I bought one probably about a decade ago now. And it's a little bit of an oddball. It's this relic from 1977. There's a pinball machine called Fireball, which was a very popular, full-sized arcade game.

But Bally also made like a four-fifth scale version of it that they sold out of Sears stores. So it's all sort of real pinball machine guts. But the actual cabinet's a little bit smaller, and there's no coin-op stuff on it.

But, you know, it plays like a real basic kind of pinball machine. It's nothing like the modern ones today. It's one of the first machines that had LEDs and actually had a computer inside to keep score and things like that. So, but it's a lot of fun. The kids like it.

And when they have friends over, everybody likes to play the old pinball machine. It's a lot of fun. I will link to a picture of it in the show notes here. It's a fun little relic. Fun to play. I'm looking at it. I have played that. I have played that one. It's pretty fun. Yeah. That was the one thing about living at Mike's house is the 20 pinball machines in the basement was pretty awesome.

He's that guy. So, we would basically like the evening was watch Days of Our Lives and go down into the basement and play for two hours, two, three hours on pinball machines or fix them or whatever. It was a ton of fun. Very nice. Yes. Yes.

And so, should we get into some actual news? Why not? I find this one funny. Darkseid ransomware gang quits after servers and Bitcoin stash seized. Now, I have questions about this one. I have many questions about this one because they came out with a statement saying that their servers were seized.

Money of advertisers and founders was transferred to an unknown account. And that, yeah, basically all their Bitcoin was taken away from them. And my first question is, first off, yes, server seizures, fine. Everybody knows that's easy. How did they get to your Bitcoin is what I would like to know, which makes me think that they didn't.

My question was, who's advertising? Yeah, that's true too. Money of advertisers? Well, this is evil as a service. So, you know, yeah. Okay.

All right. Well, first off, tough shit. Right. You know? Right. Yeah. I'm with you, Jason, that I suspect they may have just taken the money and ran. It's hard to say.

So, I think the money that they may have lost was the money that was in transit between their payment systems and, you know, being converted to cryptocurrency and those sorts of things. The infrastructure that was seized, I think they lost something in there.

But, you know, they got $5 million from Colonial Pipeline. I want to say, according to the folks who are tracking their Bitcoin account, they've, in the past six months or so, they've taken in around $70 million. Jesus. Wow. So, they're not hurting.

And the general consensus here is that- I mean, how much of that was just from ButcherBox ads? That's right. Squarespace.com. So, the general consensus among security folks is that they are not just- they're not shutting down.

They're just rebranding. They're letting the heat cool down for a little while and they will be back under a new name with- Light side. Yeah. It'll look remarkably like the old software and will probably trigger, you know, the detection in the same way that this one does.

So, chances are they'll be back. And so, we'll see. My question is, why? You got $70 million. Just stop. I know. I mean, what do you need? I know. I know. That's not how these people work, right? Yeah. I mean, I asked the same thing about the aforementioned off-air Matthew McConaughey.

Please stop inflicting us with your movies. You have enough money. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's it. It's never enough, right? I mean- Yeah. Because it's so easy and there's no punishment for what they're doing. Why not go for $100 million?

Why not go for a billion dollars? The goalposts always move. Mm-hmm. The other interesting little scuttlebutt with Colonial Pipeline is that there's been conversation about how Colonial Pipeline did not shut the pipeline down because of any technical concerns about the industrial control systems.

They shut the pipeline down because their billing systems got shut down. The billing systems actually got hit with the ransomware. That's not a good look. And they couldn't – they were afraid that they wouldn't know who to bill for things. So somebody said, shut it off.

Now, evidently, I've seen other commentary that says it's a little more complicated than that as these things tend to be and that it's not as bad as it sounds. But still, in my mind, it seems as though there should be some sort of backstop against that sort of thing.

There should be some way that – and maybe there will be now. The federal government will say, look, job one is to keep the oil and the gas flowing so we don't have this thing we ran into with people putting gasoline into plastic bags like we had all in the southeastern U.S.

Winning. Yeah, I know. We had some gas shortages here locally. There were a few gas stations near me that were out of gas. How much of that is actual pipeline shutdown and how much of it is just panic?

It's all panic. It's all panic. Just like the great teepee rush of 2020. Yeah. I do hope the people that have their bags of gas don't mix them up with their bags of bleach that they're supposed to drink for the coronavirus because that could be disastrous. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Well, there you go. This isn't so much a news story. This has been poking about for a bit, but good old Senator Ron Wyden, one of the few people in our esteemed government that seems to actually understand technology to some degree, is fairly convinced at this point that the Pentagon is tracking U.S. citizens without a warrant and wrote them a sternly worded letter about that saying, we'd like some information here.

And the DoD replied with a sternly redacted letter telling us not much. So, yeah, we'll see what happens. This is all about the, you know, we can't, we know it's illegal for us to go out and get this information ourselves, but if other people happen to be selling it, we can buy it.

Right. Yeah. Right. Right. This comes down to, there's all sorts of information that the government cannot get without a warrant. Yes. But if you voluntarily give up that information in the course of your everyday business with all of the apps you use online and someone aggregates all that information.

And they, they are allowed to sell it and they're allowed to sell it. The DoD is saying that they're allowed to buy it. If everybody else can, why can't we? Right. And it seems fair, but it seems like a, oh, I don't know, Texas sized loophole in policy, but yeah.

Yeah, I think so. And it's definitely an area of policy that is continuing to play out and evolve. Um, uh, it's, I, I get what they're saying here. I get what the DoD is saying here. And at, at its core, it is the fact that we are all giving up this information.

Yeah, we are. And, uh, that is the main problem, right? That's the one part that we'd like to have fixed tech companies. Right. And everybody else known to man. Um, but even if we are willingly giving it up, uh, it seems to be leaking out everywhere anyways. Like we've, uh, I, I don't even know if we ever even mentioned the Peloton, uh, exposing private data thing, but their rival exercise giant just, uh, heard, Exelon has just heard about that today or this week, this last week that they have the same issue.

It's a, a leaky, they say leaky API. I say poorly fucking coded API. Yeah, exactly. Um, and that is the real problem with all these companies. All this shit is poorly coded. Uh, I don't know what people are thinking at these companies anymore.

But, uh, you know, it's basically, uh, I I'd imagine it's, let's get it done as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible. And nobody thinks to like test things out or, you know, maybe, maybe the API shouldn't give out name, city, age, sex, phone number, weight, birth date, workout statistics, and history without some authorization.

Well, Brian, they do. Brian, you know, like back in the day, us oldsters had fixed all this stuff and wrote all the code that wouldn't do all this stuff. But, you know, once we turned 40, they wouldn't let us play in the sandbox anymore. So they had to start from scratch with fresh talent.

You know, this is a, I think this is a side effect of not letting people over 40 play in, in the game anymore. I think that things like this really are, this is like just a knock on effect of making it really hard for people over 40 who have like 20 years of experience writing code, making it hard for them to get a job in the industry.

I mean, I, I granted, I'm looking at it through old colored lenses because that's why I quit. But, you know, little things like writing APIs, we did, we did that in our sleep and we had it, we had it nailed, man. We could write just an API with completely secure, no problems whatsoever all day long.

And well, we always came from a privacy first coding point. You know, it was, let's make sure that, who should get this data? Well, let's make sure that this data is protected in some sort of way. And of course, I mean, I'm sure some people out there are saying, oh, so what? Your exercise bike is leaking your data.

But it's, it's the, it's the, it's, it's collecting all the data and collecting all the databases and putting them all together. You're getting so much information from this name, city, age, sex. Now combine it with Facebook account. Now combine it with a hacked Domino's account where there may be a credit card.

Now, you know what I mean? It's just, it's crazy how much of our data is out there now and is being connected together. And that's the real problem. These companies need to fucking step it up. But Brian, we're not supposed to say that because all we like is Google Chrome and Ring and we want everybody to have all the data.

I don't know if you know, nobody's heard that. Nobody's heard that review yet because of the way this thing plays out. Oh, that's right. Stick around later for what I'm talking about. Soon, there's an interesting review from somebody that did not listen to our show at all, but gave us a one star. We're temporarily challenged here on Grumpy Old Geeks.

The Grumpy Old Geeks time machine. Yes, it is. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think this is that old thing about how temporary solutions become permanent solutions. Yeah. And it's, let's get to market fast, you know, move fast and break things.

And then they never... The good enough coding. Right. They never take care of their technical debt. Yeah. It always comes due, though. Right. And then it comes due. But by that time, they have all these users. And so how are you going to update that? Oh, well, it's baked in the hardware. We can't recall all the things.

And well, hopefully nobody will notice. Guess what? They noticed. Well, and then even when they notice, no consequences. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Yep. No consequences. So why should a company give a shit? That's true.

That would be a useful change. Would be. Somebody else who needs to do that change is Venmo. Now, we've talked about Venmo before and why? Just fucking why? I mean, that's... I... Yeah.

Let's be like a bank, but social. Why? Right. Let's let everybody know what I paid for and when. And let's let them use cute emojis. And let's make it the default that everyone sees everything I did.

Yeah. That makes total sense. Well, you know, Venmo is now owned by PayPal, which was founded by Peter Thiel, who has a history of liking lots of data from people. So who knows? There's a line there, but I'm sure Peter was out of it.

But still, it's like the ghost of Peter Thiel lives on at Venmo. So what I'm talking about here is Joe Biden mentioned that he paid somebody on Venmo. And then, of course, BuzzFeed News, who is known for their crack reporting. Sadly, that's not a joke anymore.

They are known for their crack reporting, believe it or not. Went and found Joe's public Venmo account and most of his family and friends, which probably took like 20 minutes, because if you know what you're looking for, all you got to do is search.

That's all you got to do. Look, it does beg the question, why did Joe Biden ever even have Venmo to begin with? I certainly didn't until I finally had to, like, get money from some millennial and they didn't have anything else.

And I'm just like, Jesus Christ. That's how it happens to everybody. That's how it's why I've got it, too. That's how they get you. I'm like, don't you have 20 bucks on you? He's like, cash. Can't you send it at least via PayPal? Come on. What about Apple Pay? I can use Apple Pay.

Nope, nope, nope. They all like Venmo because they want to put a poop emoji next to the $20 they send you and make sure everybody knows. No. We had a plumber one time. He's like, hey, you can just Venmo it to me. I'm like, no, let me go in the other room and give you pieces of paper and then you can leave.

Venmo you, Jesus. So I thought that was pretty funny. Oh, Joe. Yeah. Grandpa Joe. This one is not funny, though. This was over at Wired and I saw it and I'm just like, oh, my God. Ransomware's dangerous new trick is double encrypting your data. So a couple of different things here.

Double pleasure is waiting for you. So some hacker groups are double encrypting your data. So they'll sell you a key and then you unencrypt it and boom, it's still encrypted. But sometimes, sometimes ransomware will, they'll both meet at the door at the same time.

One will encrypt it. And then you get another ransomware on top of it. So you got to pay them both. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all I have to say is fuck these guys in the fucking face. I just I'm sick of it. I'm sick of ransomware. I think this should be our new Osama bin Laden as we go after anybody that builds ransomware.

Seriously. I do hope these companies have a good ad campaign going with double mint gum. Seriously. I really do since apparently that's a thing now. If you're a ransomware company, you get advertisers. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, and the push is to also to if we were to apply regulations to the cryptocurrencies, that would get us much of the way there because that's what's enabling all this.

That's what they're all using. Yes. Yeah. They'll have to move to Venmo. Right. Then we'll be able to track them. No problem. No problem at all. Yeah. It's funny. Like this past week, I've been fireproofing my data, meaning that if the house burns down, that I can basically just start over.

The goal is to be able to walk into an Apple store, get a fresh laptop and start over so I don't lose client. What are you planning some insurance fraud or something? No. Just after that. This sounds a little suspicious. It's fire season. I've got a fire that's been going like for four days down the street and I just always remember it around fire season.

It's just like, I'm like, oh man, the only box that I really wants my Synology. So I can, I can like, you know, grab the Synology, my, like my little baby doll and bundle it up and run to the hills. But it also comes down to that losing the client data from my last kerfuffle.

It all ties back in together. So I've been trying to do this in, in, in doing that, I figured out that, yeah, I can make this right. I can make everything I have ransomware proof by just doing, I don't know what we've said all along, offsite backups.

And, you know, it's very, very smart offsite backup. So I've just been kind of diving into that in my, my copious free time. It's kind of been fun because also trying to figure out, it's like, okay, let's say, let's say I literally have to get out of the house and run.

I don't have my phone. I don't have my computers. Everything's gone. Then you have, you have the puzzle of how do I get it back? Because the first step would be, how do I get into my one password account without my super ginormous double ding dong key that you have to have? Cause I use one password online, one password.com and that key that you have to get into it with is monstrous.

So it's like, okay, how do we do that? And then backtrace, backtrace from that because everything comes from, you know, my password software nowadays and so should yours, everybody. Um, right. And then trying to figure that out. So I'm like, I have, I've literally printed it and mailed it to, uh, different family members and said, just put this in a drawer.

If I call you one day, read it off to me. That's it. Um, we're opening ourselves up for some social engineering here. No, not really. Not really. Because here's the other part. Shut up, Bam Bam. Hi, grandma.

Can I have my, um, yeah.

Don't send the whole thing to one person. That's how you get around that. Change of plans. Change of plans. That thing I mailed you, burn it. No, no, no. You, you, you break the key into multiple parts. That's how you do it. Cause I don't want to give like, you know, my family member, the keys to my one password.

Have to send it to multiple people who preferably don't know each other. And then you, you piece the keys back together. I'm just saying there are ways to do it that are, but it's a fun experiment. It's a fun experiment. Yes. And, uh, cause I'm weird and I think that that's a fun experiment. Well, and hopefully you won't have to have it play out to its complete conclusion.

Exactly. Exactly. Because where is that thing you mailed me? I don't, I might've thrown that in the trash. Oh, that was in my pocket. And I washed my jeans. It was a bunch of funny letters on that piece of paper. Yeah. I figured your printer was broke.

Then, then there's the other side of just how to rebuild if you just don't care anymore. It's like, okay, time for a change of career. Mm-hmm. So. No, I, I believe every, there, there's, there's a certain amount of cleansing that comes with every large data loss like that.

Every catastrophic data loss. There's a, there's a emotional mental cleansing that comes with it because you simply have to let go. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Then you just, the inner nihilist comes out and is like, what does it all really mean anyway? Right. What does it all mean? Yeah.

I did find this one funny and I thought everybody should do this who has a Windows machine. Basically, you want to set up your PC so it has a Russian keyboard on it. Because a lot of malware out there is triggered to not install if it thinks it's in Russia or the Ukraine.

There's a list actually over in Krebs on security. And somebody is at, it made it like a little two line batch script too, that you can download and run on your PC that will, will activate the keyboards, but not make you download all the language files and stuff. So when the malware lands on your machine, it'll check.

And if it sees that you're, you know, from the motherland, it won't install. Yeah. It's not like perfect security, but it's just one of those silly little things that you can do that just might save your bacon one day. Yeah. Yeah. I had an idea. Pretty clever. Yeah.

I had an idea of just making little USB dongles that just look like Cyrillic keyboards that weren't actually that, but would make the computer think that one was plugged in. Yeah. So it actually thought it had hardware hooked up to it. I agree with you.

I think this is one of those things that it might not help, but it can't hurt. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, why not? It's like, like taking vitamin C, you know, what, why not? Just don't go overboard. Yeah. Then you get the poops. It's bad. It's really bad.

You don't want to go overboard with the vitamin C. Right. Or Russian keyboards. Or Russian keyboards. Yeah. The Batscript will, it basically creates registry entries that are the ones that the malware is actually looking for. All right. Cool. I just thought that was fun. It just came out this morning.

And our last thing here is from Mike, who sent us this Washington Post article. This facial recognition website can turn anyone into a cop or a stalker. We've talked a lot about facial recognition, particularly the government or police department's use of it, which was terrifying enough.

But good old capitalism has finally brought it to all of us. The facial recognition site PimEyes is one of the most capable face-searching tools on the planet. In less than a second, it can scan through more than 90 million images from across the internet and find matches with startling accuracy. And anybody can use this.

This is open to the masses. So what is, yeah, it's a little frightening. Without public oversight or government rules or regulations controlling facial recognition use, researchers expect that sites like PimEyes will multiply, capitalize, on the internet's vast bounty of photos and videos, and making it possible for strangers to keep tabs on people's personal lives.

And what is stopping them? Literally nothing, says Stephanie Hare, a technology researcher in London. Yes. These guys are out of Poland, I believe. And Ben Yellen and I actually talked about this last week. And we tried it out.

Each of us did. Put in one of our own pictures to see what it came up with. And it was both hilarious and terrifying. Found plenty of pictures of me, including pictures of me from when I was in my 20s. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. But as much fun as it finding those pictures. And by the way, one thing that people are saying about all of these facial recognition things is that what kind of creeps you out is when they find you in the background of photos you did not know you were in.

Yeah. That's always creepy. Yeah. You're at a wedding or someone else's vacation photos. So you happen to be at the beach, you know, on that day. And you got into someone's photo. And it finds you. It finds you. Because it doesn't care. It doesn't care where you are in the photo.

There's no context. There's no context to these things. Yeah. Right. But the other fun thing about it was beyond all the pictures it found of me, it found dozens of pictures of guys who look a lot like me. The doppelbittner. Yeah. That was fun, too. Because, you know, some of them you go, wow.

Yeah, that guy really looks like me. And other ones is like, oh, that doesn't look anything like me. But enough of them look just like you that you go, hmm, if I pass that person on the street, I would give them a second look. And, whoa, you look just like me. So it's fun.

It literally makes you take a long, hard look in the mirror. It does. It does. Okay. So I'm looking at the pricing plans here. It's $29.99 a month for the Open Plus plan. You get 25 searches a day, unlocking results, up to three alerts and basic support for a month.

Now, you pay $80 a month. Here's where it gets fun. Same stuff, more searches, blah, blah, blah. You also get blocking photos from being displayed in the search results. Also, drafting and sending up to 80 DMCA and GDPR takedown notices on your behalf.

Now, that's a service. That's a service. That's actually worth paying for. Now, my question is, as soon as you stop subscribing, do those photos go back? Come back. If you block them and you stop your subscription. I'm not about to pay $80 to find out.

But it's interesting. But, I mean, geez, the 80 DMCA and GDPR takedown notices alone, that's just a buck a notice. That's actually kind of affordable. Well, there's the business model.

Well, the nice thing about it, if you put it in – like there's that one photo that I have of the Irish musician, Liam Clancy, that was stolen and passed around everywhere. If I wanted to put that in there, you could kind of use this like TinEye. TinEye was the other service that you basically put something in and it will find every instance of that photo on the internet.

So this is kind of the same thing, but for people. So I wonder if it's from the same people. That'd be interesting to check out. But, yeah, this is kind of cool. I'm going to play with it. It's terrifying. It's terrifying. But, hey, it's open to the public. So we can actually play with this one unlike some of the other ones that only law enforcement has access to.

Right. Yeah. GOG.show slash donate, please. Jason needs a new play thing. Once Jason's done printing out parts of his key and mailing them out, he doesn't have anything to do on Sunday night, so.

Right. Right. Right. Yeah, the biggest problem is then I'd forget which parts I sent to who, and then I'd have to do the mental gymnastics. And also, if my phone's gone, I'm not going to have anybody's phone number. I'm going to have to rethink this plan. Yeah, there are some flaws to your plan. There are definitely some flaws to my plan.

You're going to end up like that guy who had the millions of dollars in Bitcoin on the encrypted hard drive. You know, he had the key on the encrypted hard drive and he had 10 guesses to get it. Oh, yeah. And he couldn't remember what it was. That's going to be me. I was actually thinking he's going to be more like the guy Memento.

It's covered in tattoos. One, grandma. Two. I have to remember to, like, take my shirt off and look in the mirror backwards in a certain way and to have them all line up and then they'll lock into place and that'll be my key.

Yes, you're going to be bewildering. Bewildering to future archaeologists. I already am. I don't want to get tattoos for that. All right, guys. Well, that was fun. Yeah. All righty. Let's talk next week.

We'll see what changes to new tattoos. There you go. See you next time. Closing shout outs. Over on Patreon, we've got Charlie Thomas and Petey. And at PayPal, we've got Linda, Natalie, Andrew, Nathaniel, Michelle, Tom, and Michael.

Thank you all so much for keeping the lights on. Thank you. And over at iTunes, we've got Libvert, who gave us a one-star rating. I love this one. I love this one. Bring it on. Recklessly uninformed podcast. Woo-hoo! Hosts claim to care about privacy and security, but promote bad practices and proprietary data harvesters constantly.

Sure, hop on Google and start Googling on your Google Chrome browser. Oh, let's use Ring to expose our private lives to big tech monopolies. Let's bash community projects like Firefox and promote the absolute dominance of the Chrome browser. Don't host a tech podcast that promotes convenience over security and tech rights, says the guy who obviously works for Firefox.

Exactly. I know where Libvert works. Firefox sucks. That's why we don't promote Firefox. Neither of us use Google Chrome, you recklessly uninformed reviewer. Exactly. I use Brave. When's the last time we talked about like, yay, Google.

Yay, Google Chrome. Fuck you. I know. I don't know what episode this guy listened to or gal, but obviously didn't listen to the whole thing or get the joke. Jeez. Well, anyway. Anyways, Firefox employees are now infesting our comments, apparently.

Fine by me. Fine by me. All right. At least we got a few downloads out of them. Over at Podchaser, Gable Pagan writes in five stars, Elon Musk's favorite podcast. Yay. Hey. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister.

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. You can also help out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies. It's easy and absolutely free. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 507.

From there, you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as links to our swag and Discord channel if you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans. 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 Starkey review and preferably five stars.

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