508: PanoptiCondo

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I had a good weekend, Brian. I left the house and went out of town. I saw that. Yeah, so did I. That was great. Well, I didn't go out of town, but I left the house. So, yeah, congratulations.

Thank you. Thank you. It was nice and it was weird and I got to fly my drone over the ocean, which was fun. Yeah, and hung out with a friend of the show, Bob. It was nice to see photos. Yes, yes. He's looking very svelte. He's lost a bunch of weight, so that was very cool. And, yeah, we went to a pub with no beer, believe it or not.

We went to the one Irish pub that they had and we're like, we'll have a Guinness. We're out. They're like, do you have anything? They're like, no, we've got – what did I have? I had like a Stella. Right. Apparently a worldwide beer shortage.

Well, you know, it's like that Monty Python skit. Everything opened up. We didn't expect such a rush. No doubt. So, I did also go drinking with your friend Brian Blondell the other day. Oh, nice. And he heard the show and I remember I was trying to figure out who that chick from The Nevers looked like and he said Jessica Jones and to me, bingo.

That was it. Nailed it. Nailed it and won. Well, I have not watched the show and I did a quick Google image search for the actress and I was like, no, not at all until I saw some screenshots from the actual show. And I will give it to you in the show with the makeup and the hair and the, you know, grimacing face from the action shot.

Yes. And the fighting and the snark and she basically is Jessica Jones in the show. Jessica Jones in a bodice. No sec wrote in. So, nobody at Tesla thought that maybe we could build some sort of system where the autopilot stops the car when police are trying to do that. And this is Tesla driver slept.

His car was going over 80 miles per hour on autopilot, Wisconsin officials say. And, yeah, I mean, look, every week people are sending us stuff about how crappy autopilots are and AI driving is. Yet, somehow, there are still true believers out there. So, you know, I got into it a bit on Twitter last night.

But please do tell me again how it's just so much better to have a shitty AI Android app over Bluetooth run your car. Please do. Just keep telling me. It's wonderful. Yep. Speaking of the self-driving car, it looks like there's two sides to this story here. Okay. Elon has in the past called LiDAR a crutch.

Stocks and LiDAR going down. Oh, wait. But then a gentleman in Florida actually saw some LiDAR on a car, which was a Tesla. Stocks going right back up. Stocks and LiDAR going up. Yep. But it comes down to, in a 2018 earnings call, Musk said, in my view, LiDAR is a crutch that will drive companies to a local maximum that they will find very hard to get out of.

He added, perhaps I am wrong and I will look like a fool, but I am quite certain that I am not. Well. All right. Well, I'm okay with that. Look, he learned. All right. Well, one person said that they might be using the LiDAR to do a side-by-side comparison between their self-driving and LiDAR-assisted auto-driving.

Oh, so it's an A-B testing car. Yeah, just what you want on the road. Well, that's my point about all of this. This is not stuff I want on the road next to me. I do not want an AI Android app-driven car on the road next to me right now.

Test the shit first. Well, Brian, we've figured out how to stop this. You just got to tape some orange cones to the back of your car. That's all it really takes, right? Or wear my red stop sign t-shirt. Mm-hmm. I'm telling you, it's easy. It's easy stuff. So that's just a – it's very funny.

We'll see if Elon looks like a fool this week. He's been a moron of the week so many times. What thing does he look like a fool for now? Yeah. I saw this one over at Wired, how Apple screwed Facebook, and it's kind of a follow-up on basically how the ad market for Facebook is in trouble because everybody is saying, yeah, you know what, Mark?

We don't want to be tracked. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, regardless of whether or not they can still track you, which they can, it's a big black eye for Facebook. It kind of proved that their business model holds no water, that people are not cool with it, that they've been putting up with it because they kind of didn't understand it.

And when given the choice, they go, well, that's kind of evil. We don't like that. And I had my come-to-Zuckerberg moment this weekend finally, and I've finally fully divested myself of Facebook. I can't make any claims to be an ethical investor, but I do somewhat try.

And for fuck's sake, I just cannot invest in this company anymore. They seem committed to bringing down democracy and screwing human nature and people. Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. But remember, they still own Instagram. Yes. In new Instagram moves. Well, we mentioned that they're going to be doing an NFT marketplace soon.

Yeah. Or at least they're looking into it. They're looking into it. They're also looking into doing basically Patreon for Instagram type of things like everybody's doing now. Right. Which makes sense because if the ad market's drying up, they need revenue streams.

Exactly. What is a more perfect revenue stream by being just a middleman so content creators can get paid? Shocking. But they can take their pound of flesh, you know? Right. What's driving me crazy about this is as a content creator, you look at this playing field, right?

And it's just I know this is an old person reference, but it reminds me of like if you were a musician in the early 90s. Because all of a sudden you make your product, you put together your album, you put together your podcast. Is that good enough? Nope.

Now I have to write three songs for AOL exclusives. I have to write four more songs to be shitty b-sides to sell the hell out of my CD singles. I've got to do another song for the K-Rock Acoustic Christmas album. I wrote my album. Buy my fucking album. No, it doesn't work that way.

It doesn't work that way. And that's what it's like for us now. Like if we look at the playing field, okay, so if we really want to try to monetize, all right, so now we have to do an extra like maybe 20-minute podcast that we can put on Apple and charge a subscription for in addition to our original podcast.

And oh, wait, hold on. Now we can do a thing on Twitter where we get paid extra if we do extra content over there. And now we can do extra content on Instagram and get some money over there. Plus we have our Patreon. I mean, how much stuff are we supposed to make here? Well, don't forget Locals.com.

We need that one too. There's a million of them. Well, there's that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. No, this is the rise of the middleman economy. We saw this happen. You saw it in music. In blogging, it was a thing too. You know, here's the services so you can pay for blogging. Now we've got it with what, Substack and newsletters.

Everybody's trying to get in the middle of the people who are creating the content and the people who want to pay for content and just siphon off as much money as possible, thus killing their own market because the people who make the content can't make enough money from the people who want to pay for the content. Because all of the soul-sucking middlemen in the middle are taking all the fucking cash.

Yep. Yeah. And the Apple with the new, was it 10 or 14.6 update that just came out yesterday. Now you can have paid podcasting in Apple if you pay them $20 up front and give them 30% for the first year and 15% after that.

And I'm like, no, no, for the fact that one of the main reasons is your app doesn't fucking work half the time now because of your new, you know, awesome system that you built. You know, this is mailroom talent over there building the podcast app.

And you want us to trust our livelihood with you who can't even figure out, you know, how to not turn my feet off for the rest of the world. No, thank you. Your time is, you know, the great steward of podcasting is coming to an end quickly. Quickly.

We are out of all of the Apple charts now, and I'm guessing it's because we told everybody, hey, Apple podcast is broken. To listen somewhere else. Yeah. The people that could listen to us, you know, heard the call and the cry to arms saying, yeah, Apple podcast is fundamentally broken right now.

So maybe you want to go find something else to use. So we are completely out of the charts. And I know a lot of other people that have fallen completely out of the charts too. And speaking of that, I saw that you've put us on YouTube, which is another great revenue model for creators. Well, the thing is, since we're out of the, I don't care about the revenue from it.

That's about discoverability. It takes me an extra hour to put the video up there because every, everywhere I go, everybody's listening to podcasts on YouTube. And I'm just like, okay, here's the deal. At least we'll get some new listeners and we'll figure it, figure it out in the future. But for an extra hour, since we are out of like every chart on the planet, we need some way to get out there that's not going to cost us a boatload in ads.

And I did a bunch of research this week on ad providers and like those CastBox ads, man. Oh my God. You pay, you know, $5,000, $10,000 for a run on CastBox. Your downloads go through the roof. But the attrition rate after your run of network is over is like, it's like incredible.

I mean, it's like. I could just mean we suck. No, no, no. Well, we didn't pay for it. We can't afford it. But I've seen people who can afford to pay for it. I mean, it drops. It's like an 80% attrition rate, which makes me feel like, are those downloads real? You know, if you don't, if you're, if you're losing 80% of the audience who they're, you know, putting you in front of, it's like either your podcast has a, has a fundamental problem.

Or, you know, oh my God, somebody who's taking your money for advertising might be lying to you with the numbers. It feels a lot like when I used to take over an artist site and I would get the mailing list and I would do the first mailing and like 90% was bounces. I'm like, huh, hmm, hmm. What did you stack this mailing list with previous person that did this job?

Yeah, seriously, seriously. So the Apple Fortnite trial is coming to an end. The closing arguments were yesterday. And, you know, when we, when that first started, we talked about it. And I, I know I thought that I was like 100% that Apple is going to win it.

And I, and I thought you were pretty much on the same side too, but, uh, it seemed that way. It doesn't seem like that anymore. It's 50, 50. It's a crap shoot right now. It's funny because I've, you could feel the tide turning as this trial has gone on and on, right? Like you could feel like all of a sudden, like everybody was kind of pro Apple and then they're like, hang on a second.

What? This 30% is kind of bullshit. Yeah. And the more, you know, the more people started to come out of the woodwork because a lot of developers are scared to publicly talk about how Apple hates their developers. Uh, because they, I mean, they're just an enemy to the people.

And we're seeing a lot more people like trying to come out and say things because if you, you know, you raise the ire of Apple, you're screwed as a developer because you, then you can't get your, your app through. I mean, they hold all the keys. So, you know, I found myself switching to the other side. I'm like, you know, yeah, let's get some more alternatives in there and, uh, let's lower this 30% because it is kind of usury and, you know, make it like, there was a great argument in the, uh, in some of the testimony, make it like the Mac, make it just like the Mac.

You can have an app store for the Mac, but you can also have, you can just load an app if you want to, you know, that's, that's the thing that I always never understood. And it's what I think would be fine. Like I don't have a problem with Apple charging 30% to use their payment gateway as long as they allow you to use others.

If you are so inclined and if you have the acumen and the engineers to go ahead and build in a different payment system into your app, so be it. But if you want to be lazy or you don't have that kind of ability and you just want to use Apple system, okay, they can charge what they want. Yeah, but I mean, to do that, you need a secondary app store or another way to sideload apps that makes it, you know, possible to do that.

Cause right now the only way to put an app on your phone without jailbreaking it is to use their store and they do take a hit on, you know, bandwidth and things like that while, while it's in the store. So it's like, okay, alternate stores are fine. Give me an alternate store where I can host my own binaries to install.

And, you know, then you're just out of the loop. That's, you know, that's the way the Mac works, you know, and if I can be a developer and have my app signed, just like I do on a Mac app, you, you get $200 a year out of me for that. So it's not like it's, it's like, it's time to kind of, I think, break the, break that chain.

I'm, I'm, I'm kind of down with Epic on this one. So I don't know. We'll see how it goes. The judge seemed to be pretty in the middle. So I don't know. Fingers crossed on that one. And, uh, I was listening to, uh, I think I was listening to this week in tech and they started, they were talking about how, uh, Twitter is relaunching verification.

Yay. Yeah. There was news articles everywhere when this came out because it's still, you know, everybody still wants that blue check mark and, uh, sure. They, they tell you it's coming and it's gonna, well, actually the articles just make it sound like it's already there.

So I immediately checked. And of course there's no option for our podcast account or my personal Twitter account to even apply yet. So. Yeah, exactly. Same here. I checked. My, my personal is not there yet. Yeah. So I checked. I made sure the app was updated. It is. So it's not there yet. They're a hundred percent going to get slammed with this.

Absolutely. Everybody is of course going to apply immediately. That's actually on Twitter. So that, that makes me think there are one of three options that's going to happen. Uh, the first is they'll do next to nothing. And very few people will actually get verified because that's historically what they've done. Uh, the second is they have some sort of AI that will go through accounts.

And if they have a certain amount of followers, it'll probably get approved. And if you don't have that number of followers, you probably won't. And the third is they were just going to fucking approve everyone that applies. I'm down with that. That's what they should do. Upload your ID. If it's you approve, then you're verified.

Yeah. You are the verified person. It's like, if you want to have super triple ding dong verification where you get super celebrity status, then, you know, create that tier. But as a, as just a regular user of Twitter, I know I am me. And I would like people to know that I am me, except for those drunk tweets.

Then they can, then I can say my, my account's been hacked. My account's been hacked. But it's that person that was fighting with you. That wasn't me. Look, I, I think Twitter is just, I wish Jack would actually spend some time running the company. No, no, no. He doesn't makes, or Square makes way more money.

I, I know. I know. But look, if you're going to make all these noises about going all in on subscription model, which I would love Twitter to do, tie verification in with that. I've got to give you my credit card to give you the subscription and do a tiered thing.

So if you, you know, if you have under a certain amount of followers, you don't pay anything. If you're fucking Kim Kardashian with 20 million followers, you're paying a shit ton of money per month, but you need our credit cards. You verify us through that. Done and done. Tie it together. Make it the big push to get people to move to the subscription model or at least collect the credit card.

I don't understand why people don't ask us to. And it's not like Jack doesn't have a company that, I don't know, collects credit card numbers. That does credit card and verifications? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.

Shia is in the news again. Woohoo! They got a $500 million investment. Hold on a second. You're investing in money. You're investing in the company that creates the software to make the money. Right. Okay. Yep. That's how it goes.

I mean, $500 million is a big one. I think they had like $16 million or something before that because I know True Ventures was in because I know those guys and I knew that they were in. But so the interesting thing here that came out of this article, it says, our goal has always been to go public relatively quickly as that will significantly clarify our regulatory environment and allow customers to use currency to hedge public market volatility, which is different from other coins.

So they want to be regulated. They want to play by the rules because they want government entities to use the damn thing. You know? Oh, I applaud that. I like that thought. However, going public and regulation are not tied together hand in hand.

I'm looking at you, Uber. That's true. Like, just because you've gone public doesn't mean shit about regulatory environments. Mm-hmm. Well. So, okay. They're trying. Here's the deal. They're trying. Nobody else is trying. So. I'll give you that. I will give you that.

Nobody else in this space is attempting to self-regulate or, you know, maybe some people have made some vague noises about, oh, regulation would be fine, but nobody's doing anything about it. Mm-hmm. One of the investors said that the coin is auditable, secure, and regulatorily compliant, making it user-friendly for monetary authorities and multinationals.

So. Okay. I don't know what regulatorily compliant means in this case, but here's the deal. They're trying. That's all I care about. As long as they keep on trying. Keep on keeping on. All right. Well, we got two letters from people that are listening that are both about Chia and questions about it.

And I've decided, Jason, that you actually have gone the wrong path. You should not be doing podcasting videos and chats online. You should just be talking about Chia 24-7. Yeah, except I'm out of the game now. That whole thing is over. Like, the early adopters and getting in to start mining, like the micro-farmers, as they're called.

Yeah. Too late. It's too late. I mean, there was such a narrow window to do that. That, I mean, there's over, probably, like, I think I checked last night, there was like 10 and a half exabytes on the network. And I think there's probably 11 now. It's going up to buy like an exabyte every day and a half, which is insane.

So you're actually better off just buying rather than mining. Exactly. At this point, because it's like, it kind of normalized to around 900, like 800 to 900 right now. And I think that's probably a good price to buy if you can find a place to buy that you trust. Right. I'm just hanging on to mine.

And my farm's running. It's just going. And I'm not plotting anymore because, you know, why waste the electricity on the fact that I'm probably never going to get another coin out of them? I mean, it's the lottery at this point. I've got 50 terabytes of farm, which is a lot of hard drives.

So it's like, the best way for me to do it right now is to just, since they're brand new hard drives, they've only been running for like, you know, three weeks, pox them up, throw them on eBay, make a fortune because hard drives cost them mint now. Yeah. Well, I remember some Bitcoin people were doing that with their graphics cards.

Yeah. Like they just went, I'm going to make more money reselling my graphics card than I'm going to make mining. Yeah. Because once, once you hit that tipping point, there's, there's almost no coming back, you know? So, um, I'm just going to hang on to mine for now. It was a fun experiment. Like I got out of it what I wanted.

I got to mine some coin. I got some coin. I got to see how it works. You know, I'm still on the key base. I'm watching the chat. But, uh, yeah, as far as running your own, uh, farms anymore, it's like, you're going to spend way too much to, to basically try and get lucky.

Uh, pooling's coming up soon. So people will be able to take every, you have to replot and then you can join pools if you've got the hard drive space, but that'll give you a chance to get more Chia. Uh, but it's going to be tough because the Chinese have basically just, you just run ramp shot over everybody.

You can't, you can't call them pools. They should have called them gardens. Well, I know. Yeah. You gotta, you gotta stick with your branding people. I know. I think they do. They just went with it. Cause that's what Bitcoin, you know, coined. They'd coined the term with their coin. Speaking of Bitcoin, um, actually, um, there's one, the one that I wanted to just talk about real quick here is Paolo asked, um, he made the new mistake of buying an SAS HDD instead of a SATA HDD.

And he's trying to figure out how to connect that to his Asus Rogue Strix 590F MOBO, which sounds like it's a completely made up string of words, but Paolo, jump on the discord and, uh, ask the, ask the crew over there. I have no idea if it's, if it's a PC, I'm like, if it works, it does works.

If it doesn't, I send it back to the store and get something that does. I don't know. I literally don't know my SAS from my SATA. Nerd alert. Yeah. In more Bitcoin news, uh, Musk faces loss on Bitcoin investment, uh, cause apparently it has fallen below the price that they paid for it.

But here, here's the thing. All he's got to do is tweet. He did. It's gone back up again, Jason, because he tweeted something positive about Bitcoin. Now I know all the day sayers and bit bros out there are going to say it wasn't just that he tweeted about it. It's that it's an actual change.

It's going to make it better. Oh, fuck you. It's because he tweeted about it. And if he tweets something shitty about it tomorrow, it's going to go down again because he controls the goddamn market. Admit it and move on. Pretty much. Yeah. And, uh, since it was a slow news week, I told you I've been getting, uh, I have a Google alert for NFT now because, uh, yeah, because it, it, it's, it's the best morning news because.

Well, there was a big one this week that, that went everywhere with a very misleading, you know, headline. Charlie bit my finger was sold as an NFT and it could vanish from YouTube forever. Spoiler alert. It won't. It can't. Nope. It can't. No, it can't.

YouTube has one of the best machine learning algorithms out there for trolling for content known to man. And they do that because massive record labels will come out them and sue them. Who's going to fucking sue them for taking down a video that was bought by one person? Yeah. 3F Music bought the, bought it.

So yes. Yeah. For $760,999. Yes. It was Charlie bit my finger. So there you go. And, uh, they're saying that it was going, is now going to be memorialized on the blockchain. I know. Yeah. Again, uh, but going back to what I said, how come nobody's bought dancing baby yet?

I know. What's that? What's up with that one? It's too old. We're too old. We're so old that a meme that we grew up with that was on the internet when we started is not even remembered by anyone anymore. Yeah. Tron guy. Why is Tron guy not up there? Why is chocolate rain not up there?

Come on. Why, why is, why is all your NFT belong to us not up there? I know. Well, come on, come on people. I'm surprised, uh, Sean Bonner hasn't sold his, uh, Elyon, uh, what's up video thing that he made ages ago.

Remember that? Yeah, I do. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So somebody bought it and, uh, now everybody's all like, it might be gone forever, except it won't because there are gazillion copies of it. If you really need to actually see it again, which I mean, who the fuck does? And remember, yeah, an NFT does not, it, it, it's just a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, which we'll talk to talk about in a second.

This one though, I'm like Mark Haynes remembering and honoring a CNBC icon with an NFT auction. 10 years to the day since our cherished colleague, Mark Haynes passed away. CNBC is honoring him by auctioning an NFT of his historic market call at the depths of the great recession.

He called a bottom in the stock market at 947 AM Eastern time on March 10th, 2009, at a time when the markets were in complete chaos. Mark was a voice of reason. Mark famously said, I think we're at a bottom. I really do. Okay.

Here's the deal. If I, when I'm dead, I give nobody permission to make an NFT out of anything I ever did. Period. You heard it here first. I am a, luckily we can all just ignore you. That's true. That's true.

Cause I'm dead. So they're going to NFT the video, uh, the video and sound. So you get, it's not just him miming. We're all screwed. I love how they have to say the NFT is the actual video and sound of Mark's call as it happened.

No, it's not. Not the actual video. It's not. It's a recording of it. It's a recording of it. That's been processed through 17 layers of crap and all that. It's not, whatever. Uh, in addition to the main NFT auction, 50 gifts marking the bottom call are also being sold at $1,000 each.

Okay. Okay. All right. Who's buying the shit? Oh, Jesus. How stupid is that? Um, well, the Hollywood sign, uh, is going to be minted as an NFT. Again, uh, again, fucking sign.

It's a physical thing, whatever. Uh, yeah, this is the great money grab. And, uh, I mean, granted, they're still like working it through. They haven't quite figured it out yet. Uh, they're going to commission an artist to make, uh, the NFT and then sell that.

And, uh, the money will go to the Hollywood chamber community foundation to aid in local charitable initiatives related to homelessness, education, diversity, and inclusion. Take the money guys, take the money, make that NFT. And take the money and do some good with it. I'm fine with that. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, Jason, but you and I could just like, say, go hiking at Runyon tomorrow and take a photo of the Hollywood sign and go ahead and mint that as an NFT.

I don't know how that works with the copyright law with that since somebody owns the sign. But since it's in public, I, I'm, I'm pretty sure you have to pay a licensing fee. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. I'm sure I was out on the street tomorrow and somebody took a photo of me and wanted to put that as an NFT.

They could. Interesting. Uh, I think you could sue. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. If you're out in public, people can take photos of you. Can they not? Yeah, but you can't monetize it. So you have to have a release for that. So, yeah, that's why we used to carry around releases. I'm sure everybody that's doing NFTs is following all the laws.

I know. Isn't that great? Isn't that great? And, uh, yeah, I mean, if we're selling the Hollywood sign, I got a, I got the Brooklyn Bridge to sell you. Well, John Cleese already covered that, Jason. Damn it, John. He drew a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge and sold it.

Uh, that was his big joke a couple of weeks back. It sold for just under 18 Ethereum, whatever the fuck that was worth at the time. It was worth $1,977 and 28 cents on April 1st. So he grossed $35,158 and 81 cents. And for all the work that he put in, that seems kind of low compared to what his day rate probably is.

And why didn't he do an NFT of a dead parrot? Ah, well, you would have to get the rest of the crew involved and you probably didn't want to split the money. He's greedy that way. I'm guessing. And I can't believe we missed this one. Digital horses are the talk of the crypto world.

Okay. Now, yeah, whatever. It's like, you know, crypto kitties and all that stuff. And, uh, these are called breathing NFTs. I, I have no words. I have no words. That's it. What's a breathing NFT, Jason?

It apparently has its own unique DNA and it can be bred with other DNA, with other crypto horses. I, yeah, I know. We're old. Yeah. There's a stud farm.

There's a stud farm. There's racetracks now too. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Okay. Oh God. I hope the puppy bull does NFTs this year. Oh God. And this one comes out of Dubai. Crypto plates are the latest collectible in the NFT space.

They are extremely scarce blockchain number plates. Okay. I hope you can take them to a digital rage room. Oh God. Smash them. No. Oh God. I love it. Okay. Uh huh. Each plate is a one of one edition, meaning there are no two plates the same because it's a fucking license plate.

That's all it is. It's a, it is a, it is a Photoshop template that you can write whatever you want on and then you can pay a lot of money. And it checks it against the database to make sure somebody else didn't write that one. Yep. Yep. And then you can buy it and that's going to be worth something someday right now.

Crypto plates is running a launch offer where the first hundred personalized crypto plates will only cost you 0.005 ETH, which is about $20. And I'm sure the gas cost for that is probably a lot more to personalize your own crypto plate. Head over to crypto-plates.com slash personalize, or you could just burn your money or go to gog.show or patreon.com slash gog.

There you go. Oh, finally, finally, five Andy Warhol NFTs are heading to auction. Art experts question their authenticity. Oh, after the house announced the sale on Wednesday, some experts objected to it, claiming that the works being auctioned were essentially copies.

Do they not know what they're fucking getting into? An NFT is just a fair copy. I mean, in all fairness, if there was ever an artist that would have leapt into NFTs, it would have been Andy Warhol. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Oh, God, man.

I just... What a stupid fucking segment. Let's never do it again. I don't know. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. Oh, man. Oh, God. Yeah. Take a breather. Take a breather. Okay. And I love this one.

U.S. telecoms keep getting wrist slaps for repeatedly ripping off the U.S. government. AT&T keeps getting busted. And after someone who has spent eight hours on the phone with my roommate this week yelling at AT&T, good. Take them for everything they've got.

Eight hours. Eight hours going through different customer service reps around the world. All named Mark, Dave, Steve, Steve, finally, Mary from Mumbai got us fixed. I'll tell you, you got to time it just right because the one time that I've always had the best luck with AT&T customer support are women in India.

Nobody else. It's either the women in India or the women in Georgia. Those are the two that get it figured out. But the ones in Georgia don't really, I guess, since we're on the West Coast, we don't get access to them very often because it was impossible. I got to tell you, I mean, customer support is just so bad these days.

If there are physical locations left for whatever you're trying to get customer service with, go there. Because if you're in their face, they have to fix it before they get rid of you. Oh, she was screaming at them. And I'm like, OK, let me let me step in, see if I can help there. And then within five minutes, I was screaming at them, too.

I'm like, it is the most maddening, maddening thing you have to deal with. We're like, we've done that. We've done that. We've done that. We've done that. We've done that. Can I talk to a supervisor? What country are you in? I've got to say, I mean, we're not big on praising companies on this show because we like to find things that are horrible.

But and in no means am I endorsing Verizon. But I've got to say, I've never really had many problems with Verizon as my cell phone service provider. AT&T? I always had problems with AT&T. They were horrible. Yeah. They are the worst. They are the worst. The worst. Oh, well.

And I love this. Google made AI language the centerpiece of IO while ignoring its troubled past at the company. And this is just really fun. They're like, AI is great. AI is great. And everybody's saying, you know, that report that the girl wrote that you fired? Yeah. You know, all those ethics people you fired about your AI?

Yeah. Yeah. What about that? Well, you might want to go read that. You might want to go read that because Google's like, we have AI ethics now. Yeah. It's just, it's like, you know, one hand not talking to the other. PR is definitely not talking to the engineers and the ethicists.

Oh, wait, do they even have any left or they fired them all? I don't even know. That was a division. I don't think there are too many people left. Yeah. People seem to keep moving around. In very good news, Virgin Galactic completes first space flight in over two years in step forward to finishing development. So the Unity has gotten up to 89.2 kilometers or about 293,000 feet.

I watched the video. Looked awesome. Yeah. Good for them. Good for them. I can't wait until I can visit the first Virgin Megastore in space. Can you play vinyl in space? At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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Media Candy. Speaking of vinyl, the Glastonbury Festival was this weekend, the huge festival that occurs in England every summer that I have never attended but has always been on my bucket list except for the fact that I'm now old and camping in mud does not sound fun to me anymore.

So, I did try to attend the first live-streamed event that they did this weekend because COVID and all that sort of stuff, but it did not go well. Thousands of ticket holders faced technical trouble that either locked them out from the start of the virtual performance or kicked them out during the performance.

They made a free stream available because what else do you do when something like that is going horribly wrong in real time? You just go, damn it, and open it up to everybody. But you could only rewind that by an hour, so the earliest parts of the show were inaccessible. This was done by a company called Drift because they have two I's in it.

They promised access to the May 23rd live-streams as well as a link that would let them watch through May 30th, so people who couldn't tune in for later showings were also promised ticket refunds. So, that's unfortunate because this is a big one and they just cocked it up. Maybe they got mud in the series of tubes.

Maybe. And, you know, there was a good point and a good thing to this because they were meant to support charities and music industry staff who've been unable to work due to the pandemic, so this unfortunately means some money will not be going their way. Hopefully, they'll kick it in. Yep. Yep.

But fortunately, there are now jobs at Drift because they need some new IT guys. Drift. I mean, I get it. I know we're running out of names, people, but come on. Yeah. And speaking of music, I just saw this.

Gary Neumann has released a new album and it's actually quite good. It's called Intruder. I gave it a good listen. Gary Neumann is one of those guys that I know has influenced everybody I listen to and I dip into now and then, but I've never been a mega fan of or anything. But I've got to say the album is really good.

What it really made me do, though, is go and listen to my favorite Gary Neumann album, which isn't a Gary Neumann album because it's Gary Neumann covers by other artists called Gary Neumann random and that came out back in 1997 of all things, but it featured people like Damon Albarn from Blur, Populate Itself, Jesus Jones, all covering great, great songs by Gary Neumann.

My particular favorite is Dubstar's Every Day I Die. Links to both in the show notes. Cool. Yeah. When I lived with a friend of the show, MXV, he got me into Gary Neumann. We'd have it on the radio station in the house all the time. And I quite like Gary. Yeah.

It's great stuff. Yeah. It's just, again, I never sit down and listen to a Gary Neumann album. Yeah, you should try it. I should do that more often. Do it more often. And I tried to watch The Mosquito Coast on Apple TV+. Ah, this is the We're Running Away to Mexico show? Yeah, that one.

Okay. And they're running from the U.S. government, but they're not saying what he did. Did they have too much Bitcoin? They didn't pay taxes on their Bitcoin? Please let that be the end. No, he's Satoshi Nakamoto. That's what it is. That's the twist.

Oh, God. That would be so good. I would love the show if they did that. But here's the thing. You're never going to find out. We watched two and a half episodes of this thing. And all they kept saying is, like, you know, the kids are running with him like, Dad, what did you do? Dad, what did you do? Not now, son. Not now, daughter.

And so I went and I found a review on RogerEbert.com. And he was like, yeah, we watched the whole first season. We still don't know. And we're like, fuck this. I'm not watching this. They're saving it for season two. And I'm like, you're not going to get me to season two if you don't tell me what the fuck is going on.

They're trying to be a loss. Season two will have an inexplicable polar bear. It's never explained. They have to keep running back to the United States to press the button. The numbers. The numbers are bad. Oh, God. And just in speaking of, you know, our time in podcasting is probably has numbers ticking down as well.

Streaming giant Netflix is expanding its podcasting footprint. Great. Just what we need. More fucking carpetbaggers. But there is a job for the head of audio and podcast programming, editorial, and publishing here in lovely Southern California, if you're so interested, which I am not.

I would rather pivot and start a new career than go back into an office. I don't know, man. I think the job would be good for you. But, you know, all right. On to the next Chia. Yeah, exactly. Do you know where Los Gatos is? Yes, I do. Where is it? Nowhere you want to be.

Exactly. Exactly. Pops and doodads. Snaps back in the news with their new set of spectacles that look like a pair of Ray-Ban fucked the Cybertruck. They are hideous. They are very ugly.

And fortunately, you will never be able to buy them because they're just going to developers. Oh. Well, that just means eventually there will be a vending machine in Venice Beach. Exactly. That sells them again just like before. Except this time around, it'll be set on fire by the homeless. I know. You guys have a fire problem over there.

Oh, man. Every day. Yeah. So, yeah. They're going to people who make the lenses and AR effects. And, you know, I watched the little video demo. It's cute. It reminded me of something Nintendo made in the 80s or, you know, like the PXL 1000 or whatever it was.

It's just a little square in the middle of the screen. It was cute. How pissed off is everybody in this space at Magic Leap for putting out their bullshit videos that they could never create. So, when we actually see what these things can do, we're all disappointed.

Yeah. Thanks, Magic Leap. Thanks, Magic Leap. That was awesome. I read two books this week. Woo-hoo. I was going to go back and I was going to read the latest Murderbot novel by Martha Wells.

And then I realized I didn't read the previous novel. So, I went back and read that one. Network Effect, a Murderbot novel, which is a series or book five in the Murderbot Diaries. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Really? I think it had been so long since I had been in that world that I was out of it and barely remembered anything.

So, it was great. I thought it was wonderful. See, I can't remember where I'm at. That's the problem. Well, I didn't either. So, I did finish that one and it was great. And I immediately bought book six. So, I will be starting that this week. Okay. How long is this one? Are they still short? Five was pretty long.

Six is short. Okay. Because, yeah, the first couple were short. So, we binged them and then just got kind of tired of the Murderbot for a while. Yeah. And I think I got through three. So, I need to read four, five, and six now. Yeah. But, yeah, I put them on my Kindle, my actual Kindle, because I like reading those.

This is kind of the only way to get those is on Kindle. There's no audio version yet. I'm sure there's going to be a major motion picture any fucking moment. But, you know. I'm okay with that. Yeah. I'm okay. If they keep the tone of the book, if they don't, you know, if they basically make it RoboCop, where, you know, he kills everything, or she, or whatever, she, I'm fine with that.

If they water it down and, you know, we get a cuddly robot, I'm going to be pissed. You know who would be perfect in this? Jessica Jones. The real one? The real one. Not the Nevers one. The real one. Okay. Yeah, I agree. Totally perfect. I also read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir at your recommendation.

What did you think? Disaster porn. It was The Martian with a potato replaced by, spoiler alert, The Twist. The Twist. It was good. I really did like it. I don't know what happened with the second book.

Hated that one. But love The Martian and love Project Hail Mary. Yeah, the second one wasn't bad. I didn't think you hated it, but I enjoyed it. I didn't like it like this one. I really did enjoy this one. I found it hard to put down. Yeah, it was good. It was really good. You know, it is The Martian, but like you said, with The Twist.

And I read it in a day and a half, or listened to it in a day and a half. I couldn't put it down either. Sam, thoroughly enjoyed it. One that I should have put down was I went back and re-listened to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, narrated by Michael York. Okay. I had a drive.

I went down to San Diego. So I'm like, you know, kill the time. So I put it on, because I barely remembered that book. And the book that I listened to, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, is not the book that I remembered in any way, shape, or form. I have it totally confused with another book.

I think the last time I listened to Brave New World was, I bought it in 2008. So I haven't heard it in 12 years. Right. And I forgot most of it. And I shouldn't have listened to this one again. It's not a happy book. No, no, no.

It's early dystopia. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty spot on for written in, what, 1932? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty good. Pretty good. At least it's good in a futuristic, you know, sense of predicting the future. Pretty bad if you want to pick me up happy book.

No, I never would have recommended that if you wanted a joyous car ride. Hey, but it made my trip all the better because when I got out of the car, I'm like, shit, at least I don't have to listen to that crap anymore. That's a good book. It is, but it's just not what I was in the mood for. Coming out of a dystopian 18 or 19 months and living in a garage, going to see the sun for the first time, and then I just dive back into dystopia.

Yeah. Yes, I agree. Yes. That's not what you want to be reading right now. I have chosen poorly. We're on of the week. So Dan wrote in and said, hey, good news. Even private corporations can get in on authoritarianism.

And this is a link. Neighborhood crime reporting app Citizen is testing on-demand security force. So they've pivoted from being a place where it was just an app where users reported incidents in their neighborhoods and then we would get safety alerts. Notably, my last day of using it was when I was informed about Lady Gaga's dogs being stolen.

That was my last day too for a while. Which was in Hollywood, which I am nowhere near. So thanks for that, citizen. They also attempted to do some sort of COVID-19 contact tracing for a bit, which I never signed on for because I saw how crappy their app was to begin with and figured I probably shouldn't give them that information too because God knows what they're going to do with it.

But now, yes, they are trying to be Uber for bodyguards. So you can use the app to hire bounties and start people going around and doing vigilante-esque sorts of things. So that's great. Yeah. What could possibly go wrong? Well, they could offer a $30,000 bounty against a person that falsely accused of starting a wildfire.

Okay. Example A. Exactly. I put it back on my phone because we had a pretty big incident in the neighborhood because my friends at the liquor store down the street got robbed and it was all over the news for days. This gang of ne'er-do-wells came in and robbed them and literally tried to – they almost hit them in the head with a wine bottle that they threw across the store.

But it was on the news like every night for a week just like they haven't caught them yet. But I talked to one of the guys today and apparently they have their names. So they're probably going to get caught because here's the thing. If you're a criminal and you're going to rob a place, you shouldn't put a Taft High School football team patch on your backpack if you don't want anybody to know where to find you because Taft High School is a couple of walks away.

Exactly. So I put it back on and immediately started to get shit from everywhere else. The only nice thing that they added to the app was the fact that you get notified when a helicopter flies overhead and it will tell you what it's looking for, which is kind of cool. But – It just says you.

Yeah. Hide. Hide. Yeah. Also, Dog the Bounty Hunter has been hired through the app to find you. Yeah. Although he's pissed off because he's got to give 30% to Tim Apple for the right to come find you.

And he's got to pay the $20 onboarding fee. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, God. Yeah. And they want the power to arrest people now, which is great. Yeah. No. We have stuff for that. Yeah. The police. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God.

And, yeah. Like, we don't have enough police shootings. I don't want my police department ubered. I know. Call Paul Blart. Get him out of the case. Oh, God. What is wrong with people? Oh, God. And, yeah.

So, that COVID data that you were talking about, yeah, that was leaked. Oh, did that get out? Oh, imagine that. Imagine that. Yeah. I didn't put mine in either. I was tempted to. And then I'm like, wait a minute. These guys can't figure out where the hell I am, let alone do anything else. So, yeah.

I think the Citizen app is now. What was the one where you could tell that your neighbors are racist? Nextdoor. Nextdoor. Nextdoor, yeah. Yeah. This is firmly in the land of Nextdoor now. Well, no. You use Nextdoor to find out what person with too much melanin is walking around your neighborhood.

And now you can use Citizen to hire somebody to go arrest them. It's the one-two punch. They should bundle that. Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm all about the private market and capitalism totally taking over these things.

It's great. It's not at all why we have established a society with a police department. No, we definitely need the private industry to step in because they do such a good job. Security?

Ha! This week, as always, on Security, ha! 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, Dave. Hello, gents. Good to be back. Hello. So, no tangents first? We're going straight into, like, actual security? No, no. This is confusing to me.

I was just getting ready to say, off the air, we were talking about Cicada Land in lovely Maryland. But, uh, I wonder if you can stick a USB stick up and make it look like a cicada to sneak it in somewhere. Stick it to the back of your shirt to get through security?

We are ankle deep in cicadas right now, and they're humming outside, and it's mostly a nuisance, they don't really get in the way of anything, but they're everywhere, for sure. Well, something else that is everywhere, the ring cameras. That's my, that's my, that's my awesome segue there.

You are, you are just the master at segues, aren't you? I know. Now, we've talked, we've talked to great degree about the ring cameras before, and I've made my position on them very clear, which is I can't stand them, I think it's crazy that somebody can have a camera that captures me in my own house, all that sort of stuff.

We've talked about the police integrations and all that sort of thing. And yet, somehow, with us discussing this all the time and it being negative, we got a one-star rating that said we were pro-Amazon ring and we're bastards. What? I'm still scratching my head over that. Yeah. And that we promote Chrome.

Yes, we promote Chrome and ring, and that's all we do, and we are being completely idiotic and actually doing horrible things. We're shills for the man. We obviously have never listened to our actual show, but there you go. I'm right. I was going to say, do these people actually listen to the show? Clearly, they do not. They just go through the show notes and make their decisions.

Well, we have a theory that they do work for Firefox because they did point out that we should use Firefox. And now, every time I go to Facebook, I mean, Twitter, there's a promoted tweet for, a giant promoted tweet for Facebook everywhere. For Firefox. For Firefox.

So I block them. That's what you get. Okay. All right. So I bring this up because The Guardian had a very nice article, a very long article, saying that Amazon's ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen, or as I like to call it, the Ring Opticon.

It is now here. According to a letter, okay, in 2020, a letter to management was sent from Max Elaser, who is an Amazon software engineer. And as we all know, in tech companies, when letters to management are sent, they are filed in the appropriate place, the trash can, and ignored.

So he said, the Ring is simply not compatible with a free society. And The Guardian argues we should take his claim seriously and gets into a lot of things that we've talked about quite here. They're saying that Amazon's signature home security product could pose a serious threat to a free and democratic society, which, you know, you go, it's a doorbell.

How could it do that? Right. Yet, here we are. Because the surveillance network is spreading rapidly, is extending the reach of law enforcement into private property, expanding the surveillance of everyday life. And what's more, Ring users agree to release video content to law enforcement. And here's what I did not realize.

There is no way to revoke access once you have granted it, and few limitations on how that content can be used, stored, and with whom it can be shared. So they are saying that Ring is effectively building the largest corporate-owned civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen. An estimated 400,000 devices were sold in December 2019 alone.

That is crazy to me. That's a lot. And that's, you know, there's already rings everywhere. And I know when I go for a walk, if I see a camera, it's on somebody's doorbell, it's inevitably a ring. They are the number one device out there. And kudos to Amazon for that, because they made it cheap, and they made it easy.

Is it good? I was going to say that the highlight of it is you can't tell who's who on it, so it doesn't really matter. A cicada goes by, and it doesn't capture it. That's a feature, not a bug. A bug. A bug. Oh, well.

So, yeah, I was wondering what you guys thought about this, because, I mean, obviously, we've talked about it. I think there's no disagreement about this article from these three people. Yeah. Is it the network effect that troubles us the most? I think so.

In other words, you know, they're just expanding everywhere now, right? Like, you're kind of an odd man out if you don't have a ring camera at this point. And because everybody has it, that has just created this entire, well, a panopticon. It really has started to create that right now, right?

Well, what bothers me about it is the warrantless side of it, and the fact that once you give them permission that they can just go in, because I didn't realize that. I thought that they had to ask for permission for every piece of video that they collected, and that's not good. That's really not good.

No, it sounds like once you opt in, you're in. Mm-hmm. And there's no way to opt back out. Well, my backyard ring camera will be on its way out right now. I wonder if there's a technical solution to opting out. Could you just make it so that it's, you know, whatever they're looking for is no longer there, even though you're still using it on your network.

Could you isolate it somehow? I wonder. Or is it just because it's connected to the ring network that that's how they get into it? It's the only way you can see it, you know? It's got to go, basically go through the ring network, unless you want to do a live view, but you can't record anything then, which kind of defeats the purpose of it. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and as they point out in this article, too, because ring cameras are owned by civilians, law enforcement are given a backdoor entry into private video recordings of people in residential and public space that would otherwise be protected under the Fourth Amendment. So much like last week, we were discussing how government was doing an end round around privacies and things like that by buying data that they couldn't collect themselves.

This is a very similar approach for law enforcement to get access to things that they wouldn't normally be able to get access to. Hmm. Are they really—so to what degree do we think that they're doing an end round on the Fourth Amendment? And I'm coming at this from the point of view that the ring cameras are pointing towards public spaces.

And as we've talked about many times, there is no expectation of privacy in a public space. Not all of them. If I'm across the street in my private house and I just don't have my blinds drawn, you're pointing into a private space. Yeah. Right. Mine in my backyard is pointed to a patio area that is not—you can't see it from the street, but I have a ring camera there, so I'm alerted if somebody comes in the backyard in the middle of the night.

So yeah, that's a private space right there. That's what I'm saying. You were asking for a technology solution. I think a hammer party is probably the better solution. Well, the technology solution would be you should be able to store your video yourself on your own device and not have it go to some—or just opt out from the beginning and don't give the police this stuff.

But people don't do that. Yeah. And just to be clear here, I'm just playing the what-if game. I'm not necessarily on the side of these arguments that I'm making. Yeah. Sure. Amazon's already cutting a check. That's right. Lighting cigars with $100 bills. This is what they call sponsored content.

The high-quality ring camera that was sent to me for free. But Jason, for example, wouldn't you be liable to falling under peeping Tom laws if you set up a camera that's looking in a neighbor's house?

You're already breaking the law. Yes? You have to go back to paparazzi. If it can be seen with the naked eye without enhancement, I believe that's the rule. So that's how paparazzi get busted. They use telephoto lenses to look into neighbors' houses.

And there is no zoom, really, on ring cameras. So they are kind of like wide-angle views. So they are less detail going into someone's house. The farther away that a camera is, the less detail you get, especially on a wide angle. So it's like, yeah, they might be pointed at – I might be pointed at someone's house, but it's going to be four pixels, and I'm not going to be able to really see much.

Right. But again, so doesn't that loop back around, though? But they can skirt the law with that by saying that I'm not using any kind of enhanced visual tool to look into that house because I'm not using a telephoto lens on the camera. Okay. But doesn't that loop around to say we're not violating the Fourth Amendment then because we're not – if it doesn't violate the peeping Tom law, then it shouldn't violate the Fourth Amendment because if we're not violating someone's privacy, then we're good.

Yeah, I think that's correct, actually. I don't like it, but I think it's correct. Right. So I agree. The whole thing creeps me out as well, but I'm just trying to draw the lines here. Do we have a problem with somebody setting up a home video camera watching their front porch if the footage goes nowhere but to themselves?

I don't. I mean – No. We've had those forever. I don't either. It's the network effect with it, like you were saying. And it's also the fact that if somebody wants to look at that video, they have to come to my house. They have to give me a warrant to get that footage from me. It's not that they can just – I can see that what's really tripping me up here is that unrevocable access because, yeah, my neighbor's house gets robbed and I have video of people going and like breaking into his home or his car across the street.

So I want to give that to the police. The only way you can really do that with Ring is to give them access. I mean you can create a shareable clip, I guess, and send that, but then does that still open you up to it? That unrevocable access, it's like I want to give them one-time access for this time slice from this single camera.

But it sounds like they're taking that and running with it and going, woo-hoo, we got them now. We got all the footage. And is it historical? Is there a time limit on how far they can go back? What's the length of time that they can look at this stuff? Right, right.

So you get the robbery of the neighbor across the street, but the police also get your meth dealer coming to your house. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, not what you want. Right. Right. No, so it's funny. I made a, I sent this to you guys because I made a, Brian, you're calling it the Ring Opticon and it's a bad thing, but I thought of a way that, you know, Facebook could monetize this.

And so over. Because they need that. Exactly. Well, they do now that, now that ad revenue. They do now that we're taking their advertising money away from them. Yeah. Slowly but surely. Fair point. Fair point. Yeah. Since the advertising revenue is drying up, I made this little ad that on my live stream on Adorama last week that I think could really help everybody out and kind of solve some of these problems.

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Sounds like we produced a bit. I know. I just came up with that. I came up with a sister product called Panoptigon, which you can spray around your house to get rid of all the security cameras. Oh, that's good.

I like that. Panoptigon, yeah. Yeah, I think Panoptic Condos is a brilliant turn of phrase. I love it. I love it. Thank you. So I think Ring needs to jump on that bandwagon and figure out a way to at least give us a kickback if we're going to be giving them all this free footage.

Or maybe we get those stickers. You know that scam that they used to run with the highway patrol and the local law enforcement stickers that you put on your car that people would cold call you for in the middle of the day and say, we're calling you, sir, to talk about giving to the policeman's fund. If you send us $100, we're going to send you some stickers that you can put on your car.

And I can't say, sir, that they will get you out of a ticket, but I can't say that they won't. Can't hurt. Can't hurt. It can't hurt, sir. It's like the firefighters did that, too. It was like, well, if you've got that sticker on your house, I guess we could put out the fire. If not, well, well, you should have donated. Yeah.

And I fell for it when I was a kid. And I had them around when someone had broken into my neighbor's house across the street and I had cameras going, but I didn't catch the thing. But they searched my house and took me down and fingerprinted me because fuck the police. But I had those stickers and that was a long story.

I think I told it on an early episode of the show, but he saw those stickers and he's like, you know, these are a scam, right? I'm like, shit. Yeah. You know, the thing with the with the insurance companies used to be true, though. It used to used to put a shield on your house if you were because fire departments were funded by insurance companies.

You had private fire departments. And so if you paid into the fire department, you got this shield that you could put on the front of your house and if you didn't have the shield, they'd let your house burn down. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. I know this because a friend of mine has an insurance company.

They do. They do. I have a friend. Evidently, there are still some communities that go by this. There was a story not too long ago, five years ago or so, about this very thing happening where someone had not paid into the local fire service and their house caught on fire.

The fire department came and they let the house burn down because them's the rules. Well, we need crowdfunded fire departments now, like we have crowdfunded police with a citizen app. Well, yeah. These socialist fire departments that we enjoy, you know, where they'll just put out the fire in anybody's house.

I mean, where's the fun in that? Where's the justice in that? Yeah, exactly. Do you guys remember the movie Cuffs? I do not. With a K, with Christian Slater and Mia Jovovich back in the day. He ran like a local police department in the neighborhood that was kind of like one of those things where like the police wasn't, you know, part of the whole city.

You had little privately funded police departments. It was a really weird premise. But yeah, Cuffs with a K. I highly recommend going back and watching that. I don't believe it has legs, but it's one of Christian Slater's early works that's well worth the watch. Yeah, I think I'm good letting that one go down in history as it was, yeah.

Mia's topless. She's been topless in every other movie she's done since. Well, I was like, that's, yeah, that's all her movies. Right, right. So the ring thing kind of ties into a little bit of this next story that I got from The Verge, which was a very long read, but it's called Chicago's Predictive Policing Program told a man he would be involved with a shooting, but it couldn't determine which side of the gun he would be on.

Instead, it made him the victim of a violent crime twice. This is a chilling, chilling story that is, you know, Minority Report come to life. Did you guys get a chance to read this one? I did.

And in fact, I think I'm going to use it tomorrow on Caveat as my story. Yeah, it's, it's, I mean, I was, I, I, I was like, I'm really angry about this. Like it's, yeah. I mean, you got this guy, he's just sitting there minding his own business, going about his life.

I mean, he's had a couple of minor run-ins with the law, but no violent crime, no felonies. And this black box algorithm decides that he's the guy who's going to be trouble. And so the cops start tailing him everywhere. And now the neighborhood doesn't trust him.

And he ends up getting shot twice. Yeah. And the funny thing is, they say that like, sir, we don't know what's going to happen to you, but our algorithms say that you are going to be involved in a shooting. You might be the shooter or you might be the victim. We are going to assume that you're the shooter.

And that's, that's where it really went wrong. You know, it's like, okay, it's, it, this is, it should have just, this article should have just been called self-fulfilling prophecy. It's, yeah. I bet you had he lived in a different neighborhood, they, the police would have assumed he would have been the victim, right? Yeah.

Or been a slightly different color. Yep. Yep. A different shade of human. And he would have had a very different relationship with the police and how they went about spending their time with him. Really puts the minority in minority report. Yeah. At some point, can we come to some sort of consensus that perhaps this whole algorithm thing that we're trying to base absolutely everything on right now isn't fucking working?

Nah. Okay. Have you seen Google I.O.? Come on. This reminds me, the original cast of Saturday Night Live, so we're talking mid-70s, right? They did a bit where they said, you know, according to recent statistics, a man is attacked five times a day by violent crime.

We found that man. And so it's this guy and he's just walking down the street and every, you know, 30 seconds somebody comes and beats the crap out of him. It was, it was that kind of thing. So this reminded me, I mean, I don't mean to make light of this man's situation because it is tragic, but.

Why is nobody stepping up to help him sue the Chicago Police Department? Oh, somebody will. I'm sure. I don't think so. I mean, this is, this is like a decade old issue with him now. And, and, and they have stopped doing it, right? They've, they've retired these. Last year.

Systems. Last year. You can't rush these things, Jason. You got to break some eggs, I guess. You got to, you got to ruin a few lives before you, you, you give up the live ruining system. Yes. You just have to make sure you, yeah, you got to make sure that the first few lives weren't just an anomaly.

Yeah, I mean, if you want a true A-B test, then you really have to run the numbers for a long period of time. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that just, this thing just, and by the end of the article, I just felt, you know, I felt beaten down for the guy, you know? Yeah. Me too. No.

Me too. It's a sad story. It really is. It sucks. It really is. Yep. Yeah. Talk about somebody who needs a GoFundMe. Yeah. I hope he, I hope he finds justice. I really hope some way that he finds justice because he was wronged. Yep. Yeah.

All right. So we also have a ransomware gang that's going around attacking healthcare systems. A hat tip to Vincent, who in his own very hobbled- Irish way. And whiskey way has kept us up to date on how this has been going on in Ireland for the past couple of weeks. But apparently they have moved beyond just Ireland now.

Bleeping Computer and Gizmodo have noted that the FBI has issued a flash alert warning that this ransomware group behind the Ireland attack has also targeted at least 16 healthcare and emergency networks, including police and 911 dispatch centers here in the U.S. So this is called the Conti ransomware, and it's believed to be under the control, of course, of the Russian-based wizard spider.

Great name. Cybercrime gang. Yep. I love the names, man. They're just so good. But yeah, I think we've talked a lot of times about this, about how, boy, it'd be nice if these guys had a bit of a conscience and just left, you know, hospitals and healthcare systems out of their attacks.

Well, and some of them have claimed to, they may, they would, they would crow about this and say that they were going to leave them alone, much the way that, you know, during times of war, you don't bomb hospitals and so on and so forth. And then they just go ahead and do it. And I think a big part of it is just because of the automation that they use, they're just out there.

Well, I guess it's, it's, there are two kinds of ransomware operators. There are the big game hunters who do their homework and they go after organizations specifically. And then there are the spray and pray operators and they just look for vulnerable systems and off they go.

And so I think that's in part how a lot of the healthcare systems have been hit. It's not that they're being targeted specifically. They're, they're just sort of, I don't know, the drive-by shootings of ransomware happen. But it's just, it's not sustainable. Something has to change here.

The, the ransomware is just, it continues to grow. It's getting worse. It's, it's costing lives. We have, of course, we had the pipeline issue, which I think is going to be the thing that draws international attention to this. And it's just, we've got to figure out a way to clamp down on this because it's not You know what would really help?

Regulating cryptocurrency. Couldn't hurt. I don't know if regulating. It's how they're getting paid. Right. But you'd have to eliminate it and you can't eliminate it. It's, it's, it's that it's not something that you can just regulate your way out of because it is out in the wild.

This thing exists. You know, it's, I don't, there's no way to get rid of it. It's the whole distributed network. Part of it is the reason that it exists. You can't just turn it off by saying Senator Schmucky McSchmuck says, it's bad to use the crypto, kids.

Don't do it. No, it's, it exists now. And it is a way that people can get paid and they're going to exploit it to the ends of the earth. You know, what I see people saying is that they could apply the, I believe they're called know your customer rules that financial institutions have to apply, which, which is to help them from doing business with mobsters.

You know, those types of things, uh, to help with law, with money laundering, those sorts of things. So there are regulations in place for regular banking that, uh, some people are making the argument. If we applied that to cryptocurrency, that would go a long way towards solving a lot of these problems.

Would it fix everything? No, but it would help a lot. Yeah. If there was like, I don't know, maybe a company behind Bitcoin that could actually, you know, do something about it, maybe change the code to do things about it, maybe. But, uh, there's not, that's why I, you know, stand by, there's actual people in a company and funding behind Chia because that's a cryptocurrency that is going to be able to be able to track people down and lock things off and do things like, you know, cut the bad guys off at the knee if they have to.

That's why Bitcoin is just so damn, it's an, well, I'm sorry, one of the many gaggle of reasons why Bitcoin is so damn bad. I saw a funny thing this week, and I'm wondering if this resonates with the two of you. Somebody made the statement that, um, Bitcoin is Amway for libertarians.

That's, that's very clever. Nice. Not bad. Not bad. Not bad. Not bad at all. Not bad. Not bad. Uh, I just got a quick story here, um, in the, you know, ongoing thing of data breaches. Uh, there's an app called Daily Quiz, uh, popular app where you can make little quizzes and compete with your friends and so on and so forth.

Uh, personal details of 13 million of their users were leaked online. Peshaw, that's nothing. That's nothing. Well, yeah. Plain text passwords, emails, IP addresses, and so forth. Um, and the data's been put for sale on, uh, the dark web.

Um, it's in the Have I Been Pwned database, so probably worth checking. You know what, somebody should, uh, I, I, I suppose this already happens, but it's, like, can you get a monthly email from Have I Been Pwned that just automatically checks and says, hey, here's your update.

Yeah, you sign up for alerts. I get alerts when they happen. You can just go sign up. Yeah, put your email address in, and I think you can do your phone number as well. Um, and it'll send you alerts when you're part of a breach. I, and I sadly have gotten them in the past, so. Yeah, I should, I should, I should know that.

I'm glad you do. Yeah, okay, good. Somebody here's got to be a professional. That's right. It's certainly not me, so. Yeah. Well, we also have another breach. Air India just suffered one of the larger, though not largest, airline data breaches, uh, 4.5 million passengers.

Their information has gotten out as well. So, they couldn't get passwords, but they had access to names, contact info, tickets, frequent flyer info, et cetera, including Star Alliance, which I had a membership with, so I better go check, have I been pwned? So, good times. Yep.

Yeah, so it's, it's everywhere, and, uh, I like this. The repercussions could be felt worldwide for a while to come. Yes, except for Air India, because we know there are never any repercussions for this. Right, right, right. Indeed. Well, let's end with a fun story here.

Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall. A drug dealer was tracked down after sharing a photo of Stilton cheese. That's right. Uh, he posted a picture of himself holding a brick of cheese on EncroChat, uh, which had been cracked by the cops, and they did some, uh, fingerprint and palm print recognition on the photo and said, hey, that's our man.

Let's go get him. And, uh, yes. So his hands were in the photos? Fingerprints on the cheese? Yes. Yes. If you, if you look at the, the photo on the BBC, you can see the photo. They blurred it, though, so you can't really see the high definition. So, because we're going to do our own, our own searching down of the, of the, of the fingerprints.

Exactly. Like we don't already know who it is. It's like, okay. Cows have left the barn on that one, buddy. Uh, yes. But, um, yeah, he's going away for 13 years and six months. So for selling heroin, cocaine, ketamine, and MDMA.

Brought down by his love of cheese. I hope he got to enjoy the cheese before they picked him up. He's got some nice cheese right there. He's going to be eating some government cheese now. Fun times. Well, gentlemen, that was fun. Yeah.

Okay. In a sad Panopticon sort of way. You know. Cheese! Closing shout outs! Over at Patreon, we've got nobody. Wah, wah, wah. Over at PayPal, we've got John, Andrew, Tom, Jeff, John, Andre, Joseph, Mark, Adam, and Paolo.

So thank you all very much for your support of the show and keeping us on the air. Thank you. And over at iTunes, somebody managed to get into that broken ass system and give us a review. G. Bronca from the UK says, fun and informative. I love the show. It feels like I'm in a rough pub discussing tech and politics with my best friends.

My wife told me the show is title is a perfect description of me. Not sure what she means by that. Sorry to your wife and mine. So I'm still doing the live stream. If anybody wants to come learn about some- This time with added chia. Yes, with added chia. Learn about podcasting and audio.

I'm going to be doing some microphone demos this time. And I'm still trying to figure out what else to do because it's two hours, man. That's a lot of time to fill. But yeah, come by. I know what you can do. You can list off every place you can find our show now. That should take about two hours. Seriously.

Since just this week, we're now on YouTube and Audible. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. We hit Audible this week. That was weird. That was really weird. I guess you signed us up for Amazon. So they just said, Amazon Music. Yeah.

We're just going to put you on Audible instead. Oh, that's right. That's how we got there. Got it. Okay. I totally forgot that I'd signed us up for Amazon. Yeah, because I'm like, we're going to get kicked out because you're not allowed to disparage Amazon if you have on your podcast. And I'm like, we can try. We do a lot of that.

We do a lot of that. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schillmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy the show, please consider GOG.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on and we'll love you forever. You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies.

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