511: Amazon Baby Farms

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. Welcome back from your vacation, Brian. I'm tired. Yep. We took a bit of a farewell California trip last week, which coincided with the pandemic's over. We're opening up July or June 15th or whatever date it was. And boy, oh boy, are we open.

Yep. We are very, very much open. Not a mask was seen, really. Sat at a bar and ordered a beer from a bartender. Have not done that in a year and four months, five months. Like ye olden times. Yeah, it's pretty done. Which I, you know, I have to admit, I had a moment when I was walking around and saw people everywhere living their lives. I actually got a bit emotional. I was like, holy shit. Man, I miss living.

Oh, wow. So, yeah. Hopefully it all goes well. We'll see. All right. Fingers crossed. I like it how it is now. Let's stay with that. Yeah, me too. Me too. So, yeah. And then I came back and then looked at the calendar and realized, holy shit, I'm moving soon. I got a lot of work to do.

Yes, you are. Very soon. We'll see how that goes. At some point, I'll be taking a brief break from the podcast, but we still got to dial in those dates. Yeah, that would help because I need to go on a co-host hunt. Yeah, well, start the hunt. I need some dates so I know what to tell them. Get on that schedule, my friend, schedule.

All right. And we got a little bit of follow-up and feedback. Barrett wrote from the I Hope Elon Doesn't Say Anything Bad About Bitcoin Now file. This is a link from Coindesk. It's official. El Salvador's legislature votes to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. Woo! Yep. So the president over there decided, hey, let's try to boost financial inclusion in a country where only 30% of citizens have access to financial services, but apparently anybody can buy some goddamn Bitcoin.

Well, that's the promise of Bitcoin, isn't it? Yeah. And he announced this in a Twitter space conversation. Like, as one does. Oh, this world is fucked up. Isn't it, though? I mean, that's the big head-scratcher for me on this one is that a government announces something in a Twitter space conversation.

So he said that users won't necessarily have to use a government wallet. And they said in the conversation that they're designing a new law that would grant permanent residency to any individual who invests 3BTC into El Salvador's economy. So if you ever wanted to be an El Salvadorian citizen, the bar just got much lower.

Yeah. That's sub-hundred grand right there. I don't know any country that will let you in for that. Yeah. So the bill was just passed, and it will mandate all businesses except Bitcoin for goods or services. But the government will act as a backstop for entities that aren't willing to take on the risk of a volatile cryptocurrency.

That should be all of you. Because, yes, when you have a $10,000 swing in a day in the value of something, it's really hard to gauge how much that ice cream you just bought really cost. Yeah, that could be the cheapest ice cream ever or the most expensive ice cream ever.

Yeah. So the government will set up a trust at the Development Bank of El Salvador to instantly convert Bitcoin to U.S. dollars, and it will assume merchants' risks. It will hold about $150 million in dollars, which doesn't seem quite enough for an entire country that is now going to be using Bitcoin, but okay.

When this was announced, Bitcoin rose 10% on the news, but has since crashed well below that level. In fact, most of crypto is currently in a free fall right now. Yes, it is. Time to hodl. Hodl. Yep. Hodl. Hodl. Oh, my God. Yeah, that's interesting.

So we'll see how that goes. And we'll see how that goes. And Neil wrote in, if there ever was an NFT, I'd be willing to buy it. It might be this one. I hope he makes millions from it. And this is Tim Berners-Lee, who has decided to auction off his original code for the web as an NFT. Now, he's never made any money from inventing the web that we all use.

He basically gave it away. So, you know, I hope he does make some money off this. This is an NFT that I gather is somewhat worthy just to – it's kind of like a lifetime achievement award. Yeah, I think he might be a little late. I don't know if you've noticed the NFT market is kind of, I don't know, in the shitter.

I have noticed that just from following on Twitter. Some of the people that I follow have been pimping NFTs hard on Twitter for a long time. And they're kind of, sort of, but not really admitting that it's over. I saw a couple people post that they haven't sold shit for weeks now. Yeah, this is the timeline that I envisioned when we first started talking about it.

A couple months, and it's done. Yep, it's done. So, you know, I still say that we'll see kind of just a sports memorabilia in particular, you know, that'll probably still keep on going as NFTs because it's just like trading cards or whatnot. But, man, you people that thought that you're going to be able to put your music as NFTs and put your photos as NFTs and you're going to make bank for the first time in your life, nope.

Well, some people did. Good for them. They got in, got out. Some people did, yes. Yeah. Got in, got out. Yeah. Yeah. And finally, Adelante wrote in as well. Hey, guys, love the show. Thought of you too when I saw this. Turns out MoviePass was run by bigger jerks than even you guys thought. And this is a link from Vox.

MoviePass was even shadier than we thought. I would like to point out. Were they really? Not shadier than we thought. Exactly. I'm like, we pretty much knew how fucking shady they were from the get-go. Go back and listen to the old episodes. Go back and listen to the old episodes. This article gets into all the sorts of things that we were talking about at the time as they were uncovered.

They are exactly the big jerks that we thought they were. So they were doing things like certain movies would be subject to premium fees. Your passwords were being reset thanks to some kind of unauthorized activity on your account if you were actually using their service. And then it would take forever for you to be able to reset your account passwords after all the movies are gone.

And yeah, it just – it was complete – they fucked with everybody. They completely fucked with the system because, oh my god, we just realized our business model doesn't work. Don't forget the location tracking kerfuffle with them too. They wanted to track your drive to the theater so they could sell you to the restaurants on the way to do discounts and crap like that without your permission, of course.

Of course, because that's how it works. In the news. Well, Brian, we are in the middle of the clubhousification of social media, a.k.a.

Sucks for clubhouse. Yeah. Sucks for clubhouse for sure. That early mover advantage really didn't turn out the way you thought it was, did it? Well, it doesn't anymore, right? This is the one thing that we've really learned and, you know, I hate to say it again, but perhaps there should be some government regulation on big tech at this point because there is no early mover advantage anymore.

They don't even buy you anymore. They just say, oh, OK, we'll build that. Well, they're not allowed to buy you anymore. Yeah, that's true. Therein lies the rub, you know, so they can just make it. But here's the thing. It's OK. So here's the deal. Facebook has launched live audio rooms.

Please, somebody in marketing, get fired over that one because. Well, you don't you don't want to get up, hop on a Facebook lar with me, Jason. Yeah, let's go laring. I'd rather go. I'd rather go watch people LARP in the park. It's way more fun. But yeah.

So this is only for iOS and just a few public figures and select groups. So that's coming along with podcasts in Facebook, too, which we've kind of chuckled at before. Whatever. We connected it. If you want to listen to us on Facebook so you never leave seeing the ads, you can.

But it says it's only with an initial set of U.S. podcast partners. I don't know why they had everybody sign up for it if they're not going to use it yet. I don't get it. Collect the data. Collect the data. Collect the data. Yeah. Probably just figuring it out as they go. A little late to the party, Facebook.

And here's – this is going to – this is my fun one here. Clubhouse is building a DM text chat feature. Okay. How long do you think that should take? Well, it should have been done in like 20 minutes. Yep. But here's the deal.

Everybody is – it's just – they're just stealing features from everybody else. So there's this giant homogenization of all of the social networks doing the same shit over and over again. I am so tired of nobody coming up with a single new idea. Clubhouse is not a new idea. DMs for a back channel, certainly not a new idea.

We used to do that with IRC, you know, back in the day. We even had – and this is what we even had. We had one of those LED screens, Joey Ito bot or Joey bot or whatever it was. And we would type into the IRC channel at a conference and things would pop up on the little LCD screen so you could mock the people on the stage.

It was great. That was the best use of a back channel. This is just chat. And in Clubhouse, all that is is a webinar with no video. That's all it is. So none of this stuff is revolutionary. It's not even evolutionary. It's de-evolutionary.

It's the devoification of social media. Well, I mean, it's understandable why Clubhouse did it because everybody kind of figured out that Clubhouse is not really an app in and of itself. It's a feature of other apps. So now Clubhouse is adding the features of the apps that they didn't have to all be the exact same thing.

Next on Clubhouse, stories. Come on. You know it's coming. You know it's coming. It is. Of course it's coming. Well, no, I don't think they'll be around long enough. Yeah, they're not going to make it long enough. I don't think they're going to make it long enough. And I love this one. Google seeks to break vicious cycle of online slander.

Oh, really? Yeah. Yep. Huh. How's that going? Uh-huh. Yeah. Since Google kind of causes most of the cycles of online slander. The company plans to change its search algorithm to prevent websites which operate under domains like badgirlreport.date and predatorsalert.us from appearing in the list of results when someone searches for a person's name.

Well, you know, this is – they just used SEO against you. Yeah. That's all it is. Look, you search for anybody and you'll get the kind of alarming, well, flat-out lying results like check for known police reports and court cases and all that sort of stuff.

And then you have to pay to find out that the person that you were searching for actually hasn't done anything and doesn't have any court cases and doesn't have any arrest reports. So, yeah, this has been in there forever. Yes. Is Brian Schulmeister a felon? You know? Yep. That's how it goes. It's like I'm going to pay $30 to find out Betteridge was right again.

No, he wasn't a felon. I love this. I doubt it will be a perfect solution. Certainly not right off the bat, but I think it really should have a significant and positive impact, said David Graff, Google's vice president for global policy and standards and trust and safety. We can't police the web, but we can be a responsible citizen.

And, you know, they say that they were giving unwitting help to these people, and I think that they were quite fucking witting when they were doing this. Oh, I'm sure we'll see that they took ad money from them. Of course they did. Of course they did. Of course they did. I would count that as witting. Yes, that's very witting.

Very witting. Oh, man, I didn't even put in the one story about ad money because Team Trump is back on Facebook now because they're paying for ads. So was it like $20 million will get you in Zuck's good graces again? Yeah, of course.

Yeah. Pay to play. Pay to play. Back to Google, though. Google is using AI to design its next generation of AI chips more quickly than humans can. This comes from The Verge. Has nobody seen Terminator? Well, that's not why I put this in here because whatever.

That's fine. But the first line is, Google is using machine learning to help design its next generation of machine learning chips. I can only beat this horse so much. Oh, I've given up on that, but I get it. But it's more fun. Of course, the headline has AI.

The article has machine learning. I'm sure they switch back to AI at some point in the article and then back to machine learning because nobody can fucking figure this out. Your method has been used in production to design the next generation of Google TPU, writes the authors of the paper, led by Google's head of ML for Systems.

And then the next sentence, AI, in other words, is helping accelerate the future of AI development. See, they have to put in this kernel of truth where it is just machine learning, but they need the AI juice. You know, this is like AI is the blockchain of now, so you have to do it.

There's just no two ways around it. Okay, fine. All right. And Google also trying to do something nice here. Google Voice is discontinuing the SMS forward feature. I got this email. And on August 1st this year, they're going to remove support for Google Voice that lets you automatically forward messages that you receive to your linked carrier number, which sucks because that was one of the only features I actually used my Google Voice number for.

You know, I mean, I get why they're doing it. They're trying to stop spam. But how about you just do a verification system and let actual people continue to use the service that is actually somewhat useful? Yeah. And don't give it away for free, you know? Yeah. Charge for it. As a paid user, I would like to keep my, you know, SMS forwarding.

Look, you're Google. This isn't that hard. You can set this up. You can take a payment. You can verify a person's identity. You can monitor an account using your AI slash ML learning algorithms. And if you see a shit ton of text going out, you shut it down.

Not that hard, guys. Here's the thing, though. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google right now, is kind of in the hot seat. And there are a lot of people that say he's dropping the ball over at Google big time. And I kind of tend to agree. So I don't know if his days are, you know, going to be that long there because people are starting to get really pissed off that, you know, they're not innovating like they used to.

They're slow moving. They used to be quick. Now they're just a big old slop of, ugh. Well, they're like 17,000 companies, too. I mean, they're too damn big. Yeah. That's it. Too big to pivot. Too big to pivot. And speaking of too big, sort of, let's talk about our friends at Amazon.

We haven't talked about Amazon in a while. Okay. At least we've had a week off, and I never remember what we talk about on the show anyway from the week before. Yeah. This one comes from the New York Times article about Amazon workers, and I'm just going to go from the Business Insider version because it was much shorter and easier to read.

Amazon burns through workers so quickly that executives are worried they'll run out of people to employ, according to a new report. Well, they've got 150% turnover rate. And a lot of this is because, A, it's a crappy job. B, the algorithms are designed to get rid of people over and over again.

They have churn built in, and they want churn. And I'm like, okay, well, if you want churn, you're going to be firing people, and you can't be pissy when you run out of people to hire because you fired them all. So this just makes me think of the Matrix, and soon we're going to have Amazon baby farms because we're just running out of it, you know?

Look, again, there's a pretty simple solution here, Amazon. You're already not paying taxes. How about you take some of that money and pay the employees well enough that they'll want to stay? Or hire enough of them where they're not having to pee in bottles, you know? Exactly. Yeah, let's get some more shifts in, shorter shifts, more people, and don't, you know, just stop.

Just really, I can wait an extra four hours, you know? Whatever. I really don't need same day. I've come to this realization, especially throughout the pandemic, that, like, I don't need same day. You can take a couple days. I'm okay with that. Yeah, and nowadays, you can check the box to say, come later, and you get a little digital credit that you'll never use.

But it's funny, you know? For some shit that you don't need. Yeah, exactly. And, like, after, you know, now that things are opening up, I find myself not wanting, like, I haven't ordered delivery food, obviously, since we got back out. Go to the store, go to the restaurant, pick it up, cook at home, do whatever.

But I have not, you know, I mean, I think May 1st was my two weeks after my second vax. But even after my first shot, we stopped ordering in, you know? Saved a ton of money, too, by the way. It's like, delivery adds up.

It really does. Unless it's Amazon, where it's free, and it's on the broken backs of the slave laborers. But, and here's another fun one, though. This one came out yesterday from the Seattle Times. Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out 6% of their office workers, too.

So this isn't just the warehouse people. They're actually shuffling through office workers to, you know, get the cream of the crop to the top. Well, you're going to run out of people because not everybody's great. You have to understand that. Algorithm, yes. An algorithm is fine if you're doing, you know, if you're really trying to find a data set of the perfect cat photo and you can bubble that up to the top.

But these are, people are a finite resource. I mean, I know we make a few more every year, but birth rates are down. So better get to that baby farm, you know? They're going to need a baby farm because I was actually just thinking about that on my trip, too. Because I know an awful lot of people my age that have not had kids.

And if you're my age and you haven't had kids yet, you're not going to have kids. Oh, no, I'm not. Yeah, you're not. I mean, I know a bunch of people. Yeah. And here's the other thing that they're not thinking about. And this is like, you know, probably Econ 101, even though I've never taken Econ 101.

If you're not paying people that work in your warehouse is enough to have, you know, I don't know, maybe even buy shit that you sell, you're going to run out of people to sell, too. We've said this. I mean, I know I brought this up like maybe on episode five of the show eight years ago. I'm like, you guys got to be thinking ahead because people are just going to run out of money and not be able to buy your stuff.

You've got to pay people a livable wage. I don't understand how we're still even arguing this. It's crazy. Well, I mean, Amazon does pay pretty high, but the problem is they work you to death for it. Yeah. That's the biggest issue. It's like, yeah, you can make more money, but you're going to kill yourself doing it.

That's why we've seen a lot of people. I mean, you know, staffing is almost impossible in half of the industries here in L.A. It's like I can't go to the vet because everybody left. No restaurants have full staffing. Everybody's just decided to say, fuck it. You know, it's like everybody's had this, you know, general realization.

It's like I'd rather work to be happy because life is short. We just watched 600,000 people die in the last year. And it's like, you know, could happen to me any time. So I think there was this general existential awakening from people to say, I don't want a shitty job anymore. I 100 percent agree with you that that is what I'm seeing as well.

People have kind of come out of this going, what? Why was I doing what I was doing? It was miserable. I was miserable and I wasn't getting anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Just on this, you know, this treadmill, basically. Yeah. Well, Amazon does have another type of treadmill. And this one just came out of Scotland.

One Amazon warehouse destroys 130,000 items per week, including Mac MacBooks, COVID-19 masks and TVs, some of them new and unused, says a report. This is over at Business Insider. And apparently, instead of recycling or upcycling or refurbishing, they're just destroying just gigantic amounts of stuff.

I have the scene from Toy Story 3 in my mind right now. There you go. There you go. Yeah. That's insane. You know, and it makes me think about, you know, the false market for diamonds, too. You know, dump a bunch back into the ocean. We've got to keep the numbers down so we can keep our prices high.

Yep. Thank you, De Beers, for that one. So, and, you know, we've had this story before about, you know, them trucking returns all the way across the country because there were no local landfills next to where the warehouses were that were getting it. This is not a new story. And this one actually comes from 2019.

We don't have any numbers on recent stuff, but, you know, some whistleblower inside kind of gave an inside view on this. And it's just, I mean, honestly, I think it feels criminal to me. I mean, yes. It does feel criminal. It's like. But I do have an idea for Amazon to monetize this.

How? Okay. Don't destroy the stuff. Stick it all in a landfill and start up a new program called Amazon Subprime. And if you pay 20 bucks a year, you get to go dumpster diving in Amazon's lots. Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one. Yeah. Right. Subprime.

And since they do have all this stuff that they are going to take, need to take to the dump, they've just reportedly bought 1,000 autonomous truck driving systems, which could pave the way for one day ditching drivers, says Business Insider.

Yeah, we knew this was coming. So that's not the new, the new. Nope. And autonomous truck driving will probably be here faster than autonomous cars because it's much easier on the highways. Sometimes. Sometimes. I drove some pretty sketchy highways through Central California.

I would not want to be next to one of these. No, I mean, I've driven across this country many times and there are a lot of places where these things would get jammed up big time. It's called construction and bad weather and bad roads, you know, and people and animals, you know, yes.

Do you have, you know, life? Yeah. Life finds a way. But, you know, all these stories have me kind of wanting to sign the petition to keep Bezos in space. This is over at change.org. Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to Earth. Now, I went this morning.

I would like to know who would enforce that. Yeah. So since this morning, 5,000 more people have signed the petition. It's at 80,325 right now. So I wasn't even going to put this in here because it's silly. These change.org petitions are silly.

But in true Internet fashion, there is scumbaggery everywhere. I signed the petition. I click my little thing and I get I get a page that says, can you chip in eleven dollars to get this petition on the agenda? First off, no.

Yeah. First off, fuck you. Second of all, what agenda? What agenda is the keep Jeff Bezos in space petition going to? Is he going to Space Force? Are they going to put him in space jail? I got to figure maybe we're going to hire Space Force to keep him from coming back.

Is that the plan? That could be because obviously we don't, you know, Amazon doesn't put enough tax dollars into Space Force to keep them flying. So we have to fit the bill just to keep Bezos up in space. Just look. Oh, come on. I say like I like I said, I let him come back.

Just charge him a toll of about, oh, I don't know, five billion dollars. Yeah. Per foot. So and here's the here's the other thing about this is when you go to that page, there's a little scrawl on the right that shows people's names and how much money they've donated. And there was like, you know, eleven dollars, twenty five dollars, fifty dollars, all this stuff.

Now, you and I know that most of that stuff is absolute and utter bullshit because you can script that in five minutes. There was one donation of a billion dollars from Mackenzie Scott. Oh, talk about somebody who's one of my new favorite people.

Yeah, no shit. She can't give the money away fast enough. I don't know because Amazon just keeps making more. Oh, sigh, sigh. I saw this one. This was a head shaker. Only fans is reportedly in talks to raise new funding at a valuation above one billion as it plots a move away from adult content to become more mainstream.

Play taps, cue taps because they're done. They're done. They're done. Because as we remember, Tumblr, Tumblr was great, took out the porn, then automatic. Came in and bought it for twenty five bucks. You know, you got to have the point.

And, you know, there are about a dozen sites out there that you can do this on already that have non-adult content. Patreon dot com slash GOG, by the way. Yeah, there's that. But, you know, the founders want to walk away with a nice massive paycheck and that's about it. And like you said, the company will then fall into ruin and everybody that's employed there will be fired, not to mention the safe and lucrative space that exists now there for sex employees to make a living will disappear and welcome to America 2.0.

That's right. That's right. Hey, it's a business model, I guess. I suppose. And my final story in the news for today is Tesla backs vision only approach to autonomy using powerful supercomputer.

Woo. OK, so they're going to ditch the radar and LIDAR sensors and they're just going to go with cameras, right? What could possibly go wrong? So they've got this new computer that it does 1.8 e-flops, which I'm guessing is an exa-flop.

Right. And this guy that works there says that it might be the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world. But he then conceded later that his team has not yet run the specific benchmark necessary to enter the top 500 supercomputer rankings. So he has drunk the Tesla Kool-Aid by just making shit up.

Make shit up. Right. Also, just just for a second, how much would the oh, I don't know, fifth or maybe even the 10th most powerful supercomputer in the world cost? And can it be part of my car cheaply? Well, you know, this is the thing, you know, yes, they're talking about their giant supercomputer with five thousand seven hundred and sixty GPUs in it.

I'm like, OK, great. Yeah, it's not going to fit in my trunk, obviously. And I guess, yes, they're doing using this to build the data set that the cars will then use. So they're going to go to cameras only. Now, Brian, let me explain something here.

I'm sure that you as a X software guy know the definition of a spoff, a single point of failure. Yep. So cameras are kind of just if you're going with one one system of sensors for your car, which are cameras that could be considered a spoff.

So could I don't know, a muddy road that gets dirt on the cameras or maybe large bug snow, big bugs driving through. Actually, as we've as we've tested on this show before, there are no more bugs. There are no more bugs because we've killed everything.

Thank you, Monsanto. Or just spray paint. I could just put some spray paint on there. Even just clear spray paint would be enough that you couldn't tell that I did it, but it would be enough to screw up the cameras. So I don't give a shit how big your supercomputer is. If you just got a couple of cameras on your car, that's the silliest thing I've ever heard.

And this pisses me off because Tesla needs a win. You know, Tesla hasn't been really knocking it out of the park lately. They need a win because I need my stock to go back up so I can sell it. So cut it out with this shit, please.

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So I watched Bo Burnham's Inside. Bo Burnham is a comedian who does a lot of music-based comedy. I had not really seen anything that he had done before.

This is the first thing I've seen. So if you don't know the story behind this, he shot this entirely by himself, edited it entirely by himself, did it all during the pandemic. And it was very funny. It was very rough at times. It was touching.

It was moving. I would say this is the current, at least, gold standard of how to deal with the pandemic via art or comedy. I don't know if you watched it, Jason, but it was very good, I thought. See, I didn't like it. I thought his technical prowess for what he did by filming it himself and just everything that he did to make it work, I was thoroughly impressed.

But I didn't like the music. I didn't like the songs. They didn't really do anything for me. Are you kidding me? The songs were great. They could have been generated by a songbot AI that listens to our show. I just couldn't get into it. I think the biggest problem I had that creeped me out was his face is too close to the camera all the time.

It just creeped me out. He was invading my space, which irked me a bit. Okay. I really enjoyed it. I thought it was fantastic. But there you go. So comedy is a comedy. Subjective. Sort of. Subjective. That's right. And since we had a week off, I found myself able to listen to some music instead of just consuming tech podcasts on bike rides to stay up to date on everything.

And these are all new releases that I listen to as well. And so I also kind of view them through the pandemic lens because you've been sitting at home for a year. How are you processing that? What do you have to say about it? Everybody that I listen to here are women considered alternative or at least vaguely alternative.

And I asked my super mega industry music lawyer wife, where are the alternative rock boy bands these days? And basically she said they don't exist. No major label would sign one right now because they don't sell and they don't create fan bases, but women artists do. So I thought that was pretty interesting.

The first thing I listened to was Kay Flay. I've been a big fan of hers for a while. She has a new EP out called Inside Voices. I loved all of this. She's angry. She's scared. She's ready to go out and get it. It made me wish I was young again, actually. Because I'm far too old to be listening to that kind of music.

But it was awesome. Any relation to B-Flay? Bobby Flay? No. No. No relation to B-Flay. Okay. I just wonder. And Lorde put out a new single called Solar Power. And I loved her first album. I was pretty lukewarm about the second. This one felt the most...

Well, I mean, Lorde is basically a machine creation. She's an AI created by a record label to sell records. And there's a vague attempt by her to be... To have kind of the hot vax summer anthem. Except the song is just slow and anemic. And it never kicks in.

And she doesn't really seem to have an opinion on anything other than she wants to be out in the sun and eat some strawberries. Get in line. That seems to be the deal there. It feels like an anthem for the young girls that shop for Coachella and want to be part of something without ever understanding anything. Okay. It's just a nothing burger.

Marina, which is who used to be Marina and the Diamonds, but has now rebranded herself as just Marina. Another artist whose first album absolutely thrilled me to this day. She has a new one out called Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land. I kind of lost interest in her for a while because she changed direction and tried to be super commercial and was pretty successful at it.

So I didn't have high hopes for being interested in this album, but I fucking love it. Like, she sat and thought. There are songs about climate change, sexism, racism, income inequality, right? All the motherfucking wrongs and do it now, assholes, is what this album says.

And I'm here for it. It was great. And the final new album I listened to is old school. It's garbage. They've been around since I was young enough to, you know, enjoy this sort of thing. And they have a new one called No Gods, No Masters. I don't know if you ever knew the band Curve, Jason.

They were one of my favorite bands. And Garbage has always been considered a Curve ripoff, but kind of more poppy. And, you know, they take the sheen on it. But they've finally gone full curve. This is a raw, angry, hard album. Shirley has no more fucks to give.

And it's a brilliant but somewhat difficult album, but is by far the best they've done in years. Oh, that's good. Some good listening. Yeah. All right. Yeah. And sticking on the music beat, we just watched 69, The Saga of Danny Hernandez, which is Takashi69, that little idiot dude.

Yeah. That weirdo dude. Yep. Yep. Yeah. You're not going to like him anymore if you watch this. I never knew his backstory, so it was interesting to watch. He's a little shitbird and a stool pigeon. He's a rat. He's a total rat. He flipped faster than a pancake on everybody he knew.

So, yeah, I don't expect his story will have a happy ending whatsoever. And he seems kind of like a no-talent asshole. Yeah. That seems to be my impression as well. Yep. We did watch the first two seasons of Lupin on Netflix.

I kind of put this on the back burner. Everybody had been recommending it because it was in French. And, you know, by the end of the day, my eyes are sore and I don't like to read subtitles. And neither does my roommates. I watched the first one with the French subtitles and I loved it.

Absolutely loved it. And we started watching it together and she's like, I can't read it. We're old. We don't have the eyes for it anymore. So, we flipped on the, you know, the captioning or not the captioning, the overdubs, the dubs in English. And they did an amazing job.

After watching it in French and then flipping to English, I mean, it just matched. They did a great job. They matched the dialogue. Everything was perfect. Not like some, you know, foreign movies. I was about to say, that's pretty rare. Yeah, we watched the whole two series.

It was kind of cheese. The first one was the best episode, but the rest were really good. It just kind of reminded me of Hustle, the BBC show, the con artist show, met Burn Notice almost. So, there's not a lot, there's not a whole lot of seriousness in it.

I mean, they try to be serious, but it's lighthearted for the most part, you know. But I thoroughly enjoyed it. I can't wait for season three, which has been picked up. Cool. Yeah. It's definitely worth the watch. And one of the things that living with, you know, someone of the opposite gender, you have to watch shows that you generally wouldn't watch, like The Real Housewives or things like that.

And I got drug into, dragged into watching Legendary on HBO Max. The, you know, the ballroom scene. Not the ballroom that you think of, basically. When you think of standard ballroom. We watched the first two seasons.

We watched the first season when it came out and then we just finished the second season and it's been renewed for season three. I'm a ballroom expert now, motherfucker. I'm like, oh, man, that was the weakest duck walk I've ever seen. Hey, man, if you're going to do hands, do hands. And me, I'm just, like, screaming at the TV, judging everybody.

Hey, man. It's a fun show. It really is. It's good to be exposed to things you wouldn't normally expose yourself to. Mm-hmm. And I don't mean other people on the street in a trench coat. No, exactly. And I, honestly, I thoroughly loved the show. It was, because it was one that came out every week.

So, you couldn't binge it. You can now that it's over, but we watched every episode in order. And it's a ton of fun. It was a ton of fun, I got to say. Excellent. Yeah, highly recommended. And Steve over on Patreon says, listening now to the other one, the Crypto Queen one that we talked about before.

And he says, there's another BBC podcast called The Lazarus Heist about Korean hackers. Pretty good listen. Covers the Sony hack, amongst others. I'm up to date on it. I kind of binged it over the weekend. Fantastic. Oh, man. Really? Yeah, the BBC can put a show together, man.

They really can. Where's your argument that it's not a podcast? It is a podcast. I mean, I got it on my podcast player. But that's what I said about the NPR podcasts, and you said they weren't podcasts. No, I just said they were reruns. Because NPR is just rerunning their shows. NPR is, I mean...

Got it on my podcast player. But they're just reruns that were government funded. You don't know if they broadcast this on BBC radio. They might have. They might have. I don't know. Either way, I don't care. I give... You know, it's the AI fucking machine learning. I can't... I can't... Look, everything is everywhere.

I can't be bothered to care anymore. So, yeah. Everything is everywhere. I really can't be bothered to care anymore. But the show is fantastic. So, it's... Excellent. I will add it. Yeah, it's on part 10 now. I think there's probably going to be 12 parts. So, you got plenty of time to catch up. But, yeah, it is the best look into the Lazarus group that I've ever heard.

And they've definitely showed me that the Sony hack was definitely done by them. So, it's pretty good. Pretty good. All right. And the fifth and final season of Kim's Convenience has dropped on Netflix, at least here in the U.S. I've gotten up to the very last episode, which I'll be watching tonight.

I'm not... I don't know how I'm going to feel about this because if you don't know the backstory on this, nobody knew that this was going to be the fifth and final season. Cast, production, nobody. Because the executive producer basically just decided, I don't want to do this anymore. And the people that pay whatever network it's actually being funded by said, well, if we don't have you, we're not going to do it.

So, it just ends. But it's the kind of show that I don't know if it needs a final episode because it's kind of just about everyday life and everyday life goes on. So, I'll see how I feel about the fact that it's just going to be kind of another episode. We'll see.

All right. All right. Apps and doodads. Well, Brian, over the break, I made a couple decisions that I got your approval on. First one is we are actually moving our main website from WordPress business to PodPage.

All right. And it's a hosting platform that is designed for podcasts. And it's going to make my life easier. But there are some changes that are going to happen. The first thing that people will notice is you don't have to go to the website anymore to get all the show notes. They're going to start being in the feed. So, because PodPages actually takes our feed to build the pages for each one, which makes it easier for me.

So, I only have to do the show notes in one place. It's cheaper. So, you and I actually make more money, which is great. It comes with features that we pay another service for that we just canceled, which is great. And it looks better, which is also great. So.

Yep. Win, win, win. Yeah. Geo Geeta, except for the fact that I have to port over the show notes from the previous episodes into the feed, which brings me to another point. There are going to be a lot of back episodes with no links in it coming soon.

It'll get to the point where I just get too tired to keep moving them. So, I'm thinking maybe I'll do a hundred of them. And then the back catalog can just, it just is what it is. You know, half of those links don't work from the old shows anyway. So, who cares? Yeah, that's fine. Who cares? They're old. Who cares? It's not like we're not doing evergreen content here.

So, that's the way that goes. And we don't put ads on our pages, so it doesn't matter. Yes, we do, actually. We do put ads on the pages. Yes. Look at us. I didn't even know that. Yeah, I know, because I'm the one that does it every week. Yeah. The links to the advertisers will be in the show notes, in the players, and on the new website as well.

So, that will be there. And another update, I was doing the Adorama XP live streams every week. Those are no more. I am done. Okay. Did eight hours worth of those and ran out of content.

So, turns out the way that you have to get on Twitch is there's so many different layers of audio dumb fuckery that's going on. To try and do a lot of the things I wanted to do with, you know, like mic demos and stuff like that. You're never going to get actual fidelity from the microphones that you want to test.

So, it's unfair to the actual manufacturers for me to be doing those things because the people aren't going to hear it. That's why, you know, YouTube is a perfect platform for that because you do the videos, you're just going straight into the recording, blah, blah, blah. I had a ton of fun.

You can catch my four episodes up for the next, like, you know, month or two before they roll off. They don't keep them forever there. And the last episode is a two-hour editing marathon. So, there's lots of good stuff up there. I did a ton of stuff, but yeah. And so, with the death of my Adorama XP, and oh, by the way, there's still a sponsor.

We still love Adorama XP. I'm just not going to be, or we love Adorama cameras. I'm just not doing the live stream anymore. You're just not doing a show. Yeah. Yeah. I can't do the show anymore. It was just, it was too much, and I literally just ran out of stuff. But since that's done, and I'm not doing my podcasting course because I waited too long and nobody wanted it, I have zero need for a video studio anymore.

So, I am now out of the garage. The garage is gone. I am back in the house. At my lovely Uplift standing desk with one computer, a monitor, a couple speakers, which means I have a garage full of crap to sell.

So, I'm selling everything. Or as related in previous episodes, just stop by Jason's house and he'll give you shit. Yeah. Well, you can talk to Dave Bittner a little bit on security, see what kind of goodies he got. No, I've already sold some of it. I'm putting together the spreadsheet. I'm going to basically key towards anybody living in LA, they can come pick it up first.

So, if you're a show fan who needs audio gear that lives in LA, hit me up offline. I'll get you the spreadsheet when it comes out or follow me on Twitter. I'll probably post it up there as well. But man, there's a lot of stuff to get rid of. And nobody hires me as a producer anymore. So, it's like, this is like a huge weight lifted off my back.

It's like, I am down to one desk. I can focus on other things like working on this show more, which makes me happy. You know, there's that and always worried about if somebody was going to come steal my crap, you know, or if it was going to burn down, you know, because renter's insurance doesn't cover a lot of that stuff.

So, that would be just SOL. So, just having everything down to one desk is just fantastic. It's so liberating. I miss it so much. It's the way God intended you to podcast. It really is. It really is. I just got my Mixpre 6. I got my RE 20 and just set.

That's all I need. Oh, man. One thing that I don't need, though, and Facebook is trying to do this. They're trying to run ads in VR games on the Oculus platform. And this is so- So, you can walk into a McDonald's while you're in the middle of your shoot-em-up?

I have no idea how they were going to do this. And the backlash was just instant and very loud. I mean, we talked about this on our Discord channel for a bit, some of the people that have them. And, yeah, we're like, what the fuck are you thinking?

So, anyway, there was a paid title called Blastin' from Resolution Games, and they were going to be the first test case for it. Well, they got so much bad press that they said, yeah, we're not going to do that. No, thanks.

We're just not going to do it. If I pay for something, I shouldn't get ads. That's ridiculous. Yep. That's the way it should be. So, I'm sure Facebook is scrambling trying to find somebody to let them put ads in their games. Or how about this? Facebook, don't. Just don't.

Just don't. Yeah. If you have your own apps, your own games, fine. Do whatever you want. But stay away from third-party people, please. And this one was a strange acquisition that happened last week. Day One has been acquired by Automatic. Automatic, the maker of WordPress and owner of Tumblr, now owner of Day One.

And it's strange because Day One is a – it's basically a diary platform, like a journaling diary platform that is meant to keep stuff on your computer. It's not really meant for sharing. So, I don't quite know what happened there. I'm guessing maybe Day One was just running out of money and Matt was feeling gregarious and just swooped in and bought them.

I don't know. But even over on the Discord channel, we were all kind of scratching our head about that one. And I picked up a copy of Mastonaut this week for $7.99 on the App Store. Okay. What is Mastronaut? Mastonaut. Mastonaut is a Mastodon client.

Okay. I've been trying to find a decent Mastodon client so I could just have it on all my machines instead of going to the different websites and things like that. And it does what it says on the tin because I'm on one of the Mastodon channels for Podcasting 2.0, Adam Curry's thing. And I found a couple of them that are like, you know, news-centric that I jumped on.

But, I mean, it does what it's supposed to do. Kind of looks like a, you know, like a Twitter clone. But that's about it. I just don't need another place to go to. Yeah. I had specific questions and conversations I wanted to get into on the podcasting thing. So that was the only way to really do it was on Mastodon.

I didn't like the web interface. So I just said, ah, screw it. Eight bucks, I'll try it. It's a decent client. I've tried a bunch of other ones and this is definitely the best one I've tried so far. So if there's a better one out there, feel free to, you know, let us know in the Discord channel for sure. And big hat tip to Colin from Twitter on this one.

It's a Brave or Chrome and Brave extension called Tweak New Twitter. Okay. Just gets rid of the cruft. It's nice. Yeah. It's just like the one that we used to use for Facebook. I can't even remember what that was because I haven't been on Facebook in so long. Facebook Purity. Purity.

Okay. FB Purity. Remember, they weren't allowed to call it Facebook. FB. That's right. They can't call it Facebook. Yeah. So it's kind of the same thing as that. You can get rid of all the crap. So highly recommend it. I shall install that. Yeah. It's a much nicer experience. All right.

And because I'm moving, I'm starting to pick up things for my new place. When I first moved into my place here in Santa Monica, I got some of the – I changed some of my outlets to have USB chargers in them and they didn't have the fancy Type-C back then. That didn't exist yet.

So I am moving to the future for my new house in Toronto and I picked up a pack of Leviathan T5633-W, 15-amp Type-C, USB charger slash tamper resistant receptacle, one pack white.

Picked up a few of those. Looks great. Can't wait to install them. I found having them built into the outlets in certain places in the house like the kitchen or the living room, super convenient, not just for ourselves but for guests that come over. If they want to charge their phone easily, it's right there.

So if you are a tech guy and you've got a lot of things that charge with USB, I highly recommend changing some of your outlets to these. They're fantastic. Cool. Yep. And I checked out Neva. I've been hearing about it for a while and not just from Prof G.

It's a paid, I guess, $5 a month search engine that doesn't track or sell ads or anything, which sounds great in theory. I haven't had a chance to dig in too much yet because I signed up right before I left on vacation and I didn't do much Googling or Neva-ing. But I will be checking it out and doing some A-B comparisons with Google.

One of the criticisms I've seen a lot online is they supposedly rely on Bing to get a lot of their search results, but they do refute that and say they crawl the web themselves. So we'll see. I'd say give it a go. What do you have to lose? Because as we discussed earlier in the show, Google is evil. You can sign up and get a few free months, more if you unlock shit by giving them some data or connecting things to make it more sticky so you'll stay, but whatever.

It's worth a shot because Google sucks and I like paying for services if it means they're better and they don't sell my data. Are you listening, social media companies? Well, I tried it. Yeah. I ran it for three days. Uh-huh. Yeah, it sucks. There.

That's too bad. Yeah, it's too early. Like, you know, I searched for bike stores. I just did a search for bike stores in my neighborhood and there are, you know, three within a quarter mile of my house and not a single one of them showed up. I'd have to drive all the way across the valley if I listened to their results.

Okay. I'll have to check it out a little bit more. That's unfortunate. What I did like, though, is you were able to go in and kind of put preferred news sources and their news page I found very helpful. Very nice. Yeah, that was decent. That was decent. I'll probably, like, do half and half with it.

I'm not going to have it as my default search engine because you can get the browser extension for it and you just don't need it as the default extension. But you can check out the homepage and you can set those default news sources. Right. Even, like, the new search wasn't that great. I think it's a great product in the future.

It's not there yet. But, yeah, I did all of the connecting and things like that. So, I've got, like, seven months free. So, I'm... Yeah, so do I. So, you know, I'll keep it around. Hopefully, they'll get better. Yep. Definitely worth checking out. And a big thanks to everyone who sent in notes and screenshots about their discount experience with that Apple refund that I've been getting.

Well, good for them, not for me. I got my receipt for my Apple One Premiere renewal, which is $29.95, and there was no discount, period, taken off from that mysterious credit that I keep getting for Apple TV+.

So, don't know what's up with that. And, of course, in typical Apple fashion, nobody has, like, replied to my email yet. So, whatever. I wasn't expecting to get it. So, whatever. Doesn't matter. I did pick up one more app called Webcam Settings, and I got this from the Mac App Store for $8.

I've got a Logitech webcam, like one of the older ones, and the camera settings app just doesn't work on half my machine. So, I just picked this one up. You can set the camera settings, and it stays. They stay, which is what I need.

You know, that's the biggest thing. I'm like, okay, I don't want to have to come in and reset everything every single time. So, $8, fine. It works. It does what it says on the tin. So, if you're having problems with your webcam settings or you can't get the Logitech camera settings app to actually, I don't know, work. My biggest issue is like the UI, it works, but the UI doesn't, the labels are backwards, like literally written backwards.

I don't know how they did that, but the text is literally reversed. I'm like, am I supposed to look at this in my webcam backwards so I can make, figure, I don't know. So, but $8, done deal. At the library.

Ralph wrote in and said, hi, Jason. For your information, Kindle purchases can be returned within seven days after purchase. From the digital orders tab, select the return for refund button next to the title you want to return. In the pop-up window, choose the reason for return and then select return for refund. So, there you go.

Thanks for Googling that for me, Ralph. Appreciate it. Yeah. And I was on vacation for a week with three kids, so all I read was a shit ton of kids' books over and over and over again. All right. I read Exhalation by Ted Chiang, which is a book of short stories.

It's his latest book of short stories. His previous book of short stories, Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. That's the one that had the story that the movie Arrival was based on. Yep. So, I haven't read that one yet. That one's in the queue because I finished Exhalation and I loved almost all of it.

There was, it seemed to be, there was an inverse proportion of length to enjoyment. The longer the story was, the less I enjoyed it. The shorter stories were really good, got you thinking and left you wanting more. The ones that dragged on forever, I came away going, I feel like I wasted my time.

Now, see, I had read Stories of Your Life and Others first and I felt like, oh man, this guy is so good at short stories. I really want him to write a full novel. And then I read Exhalation and I felt the same way. I felt like, hmm, maybe he should stick with the short stories. Okay. So, you have read it before.

Yeah, I've read them both. Yeah, they're fantastic. Yeah. That one in the middle about the digital pet things. Yeah. That was like three and a half hours of my life I wanted back. Yeah, that, I remember that one standing out as being particularly boring, but most of them are really good. Yeah, they're really, really good.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. So, except for that one. And my friend Brian Brushwood has a new podcast out. And I'm putting this in at the library because basically his podcast is called The World's Greatest Con. Fantastic. He hit number one in Apple. He's killing it with it. It's a great show, amazingly produced, but it's based on Operation Mincemeat by Ben McIntyre, which I've read and reviewed on the show before as a fantastic book.

But, I mean, he lifts the book almost verbatim into the podcast, but he does wrap it in his own personal stories and gives it the Brian Brushwood spin. And, you know, I've known Brian forever and I love the guy. So, I'm really happy that he's doing it.

And the production team that he's got is top notch. The music that they source, the way they pace it, it's a great listen. They're up to episode three now. So, link for that will be in the show notes. Check it out. Cool. Security?

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

I can't read today. And, finally, he's the co-host of Recorded Future, where he takes you inside the world of cyber threat intelligence. I will – I'm going to change my glasses right now as we roll into the show. It dawned on me I don't have my reading glasses on as I'm going back and forth like an old man.

What's that shit over there? How are you doing, Dave? I'm doing well. I'm doing well. A bit of a hectic day today, but not in any sort of bad way. Just, you know, scheduled from thing to the next thing.

And some days are like that, but I can't complain. All righty. All righty. So, before we jump into proper security, if we even have any of that this week, I wanted to tell you about Penn Jillette's very poor OPSEC. So, I spent some money on his show, and I did his Patreon, and I got a cameo video from him for my dad for Christmas last year.

Nice. So, I'm going through – I'm putting everything into iPhoto right now as my backup because I've got everything in Google Photos, which does amazing facial recognition and search and things like that. And then I put everything into iPhoto or Apple Photos now, whatever they call it, and their face recognition is just the worst I've ever seen.

It's terrible. Terrible. But they do have location tracking on your photos, so you can get a nice map of where you've been and all this other stuff. And you can sort by media types. So, I'm sorting by video because I was looking for a Bam Bam video probably at that point, and I came across this video of Penn Jillette that he did for my dad.

And you guys can see this in the show notes. We will not publish this publicly, but you guys can see it. And, yeah, you can see that Penn definitely did this from his home in Las Vegas, and now I have a nice little pen on the map of where he lives.

So, anybody that has gotten a cameo from Penn, I'm also assuming maybe that's a perk. Most celebrities. Yeah, or most celebrities. Probably, yes. Yeah, the Slammer. No, the Slammer's gone. The Slammer has been destroyed. Is that right? Yeah, they ran it over with a tank a long time ago for a movie.

Oh, okay. Shows what I know. Yeah, that had to be like four years ago. You know, this is some aspect of even Apple with its privacy functions. So, the convenience of tagging your location when you do videos and all that sort of thing, and it's all done automatically.

And if you're not terribly aware of it, and everybody's using their phones now, particularly for a company like – and a service like Cameo. It's, you know, people, celebrities are just using their iPhones to record these little videos and send them off. And, you know, if anything, I think Cameo, the service it goes through, should have some sort of responsibility to strip this data from the files.

But I guess they don't. No, no, no, here's the thing, though. This – I can't blame Cameo because I haven't gotten an actual Cameo video through the service. This came directly from Penn through Patreon. Oh, okay. So, I think that this is, you know, just him doing it.

I don't know if Cameo strips it. I'm assuming they might. One would hope. One would hope, but – Otherwise. Well, there's one way to find out. There is one way to find out. Anybody you want to stalk? Who's the cheapest celebrity we can get? I'm going to go with Gilbert Gottfried, probably.

He's expensive as hell. Is he really? Gilbert was one of the top five Cameo – I think he was number two on Cameo for last year. Oh, okay. Yeah, he's huge. All right. Okay. Maybe Carrot Tom. Well, I'll take a gander this week. I'm going to look through Cameo's catalog, as it were, and see if there's some obscure person that I've always thought was either funny or intriguing.

And perhaps, if the price is right, if I can find somebody cheap enough, I will order a Cameo and we'll check for the location data. Yeah, I wonder if we can find out if they do Android or iPhone and maybe get one of each. Find somebody that has an Android phone and somebody with an iPhone so we can EB test.

Is Richard kind on Cameo? He'd be a good one. I'm not even sure who he is. I'm going to have to Google that. You'll recognize him when you see him. He's that guy. He was on Mad About You. He was in Bugs Life. He's a sort of a nebbishy kind of character actor.

Yes, instantly recognizable. Just did not place the name in the face. Yeah, you know, come to think of it, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm sure you can do this, but I've never tried to hide the location metadata on a video file before.

I suspect, I mean, it's just a setting on your iPhone when you make the recording, but it's an interesting thing to think about. I haven't really thought about that before. Well, maybe, Dave, you'll get a Cameo from me later today. Right, right.

We could share with each other. And figure it out. The three of us can sign up and we'll just buy each other's Cameos because no one else will. Yeah, GOG slash Cameo. Or we could do it on your Patreon. There you go. See? I'd be willing to do that.

I'll do people's outgoing answering machine messages. All right. We'll set that up on our Patreon and we'll take our 30%. Actually, you know what? When I go to RSA every year, I usually end up doing a handful of little videos for people.

Like people come up and they'll introduce themselves and they'll say, oh, my son is a big fan of the Cyber Wire. He can't be here. Would you mind just saying hello to him? And we'll do a fun little Cameo-esque kind of thing. So oddly enough, people have asked me for that.

Not to the point where it would make any sense for me to be on Cameo itself, but in the very, very narrow world of cybersecurity, I've had that question asked to me and I'm happy to do it. So there you go. It's about as narrow as a celebrity as you can get, right? Yeah.

And how embarrassing would it be if you actually had poor OPSEC on your videos? Yeah. Although, you know what? I think it's a cobbler's kids have no shoes kind of thing because I mean that comes up all the time where – in fact, you know what? A couple months ago, we had those stories about how the bad guys were targeting cybersecurity people.

Remember that? They were targeting them to try to get their information because – and I can't help thinking, is there a sense of overconfidence? I think it probably goes one of two ways. They're either overconfident or they are wicked paranoid about everything. Yes. And there's no in-between.

Well, what about – can we factor in ambivalence? Like, I just don't care. Well, you could, although I suspect – You'd probably be in the wrong field. Yeah. Exactly. Right. Exactly. I don't know how long that would serve you well as a professional, but certainly you could go that way.

Yeah. I'm just throwing it out there. You know, I see everything that way. I'm ambivalent about everything, so whatever. Now, this next story that I have, I just love because her name is Reality Winner, and obviously she did not win reality for a while.

This is the NSA contractor who leaked a document to The Intercept a while ago, and The Intercept dropped the ball and reprinted her actual, you know, printout, which they then went and found the micro dots on it and traced it right back to the printer.

Where it came from and had her in custody in, like, you know, 17 seconds, because, I don't know, that's what the NSA does. It's kind of their thing, yeah. Yeah. They just went to their HP printer database, punched in the – Right. Right.

But she's out now. She's – they let her go for time served and good behavior. I just – I just – I – you know, I can't – I can't falter for what she was trying to do. Whistleblowers, I'm always, you know, generally a fan of.

But, yeah, I'm not a fan of The Intercept, and I do believe – are they still even around? Because I know Glenn Greenwald got the boot or quit or whatever. I tried not to follow them. I'm not a huge fan of them, but especially because of what they did to her, you know.

Yeah. You know, I think there's also – people say that she got caught up in what was a very aggressive effort by the Obama administration and then – which flowed through to the Trump administration of going after folks who are leaking things.

And so, you know, I think something that folks are kind of taking a wait and see on is how that's going to flow through to the Biden administration. I suspect President Biden, having been a key component of the Obama administration, is probably following in his predecessor's footsteps and will be aggressively going after leakers and leaks to the media and so on and so forth.

But some people have made the case that they went after her perhaps harder than she deserved. I believe it was – it wasn't – she got the longest prison sentence for anyone for this sort of thing, I believe.

I have a vague recollection that the 10 years she got was a particularly long sentence. And so maybe the fact she's getting released early is more in line with what they would expect. Kind of a correction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was the longest ever handed down for a government leak to a news outlet. Wow. So there you have it. There you have it. So maybe she'll be – now she's back to reality up to – I can't rap. Never mind. Back to life.

Back to reality. This next one – But she's got a gag order on her. She's not allowed to talk about anything even when she gets out. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's probably a good idea. I was going to say that's a good intervention for her maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Why don't we keep quiet about stuff from now on? Yeah.

Yeah. This next one I thought was pretty funny. Smartphone and smartwatch data led to husband confessing to murdering his wife. Well, yeah. Who among us has not been there? Oh, yeah. Always unplug the Alexas.

Don't take your phone with you. Yeah, basically. Don't take your watch. Don't check your blood pressure while you're busy murdering your wife. Yeah. That's pretty much it. I just love that the detectives came up to him at the memorial service and said, hey, can you come with us to Athens?

We want to – we want to help you – or help us identify a suspect but not telling him that the suspect was him. And basically they showed him the evidence and then he confessed eight hours later because, yeah, you know, it's the internet of dumbasses on this one.

Well, you know, it's getting harder and harder to not be tracked by things these days. Like you basically just have to not have any electronics on you or near you at this point, right? Yeah, you basically just have to run around in a unitard with no electronics on you, not take an Uber, don't drive your own car, don't run a bicycle.

Let's not talk about Dave's weekends. Yeah. Well, I feel seen. I feel seen. Yeah. So – Yeah, I mean it was her – so all these devices that they had with a combination of their phones and her smartwatch were keeping track of what they were doing in the house and none of that lined up with the story that he told the police.

Yeah. And apparently just pulling the data cards from the home security camera that probably had it on video was not enough. Right. He thought he was one step ahead of them. But it's interesting also to think about how much that the smartwatch logs throughout the day.

Yeah, a lot. It logs a lot. Yeah. Right. That's kind of their – why you get them. That's kind of the point. Yes. Yeah, but the fact that it's also logging it, that it's not just – you know, it's not only when you reach down to your watch and say, hey, what's my heart rate or what's my EKG or that sort of thing.

Like it's – as the day goes on, it's keeping track of all that stuff and it can be pulled up and, you know, sadly, they saw her heart rate go through the roof at a terrible moment and were able to use that against it.

Yes, it went up and then it didn't. That's kind of it. Yeah. Yeah, because, I mean, mine's always tracking because it's got the alerts if something goes wrong, you know, the AFib warning and stuff like that. So, yeah, it's always tracking. And I can go back and look at my graph throughout the day and see it.

So, that's a feature, not a bug. Mine gave me a fall warning the other day. Did you fall? Actually, no, I hadn't. But I was folding up the seats in the back of my car.

They were folded down because I was hauling some stuff around in my car. And so, I kind of slapped the seat to push it back up to its upright position. And evidently, in the combination of that slapping motion and moving my arm really quickly, I felt a funny little buzz on my wrist.

And I looked down and it said, we believe you may have fallen. Have you fallen? And I said, no. Can you get up? Can you get up? Yeah. Well, and I was like, don't call 9-1-1. Don't call 9-1-1. Don't call 9-1-1. But it was fine. But nice to know that it was keeping track of that if something had happened.

And it would have called 9-1-1. Yeah. All right. Pretty cool. Here's the deal. So, that's kind of like spank detection. So, you might want to not use that hand if you're doing any spanking activities. Your phone gives you a, you're going to go blind if you keep that up warning.

It's not the spanking I was thinking of, but I thought maybe he might be spanking his wife in a moment of bliss. Oh, that kind of spanking. Oh, well. Because you get the fast motion on the arm and then the stop. And then. Right. Right. See, both Brian and I have been married long enough that we were thinking of the other kind of spanking.

Yes. Spanking. Yeah. I'm well past the spanking of the wife stage life. I'm more along the lines of, let's have a glass of wine and go to bed early. But okay. Okay. Yeah. And, but just, just to be sure, I do keep the watch on my left arm.

Not your spanking arm. I am. And I am a righty. So, that's all I'm going to say about that. So, unless I go looking for some strains from myself. I spent a long time, much like baseball players, I spent many years working on my ambidexterity for spanking. I am a switch hitter.

It's a skill. It's a skill that must be maintained. It is. It's a skill. Yes. Yeah. Not as valuable as a skill as baseball. You've got to be able to mouse still. You've got to be able to mouse simultaneously. I was thinking your finishing move might be both cheeks at the same time. That's all you've got to say.

Anyway, this next story. Moving on. I put this next story in here because I know that perhaps once in a while, some of the members of this show may take a virtual trip to Sweden to gather up things.

Oh, I don't know. Like that HD Star Wars file that you lost when you do your hard drive properly? Exactly. Some of us may have benefited from those trips that our good friends have taken to Sweden. Yes. So, this is both a cautionary tale and also an interesting little bit of cybersecurity stuff here.

The folks over at Sophos have found some malware that when it goes on your computer, all it does is basically block you from being able to visit the Pirate Bay. Okay.

Brought to you by the RIAA. Yep, exactly. And what it does is they have all sorts of decoy apps on the Pirate Bay. And when you download one of these decoy apps, it goes through and it modifies your hosts file on your machine and keeps you from being able to hit the Pirate Bay.

That's not a very sophisticated piece of malware there. But does it need to be? I mean, because Jason, you and I have been web development people most of our lives. We know what host files are and how to modify them and how to check them.

But I would say dollars to donuts if you took your average person and said, do you know what a host file is? They'd have no idea. I don't know. Most of the people that visit the Pirate Bay probably do because it's, you know, you have to be somewhat sophisticated to, you know, search it out and run a BitTorrent client and things like that.

I mean, I could be giving them more credit. Launch an app and you type in what you want to search for. It's not that difficult. Yeah, true. Not like the old days. Nope, not like the old days. I think the plan here is that it's a lightweight thing. It's not really out to do much more than what it does, which is just keep you away from there.

So, I don't know. It's just kind of clever and funny. I like it. So, if any of us find ourselves unable to hit the Pirate Bay, check your host file. Although, I guess you'd have to be on a Windows machine, which I don't think any of us are, right?

No, but we do have host files. There's host files on Mac. See? Point made for Brian. Yeah, Macs are Unix-based. So, there is a host file, which, you know, sometimes you want to actually modify your host file so it doesn't call home to some of the Adobe apps that you have maybe gotten here and there everywhere.

Just saying. Right, right, right, right. Yeah, we used to use, what was the app that did that, that kept... Little Snitch. Little Snitch. Thank you very much. Yes. Little Snitch was worth its weight in gold back in the day. Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

To intercept all those calls back home. Yeah. I still run it, but now I pay for Adobe, so it actually does its job now and actually protects my computers. Mm-hmm. Oh, how times have changed. But the other thing is, the sophisticated people don't go to the Pirate Bay.

So, I don't know, I can't tell you the last time I actually got anything from them. Is that right? Yeah, we have better dark alleys nowadays. Ah, all right. Well, I'll take your word for it. No, I mean, not to, you know, incriminate myself or anything, but I've heard that you kind of basically just Google thing you want to get, torrent.

Yeah. And Bob's your uncle. For the most part. Is that right? Yeah, for the most part. Yes. Yeah. But I think it's so much of a crapshoot now because so many of those files have malware in them now. I mean, it's a primary way to get malware onto people's systems is through pirated software, even stuff that runs.

So, let's say you're looking for a copy of Photoshop. You'll get a copy of Photoshop, but you'll also get a little something extra. Yeah. Yeah. In general, it's just easier to be on the straight and narrow these days. Pay for your software kits and your media. Well. Yeah. Well. I don't know about that, but we'll see.

I mean, let's not go crazy. Seriously. Seriously. Well, I mean, I think we've always had a pretty hard and fast rule about that, which is as long, make it easy for us to get and relatively cheap and we'll do it properly. Make it hard and crazy expensive, then, well, Sweden it is.

Yep. Yeah. So be it. That's true. I remember there were times when if I wanted to, way back in the, this is probably in the 90s, if I wanted to get a piece of music on my computer or something, sometimes it was easier to go download the piece of music than to go find my CD that I owned and get the CD and put it in and rip the song.

And, you know, it was just. Yep. Fire up Napster. And I felt no guilt about that. Why more? Well, I already owned it. So, yeah, I didn't feel guilty about it at all. Yeah, you shouldn't feel guilty about that. Yeah, no, that's totally a legitimate use. It was often, you know, it's not oftenly did I own it once.

I probably had it on cassette and then I had it on CD and then the CD got scratched and I bought a second copy on CD. So, you know, fuck you guys. I'm not paying for this again. Right. Yet another reason for me to buy the white album. Yeah. So you guys have a couple of minutes.

I'll tell you a quick story about a ladder. Oh, do tell. Do tell. So I've had I've had my eye on getting myself a nice long extension ladder for a while. Dad dreams. Yeah, I've had a few jobs around the house that would require a ladder and it sort of came to a head recently because I have my stovetop vent, which runs out of the kitchen and out the side of the house where it runs out the side of the house is fairly high up.

And some birds had nested inside the vent, inside the, you know, the tube that goes from the outside. And so you could hear if you listened carefully, you could hear the baby chicks behind my microwave. Right. That's when the mama or daddy bird would come.

Yeah. And this was fine and it was kind of cute and whatever. It wasn't a big deal. And then all of a sudden something started to smell bad. Really bad. That's how it goes. Microwave. The microwave back shielding might not have been that great. It was just a matter of time. Yeah. Yeah.

So. So I decided, you know, time for me to start thinking about doing something about this and time to get a ladder. So meanwhile, I've been driving home from work every day, driving through my neighborhood and I noticed one of my neighbors is having a new roof put on their house and it's taking several days to have the roof put on and I'm just sort of keeping an eye on their progress.

One day I'm driving home and it's kind of a drizzling outside and I see leaning up against the house is a lovely, probably 24 foot extension ladder and I see on the ladder a sign that says free ladder. Well, first come, first serve.

I'm thinking this is my lucky day. So I drive home, run up the street before anybody else gets there, right? Yeah. There's going to be a rush. Well, I mean, not every day somebody gives away a free ladder and ladder, extension ladders aren't cheap either.

No, they're expensive. They are quite expensive. So I knock on the front door and there's nobody there and I peek inside and sure enough, the house is not occupied. So I take the little sign off the ladder and I put it on the front porch and I grab the ladder and I go home and I'm very happy with my new ladder and the next weekend I'm doing odd jobs around the house.

I go up and I fix the thing with the vent and pull out probably 10 bird's nests out of the pipe and all sorts of other things. Live in large with my new ladder, right? And then, so I'm sitting on the couch there and my wife is sitting at the other end of the couch and she's kind of scrolling through her emails on her phone and she pauses for a second and she looks at me and she says, oh, Dave.

I said, yeah. She said, I don't think you're going to get to keep that ladder. I said, oh, why? She said, well, let me read you this email. And there's an email that went out to our community mailing list and said, dear neighbors, we are the owners of such and such address.

We've been having lots of work done to the house, including a new roof and have had several contractors. And evidently, another one of our neighbors got frustrated that we've had this ladder up for several days and they put a sign on our ladder that said free ladder. Now, we're upset about two things.

First of all, that someone would have put the fake sign on the ladder and also we're upset because we've lost our ladder. So if you're the person who is responsible for taking the ladder, please bring back our ladder. So I'm sitting there on the couch.

I'm like, well, email them back. We've got to take the ladder back. So email them back. We took the ladder back and they were very grateful to get the ladder back. We still don't know who put the sign on the ladder. To me, that's the real villain here, right? I agree. Because I don't find you.

You're not at fault at all, Dave, if you're worried about that and looking for. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. I could just see, you know, like me in prison. What are you in for? Well, funny story. There was a free ladder. Right. There was the sign on this ladder. Reality winner printed out a sign and put it on the ladder.

No, it's just a little bit of social engineering here. And I bit the hook. So anyway, next day, took a trip to Home Depot and ladders were on sale. So I bought myself a new ladder. So I still have a ladder, just not a free ladder.

I was going to say, you should have finished all your chores. Yeah. And then given the ladder back, finish everything up and, you know, push off buying a new ladder to another day. That's true. I could have held the ladder for ransom. We have your ladder.

If you ever want to see your ladder in one piece again. Or I will return your ladder when I'm damn good and ready. I have more jobs to do around the house. You have already inconvenienced me with your ladder story. Well, here's what gets me.

How did they know that there was a sign on it before the ladder was taken? Because I left the sign on the porch when I took the ladder. And that was your fault. That was your problem. You would have never had to purchase a ladder. You just had to take that sign home with you.

Although, no, because then they would have just thought Dave stole the ladder. Right. It would have just been, yeah. And then another neighbor would have ratted me out. They would have said, oh, yeah, we saw, that was Dave running across the neighborhood. I got a ring footage. He's on my ring camera with a ladder.

Right. Right. Exactly. There he is. In a unitard with no phone. Dave is only fixing things in the dead of night in all black. Yeah. I don't know why he's got a furry outfit on, but he looks awfully happy to have that ladder. I saw the world's largest raccoon doing roof work the other day.

I have no idea what's going on. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. So, anyway, all's well that ends well. But I'd say be careful when you see something that has a sign on it that says free. It's always too good to be true.

Do your due diligence, right? There are no free lunches, or in this case, free ladders. So, that's my story for this week. Lesson learned. Well, sorry to hear about your troubles, Dave. The ladder troubles. Yeah. Yeah.

He should have let you borrow it, at least, so you can get your work done and not have to go buy a new ladder. Seriously. No, no, no. It was an excuse for me to buy a ladder. There's no way I was... Look, once I had a ladder, I'm not going back, right? Look, there's no way I'm living without having a ladder. Now that I know what it's like having a tall ladder, no.

I'm having a tall ladder. So, now I have a tall ladder. I'm good to go. All right. But do you see how this works on this podcast, Dave? Jason is actively pissed off at the people who had their ladders stolen. I am. They should have offered it to you, because here's the thing.

Dave was obviously in need of a ladder. And he... See, Jason was really pissed at them. So, they should have really let you said, hey, so thanks for bringing it back. But you, sir, you know, are you really in need of a ladder that bad? Because...

Right. True gentleman that you are. Exactly. You brought it back, so we feel that we must reward you. You can use our ladder anytime you like, because we just live up the street. We're being neighborly, and you did a good deed. They rewarded him with a step... They rewarded him with a stepstool. Yeah. Right, right.

It's a little... It's a little plastic ladder from a Tonka truck. Yeah. It's been bronzed, and I stick it on my front porch. Mm-hmm. So... Anyway, that's my story. I'm sticking to it. Talk to you next week.

Closing shout-outs! Over at Patreon, we've got James, Craig, and Ron. Thank you. Thank you. And over at PayPal, we've got Andrew, Natalie, Linda, Ralph, Mark, Miles, Nathaniel, Tom, Michael, Michelle, Tom, Andrew, John, Mark, Joseph, and Jean-Andre.

Thank you. Thank you very much, everybody. And over at our tip jar that we have now, where you can go directly to us, we've got Spencer, Anthony, Michael, Elaine, and Anne. Love you all. Thank you very much. Thank you. And at iTunes, we have a five-star review this week from Hanku. Had to download this app to leave a review.

I started listening to these guys two years ago, and I look forward to each new episode. Do you love Google Chrome? So do they a lot. Probably sponsored by Google. Are you a fan of Elon Musk? Not as big a fan as these two. Want to hear all the good news about crypto? Well, these are your guys. Do you own a ring camera? Tune in so you can listen to people who own multiple rings.

My only issue with them is that they are sponsored by Blue Yeti Microphone, even though it is obviously the best microphone ever, and they use it all the time, and it's just a little weird how much they love that microphone. All in all, an entertaining podcast by two dudes that wish they could join Clubhouse and dream about owning NFTs. Very funny.

Okay, I love the snarky, funny review, but I'm concerned now that somebody's going to read that and not listen to our show. I know. That's the downside of it. I'm like, it's very funny if you know the show, but if you don't know the show, it's just like, what? Especially coupled with that one-star review that we got that actually told us that we loved Google.

I know, I know. This might be spiraling out of control. Okay, maybe dial the snark back down a little bit, guys. And a big thank you to Doug Amoth over at Fast Company. He put us in one of his For Tech Podcasts You Should Be Listening To article.

So big thanks to Doug. He says, sporting a nice balance of serious sensibility, sarcastic cynicism, and downright funny moments. It's a good case study of the realities of online experience. I think I'm going to steal that for our show description. I really am. Might as well. It's actually really nice that we got put in one of these.

It's been a long time. I've actually kind of felt like, are we just like throwing our show out into the void? Because there's just been, no one has written up or even mentioned us in articles. And there are thousands of podcast articles every week. So it's nice to actually be noticed by someone.

Thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate that, Doug. It made me feel warm and fuzzy just for a little bit. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Hey, somebody typed that in wrong, Jason. Well, since somebody didn't do many notes this week. Nope.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy the show, visit 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. It's easy and absolutely free. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 511.

From there, you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode as well as links to our swag and Discord channels 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 snarky review.

Not as snarky as that last one. And preferably five stars. Stay grumpy.

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