512: It Has a Hole!

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Shit is getting real, Jason. Woohoo! I am getting rid of everything. You and me both, buddy. I'm not quite Spartan like you, but I'm packing up a bunch of stuff. It's been crazy. I mean, this is my last month here, and then I moved to Toronto, and the wife and I have been kind of slowly going through things over the past few months.

And then we woke up and went, oh, shit. We only have like four more weeks. Ah, yeah. Well, you're theoretically moving to Toronto because if you don't hurry the hell up, you're going to be stuck here. Well, we'll see about that. You know, we'll see. But, yeah, my old company storage unit is now gone.

That's been sitting around forever. My Vespa has taken its final ride, and it's been delivered to its new location. And we've given up the ghost on trying to keep our place looking normal, and we're just surrounded by packed boxes everywhere now. So good times. That's how it goes. That's how it goes.

I had a garage sale this weekend, and it dawned on me. A garage sale is the perfect way to turn thousands of dollars worth of beloved items into pocket change. Exactly. I don't even bother. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, you only put things out that you would give away, and anything that comes in is just like – just a bonus.

Just a bonus. Yeah. We're donating a shit ton of our stuff to – what's the organization that Carter works for all the time? Building houses. Habitat for Humanity. They're going to be – we have a scheduled pickup, and they will be taking away lots of my beloved items because it's not worth it for me to go sit in my front lawn for a day.

Yeah. Fortunately, we have a friend that does it for us. I put it out there, say, I want this much for it, and then about halfway through the day, I'm just like, get rid of this shit. I don't care. Just let people take it. Yeah. That's it. That's pretty much it. Yeah. So I got a little follow-up on class action lawsuits.

Brian, we always joke that you have to file for them. You have to take the money because otherwise it just goes back to the lawyers. It is our civic duty to do this. It is the only way that the money gets taken away from these companies. It's the only way they get punished, and it's still even just a kiss and a slap.

But fucking take your pennies, people. Exactly. Exactly. But I've noticed they're going up. I got a check from Birch Communications Settlement. I don't even know what the hell this one was for. It's like basically some kind of robocall thing, and some plumber sued the company. And thanks to the plumber, I got $24.34.

More than you made from your garage sale. Yeah, about. Just about. And another one I got in the mail. This was for Drizzly. Yep. Now, I'd never heard of Drizzly until you lost a bet and sent me a bunch of beer when I lived in Chicago. That was the Twitter bet, I think.

Yes, it was. Yeah. Yeah. And you sent me some Drizzly beer delivery, and I'm like, ooh, I kind of like beer delivery in the middle of winter. So I signed up. And I'm guessing you probably got one of these too, one of the emails? Yes, I used, well, in addition to sending you the beer in Chicago, Drizzly was my mainstay the first few months of the pandemic when we felt like we couldn't go anywhere and nothing was open anyway.

So they brought me the alcohol that got me through the early days. Did you switch to somebody more cost effective during the later days? I switched to going fucking out to the store and wearing a mask, you know? Yeah. Yeah. We use Total Wine for our delivery.

So hopefully they'll get breached soon too, because- I'm sure they will. Yeah. This is a data breach settlement. And my roommate, Shay, got a check the other day for $180 from a data breach settlement. I can't remember who it was from. That's a big one. These are going up. Yeah. Well, I think certainly for the data breach ones, I think that at some point, some judge said enough with just giving people free credit monitoring.

Everybody in the entire country has free credit monitoring for the next 25 years, because that's all that was given away for a while. I know. They're going to have my credit score on my tombstone, because I'm still getting monitored long into the afterlife. In the news.

Well, Jason, it's another week and another people, another group of people have lost all their Bitcoin. Again. Again? Again. This time it's in South Africa. Cryptocurrency investors in South Africa may have lost nearly $3.6 billion.

Well, I mean, check the exchange rate right now. Maybe more, maybe less. Who knows? In Bitcoin, following the disappearance of two brothers associated with one of the country's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, according to Bloomberg, a law firm in Cape Town says it cannot locate Amir and Ras Kaji, the founders of AfriCrypt.

In April, the exchange told its investors it was the victim of a hack and asked them not to report the incident to the authorities, on account that it would slow down the process of recovering their missing money. Hmm. Seems legit. Yes. And AfriCrypt is known for their abscondo coin.

So, yes, the law firm that has been hired to kind of follow this thing says they cannot find the brothers at all. It found that someone had withdrawn the pooled funds from the local accounts and client wallets where the coins were stored originally and put them through tumblers and mixers, making it difficult, although not impossible, to trace the money.

Buyer beware. Yep. Yep. Caveat crypto. Yep. Yep. I saw this one. This is fun. A judge dismissed the United States' antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, saying the FTC failed to show that the company was a monopoly. Because they're kind of not, really.

I mean- They're not. There are other social networks. They're just douchey. Yep. They are not a monopoly. They are too big, and they engage in very suspect practices, and they're shitty, but they're not a monopoly. Yes, yes. The FTC has to prove the burden of douche. So, we'll see how that goes.

But this one, this is right on the heels of this one, which I just love. Facebook can be held liable for sex trafficking, says Texas court. Okay. Now, people, this is where your words matter. The Texas Supreme Court has ruled that Facebook can be held liable if sex traffickers use the platform to victimize children on Friday.

What about the other six days of the week, I ask? Yeah. What day? Thursday. Cool. No problems. Thank you, futurism.com, for that one. So, yeah. All right. Well, you know, okay.

This is good, I guess. Right? The court disagreed with Facebook, and they said, in a majority opinion, we do not understand Section 230 to create a lawless no-man's land on the internet, in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking.

Take that, Zuck. Hmm. Well, I mean, in Facebook's defense, I doubt that they are knowingly or intentionally participating in human trafficking. It's just their platform is being used for it. Yeah, I suppose it does. I mean, I'm pretty sure every Russian Bride site is going to be, you know, under that umbrella.

So you got to check the ads. That's true. That's true. You can do anything on Facebook if you pay for it. Let's be honest. That is, that's how Trump is back. Yep. So, yep. There you go. So we talk a bit about investing on here, and I've been talking a little bit now and then about how I'm trying to become more of an ethical investor.

And as part of that, I dumped my Facebook stock quite a while ago, because fuck them, and they're evil. So there's a tiny company out there. It's a hedge fund called Engine Number One, and they made the news because of what happened with ExxonMobil a little while back, which is they basically instigated a shareholder's revolt that unceded three members of the oil company's board of directors and replaced them with more climate-concerned candidates.

So that's the first time that anything like that has ever happened, and it was pretty cool, and they caught my eye at that point. So I've kind of been following what they're doing, and now they're basically opening things up to us regular folks, ordinary investors, anybody with a 401k, you Robinhood-type people, all that sort of stuff.

They are launched, well, as of now, they have launched an exchange-traded fund, or ETF, that will track the performance of the 500 largest public companies in America. And obviously, you put enough money in there, they have enough power on the boards, or at least able to bend the ear of people on the boards in these companies, and they're going to keep fighting the fight for climate change.

And I love this idea. I will be investing in this. So pretty cool if you're into that. According to this article, you are macro-prudentially curious. I suppose I am. I don't know what the fuck that means, but it sounds good, I guess. Yeah. So here's something out there for those of you that want to try to invest ethically.

This seems to be a good deal here. So check them out. There's a company called Epic Systems. It is the biggest electronic health record company in the United States, and it claims, using that big data, that they can solve a major problem for hospitals, identifying early signs of sepsis, an often deadly complication from infections that can lead to organ failure.

Sepsis is scary-ass shit. I've known a couple people that have had it, and they were close to dead. Yeah. That's not good shit. It is the leading cause of death in hospitals. So, obviously, hey, cool. Use your big data. Come up with a way to predict this early. Save a bunch of lives, right?

Sounds good. The algorithm does not work as well as advertised, according to a new study published in the JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday. Epic says its alert system can correctly differentiate patients who do and don't have sepsis 76% of the time, which sounds great.

The new study found it was only, right, 63% of the time. They missed a ton of cases. There were a ton of false positives, and it just does not work as well as it does, which, okay, that sucks. Maybe they can do better with it. Hmm. If it were a free service being supplied, then maybe I wouldn't feel so bad about it.

But if you're charging for it and you're claiming that it works way better than it actually does, that's some bullshit. Yeah. 63% is not much over random. No. Just a little bit. About 13%. Yeah. That's great. That's great. Yeah.

And tying into that story, I also found this over on The Verge. Hospitals are selling treasure troves of medical data. What could go wrong? There's nothing new in this article that we haven't talked about about a gazillion times on here, which is basically they're selling everything. Doesn't count for HIPAA because, you know, they de-identify the records.

Bullshit. Yes, we know that doesn't fucking work. So just so you don't know, or just in case you didn't know because you've never listened to this show, these companies can sell your data. They don't need your consent. They don't even have to tell you that they've done it because they just kind of pretend that they've de-identified it and that's that.

So good times. Yeah. I like this. They call de-identification a privacy placebo, which, you know, although the problem is half the time a placebo works. So I think they might want to change that term just a little bit. But yeah, this is just standard bullshit.

Get the data, resell it, profit. And what I thought was kind of an interesting move, Amazon has buying the secure messaging platform Wicker, which I have personally not heard of, but I guess it's big in government right now. And that's kind of why they're buying it because, you know, they lost the Jedi contract, at least for now, and they want to get into that space.

And it's just, to me, I'm going to do my Kara Swisher here. I think it's interesting. I don't know. I just find it, it's just interesting. What do you think? Because I find it interesting. Okay, I'm done with my Kara Swisher there.

I was just listening to that podcast this morning. Nailed it! Look, if you had to take a fucking drink every time she said something was interesting and then offered absolutely no more thoughts on it, you would be dead drunk 10 minutes into the podcast. Yeah, I don't want to see the Gropial Geeks podcast bingo card personally, though, because I'm sure we've got some, we've got some things that we do every single week.

Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. But the interesting thing is just starting to drive me nuts. I think I need to take a break from her podcast for a little bit. Yeah, it's getting a little repetitive. I did find it interesting just because I hadn't really noticed that Amazon had really bought into other kind of platforms or software before.

So I thought, okay, why are they buying a secure messaging platform? That seems weird, but I guess they're tying it in with AWS for their customers. So that kind of sort of makes sense. So I get it. And it's not that interesting. No, it's not actually that interesting. And I thought, I thought they completely reversed the whole Jedi deal anyway.

So I think it's all, I basically, I think it's been scrapped and they're going to have to start over again. Everybody's going to have to do, get their, get their PowerPoint presentations ready and pitch again. Yeah. Because Bezos got butt hurt. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, this is, you know, this is just a service they can sell on AWS.

So, um, and it's probably a pretty good one. Yeah. Yeah. I don't need it. I suppose it is. I guess if you, I mean, if we wanted to roll out our own GOG private, you know, white label network, messaging network, yeah. Yep. All right. There you go. And a new study has come out that many people don't want to work anymore unless it's from home.

Now we've been hearing, we've been hearing. They need an article for this? Yes. I mean, everybody sees this. I don't know about you, Jason, but anywhere I go, I see signs up, you know, employees needed. We need bartenders. We need servers. We need waiters. We need waitresses. Nobody wants to go back to those jobs because after a year and a half of not working them, they realize that they're fucking shitty and don't get paid well.

And also smart people, a lot of smart people have found other forms of employment during the pandemic and don't need to go back to those jobs. Yeah. That's the problem. Yeah. Tons of people are, and as far as like not those kinds of jobs, as far as office jobs and things like that, people are just quitting.

People are done. I just want to know where the hell they're going. You know, they're not. They're living off the money that they saved up during the pandemic, which for a lot of people is quite a lot of money. Yeah. There's going to come a reckoning for that. Oh yeah. Of course there is, Jason.

There's no free lunches. No, there's not. Well, nowadays there's no lunches because there's nobody in the kitchen to cook it for you. This is true. But the article goes on to say, if you're one of the approximately 50% of Americans who worked remotely during the pandemic, you're probably wondering if remote work is in the cards after the pandemic is over.

The vast majority of people say they'd like to work remotely at least part of the time. But the reality is that there are far fewer remote jobs than there are people who say they want them. Only about 10% of jobs on popular hiring platforms include remote work. And as the study is going on to say, you know, people have figured out that they were productive.

They were able to do it. They were able to figure out a way to make work from home work and they didn't have to commute and they got to spend more time with their families and taking care of other things. My cautionary tale on this is, as everybody discovers, there is this thing called work creep. And when you're working from home, work creep goes into your entire day and night.

So I'm not sure how well people are going to do with this long term, but they want to do it. And this article is basically saying if you want to, if you're a company and you want to hire people, you better start offering some work from home options. Yeah. Yeah. That's the way it's going to be from now on.

We knew that there was going to be a, you know, a big tectonic shift in how people were going to work after this whole thing was over. So yeah, it's here. So I'm sure some companies will be able to allow complete work from home for certain people, but I think more often than not, it's going to be a hybrid. And like I discussed on our discord channel, that's something that the company that I'm going to work for is going to be doing, looking to go in two to three days a week and the rest of the time from home.

And I think that's going to become pretty, pretty common. You see what we need to do now is we need to get that tele-robotic bartender gig going. So we can all sit at home with our VR goggles and then with my handsets, I can pour you a drink so I can be socially distant working from home and still be a bartender.

And we are literally at idiocracy. Yep. But you have to kick the robot in the balls every five minutes.

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Shop now at QVC.com. So I vaguely remember that there was a Dune movie coming out at some point, sort of, in the distant past.

I remember seeing a trailer and being cautiously optimistic about it. We're going to have to wait even longer now. They delayed it first to October 1st. It was going to be December 18th last year. It's now been pushed three weeks? That's an odd number.

To October 22nd for no reason whatsoever I can figure out, other than maybe they're hoping more people will go into theaters at that point. But who cares? I won't be because it'll be released simultaneously on HBO Max. Yeah, this is one of the last ones that's going to have the cross-release. I mean, it's so effects-heavy.

Maybe they're just still rendering it. Who knows? Maybe. Maybe they are. And somehow I missed this information about the movie. I'm sure it was out there, but it will be the first of two movies, and it covers only the first half of the book, with the second movie arriving at an unknown date based on the, whatever, second half of the book.

So, and there is a prequel that has also been announced. Now, prequel means it's going off Frank Herbert's original stories and onto his son's shitty follow-ups. So that's not good. Ah, well. Well, you know, some things can be fixed in post, so we'll see what kind of screenwriters they get in to patch that puppy up.

That's true. And Foundation is coming to Apple TV Plus in September. I'm very excited about that. They have said here, and I see your notes now, there is no date. There was no date. On all of these articles that I found, no date, no date.

I started to play the trailer this morning, and the big right, like up in the right corner, it says, coming September 24th. I'm like, how the fuck did you miss that? Apparently there's a date. I did not watch the video, so maybe every single person that wrote these articles did not watch the video either, because there's no new footage.

I've already seen the trailer, so I didn't watch it again. I was just looking for the actual drop date and realized I was reading an article that had no drop date. We scooped them! We scooped them! Yes, we did. Take that verge. There you go. Oh, yeah. It looks good. I kind of want to go read the books now before it comes out, so.

They're great books, but you've got to read them with the knowledge that they were written in the 50s. See, that was the problem. I read the, like, I went through them, the audiobooks, and they were just so, they were kind of hard to get through, so. Yeah. But I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention, so it's one of those things where I need to start taking a hike and maybe listening to it on the hike, but.

Yeah, this is not crapper reading sci-fi. This is full-on, hardcore, you might need a flowchart. Yeah, it's a game of Thrones-ian with the characters. Yeah. And just a quick reminder that Ted Lasso is going to drop on July 23rd. I'm very excited.

That means I'm going to have to renew my Apple Plus. I can't get rid of it, so. Well, I got the Apple One thing, so it just comes packaged with it, and it also comes packaged with Apple Fitness, which I have not done once, period.

I took the one-month free trial on that. I looked at it one time, and I went, these workouts are dumb, and that was that. Well, you got to use an Apple TV, and I don't have any Apple TVs lying around anymore, so. I think you can use your iPad. Yeah, I mean, I've got the big 12.9-inch iPad, but that's still not a big TV.

I'd have to, you know, cast it to the TV, and like I said, I don't have an Apple TV to it, so I'm going to have to find another way to do it. Maybe get another HDMI cable, plug it in, and guess what? By that point, I could have just walked around the block three times and got my exercise in, so pass. All right, and in somewhat surprising news, except for the fact that I personally don't think we'll ever see this, a new Galaxy Quest TV show is in the works.

I loved Galaxy Quest. One of the best movies ever made. It was a very funny movie. Yes. So, a TV series version is being pitched, reportedly being developed by Simon Pegg and Secession writer, Georgia Pritchett. Ooh. Yeah. I just got chills from that. That could be fucking amazing.

It could be, so we'll see. This is not the first time that they tried to do this. Amazon originally set up plans back in 2015. I remember that, yeah. But unfortunately, the death of Alan Rickman killed the idea. Then back in 2017, Paul Scheer was tapped to write a version of the series, but little more has been heard about it since.

But apparently, it's still kicking around. So, we'll see. I personally would welcome it. They may ruin it. Who knows? Well, I mean, Simon Pegg and Georgia Pritchett, those are two pretty big heavy hitters who make some of the best things in the world. As long as this doesn't screw up with upcoming seasons of Succession, I'm okay with Georgia taking a break.

But the news just came out that season three, they just finished filming season three of Succession, and it comes out in the fall. There's going to be at least one more season, possibly two, but probably just one. And they do have a wrap for the story, so it's not going to just be one of those trail off to the end ones, which has me very happy, because my favorite show on TV is Hands Down Succession.

I love it. It's good. It's real good. Oh, yeah. And this one's for you. Frasier Revival release date teased by Kelsey Grammer, which means there is not one. Period. Probably the first quarter of next year, says Kelsey Grammer, and they're trying to get most of the actors back, except for the ones that are dead.

Well, that's only the dad. Everybody else is still alive and kicking, so. The dog's gone, too. Oh, Jesus Christ. The dog was better than half the characters. He had all the best lines. He did. He did. He was a charismatic little fucker. I'm very excited about this.

I fucking love the show. I mean, it's just, it was one of the best written shows in all of human history, I've got to say, and I'm excited to have it back, as long as they have a good writing team. That'll be great. Okay. Okay. Well, here's to checking it out. It's one of those ones where, you know, I've seen a couple of them, but the problem is the story was so intertwined in past episodes, it was hard to pick up in the middle.

So, you lose a lot. It's not one of those ones where you could just jump in for an episode and jump back out. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. I finished Kim's Convenience, I watched the final episode, and I was okay with it. I'm sad it's not coming back.

I'm sad there isn't going to be more, but they kind of, I think they may have had an inkling. They certainly didn't set it up with like a cliffhanger, we need to come back and resolve this, but some characters were getting ready to make some changes in their lives, and some weren't, and it just, life goes on. And I liked it.

It was very good. I'm happy I had that series in my life. All right. That's a satisfactory ending, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, it was fine. It was fine. And another Canadian show has just dropped season five on Netflix, Working Moms. I started watching this with my wife. Everybody needs a show that they can watch with their spouse.

This is one that I can watch with her. The writing isn't as good anymore. It's still funny, but the first couple seasons were actually really funny and very clever, and I feel like this show should have ended, and Kim's Convenience could have kept going. All right.

And I watched LFG, which is short for Let's Fucking Go, and this was talked about a bit on our Discord channel as well. This is over on HBO Max. It is a documentary about the US Women's National Team fight for equal pay. And it is, oh, just shy of two hours long, and if you are interested in the subject matter, you know all of this already, so you didn't need to watch it.

Okay. Yeah. All righty. I finally finished. We have been binging. I think I mentioned this on the show before. The Great Food Truck Race. Right. And there's a new season out, season 14. We just finished season 13. Yes, we binged 13 seasons of The Great Food Truck Race.

Talk about not deep TV, but it's fantastic. I love it. So I can't wait to see it. Because they said on the commercials that it was an all-star episode. So I'm like, oh, we're just going to skip all the other ones and watch it, but it'll spoil all the other seasons. So we're like, oh, man, we've got to go watch them all first.

So that's been my afternoon for the past, I don't know, six months at this point. By the end of the day, man, you know how you said you need something to watch with your significant other? Well, me and my roommate need something as dumb as you can possibly get in the afternoons. And that fits the bill absolutely perfectly.

All right. Fair enough. I will never, ever watch an episode of that, but I'm glad you enjoyed it. All right. Ups and doodads. So these stories were meant for a previous show, but we were running long. So they're a little bit old, but I think it's important that we talk about them because this comes perfectly into Grumpy Old Geeks territory and our connected devices and the things that we buy that we never actually really own or control anymore.

Peloton had their problem with their treadmill, which was, you know, one kid got hurt. I think one kid got killed. One kid got killed at one point. You know, shit happens. We seem to be kind of okay with people having guns in their houses. Shit happens. Treadmill. So their solution was to force the owners of its $4,295 Tread Plus to either return the machine for a refund or pay the $39 monthly membership fee to use it at all.

I know. Because even though it does have safety stuff on it, it's got a couple different things to begin with because it's not a death device. There are certain safety procedures that are built into the device that are actually physical, but they added a safety feature called Tread Lock that they could only have on or off if you were an ongoing subscriber, apparently.

It's a four-digit passcode, and you need to pay $39.95 a month to be able to use a four-digit passcode. I know. Needless to say, people were upset about this. Really, you think? And they are looking into making it available without a Peloton membership, but due to current technical limitations, they're not sure when that'll be possible.

Okay. I... Not sure when it will be possible to make it... To put a passcode onto a system. That's already there. That is already there. And there are different things as well.

They just can't figure out how to not charge for it, is what they're saying. Yeah. Okay. Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm going to add this on to the, this is why we can't have nice things file, just like your Peloton.

Keep AirTags away from children for safety, warns Australian regulator. Well, AirTags have a battery in it, right? And apparently Australian children like to eat the batteries. So, now they're saying, well, keep your AirTags away from kids because maybe, just maybe, the battery compartment on the back could not be, could be open for some magical reason.

And then the child might eat the battery. Right. Well, I'm thinking that if your kid's eating batteries, hmm, I blame the parents, but I get it. I get it. Children, small things, but everything has these batteries in it.

Why are you going to pick on AirTags for it? Hmm? Hmm? Hmm. This is true. Yeah. Well, let me skip ahead a little bit in our show notes then to talk about something related. Yes, AirTags have batteries. What is one thing that they do not have? I don't know, Brian. What? A hole. Oh, yes.

The hole. Ah, the hole. The mysterious hole. The entire reason I have this article here is because of the headline, Chipolo's one spot isn't quite an AirTag, but at least it has a hole. No shit.

So this is a competitor to AirTags. It works with the same technology. They've updated it, so it works with Apple's Find My Network and all that sort of stuff. It is $1 cheaper. And it comes with a hole. But it comes with a hole. Also, it doesn't look all shiny and nice like an AirTag, so people may not know what it is, thus, you know, defeating the purpose of, like, trying to keep something on the down low so you can trace it and track it and not lose it.

Oh, that one looks much better. It looks way better. I'm totally – I really have next to no use case for any one of these, but if I'm going to get one, I'm going to get the Chipolo with the hole. Yeah, I've got two AirTags. One of them is still in a drawer because I don't do anything with it.

The other one's on my keychain. And fortunately, I don't have very dumb children around that might eat it. Right. Yeah, and – I don't know, man. But yes, the hole. You get a hole at a discount. It's amazing.

I love it. I love it. So, another story that was a little bit old at this point, but again, it's right in our wheelhouse. The Texas power grid. And we all remember last winter storms disabled parts of the grid because they weren't expecting snow in Texas, even though it does snow in Texas.

And now there's a summer heat wave that is, again, threatening the grid. And one solution that Texas power companies have found? We'll just turn up your thermostats. Oh, yeah, this one. Problem is, customers weren't aware that the power company could and would do such a thing until their homes got uncomfortably warm.

It's called reading. It's called reading. It's called there's no free lunch. It's called there's always a catch. The people whose thermostats that they were able to control either got free smart thermostats or enrolled in a program called Smart Savers Texas, which entered them in a sweepstakes to win up to $5,000 off their energy bill for the next year.

And in the small print, it said, we get to control your thermostat because, you know, we're going to make sure that our grid doesn't go down by making you very, very hot. Yeah. Yeah. This one, no sympathy for the dumb.

No sympathy for the dumb. There is a terms of service. You clicked on it. You said, OK, give me that $5,000. Yep, that's exactly it. So here's the deal. And this is going back to something I think we were talking about two or three shows ago about the, you know, the Apple privacy environment where you're paying a premium for a better product that keeps your data private versus the Android.

It's cheap, but, you know, here you go. We're really that is tech now. If you pay the money, you get better service. You get better devices. You get better control. If you want it cheaper, there are catches. Yeah, there are definitely catches. Come on, people.

What did you think was going to happen? Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, that's all. But it is a weird thing. Like, I don't know. That is we knew this was going to come. We knew this was coming. And it's just a strange thing to have something in your house that is no longer in your control.

And I would highly recommend not signing up for these programs. Be a smart saver, Texans. Just don't sign up for smart savers. Yeah. I mean, I have a nest in my house that was given to me by the city of Los Angeles. And, yeah, at certain times, they do have the ability to do that.

And I know that. And I know what I signed up for, but I read the fucking terms because I knew it was going to be in there. Come on. Anyway, I saw this one. I thought it was pretty fun. iPod interface for Apple Music and Spotify by Tanner Villarite.

It's a cute little JavaScript widget that's just browser-based that turns your browser into an old-school iPod. And you can link your Apple Music account or your Spotify account and just play your songs through that. It's cute. It's very cute. And one of those things that we did, it's like a portfolio piece, like something we would have done back in the day.

Oh, yeah, totally. I just thought it was fun. And it works perfectly. It's pretty cool. All right. Pretty cool. So check that out. And all the drone people out there, you have to go sign up now for the Recreational UAS Safety Test or TRUST. In the past, you had to register your drone if it was over a certain weight.

And now if you own one of those drones, you're supposed to go get a TRUST completion certificate. So you go sign up to one of their providers, you take the test, takes about a half an hour, and then you can print out your card. The interesting thing about how they do this, though, is if you forget and don't print out your card, to go back and do it again, you have to take the whole test again because they don't keep any user data whatsoever.

It's like you come in, you do your test, and everything that they have collected at the beginning of the test is all wiped as soon as you complete the test, and it's done. It's gone. They do not keep any data. Okay. I thought that was pretty good. Yeah, that is good. I mean, that's the only reason I put it in.

I mean, nobody's going to go take the test, and nobody's ever – no cop's going to roll up on you and go, hey, son, you got your TRUST certificate over there? Come on, hand it over. I'm going to give you a ticket. No cop ever is going to do that. No. Yeah, because it's – yeah, whatever.

But either way, you should take the test if you have a drone and you fly it just so you are, you know, cognizant of what you should be doing. It's the right thing to do. Yes. That said, I haven't done it yet, so I don't know how hard it is. And Barrett sent in an article and says more from the who the fuck gets paid to create this shit file.

And this is about Canon. Back in 2020, the China-based Canon subsidiary, Canon Information Technology, introduced an intelligent IT solution for corporate offices that included five different functional models, one of which is smiley face access control. No, you want to talk about idiocracy, welcome to it.

If you want to get into the office and do your soul-crushing job for pennies or rubles or yen or whatever, you have to smile now or the door won't open. And I just love this part of the press release. In addition, based on the corporate culture of moving and always being, Canon has always advocated the concepts of laughing and big health and hopes to bring happiness and health to everyone in the post-epidemic era, Canon wrote in a press release.

Therefore, in the IT solution, a new experience of smile recognition is specially incorporated. It is hoped that smiles can let everyone relax and get healthy so as to create a more pleasant working atmosphere and improve efficiency. Smile or die. Well, here's the thing. If I'm going to put this in my office, I'm going to get one of those modules that is the firearm control.

Because if I hold up an AR-15 and I'm smiling and it lets me in, it kind of defeats the purpose. It does indeed. Yep. Moron of the week! Well, Brian, when you think things can't get any dumber with influencers, out comes the Tour de France.

I'm sure everybody's seen this one by now, but this is just too funny. Some idiot influencer with the sign caused a major crash. A lot of people got injured. Some people that were frontrunners didn't quite stay in the front very long. And now the French are, there's a woman hunt for her, an international woman hunt, because France wants to sue her, which is fine by me.

Yeah, but she, and she was German, they believe, by the way. That's all right. But she got on a flight, which is untraceable for some reason. I don't know how that works over there. Okay. Couldn't do that here, that's for sure.

Nope. But she has left the country, and so if you have any information, please call 1-800-DIPSHIT. Yeah, this is pretty bad, but, you know, I mean, if she's German, it's kind of encoded in the German DNA to fuck with the French. 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. And finally, he's the co-host of Recorded Future, where he takes you inside the world of cyber threat intelligence.

Welcome back to the show, Dave. Hello, hello. Good to be back. Good to have you back. I thought we'd start with a little Star Wars. Obviously, we don't have much to discuss because we're in animation land, and we've talked about that a bit. The Bad Batch is fine.

It's not great. Yeah. It is what it is. But there is a long-form article over on The Atlantic that puts our childhood agony into words. How Disney mismanaged the Star Wars universe. There is nothing that I think we would consider controversial in here.

It is the exact same opinions being spewed forth by us and everyone on Reddit. They just don't know what they're doing. Yeah, yeah. But I think they rightly point out that the TV show, like The Mandalorian, is the kind of stuff that we love and why.

My conclusion after reading this article was that I think George Lucas is better at posing questions than answering them. So, in other words, he puts the notion of the Force out there and doesn't explain it, and we all love that. And then he explains it, and we hate it.

Right. Yes. Mini-chlorians for the win! Like, oh, come on. It's like at the end of A New Hope, you know, when they're flying down the trench and Darth Vader is behind Luke's X-Wing. And, you know, Vader says, the Force is strong with this one, but first I better get a blood test.

Like, come on. Yeah, and I feel that that was part of the problem with the three new movies, outside of the fact that, of course, they basically rehashed the same general plots. And, you know, okay, well, we can't have a third Death Star.

Let's call it Starkiller Base. Okay, now we have to go blow that up? All right. Yeah, they do tend to explain things too much. Like, did we need to know? If it were the original trilogy, we would not have known about that Rey was related to the Emperor.

Did we need to know that? It ruins it. It's just stupid. So, yeah. Yeah, being dropped into that universe and sort of having to put the pieces together was part of the fun of it. I also think that there's that valid point that great art is often made because of limitations, not in spite of them.

Yep. And I think there's no better example of that than looking at the original trilogy versus the prequels with, particularly, again, episode four, when Lucas had all kinds of limitations put on him. And you compare that to the prequels where he could do anything he wanted. Misa think he fucked up.

Yeah. I mean, think about, you know, just the fact that we would have had, if he had been able to do it, we would have had a CGI Chewbacca. And who wants that? And a CGI Yoda and all that. Yeah. And we saw the CGI, what's his name?

The fat guy. Jabba. Jabba. Jabba. Jabba. Yeah, the fat guy blanked on that. I don't know how. The CGI Jabba the Hutt, which was just like, what? Pizza the Hutt. Yeah. Right. Well, and again, back to Mandalorian. One of the best decisions they made was making little baby Yoda a puppet so that he feels real.

Yeah. And we, that resonates with us and we love that. And I, you know, so. Yeah. Going back to your point about great art is often made because of limitations. One of my favorite things from when I was a teenager, I was very much into the band The Jesus and Mary Chain. And they famously did an interview where they said, if we actually knew how to play guitar, we never would have written music.

It's because they didn't. That they did these amazing things that nobody had really ever done before and it sounded so good. So. Right. Yeah. Right. There's a lot to that. When you don't know what the rules are, yeah, that hasn't been ingrained in you. You can you can make interesting new things and certainly plenty of people will make new things that aren't interesting.

But every now and then you get a great artist who, because of that lack of, I don't know, I guess I hate the word indoctrination because of how it's been taken over by people. But, you know, having the rule, not being taught music theory, you know, what you can and cannot do.

Sometimes that can be a good thing. And there's the other, you know, the other school that says, oh, you must learn the rules before you can break them. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Which just totally negates the other side of it. But I prefer just breaking the rules first.

That's more fun. We do know that. Yeah. Right. We are aware. Yeah. So, Dave, your latter story resonated with quite a few of our listeners. There was some discord discussion and Rick had felt the need to tell us his story as well.

So perhaps you won't feel so bad. Rick says, I got a $600 set of golf clubs that were on the side of the road after loading. I went up to the door to make sure they were really free. The wife said she caught her husband cheating. And if I didn't take them for free, she would pay me $20 to take them. I passed on the $20 but took the clubs, swapping them for my Goodwill clubs with my nice bag so I wouldn't be recognized on any local greens.

Right. I love it. I love it. Yeah. I guess maybe the cautionary tale out of all of this is, you know, just because a sign says free doesn't, you know, have a healthy dose of skepticism. Because you never know.

Best to knock on the door and verify. I like this story from Rick, though. That's good. Yeah. And Armchair Rambo has done some work with one of your epic rants. This is not safe for work by the Organ Grinders featuring Dave Bittner with one T.

I hope I spelled his name correctly. Is it Bittner? Too lazy to check. If anyone donates, I'll forward it to you guys. I already send as much as I can. Cheers. And in closing, fuck you. Yeah. Well, Rambo, thank you very much for this. I have to say this filled me with delight and joy.

Yeah. This is wonderful. This is a wonderful thing that you've made here. And I hope everyone goes and checks it out, making something good and entertaining out of my rant. So thumbs up to you. I've also included a photo here. I don't know if you guys can include it in the show notes.

But if you do a Google image search for Dave Bittner, not only will you find pictures of me, various stages of my life, but there is an archival photo of Dave Bittner and his KMOX radio orchestra, which is a real thing.

Evidently, back in the day, when radio stations had their own orchestras, there was a guy named Dave Bittner, properly spelled two T's, was the band leader of a radio orchestra. And this also, I love. Yes, it's a wonderful photo. Isn't it great?

Yeah. If I were a time traveler, maybe this is, this is, I could see this happening, you know, this is so. Well, since he is an older gentleman, maybe this is a Benjamin Bittner moment. Could be. Could be. Yeah. You never know. You never know. It doesn't really resemble me in any way, but that's all right.

And Barrett wrote in and said, somebody called Bittner ASAP just in case. And this is, of course, the story about the Western Digital MyBook live drives that are, if they're connected to the internet, are, I don't know if anybody's even actually figured out exactly what's going on yet, but they're getting wiped.

Yeah. So, be careful with your drives there. Yeah. We covered this story. I don't understand. Evidently, these are older devices. And, yeah, if it's hosed up to the internet, somebody's going out and finding them and has some way to wipe them.

And it gets gone, baby, gone. Yeah. I have two of these drives, but they're basically just backup storage and they're not connected to anything. So, good to know. I will not be connecting those to the internet anytime soon until somebody figures out exactly what the hell's going on. Yeah. I think this is, you know, one of their services that you can handle.

But I just, yeah, I get them and I wipe them immediately because they all come as ex-fat. So, I always just do mine as APFS anyway. So, I don't use any, I never trust backup tools that come from the company that makes the drive. I don't know why. Seagate, looking at you.

They just tend to never work. So, it's just, yeah, we've got enough backup tools now. We've got Time Machine on the Macs. There's Carbon Copy Cloner for the Macs. We've got a PC. I'm sure that there's something glorious out there for you to use too. I just don't know it. Right. But, yeah, find a professional set of backup software and don't use the crap that comes with the actual hard drive.

Because it's like they don't put any time or effort into it. It's a, you know, a kitschy add-on. Right. Right. Right. It's the free thing. And most of the time they job it out to somebody else and then it sort of becomes neglectware. Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yeah. So, I got this one, which made me chuckle. DreamHost database leaked 814 million records online, including customer data. This is not a good one. I mean, DreamHost is, they're kind of like HostGator, you know, bargain basement.

Cheap and cheerful. Craptacular. The worst hosting on the planet. You know, if you host with either DreamHost, HostGator, or GoDaddy, expect this to happen. That's just the way it goes. But the thing about this is some of the records have their WordPress accounts as well, which is not good because they do a lot of the stuff for WordPress.

And when I did a Google search for DreamHost breach to find the latest news, the second result is Hacked Sites Overview, DreamHost Knowledge Base. If you're not comfortable fixing your WordPress site on your own, you can request DreamHost's Hacked Site Repair, a professional malware service tool.

Yeah. You know, you break it, you fix it, you break it, you fix it, you pay for both, and there you go. Right. Solid business model. It is a solid business model. Right. That reminds me of, I don't know, probably a decade ago when Microsoft started buying up antivirus companies.

And it was sort of like, you know, selling the, like you say, but you're selling both sides of it. You're selling the software that is susceptible to the viruses and you're selling the solution. So I guess it's a good business to be in.

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that. That was my next comment was going to be the Microsoft business model out of the game. Right. That really is it. Right, right. Yeah. Interesting. Well, I put in an article here from the folks over at MIT Technology Review, and I put this in here for you, Brian, because I thought you'd get a kick out of it.

This is a flowchart that they have put together. It's a lovely handwritten flowchart of what is AI. And to determine whether or not something is AI, they have this lovely little flowchart here. And I like this a lot, actually. It starts off with, can it see?

Can it hear? Can it read? Can it move? Can it reason? And you just make your way through the flowchart. And by saying yes or no, it'll say, well, it sounds like it's just a camera. It sounds like it's just a word processor. No, that sounds like math. Neat. That's machine learning.

Right. Right. Right. And then if you make it all the way through the flowchart and you say yes enough times, you'll say, yep, it's using AI. And this is as an approachable guide to this as anything I've seen.

And so I rather like this one. Yeah, it's very clever. And I do like the fact that they actually point out that the definition of artificial intelligence is evolving and moving, meaning we have moved past what was the established definition, and it's become much more fungible.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Still, you can't put it in your headlines and then switch it in the article. That's all I'm saying. Yeah. Editors, pick fucking one and stay in the lane.

Well, and your marketing materials as well. Yes. Yes. That's where it pops up. Yeah. Yeah. It's the most offensive, I think. Yeah. All right. Well, I'm going to go head out of here, and I'm going to listen to some more Armchair Rambo, Not Safe for Work, my soon-to-be top 10 single from my new-to-be-released EP, Dave Bittner Rants Against the World.

We got to get you angry again. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, let's work on that. Mr. McGee, are you trying to make me angry? You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. Closing shout-outs! Over at Patreon, we've got nobody.

Nobody loves us. Nobody loves us. No new people. Bummer. And over at PayPal, we've got Adam, Thomas, Charlie, Simon, Michael, and Matt. Thank you very much. Woo-hoo! Thank you. And over at our tip jar, we got Spencer and William Generous, who was indeed generous.

Promotive determinism there. Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you. Everybody that has thrown us a few bones this month or this week, we appreciate it very, very much. You have no idea. No idea. So I can go buy all the stuff that I sold at the garage sale.

The cycle continues. The cycle continues. Lather, rinse, repeat. Yep. Sad news, John McAfee committed suicide in prison in Spain after he was going to get sent back to the good old U.S. of A for a trial.

He was going to get trialed and get jailed, and he took the other way out. Yeah, he did. He did, of course. Interesting guy, I will say. Interesting guy. Yeah, this makes me kind of sad. He was crazy, but, you know, he was an entertaining kind of crazy.

I know people are going to say, oh, he had child brides, blah, blah, blah. He, you know, killed his neighbor. Well, the neighbor murder thing, I'm kind of with him on that one. His neighbor did deserve to die. Here we go. I'm just saying. He killed his dogs. He poisoned his dogs. So... That a little...

Yeah, okay. I get it. There are like 16 of them. He killed like 16 dogs. So, yeah. You don't get to turn into John Wick. Yeah, you do. It's Belize, man. You can do whatever you want. All you have to do is Belize in yourself. Jesus Christ. Okay, I'm just going to sign off on he was a charismatic and troublesome individual that I'm not sure will be missed too much, but there you go.

Certainly not by anybody in Belize. Yeah, the happiest, happy 50th, happiest, happiest 50th to Elon Musk. Oh, did he celebrate by pimping some random crypto? Must have. Must have. Must have. Okay. Yeah. Elon, you want to give me a birthday present too?

Get that stock over 700, baby. Come on. You can do it. Please. Pretty please. And a happy 50th to super fan of the show, Desiree. She tied one on and one of our favorite people over there in Sweden. So, happy birthday, Desiree. Happy birthday.

Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoyed 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 512.

From there, you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode as well as links to our swag and Discord channel if you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans. You can also head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash review and toss us a snarky review and preferably five stars.

Stay grumpy and respect your damn elders. Yeah, fuck you guys. Fuck you guys. Fuck both of you. Fuck both of you. Fuck you, Jason. Fuck you, Brian. Fuck you both. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I don't like to curse, you know.

I generally don't. Something I generally don't want to do. Let me just say, without reservation, fuck you guys. Both of you. Fuck you guys. No, no.

I'm very grumpy. No, no.

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