515: Bro Code

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. Bezos made it. Yay. Next. Yeah. Whoop-de-doo. Who's the next billionaire that's going to blow a ton of money doing something that we did 60 years ago? Yeah. Well, you know, it's one of those things where, you know, I'm glad he put his money where his mouth is, you know, put his own ass on the line.

I was just really, you know, I wanted them to make sure that they were safe just so grandma didn't blow up. That would be the worst thing. Yeah. And the kid, you know. Ah, the kid's an entitled little shit. I don't care about him. But grandma, she was an actual hero. Yeah. It's like he surrounded himself with talismans to make sure that we didn't all want it to blow up.

Seriously. If he'd have just had a baby and a puppy, then it would have been perfect. Pretty much. Well, good on him, I guess. Whatever. Maybe come back now and do something useful with your money. I don't know if you noticed while you're up there. Planet's blown up here. Yeah. Well, that's why he's going up there. He wants to get the hell out. He's the smart one.

I mean, if you're the richest guy in the world, why the fuck not? Let's just leave. Why not? Speaking of leaving, I had a big cancel fest this week and it feels great. Okay. I said goodbye to Spotify, Hulu combo. So that's gone. And Peacock, which was just that one and done thing.

I finally figured out how to get rid of that. Discovery Plus until Picard is back. So saved a couple bucks there. Actually, no, Paramount Plus. I think I said Discovery. Yeah, Paramount Plus. That was gone, too. But I see Discovery Plus. Cooking with Picard on Discovery Plus. Yes, he uses a lot of wine in his cooking. And I got rid of Showtime, too. So that's a lot of money to save this.

Yeah, that is. Half an hour. Because I totally forgot that I had Showtime, even. I'm like, what do I have Showtime for? There's some show that I watched. Your Honor. I think that's the last show in Showtime I watched. So I've been paying for nothing for that. And the ones I'm keeping are HBO Max, Netflix, and Jeff Bezos Prime.

What are you using for music streaming? Are you not listening to music these days or putting up with ads? Well, I have Apple One. So I get Apple Music for free. Not for free. I get it for $30 a month. Nothing's free. But also, I've got a pretty big hard drive on my computer.

I've moved everything. I've gotten down to two computers now. I got my MacBook Air M1 for kicking around the house or out in the yard or whatever. But the reason I'm a little late today is I had to reboot my MacBook Pro 16. Right.

Now, the MacBook Pro 16, it's in a bridge dock, which is nice, hooked up to that giant curvy monitor you conned me into buying, which I love. See, that's the show in a nutshell. Conned you into buying, and I love it. What the fuck? So, one of the things about dock living that they never tell you is if you use a wireless keyboard and mouse, you're screwed on reboot.

You have to take it out of the dock every time. Well, that's annoying. It is, because if you run FileVault, the Bluetooth drivers don't load until after you've typed in your username and password. Don't! So, you can either have – you can be insecure and turn off FileVault, which I'm not going to do on a laptop.

Right. Or you have to unplug it every time and then manually log in and then put it back in the dock, wait for everything to sync up. It's like, oh, God. But to the point, I got a two-terabyte drive on this MacBook Pro, which means I have more than enough space for my entire music library.

Okay. And unless something new comes out, in which case, I guess you get in your car and you drive down to Walmart and buy the CD and rip it. Yeah, I guess so. Wait, no CD drives anymore. No. Well, you know, that's what – the internet still works for pirating music. I don't know if anybody's told you, but you still can do that.

Yes, I'm aware of that. Yeah. And it's funny, though. Just one last thing on Apple Music. So, I can play, like, almost everything here and then it does sync most of the stuff up to the cloud if it, you know, if it matches. Right. Except, of course, the one song, The Canary in the Coal Mine, Killing an Arab, will not play.

I still – it's amazing how there's not more upcry. Well, I guess it's not amazing. The Cure at this point are an oldies band and it's one song from, you know, the very first album that they ever recorded. But still, like, come on, people. It's a great song.

It's a fantastic song. Unbelievable. Yeah. So, I can play it. I can only play it locally, but that's fine. That's totally fine. But, yeah, that's without – I never use Spotify. I mean, I almost never use it. So, it's another $10 a month. It's $120 a year right there.

And, God, who the fuck needs Hulu? No one. Absolutely no one. Yeah. I'm just, what, two weeks shy at this point of my big move to Canada, which has vastly different media providers. So, basically, everything that I'm subscribed to is going to go away.

We're going to play the, oh, no, I wanted to see this game and renew things as needed, except for Disney Plus and Netflix because I'm doing the kind of family share with my sister-in-law who also has kids about the same age. They pay for Netflix. We pay for Disney Plus.

We share the passwords. I'll be keeping those. I will be keeping Spotify just because that's what I use to listen to music these days and play it on the ladies in the tube. And all my kids' music that he likes to listen to is all streaming off Spotify. So, I'll be down to those three services.

I guess, I don't know what I'm going to do with Amazon Prime yet because it's so different in Canada. But, then again, I have my handy-dandy VPN router. So, it is what it is. Yeah, I'll be able to watch most of the things anyways. It's just a matter of deciding what to pay for. Plus, we decided we're probably going to get a cable package from lovely Rogers in Canada when we get there.

Yeah, robbers is right. Yeah, they are robbers. But, we'll get, like, the basic one because we realize, you know, local news, news in general is still a game that isn't really out there on the streaming very well. So, got to have that. Yeah, local news is a must. Forget the rest of them.

Hey, we're going to get CNN Plus soon, though. Did you hear about that? Yeah, I read that package and I'm like, what? What? Yeah. So, I don't know. I can't imagine too many. I don't know who the target market is for that. So, we'll see. I can only imagine the target market is the CNN anchors, but one would assume they'd get it for free.

Yeah. Go in the archives. Yeah, I don't know what the thinking is there because, well, I mean, they got to do something. They got so much time on their hands because nobody's actually watching CNN anymore. True. Since the carrot's out of office, nobody really cares. I did watch it this morning for the Bezos launch, but that was about it.

But I could have turned to any channel for that. They didn't have it on Amazon Prime? They might have. Who knows? But it's better than Discovery Plus. I would have gotten it next year because I don't get anything new. They did do the great food truck race in real time.

So, I think maybe they're starting to get the hint that, hey, you got to do this. But I'm sure it's licensing deals that have to expire and renew and all crap like that. The lawyers are the problem. Oh, yeah, it's all deals with the cable companies. That's the big issue. So, sort it out.

I've got two weeks, and then I want to be able to watch the kitchen. Damn it. You need to, what was it, sling, where you could get those sling boxes before they discontinued them. You could have put one at somebody's house down here and then just had it on the food channel all the time. So, this is making the rounds. The majority of COVID misinformation came from 12 people, this report found.

And this comes from the Center for Countering Digital Hate. If there's only 12 people, sounds like it'd be pretty easy to stop. Yeah, you'd think so. You'd think so. I guess the argument, I suppose, the thing, the quiet part that they're still not saying out loud is, we're okay with misinformation.

We consider it free speech, I suppose. Yeah, and the whole problem with the anti-vaxxers is they play the political card and not the health card. So, there's a whole bunch of stuff behind the scenes on why Facebook and Google and Twitter won't put the kibosh on a lot of these people, which is bullshit, in my humble opinion.

But, yeah. A lot of these people, apparently, they only have to put the kibosh on 12. Well, you'd think that they would do something about that, but I guess not. I guess not. And there's a lot of arguments saying that it's not just these 12 people. It's not just Facebook that's the big problem.

You look at people like Fox News, which is part of the problem. But how many people watch Fox News anymore? They're in the same pickle as CNN. Nobody's watching anymore. But guess where everybody is every day? On Facebook. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? Yeah. Oh, you got to wear your mask again.

That's what you got to do. That's right. Silly rabbit. Yeah. Well, you know, I never stopped. That's the thing. Like, I've been wearing my mask indoors anyways the whole time, even after they said it was okay not to, because we played the game of, we don't know.

We're not going to do vaccine cards because that's too close to, oh, I don't know, a driver's license? Common sense. Common sense. We could have done that and we'd be out of this pickle already, but nope, we decided we can't do that. So we have to trust people. And back when everybody was required to wear a mask indoors, people weren't.

So I don't trust people. I just don't. I've been wearing my mask indoors. I have a kid. I'm getting on a plane. I have to do a COVID test, rapid test prior to the plane. If I don't pass the rapid test, I don't get on the plane. I'm not trusting anybody.

Yeah. Because, Brian, freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Yep. In the news. Well, and we're all going to die pretty soon anyway news. It's MI predicted back in 1972, the collapse of society.

And a couple of new researchers have popped up and they kind of ran the numbers again and then said, yep, right on schedule. Yeah. You know, I think we're creating towards it in many ways. The biggest one being climate change. And I think we're going to look back at this year and, you know, we're going to look back at 2020 and go, oh, pandemic.

And at 2021, once we have some distance from it and things, if things continue on in the same course they are right now, we're going to look back at 2021 and go, that was the tipping point for climate change, as we've seen these crazy fires and buildings collapsing and everything left, right and center.

But this particular paper more gets into the fact that we will absolutely strip. We will have hit peak economic growth. It will no longer be sustainable. And the entire world will basically go into an economic downturn, which will basically unstabilize society.

Yay. Yeah. Because we're running out of shit. That's kind of it. It's like, you know. Yeah. You know, we've all got everything we could possibly order from Amazon. We don't need anything more. And that means production stops and slows down. And that means job growth stops and slows down. And that means people are on the streets and upset and don't have any money to buy the shit that they don't need anymore.

And then everything goes kablooey. Yes, and resources, because they don't have the stuff to make the stuff that you need to buy from Amazon that you didn't need in the first place. Yes. But the end of the piece basically says that there is hope. There is hope that we can all come together and come up with a brave new world that will work just fine if we just put our heads together and make it happen.

If we can't self-select into you are not vaccinated, so you need to wear a mask indoors, and we can't get that part right. That ain't going to happen. Oh, I know. I know. It's wishful thinking. You know, the human race is, you know, we are hardwired to make it as difficult as possible to move so greatly into that brightly lit future that we've all been reading about in our dystopian novels since we were 13 years old.

Well, on the plus side, as society collapses, we'll be able to watch it in real time in super high-quality video because Japan has broken the internet speed record with a 319 terabyte per second data transfer. That's snappy. That is pretty snappy. It's almost twice as fast as the 179 terabytes.

I love how they have to do the math for you. Almost twice as fast. I know. 179, 319. And by the way, I think these are terabits because it's a lowercase b. Oh, that's right. Terabits. My bad. Yeah. Sorry. No. I just wanted to clarify because people will write in.

People will let us know. That's true. We should get it right. The fiber optic line had four cores instead of one. Researchers fired a 552-channel comb laser and multiple wavelengths with the assistance of rare-earth amplifiers. Well, it's going to be the shortest cable ever because rare-earth is definitely a thing right now.

Yeah. So this was confined to a lab. They use a coiled fiber to transfer data at a simulated 1,864-mile distance without losing signal quality or speed. That's impressive. Now, obviously, this is going to be very expensive. Yes. This will not solve the last-mile problem.

You will not be having rare-earth amplifiers coming directly up to your house. However, it will be used with internet backbones and other major networking projects where capacity matters more than cost. So this basically means you will not be getting faster internet directly. But there will no longer be choking when there's a surge of users.

All right. That's kind of nice. Yep. And Marie wrote in, evil tech gets away with a slap on the wrist again. I'm wondering how often she listens to the show because we talk about a story like this every single show. Every week. Yeah. I just hate that big U, which in this case is Uber, is able to negotiate away all their bad acts.

Don't use them. And I file for every penny of any class action I am eligible for. Keep up the good fight, guys. Thank you. Yeah, this one is infuriating. Infuriating. Yeah, it is. A $59 million fine it received for refusing to share data about sexual assaults on its service has basically been a plea down to $150,000.

And they put in, yeah, they put in $9 million into some victim funds. But they're not going to say that they were accountable for anything, of course. Yep. And save $50 million, basically. Yeah, that's about it. Awesome. And as they continued, everything is subscription now.

Tesla's full self-driving subscription is finally available after multiple delays. And as they point out, they've done the math here. It might be better value if you'd not commit to a purchase. Also, it's not quite autonomous. It's not a full self-driving. No, it's not.

It's not. It's not. It's level two. And, you know, from all the videos I've seen, it's kind of like level negative two because the thing could just do whatever it wants at any second. So I'm like, I don't think I would ever pay for this. No, no.

It's $199 per month. That is significant. That's a car payment. Or $99 if you bought enhanced autopilot before it was discontinued. Right, right. This is a car. And if you don't have the hardware because you bought early, they'd ding you for another $1,500 to get the hardware plugged into it.

So. Right. Yeah. All for the ability to have your car stop if somebody walks by in a red T-shirt. See, now here's the thing. It's like I don't want self-driving cars. I just want anti-crashing cars. I want to drive. I love driving. Driving across the country is my favorite thing to do.

But, yes, I've done it so many times, as you know. But, yeah, I just want anti-crash technology because I almost got run over three times in the Ralph's parking lot today while Jeff Bezos is flying his ass into space. I'm like, can somebody, all these billionaires get together and actually just make a car that doesn't run people over?

That's all I'm looking for. That's all I'm looking for. But I like to drive. I don't want a self-driving car. And as you always said, it's all or nothing. We need them all. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. And we've got this other story here coming out of the UK about a company called Okado.

They've got robots that can't even not bounce into each other because there was a robot collision that sparked a fire at their main warehouse, the Hive. There's a video in the article that I linked, and you get to see the whole place in action. It is impressive as hell, I got to say.

There's like over 2,000 robots that are all doing picking for online grocery delivery. They've got robots that are picking them out of the baskets and putting them in the carts and things like that. But just watching these robots run around and pick shit up and drop it off was impressive. It was extremely – and they're big.

They're like washing machine sized. So you don't want to be out there on the floor with them. That's for sure. But apparently a couple of them ran into each other, caused a fire, so they're down for a week while they figure it out. But I recommend going and watching the movie on it on the link in the show notes.

It's pretty cool. Yeah, it is pretty cool. And I actually grabbed a bunch of bullet points on this story, but really all you need is the headline. Why you shouldn't let a startup scan your eyeball in exchange for crypto. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, that's basically it. So, yeah, this is some sort of company.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and major venture capital firm Anderson Horowitz are all backing a recently revealed plan by a company called WorldCoin, which matches up three big ideas. It's a cryptocurrency company. It's a universal basic income project.

And it's also a biometric scanning company, WorldCoin. What could possibly go wrong? Yes. So, yeah, they're basically saying, give us your eye scans, which we're going to use for, air quotes, security only. Yeah. And then we'll give you some coin, which is basically UBI.

No, it's not. This is dumb. Don't do it. Well, I mean, this is like way early days for this thing. This is like, you know, some of the stuff leaked before they even announced. And Andreessen Horowitz, they throw money at everything. Reid Hoffman throws money at everything. These are all gazillionaires already.

I don't know Sam Altman. But, yeah, I don't know if they've noticed, but the world is kind of soured on crypto at the moment. Yeah, I was going to bring that up at some point in the show, and I didn't know where. But, yeah, it's all down, and it's not coming back up right now.

No, it's not. Be a hodler, whatever they call them. Don't spend your... Hodles. Hodles. Hodle the door. Yep. Hodor, Hodor. Oh, God. Yeah, this is a silly idea. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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Media Candy. Matthias wrote in and said, did you miss this one? The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn't harm sales. No. We talked about this when it came out in May 2015. Yeah. I guess we can get into it a little bit.

Okay. So, there was a big... The European Commission paid about almost half a million dollars for a study on piracy impacts the sales of copyrighted music, books, video games, and movies. They did not share the report because one report said that there's no evidence that piracy is a major problem.

This was, of course, in 2015, quite a few years ago, before streaming really became the de facto standard for everything. The results did not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales of online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect, but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect.

They did find an effect, however, for movies, films. So, 100% there. And, again, the argument, of course, is that if you're paying for Spotify, you're probably not pirating music anymore unless you're Jason. Well, the thing about Spotify is I do believe that they are the biggest pirates on the planet because they don't pay anybody.

They give the music away for free. Yep. Almost for free. I mean, you can get a free Spotify account. You just have their rules. But, I mean, they've weaponized. They've really weaponized piracy against the people that they're pirating. And I've got an article in here.

Spotify executive calls artists entitled for requesting payment of one penny per stream. And this comes from the guy that basically built the back end for it. And he, I mean, they should never let this guy in front of a microphone again. He said the quiet part out loud here.

Yeah. His internal monologue escaped the barn. He said the problem is this. Spotify was created to solve a problem. The problem was this. Piracy and music distribution. The problem was to get artists' music out there. The problem was not to pay people money.

How is that not piracy? It is. It is. I mean, it's like, yeah, the problem was piracy and music distribution. That wasn't a problem. Actually, we had Napster. That worked pretty well. It worked really well. And people still bought music when Napster was around. So I think the problem is the fact that CDs went away.

It just became the easiest way to get it. But people paid for music on Apple. You know? There were places where you could buy music. There's still places where you can buy music. You know? You don't have to pirate it. But, yeah. Spotify, to me, is just the most egregious pirate on the planet.

And they hide in plain sight. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can't find an artist out there that doesn't think that Spotify is ripping them off because they are. Yeah. That's the reality. It is what it is. Speaking of feeling ripped off, I finished Loki. Okay. I actually, what was it?

A six-episode run? I've thoroughly enjoyed the first five episodes. And then the sixth episode went, oh, no. It's just Marvel Universe again. Great. See, it didn't bother me for some reason. I liked the ending. I kind of liked it. So. I tapped out.

That was it. I don't think I'm going to watch a season two. Yeah, I will. I definitely will. But I thought it was a fun ending. It did not bother me one bit. And it had the guy from Lovecraft Country in it. I like him. I think he's a pretty good actor. Okay. Yeah.

It didn't bother me. It's like, you know, there's the 50-50 out there. Some people loved it. Some people hate it. Seems like more people hated it than loved it. Or at least more people that are talking about it and bitching about it hated it than loved it. Well, that's what we built the internet for, Jason. That's right. That's right.

Fire up the internet outrage machine. Exactly. That's entirely what it's for. So let's do a little bit of that ourselves. Sure. The new Anthony Bourdain documentary, Roadrunner, is coming out. I'm quite excited about it. It's only open in theaters right now, but will be coming to HBO Max shortly.

We don't know when. So it's a documentary. It pieces together archival footage, interviews, show outtakes, and attempts to tell the story of its subject in their own words. Unfortunately, it also includes words that he never spoke. Ever. He wrote them. He wrote them. Never spoke them.

And the film's director, Morgan Neville, decided that there were three quotes that were just too good that needed to be used. And a normal human being that has ethics and isn't enthralled to new technologies would just have had, oh, I don't know, say maybe some of his friends read those quotes out loud or even the director as a voiceover reading those quotes out loud.

Nope. They created an AI model of Bourdain's voice. So basically, Bourdain is saying something he's never said before. See, you know, if he would have just done it and said it, he said that would have been fine. But he didn't say it. And it's only three lines, you know, so it's not a huge portion of the movie.

But, yeah, it's just shitty that he didn't disclose it. And there's a big kerfuffle now where he said he went to the estate and talked to Bourdain's ex-wife or his widow and she said it was okay. And she's like, no, I didn't. That's bullshit. You're lying. And he's being kind of a jerk about it.

Yeah, he is. Yeah. We can have a documentary ethics panel about it later. We don't need to. We already know what a documentary is supposed to be. We understand the ethics of a documentary. You're not supposed to make shit up. Yeah. Well, you know, look at half the documentaries that are out there right now and they make shit up all the damn time.

Yeah, that's true. The Blackfish one and Seaspiracy, I think, is the other one. It's just they're riddled with bullshit. So, yeah, you know, whatever. But you just should all you had to do was say that, you know, AI generated voice or something. Just put a little disclaimer down there somewhere.

That's all you had to do. Although maybe he likes this because everybody's talking about the movie more. So true. Could be fake. Could be faked. Just like Tony Bourdain's voice. I did watch a couple movies this week. I watched A Quiet Place Part 2. I have to say I did like A Quiet Place Part 1.

I would have liked A Quiet Place Part 2 better if I was in a movie theater. I have to say this is not the type of movie that you kind of want to watch in your bedroom with two sleeping, farting, snoring dogs next to you. It kind of takes you out of the moment. Hard for me to think of a movie I would want to watch alone with two quiet, farting dogs.

Yeah, but they're cute. They're cute. Okay. I checked out The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard as well. If you liked The Hitman's Bodyguard, then you'll probably like The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard. They're silly movies. Don't take them seriously. They're funny. And they're just a bunch of fun. So I enjoyed this one as much as I liked the first one, which was a lot.

So they're not everybody's cup of tea, though. I'll give you that. But I thought it was fun. I finished up Bosch. Good ending. I was okay with it. And then I found out that they're making more. They're doing another spinoff series. And here's another one that I didn't know about.

It's on the IMDb channel. Have you ever heard of the IMDb channel, Brian? I've seen commercials for it and went, oh, that's interesting. Yeah. IMDb is owned by Amazon. Why not just put them on Amazon? It would make no sense. I don't get it. But I did see on HBO Max, I have a five-part binge watch coming up.

I have Planet of the Apes, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, and Battle for Planet of the Apes. All the originals are out on HBO Max. And I'm very much looking forward to popping some popcorn and kicking back and watching those. All right. I mean, I don't know if they have legs.

I don't care. It doesn't matter. No. Right? It's good, cheesy fun and better than the new ones. That's for sure. Yeah. All right. So I saw this just because one of, an ex-client of mine is involved in this, so it hit my news feed. There's a new reality TV show coming.

It's a new competition. It's the world's first, thanks to Fox, avatar singing competition series called Alter Ego. Okay. That will have celebrity judges, including Grimes' Will.i.am, who shows up at everything, and Alanis Morissette, judging avatar performances of you singing.

It's an unusual concept, they point out, but not necessarily a bad one, they say. In theory, this could help budding talent overcome stage fright or self-esteem issues by using an avatar as a stand-in. I would like to point out, it is actually a very bad concept, as the only way to make money in music is to tour, in person, on stage, in front of people.

That's it. Yeah. No, this is, I mean, you know what you're going to find out of this show? Very good studio musicians. They will have a nice career as a studio musician if they can't get out in front of a crowd. Except you can't really have a career as a studio musician because nobody buys music. That was my second point.

They're going to have a very long and short career at the same time. Oh, no, this just looks terrible. Yes, of course it does. All these, I mean, we've hit peak stupid on reality shows. Apps and doodads. All right, there's a new app in town for social media, and it seems to be the one we've been asking for for, I don't know, since the day the show started.

It's a paid social, well, it eventually will be a paid social network that you have a free tier with some paid upgrades, but it's called Halo app. I do have to say that their naming of the app is kind of terrible because there's another app out there called Halo. So if you forget to put, if you leave a space in between Halo and app, you're going to learn about language learning.

But if you type Halo app, all one word, you can find this. Lest we forget the powerhouse social media that was named Elo, which is also quite close in name. Oh, I didn't even put that together. Oh, no. Tarnished with a little association there. Yeah. So it's really bare bones right now.

It was invite only. I sent you an invite. I signed up and I have seen a picture of your dog. That's about, I haven't done anything. I don't, it doesn't matter where I go. Nobody's on it. Well, it's not even that. Well, yeah, because before it was invite only. It's open to the public now.

Chris Lockhead, friend of the show, did a really good interview with the two founders on his podcast, Follow Your Different, episode 226. That'll be linked in the show notes. I really like these guys because I like how they're, they're not doing any other press. This was the only press that they're going to do because they're like, we want to work on building our app.

We don't want to grow fast. We want to grow slow. And these guys know what they're doing because they were some of the powerhouse minds behind WhatsApp that did exactly that and then sold for $22 billion. So these guys have chops and I'm sure it will get better as it goes because it is bare bones right now.

Yes, it very much is. There's not much you can do. But then again, that's kind of the point. Yeah, that's exactly it. Timeline based. Everything is end to end encrypted. They don't have your data except for your address book because you have to, that's how they put people together. Phone numbers. You know, that's, they, they, they say that there's a trust with people giving other people their phone numbers and that's what they're basing their, their model on, which is pretty good.

I like it. So it's, you know, you control who sees your stuff completely and there's no algorithms that are going to, you know, that are going to try and sell you anything. And they're like, look, if you use the app once a month or 5,000 times a month, we don't care. You know, we're just, we built, we built the thing that we wanted in the world.

And I'm like, good on you, man. Good on you. I also, uh, it was an interesting week because we did move a gog.show, our website over to pod pages. And, uh, in doing so, I mentioned this on the show before that, uh, I have to go back and move a lot of the show notes over because we never put the show notes in our RSS feed.

So I've been slowly going back, but it dawned on me when we turn off our WordPress site, well, there goes everything. I'm not going to be able to get back to them. So I, I put my programmer hat back on, Brian. I went and I grabbed a copy of MAMP Pro 6 for Mac, which is basically, you know, LAMP stack.

So, um, it was, it was really fun to get set back up. I actually kind of enjoyed it. Having my SQL databases running again. I'm playing around. It's like, oh man, don't go down the rabbit hole. And I grabbed a copy of NAMO, which is their internal DNS server. So you can get them both for a hundred bucks, which is what I did.

And I dragged in my export file from wordpress.com pain in the ass as always, because WordPress importers and exporters are terrible. God, they're all so bad. Oh, so bad. I finally got it working. So I got the content, you know, I got enough of it so I can keep porting things over at my leisure, but, uh, yeah, our new website's up.

Check it out. Um, it, it works pretty well. Everything should be there, but we also have the, uh, the new feature to leave a voicemail and we got our first voicemail, Brian, here we go. I saw that. Yeah. Let's play it. Hi, this is Moss 6502 on Twitter.

Congratulations on the new segment. Looks great. I noticed you keep the tradition of almost no trackers or ad craps or anything like that. So thank you. And congratulations again. Bye. I'm assuming you could hear that because I couldn't. I did. All right. Well, I'm assuming you've already listened to it. So I did. Moss 6502 makes an invoice appearance.

Yes. Thank you very much, Moss 6502. Uh, so it's pretty cool. So go, you know, get your cocktail on and leave us a, leave us a VM. We did cut it down to a maximum of two minutes. So, um, yeah. So that leaves out some of our listeners that, uh, write 18 paragraphs every time they write us.

Yeah. We're looking at you, Ireland. Looking at you. Uh, I also grabbed a cool little app called text sniper. Uh, it's four bucks. Usually it's 10 bucks in the app store, but I've got a link that's good for the next like couple of days, like five or six days, but it's a cool little app that runs in your system tray.

Uh, I don't know if they have a PC version. I just got the Mac version, but it, uh, it, it just gives you a quick key command shortcut. Uh, you copy and select any image that has text in it and it will do OCR and pull the text out for you and boom, right into your clipboard. It's phenomenal. So easy to use.

It, yeah, it's for four bucks for unlimited for a lifetime on it. Hell yeah. Easy, easy peasy on that one. So definitely check that out. Text sniper. Cool. Uh, so my AirPods, my originals were starting to go, uh, it reached the point where I could never tell if both actually were going to play or not on my bike rides.

Usually just one year would play in the other wouldn't because it wouldn't charge properly or it just wasn't connecting right sometimes. So I just bit the bullet. I'm like, well, I mean, let's go. I, I, I, whatever. And I got the AirPods pro and, uh, they're nice.

They, the significantly better sound. Um, there's no doubt about that. Uh, the, the, uh, noise cancellation feature is nice and, but kind of freaky. It's really freaky. I can't, I have a hard time with it because I always feel like somebody is going to sneak up and murder me when I've got, when it's that silent, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. It's really quiet when you're walking around. It's a little different on a bike, uh, definitely struggles with the wind and it just kind of really sets you like it, it made me feel kind of nauseous almost. Uh, so yeah, it's easy to turn on and off. Yeah. I do the pass through with it when I'm out walking.

Cause I want to hear what's going on around me, even though you can't hear. The cars that are trying to kill you anymore. It's still nice to know if like, you know, wild animals creeping up behind you. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, I mean, worth the upgrade, really great sound. I'm pretty impressed by it. The, the thing that annoys me and it annoys me with, you know, this is just grumpy old geek talking.

Like I got so used to the, the controls, the tap, like one tap, two tap, three tap, red fish, blue fish. And now it's squeeze. Yeah. And I'm like, Oh, can I just have my taps back? I like tapping, but, uh, that's the only annoyance. But, you know, like everything else, you just get used to it.

So yeah, it goes quick. Uh, yeah, it goes quick. But one thing that I couldn't use anymore is I used to have a three in one charger on my nightstand that fit everything perfectly. Uh, it was wired, but it had like a groove and indent that was made just for the old AirPods.

So the new air pod case, which is wider, uh, bigger pill to swallow did not fit in it anymore, which meant I needed to get a new wireless charger. And I bit the bullet and spent a bit more money and got a wireless charger. I got the wireless charger, a mug pill three in one fast wireless charging station dock for iPhone 12, 12 pro 12, four max 11, 11 pro X, XR XS eight plus Apple watch SE six, five, four, three, two AirPods, two pro Chi phones with QC 3.0 adapter.

And, uh, it, you know, 40 bucks, not cheap for a charger, but it is wireless. Um, I don't have the, the spaghetti behind my bed anymore. One cable for power. That's it. And it works perfectly. Love it. I, this is a great upgrade and it's going to be a great, you know, for the new house, just to have some stream clean lines without all that spaghetti behind the bed collecting dust anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty nice. I might have to. Yeah. And if you don't have the watch, the watch bit folds back. So you, you can actually fold it behind the phone charger bit. So you don't even see it. So it's even more streamlined if you just have a phone and, uh, the AirPods. So, well, there you have it.

There you have it. And, uh, emoji finalists have been announced for Unicode 14.0, uh, exciting stuff. Not really. Yeah. Melting smiley face, disco ball beans and a pointing finger in various skin tones.

The thing that stuck out for me here is just, uh, they say we, they're doing more with diversity inclusivity in mind. In particular, you'll notice there are several new versions of the handshake emoji and that's a big deal due to technical limitations. It was one of the few characters you couldn't modify with a skin tone, but after about two years of work, that's almost going to certainly change with Unicode 14.0.

Now I probably should have Googled this to find out what these technical limitations are, but if every other one can have multiple skin tones, what is the technical limitation on a handshake emoji? And why did it take two years? I honestly think it's because it's two separate entities in the same character.

So instead of passing two years, Jason, I know, but Hey, we had, it was Corona time. They were busy. I want to know. They weren't busy. I want to know. I don't even care about that. I'm looking at the one that looks like the pregnant man with the mustache. What's up with that? That's the Arnold Schwarzenegger.

God, I wish I remember the name of the movie. Oh, the, it wasn't twins. It was, oh, not twins. One of the, one of the other wonderful pieces of the au revoir, the Oscar winning au revoir between Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah. I'm glad I can't remember the name of that.

That will not bother me one bit. And you're part of town. You can check this out before you leave. It's called the Trick Art Museum down at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. It's basically kind of an AR museum. So you go through, it's like 25 bucks to get in and they have different prices for kids and military pricing, all that stuff.

But it's these murals that are painted up. You have to get an app. And then when you use the app to take your selfies, the backgrounds come alive. Oh. And I'm like, why didn't you just put up a green screen and just do it all with a green screen? It truly looks like one of these weird hybrid, silly things that I just don't understand.

I guess I just don't understand what these kids are doing nowadays. But did you look at the video? I did. I won't be going. Yeah. I didn't think you would be going. But if anybody here has gone, please send us a link to some of your selfies from the Trick Art Museum. At the library.

Justin wrote in, love the show. Listen every week. Heard Brian is looking for something to read. Have you tried Octavia Butler? Not shitty sci-fi, but maybe interesting. Lots of super fans out there. I read Earthseed series a long, long, long time ago.

I vaguely remember it being kind of good, but I don't recall reading anything else by her. So there you go. I've been dabbling with a lot of Kindle samples of sci-fi books, and so far not one of them has caught my interest, which is making me think it's not the books.

Maybe it's me. All the stress and whatnot of packing and moving means I'm just not in the mood to relax and read. I don't want to engage with my downtime. I just want to disengage. So, you know, I watch things like Loki instead. So I think reading is on the back burner for me right now. It's just not happening.

Yeah. Yeah. I have those times too. But I did read Earthseed because when you read it, you talked about it on the show and I went and got it and I read the two books and I was, I do believe I was frankly underwhelmed by the, by the books. They didn't really, they didn't land with me at all.

Didn't land with me at all. I read a short little book of poetry called Los Angeles is hideous poems about an ugly city by Andrew Heaton. Very funny stuff. Very, very funny stuff. Yeah. I didn't read the full book. I read some of the excerpts that are online and it's hilarious. Yeah.

I have Kindle unlimited because I keep forgetting to turn it off, which was on my list of things to turn off. So I, at least it paid for itself this month because I got that book out of it. It's very short, but it's very funny. If you're, if you have been to Los Angeles or ever lived here, you will, you will get a kick out of it.

If you've never been to Los Angeles or never lived here, it's probably not going to make much sense to you. Nope.

Security. Security. Dave Bittner is back. Dave is the host of the cyberware 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 of the world of cyber threat intelligence.

I decided to take a breath this time because I almost passed out last week. That's good. It's good. We do need you for the rest of the segment. Kind of do a little more cardio, Jason. Yeah. That's right. That is my cardio, Brian. That is my cardio for the week. Legend had it that Frank Sinatra used to sit underwater in his pool and practice how long he could hold his breath to be able to work on his- I think he was just drunk.

Yeah. Probably equally as valid. Sure. Frank's in the pool. Fish him out. He literally had one guy that followed him around around the house just to fish him out of the pool every couple minutes. It's a big hook. Yeah. Hashtag life goals.

Yeah, really. So I want to start off this week because we had a little chat over on Discord and one of our Discord listeners, Katare, I believe that's how you would pronounce that, said he would double his Patreon donation this month if we talked about this on the show. And I thought it was a valid topic.

It also- I'm in it for the money. Yeah, I'd like the money too. Hopefully he donates more than a dollar. Right. We're going to discuss PornSec this week. We have a comment. I'm a name redacted to protect the guilty, even though he put it on Discord.

So probably still out there. But I thought on the show, we should respect privacy. Being the family IT guru, I get unique pleasures of finding porn on my 70-year-old father-in-law's devices. I know that there are probably a few of you here that share the same fate.

So here's my question. Have you told your significant other when you do find something quote unquote interesting? If so, what has been the outcome? I'm thinking I should just go to the grave with this one. Your thought is correct. There is absolutely no upside to telling anyone about any of this.

No, absolutely not. Yeah. I'm reminded of a friend of mine whose father passed away a few years ago and he was up there in years and she came to me after she and her brother had spent a few days cleaning out the house and she said, David, I found my father's porn stash.

I remember this. I remember. Okay. It's all right. You know, well, I mean, you know, look, he's human. We're all human. It happens. Yeah, exactly. Everybody has needs, you know, I don't, there's nothing wrong with that. No shame. She says, David, it was very specific.

Very specific. My 75-year-old father seemed to really like one thing in particular. And? I'm on the edge of my standing desk here. Come on. Tell me. Yes.

Large-breasted African-American women was the. Oh. Who among us? Yeah. That's. How vanilla can you get? Or chocolate in this case. I mean, I'm guessing if you're a, yeah, I, I, I look, I can, we can go into all the psychological reasons why, you know, that might've been particularly titillating to a man of his generation, you know, the greatest generation.

And I'm sure there are many, but, but I, I think she was just surprised. It's not like she was, you know, upset or disappointed or anything like that. I think she was just maybe impressed by, like, there was no variation. It was a very, very narrow lane that, uh, that she had discovered here.

So again, we're speaking as, as cisgendered men of a certain age. So take, you know, those, those of us that are listening to the show that are trans or very involved in their pornography and their, their tastes and whatnot, you know, just, just remember this is coming from older white men and, uh, but you know, it, it, it is what it is and, and we, we like what we like and, and who among us doesn't, you know, there's a, there's a, the very narrow lane that people are into and that's, that's what it is.

So there you go. Yeah. I think with age, I, you know, with age, your options go down and you just kind of focus on the thing that you really like. That's, I think that's really, whatever works. Yeah. Cause it's like, uh, you've seen everything else and it's like, ah, that one thing really gets the engine going.

So I'm just going to stick with that, you know? Right. Yeah. And again, there's, I don't see any upside to sharing this information. I think it's, it's a part, not only the bro code, the it code, perhaps that, uh, you know, unlike, unlike the folks at the geek squad. I was going to say, not the geek squad code for sure.

If you find something, you don't put it online. You discreetly just, you know, maybe make a copy for yourself if it's in your lane as well. Exactly. If it's looking good, why not make a copy? Yeah. And then you leave it at that and you don't mention it to anyone. You don't tell anybody about it.

You go to the grave with it. I'm, I'm reminded very much of, and again, I don't, I don't listen to Adam Carolla much anymore, but back in the day, I enjoyed his podcast and his podcast was often just recreations of, of man show bits. And one of the man show bits was, uh, I can't remember what they called it, but it was, uh, you had a friend that if you died, you had a porn buddy.

If you, yeah, this was obviously well, you know, this isn't the age of physical porn. This is not digital, but, uh, you, you had a porn buddy and, um, if, if, if, if your porn buddy heard that you had been hit by a truck, you immediately ran to the house and removed all the pornography.

Yep. Yep. And that was the job. It was a great bit on the British show Coupling about that. It was fantastic. Oh, that was a great show too. Oh, that show was so good. Yeah. So good. Uh, there's a couple of things I'm reminded of here. One is there, there's the list of, uh, recommendations to men over 50, which is, uh, never pass by a restroom, uh, never waste an erection and never trust a fart.

Yes. Yes. Oh, the things I have to look forward to. That's right. Yeah. It's right around the corner. Already there, right? Already there. But, uh, I think Brian, to your point about, um, you know, folks who's, uh, the spectrum of sexuality may exceed our own.

I, I truly believe that the availability of porn and the availability of the wide variety of porn that, that anyone, the fact that anyone can check out anything, I think that has led to greater understanding. And I would even go so far as to say, I think that may, that may be one of the things that caused a lot of people to be more okay with gay marriage, because I think it took away

a lot of the scariness of things rather than, you know, your imagination running wild on you saying, well, what is it that those people do? Or what, what's that like? You can go just look at it. Like, well, there it is. Okay. Now I get it. That's what they do. All right. Not so scary. I will see, I will see your upside, which I, I, I 100% agree with, and I will, I will see it with a dark side thought that goes along with this.

Um, we're, I mean, we're all seeing this, the studies are coming out and, and I'm increasingly reading articles about it all the time. The, the, the easy availability of porn is also desensitizing kids and it's pushing them to more and more extreme acts and in more extreme, um, lanes, as it were, they, they've moved out of the slow, the sexual slow lane and are going quickly to the sexual fast lanes at very young ages.

Um, you know, let's be honest, we're, we're older men. We've, we've enjoyed our, our experiences on the earth and it doesn't have quite the same impact that it once did. Um, you know, enjoying time with my wife is not quite as exciting as one night stands back when I was 17, let's be honest.

And, uh, these kids today are like blowing those neuro receptors out of the water with this extreme porn these days. Yeah. Yeah. I would hate to be, uh, uh, uh, I would hate to have to deal with the expectations that are placed on a teenage girl this, these days when the boys that she's dating have their, their expectations for relationships have been set by pornography.

I don't, I don't know how to make you a lesbian. Let me look up some of that right now. Pretty sure that's on a standard tab on Pornhub. That's, that's ready. Oh yeah. That's, that's, that's a, that's a main category. Yeah. And then you can dive down into your specific lanes.

No, there definitely is a dark side. There definitely is a light side, but, uh, you know, it's like one of those things where I don't think kids should be really able to look at porn until they get laid at least once. So you have some kind of, you still have some kind of point of reference. How are you going to know what to do? No, no, no, no.

Wow. Is this, are we going to require, uh, getting laid cards like vaccine cards before entering Pornhub? Literally. You have to, you have to hand in your V card before you can actually look at, look at Pornhub. Can you go through some kind of virtual reality training experience ahead of time and then you can earn your card that way?

Sort of, because here's one of the things that I've heard from, you know, Gen Zers and read on, on different forums is that the problem that kids are having when they finally get together with the opposite sex or the same sex is just like the smell. They're like, I didn't expect it to smell like this.

And I'm like, that's what it smells like. Come on, dude. Get sweaty and nasty. Let's go. They're like, but it doesn't, it doesn't smell like that on Pornhub. Like, oh, it just smells like Vaseline and shame on Pornhub. So, so, so basically you're saying we should make a, we should start marketing candles for sex that smell vaguely of electronics equipment.

Something like that. Or maybe that goop candle was actually genius for the right crowd. All right. Well, the longer this conversation goes on, the closer I am to having to put my resume up. I was going to say, Dave is skirting the getting canceled line here.

So maybe we should move on. Let's move on. Have we satisfied Qatari's need to double his donation? I believe so. I believe so. I shall monitor the Patreon account. That's patreon.com slash GOG if any of you should also feel compelled.

Bro code it. Yeah. Yes. There you go. So NSO spyware was allegedly used to target activists and journalists. So we've been hearing about this for a while. And the Washington Post has shared a multi-partner investigation claiming that the Pegasus software was used to successfully hack 37 phones, including journalists, activists, and the two women closest to the murdered Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

This is all from a 2016-era list of 50,000 phone numbers from countries believed to conduct both extensive surveillance and use of NSO tools such as Hungary and Saudi Arabia. A list included 1,000 people who didn't obviously fit the software's intended criminal targets, including over 600 politicians, 189 journalists, 85 human rights activists, and 65 business executives.

And NSO, of course, says, no, surely not, no. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Spyware's going to spy. It is. NSO Group is sort of, as you mentioned, hiding behind the claim that once folks buy their software, they have no control over what they use it for.

Mm-hmm. I suppose that's true to a certain extent, but- They're just a platform. On the other hand, well, and NSO Group, they're an Israeli company. They had to get permission from the Israeli government to sell to companies like Saudi Arabia, and they're unfriendly neighbors around the region.

So, it's like Casablanca. We're shocked, shocked that people are using this tool for the things that we did not intend for them to use it for. Mm-hmm. One of the interesting outcomes of this is that Amazon announced after the article came out that they've cut off NSO Group from using their infrastructure.

Right. So, it might be harder for NSO, I'm sure they'll find someone else, but it might be harder for them to find the infrastructure they need. And, yeah, who knows? Maybe this could cause the U.S. government or other governments to put more pressure on the Israeli government to clamp down who they allow this to be sold to.

NSO Group is also making the strong point that this tool is not allowed to be used against American citizens, that they strictly prohibit that. So, for what that's worth. Right. Yes. Microsoft has come out as well saying that they're doing their part they can to disable these weapons.

So, they're like, yeah, this isn't good, guys. You can't do this stuff. So, Microsoft is throwing their hat in the ring as well. I've got a link to that in the show notes. I think one of the significant revelations here, too, is that they had a zero-click, zero-day for iOS, which is unusual that they could – evidently, there are some vulnerabilities in iMessage where you can send a message through iMessage and it will execute code without letting you know.

I think it has something to do with the graphics rendering engine in iMessage. It's just not for emojis and memojis? What? So, there were ways that they could basically own an iPhone or any iOS device without the person even being aware.

Not seeing a text. You didn't have to click on anything. I can send someone a dick pic and literally fuck them? Yes, you could. Nice. Nice. Yes, you could. And we were trying to do a clean show this week. I love it. But, Brian, you have to remember, this is Grumpy Old Geeks.

On this show, they're called dickies. That's right. Selfie is a selfie. A dickie is a dickie. Come on. Oh, all right. It's not good stuff. Not good stuff at all. No. Another thing that's not good – I thought this one was just so funny. Mega-branded Freedom Phone is a black box that should be avoided at all costs.

Did you guys check this one out? You didn't even need to add the Freedom Phone to that headline. Yeah, I think I – earlier in the week, I tweeted about this when I first saw it. I think I said something like, I'm not sure if this is a parody or not, but if it's not, I don't think this is going to work out the way that these folks hope it's going to work out.

Over the course of the rest of that day, some of the people who actually know what they're talking about when it comes to these phones and the technologies and so on and so forth said that this is a generic phone that you can get from like Alibaba or one of those suppliers.

You can have it branded to your own brand. For $150. It's $150, like white-labeled OEM phone. Yeah, and that's all they did. That's all they did. And they – you know, you can set your – what software you want on it. Say, okay, throw on a copy of Parler, throw on a copy of Signal or Telegram, and boom, give us $500.

Right. But it says it's the best phone in the world in the ad. Yeah. Surely they're not lying. No, no. Yeah, remember, this comes from Eric Finman, a 22-year-old crypto millionaire. That's really who I want to buy my electronics from. I know we can't go back very far historically with 20-something-year-old crypto millionaires, but has anything good come from a 20-something-year-old crypto millionaire thus far in human history?

Hmm. That's a good question. Probably a good party or two, but that's about it. Yeah, yeah. Nothing's really jumped into mind. I mean, NFT. Party house. NFT. Party boat. Party rocket ship. Yeah.

And these phones, by the way, they come preloaded with all sorts of both firmware and OS vulnerabilities. So they are insecure right out of the box. Pre-hacked. We call that pre-hacked. There you go. And then you add on top of that, one of their selling points is that they're not going to prohibit anything from being loaded on this phone.

They're not going to prohibit anything from being in their app store, and we all know how that story is going to end. I know. Yeah, that goes great. And you also have to remember that this is the favorite phone of the North Koreans. So this is the phone that they buy the most for their people. So, you know, that's great.

I'm sure that's a fine piece of kit you got there because we know, you know, Trump and that regime were big buddies. So I guess that is a selling point for them. Yeah. One of my colleagues pointed out that this would be the perfect device to order up a steaming supply of Freedom Fries.

Oh, man. Yeah. I did a 20-minute conversation with Eric Hundley about this. It was a little bit lively. But, yeah, you know, just don't buy this thing. I'm pretty sure listeners of our show are not going to buy it. Eric's show, probably not going to buy it.

But this thing is just built for fuckery. Actually, you know what? If you're proudly unvaccinated, buy it. Go ahead. Be my guest. I don't care. You can be infected in the real world and the cyber domains. You might as well in for a penny, in for a pound.

Double fisting. That's right. Go all the way. Yep. And I saw this one. I thought it was fun. A friend of the show, David Teeter, posted it about the encryption lava lamps at Cloudflare. Have you guys seen this before? I think we covered this on the show. We did? I think we have.

I don't remember it. I've seen them in person. You've gone? I've seen them in person. Oh, cool. Yeah. I was at an event at RSA, which is in San Francisco, in non-COVID years. And there was some bar or restaurant that was across the street from Cloudflare's headquarters.

And from the street, you can see into their lobby. And there are the, how many are there? A lot. This is over 100 lava lamps. Yeah. It's just row after row of shelves with lava lamps. So not only does it look cool, but the fact that they're using it to seed their random number generator, I love it. I think it's great.

Yeah. I think they could improve this. I think they need to scatter some beanbags around and let people sit there and get stoned and play some good old 70s LPs while this is all happening. Well, anybody can go in and tour the place. So they even said that actual visitors help them because it helps seed the random number generator.

So, Brian, I think you might be onto something. Well, get in touch with Cloudflare. Get their people to call your people. All right. We'll make it happen. My new job is hospitality for Cloudflare. Yes. Yep. Yep. There you go. I put a couple of things in here. There's an interesting project that some folks are working on, and they're calling it the AppCheck Research Project.

That's A-P-P-C-H-K. And it's a privacy monitor for iOS. And basically, it's a VPN that you run on your iOS device, and it gathers information about all the other places that your apps are reaching out to.

Basically, it logs what all the apps on your phone are reaching out to. So, it's Little Snitch for iOS, basically. Yeah. That's a really good way to put it. Yeah, it is. It is. Although, I don't know that it interrupts you in the moment the way Little Snitch was so good at doing.

But this is something – I don't know that this is something recommended for everyone. But if you're a techie kind of person and you're interested to know what's going on behind the scenes, this might be a fun thing to look at. So, I include that there. We'll have a link to it in the show notes there.

Any word if they're planning a port for the Freedom Phone? That's a good question. They do not have an Android version yet. They do have links to other, I think, comparable sort of projects on Android. Yes, they do. But so far, this one is just iOS.

Yeah. Cool. Yeah. And then finally, my favorite story this week. This comes from junkie.com, and it's about – I believe it's the Australian government in cooperation with Woolworths, which if you're in Australia, they refer to as Woolies.

Someone got commissioned to make some stickers with the mascot characters of the upcoming Olympic Games, the Tokyo Olympics. And darn if they aren't furries. They are 100% furries. They most assuredly are.

This is most excellent. Most excellent. Yeah. Yeah. So, they inadvertently commissioned the creation of a bunch of furry stickers. I don't know how I can get my hands on these. Perhaps we have some listeners over there in the great continent of Australia.

Oh, we do. We have plenty. So, guys, come on. Get their hands on it and shoot one my way. I would be forever grateful. I'll tell you what. If someone send me some of these furry stickers, I'll send you a pack of Cyber Wire stickers. How about that? There we go. Yeah. Cross-border cooperation.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. I'm sure the folks in the Cyber Wire are going to be happy that you're sending your stickers out to tickle your face. Well, you never, you know. Although, you do have a fox head in the office, so I guess that's okay. Yeah, exactly.

My coworkers are well aware of my particular predilections. Yes, they know which lane you go in. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, maybe I'll just stick these on the door to my office and see how long it takes for people to say, Dave, really?

Really? You know you're part of the tour, right? You're part of the tour. We can't, you can't, you can't wear the furry outfit during working hours. Stormtrooper's okay, but no furries. Stormtrooper's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Which, by the way, I just want to remind everyone that there's still no Corvette out in the parking lot, so maybe I'll have more luck with the asking for stickers than I did with a $75,000 automobile, but it's not too late.

It's not too late. So. I do, I gotta say though, there's the tweet from the guy that drew this stuff, or gal, I don't know, it's hard to tell, but it says, good day, that's my art and my redesigns. Had no idea they'd finally gone into use. Laughing my ass off.

Happy to field any questions. Rest assured, the people employing me had no idea what furries were, but I did. They never do. They never do. Never gonna see a furry coming. That's right.

That's right. But you'll know when they're there. That's so good. So good. Yeah. All right, guys. All right, guys. Thank you very much. Closing shout outs. We've got a new Patreon subscriber this week, Phillip. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Phillip. And over at PayPal, we've got Michael, Nathaniel, Tom, Michelle, John, Andrew, Tom, and John Andre. That's a lot of Toms and Johns. Well, we're very biblical. Yes, we are. Over at our tip jar, we've got Alana Q and a big tip from James G. Thank you all so very much.

Thank you. And no new iTunes ratings. Bummer. Bugger. Bugger, bugger, bugger. We do have a shout out, though. I want to throw my hat tip to Mike Kilpatrick from News Hub down in New Zealand for the plug in his website down there. Billion dollar heist, missing cryptocurrency, six must listen cyber podcasts.

My favorite line from his piece is, it won't take long to work out just how this podcast got its name. Be warned. If the thoughts of two old white dudes in their late 40s are likely to offend your sensibilities, proceed with caution. My impression of the world over the last few years is two old white dudes offend most people's sensibilities.

That's pretty much it. Yeah, we're kind of screwed. Okay. We're kind of screwed on that one. Damn it. God, to be old and white. I know. This is supposed to be our salad days, bastards. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. 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 515. 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 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.

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