520: You Can Be China

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian coming from the cave. I got the dogs barking. I'm on a new mic today so I might sound a little wonky. Hopefully not. Try and fix that. It's just one of those mornings, Brian, where you just want to stick your head in the sand. But anyway, we're here. Let's do it. Might sound better if we stuck our head in the sand.

That's true. That's true. Less echo for damn sure. That's right. So, Brian, I bought some ETH this week. I jumped into the crypto. All right. Any planning on buying some NFTs? No, Brian. What brought this about? I plan on minting some NFTs.

Oh, Christ. Here's the deal. We've been talking on this show for months and months now about NFTs and how silly they are. And we tell everybody, hey, if you can make some money off of it, take the bags of money and run. And I'm like, you know, we give a lot of good advice on this show.

Sometimes we should maybe follow it. All right. Going to put up some of your photography. Maybe while you're at it, throw up a Grumpy Old Geeks NFT and see if anybody bites. Well, we're definitely going to throw up a Grumpy Old Geeks NFT. That's for damn sure. But no, I'm going to try and I got to figure this out.

This is it's a learning experience for me, Brian, because I have a physical object that I want to tie to an NFT that I want to actually sell, which is in its own meta way, kind of a disappearing asset. Because I have the what they call the blue lines from the book Edoru from William Gibson.

Now, those are the it's the proof that they send to William when they're like marking it up to finish to go to press. Yes. So I bought this a long time ago. I've talked about on the show a couple of times, but it's signed by William. I have a certificate of authenticity for it. But you can't expose it to light for very long because it will fade to blank paper and then all you will have are just the notes on blank sheets of paper.

Yes. So I want to try and figure out how to make an NFT out of that and sell the book and the NFT at the same time. So that's what I need to do because this book has been sitting on a shelf for 15 years and I bought it as a Christmas gift for a girlfriend who ended up being kind of a dumpster fire.

So I kept it. I am well aware of your dating history. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. We had pizza with her. After we saw the Goo Goo Dolls at New Year's. That's right. Yeah. Anyway, so the funny part about the ETH transaction that I got because I got my MetaMask wallet set up and I went and I went and bought the ETH.

I went and bought $250 worth just to cover the bases because I don't know how much the minting is going to cost and all that. And I'd rather just have enough instead of not enough. Not have to deal with it twice. Exactly. Because you get to pay transaction fees and all that crap. So I got it. It cost me like $263 after the Ticketmaster cost, you know?

Yes, of course. Of course, as soon as it lands in my wallet, it's already down to $235. Like, what the fuck is wrong with this shit? I know. Crypto is crazy. Now, let me just – I'll get into this a bit again then too because we do talk about this all the time on the show and we not only make fun of NFTs, but we also make fun of crypto just in general.

I think we've had, you know, one solid bit of crypto advice all along, which is don't use money that you wouldn't just take to Vegas and blow. Right. That's rule number one. Free money. Only use free money. So I have crypto. I have Ethereum. I have Bitcoin.

And I have Filecoin. Not a lot, just a little bit. And here's my other bit of crypto advice. And this has held pretty solid for me for the last few months. And I've made a bit of money off of it. Buy Bitcoin when it's low, around $30,000, and then sell when it gets high, which is basically any time over $4,500 or $45,000.

Okay. Because it seems to be slowly vacillating between lows under – just under $30K and highs peaking at around $50K. And it just keeps bouncing back and forth like a tennis match between those two. Yep. And I just keep doing that. And it's working. Oh, that's good. That's good.

Yeah. I was talking to Kevin Rose about this. And the one thing he does – he had a really good point. And he's like, if you look at the history of Bitcoin, there are massive spikes. And then it comes down and it normalizes. But the floor is always rising. The floor now is at like around $30,000, like you're saying.

Yep. But then it will peak back up. I don't know what it's at right now. It was like $48,000 or something. Something like that. Something like that. It's – I'm at the point where I should probably sell. Okay. And then it will – yeah, then it will drop back down and then let the cycle lather, rinse, repeat. Exactly.

But he was – he did make a very good point. It's that $30,000 will be $31,000, $32,000, $33,000. That's what everybody who is into crypto is like banking on. That floor is just going to keep rising. Yeah, but the floor just keeps getting higher and higher. Exactly. Exactly.

So as soon as I get to figure out the OpenSea stuff, well, we're going to put up the first Grumpy Old Geeks as an NFT. Fuck it. Why not? Why not? You can have it because the rest of them aren't making us any money. Yeah. Well, if you're using Coinbase for your Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, you might have gotten an email that freaked you out this weekend.

The major cryptocurrency exchange said it mistakenly told about 125,000 customers that their two-factor authentication systems or settings had been changed. This email and SMS notification were sent due to – and I love the air quotes here – internal error and not the result of a hack.

Intern error. Probably. So it all happened over the course of about 82 minutes on a Friday. It was followed up with a second email stating that the message was sent by mistake. But at least one person in that period of time sold around $60,000 worth of their crypto because they were worried they'd lose it somehow.

There was understandable concern in the wake of the report from last week in which Coinbase customers claimed their accounts were hacked and they couldn't contact employees for help because nobody can contact anybody for help because there are no customer service departments for any web company anymore.

Anymore, yeah. We were so silly back in the day by doing that. The company has now said it's rolling out voice and live chat support options. Doubtful. It's so funny that the best customer support in the industry comes from porn sites and ransomware assholes.

Those are the two best because porn sites don't want chargebacks, so they'll do anything to get you there, including some of the most nefarious shit that I've ever heard of. I'm not going to go into that one. And, of course, ransomware because they just want your money.

But, yeah, regular what are supposed to be legitimate above-the-board businesses do not have any kind of customer support whatsoever. Yeah. As we've been saying for years now, it's basically just shaming them on Twitter to hope somebody gets back to you. That's it. That's it. So did you get the notification?

I did not. I didn't either. So. Yeah. Yeah. 125,000 users. They got millions of users. So I'm guessing it was just a tempest in a teapot on that one. I love this one. This is just for the headline alone. Tesla on autopilot crashes into two parked cars. Again.

If you want to keep your non-Tesla car safe, paint it red. Oh, my God. So this happened down in Orlando. And here's the real kicker. It hit a cop car. Nice. Yeah. So a cop was investigating a stalled car on the side of the road, and then Tesla just comes right along and bangs into both of them.

So it could have been, you know, a horrible tragedy. But when is it – when is this going to come to pass that people just stop using autopilot? Because it's dangerous. It is not autopilot. It is barely pilot.

You know? What's – I just don't understand. Well, the Transportation Safety Board is working through the process of trying to get Tesla to at least rename it. Okay. Renaming it. Great. Cruise Control 2. Oh, no, no. No, you know? Cruise Control Plus.

Plus. That's it. That's it. We live in the land of plus. Yes. Cruise Control Plus. Oh, God. So, yeah. It's still happening. And I saw this friend of the show, Kent Nichols. I don't know if he's a friend of the show. I don't even know if he listens to the show. But he's a friend of mine from Ask a Ninja.

He wrote a tweet, said, want to feel old? Freshmen in high school were born in 2007, the year the first iPhone was released, which I immediately replied to go die in a fucking fire for reminding me of that. And it was just funny because that weekend, like the weekend before he posted this, I had found my first iPhone, which I still have, which is the slippery bar of soap, which has, I mean, it has battle scars on it, man.

It is dented and scraped and scratched because when you were at the bar, you had a cold pint in one hand. Then you'd reach down and pick up your phone. That thing would fucking fly out of your hand like a bar dial in the shower in the morning. It was kaboom. All right. Yeah.

14 years ago. 14. We be old, Jason. And two other little bits of follow-up. Now, C-Rod is just one of many, many people that wrote me directly about the show last week and about their debate over skateboards and whether they have changed any since you were a child and you were riding your skateboard around.

They have. They're not made of space age materials in quotes here. And then he links to the best carbon fiber skateboards in 2021. So, yes, there are different skateboards now than were back when you were a kid. Yeah. These are novelty boards. We had this back then, too.

We had Bonite. We had Everslick. We had all of this crap back then. The thing is, they're novelty boards. They try this every now and again. Flight Deck is the new Powell one. Steve Caballero rode it for a while and then he stopped riding it. You know why?

Because it sucked. It was too squishy. So this has been a cycle since the 80s. You know, it's nothing new. But when it comes down to it, seven-ply maple, straight-up fucking indies and urethane wheels with regular bearings are still the de facto fucking skateboard that everybody rides.

So, you know, go out and just see a skater on the street. Well, you're in Toronto now. You could go find a snowboarder or a snowmobiler. Maybe they have one lying around. But the shit's still the same. It's still the same. Same Zambonis as they always rode. Exactly. Now, Sid also wrote in, well, we're at the time to watch the whole video about McDonald's and Taylor ice cream machines.

This guy seems to have done a lot of investigation into the matter. P.S. Love your show. And this is where I have to briefly complain again to you, Jason, about the new method that you're using for our show notes. I cannot easily tell where the hell. I'm assuming this is a YouTube link, but the way you've changed it, I actually have to click on it. Yes, it is a YouTube link.

Okay. Well, there you go. The real reason McDonald's ice cream machines are always broken. The problem is that I have to, like, copy and paste these into the actual show notes, so I can't do it. I have to do it this way. But if you cursor over it, it will say YouTube.com.

There's a hover state. Sorry about that. Oh, and now the dogs are going bug nutty. I'm not getting the hover state. Interesting. Oh, interesting. Check my settings on that. Okay. Anyways, that's it for follow-up. Okay. The show notes are broken as well as the ice cream machines. And the show.

And the show. In the news. Now, I saw this one over at the Next Web, and it piqued my interest. An end to constant cookie warnings?

UK plans post-Brexit overhaul of data laws. And, yes, we have the fucking lovely EU to thank for those stupid-ass cookie pop-ups. I'm just so used to it now. I'm just so used to it. It's so annoying. It's not going to change just because the UK is going to change it.

GDPR is still going to require it, so we're screwed. Ah, they're talking about changing it and making it only for quote-unquote high-risk sites. What the hell does that mean? Judging from normal browsing these days, that's all sites. All sites. Exactly. I'm like, what qualifies as a high-risk site?

And if it's a high-risk site, do you really think they care about your fucking cookie notice? No. No. I'm sorry. Every fucking website on the planet uses cookies. It's the way it works. Look, we should treat this the way that we treat so many other things. When it was brand new, okay, require the notification so people are aware of it.

We've all clicked on it 10 gazillion times now. Let's move on. Let's still require the same sort of thing. Let's have it be a little bottom, a little link down at the bottom with the privacy policy and the TOS. Can we stop it with the fucking pop-ups? I know. It's ridiculous because it breaks so many websites because there are no decent web programmers out there anymore.

I swear the industry of web programming has gone down the shitter. Oh, God. It's so bad. So, yeah, we'll see how this comes out. But I don't think it's going to – I don't buy it. I don't buy it one bit. Yep.

And Apple has agreed to change several rules that govern its app store as part of its settlement with developers who filed a class action lawsuit against the company. Now, I'm not sure if agreed is the correct verb when you've lost a lawsuit. I know. And you are required to do so. But let me explain.

When you are convicted of a crime, you do not agree to go to jail. That is not how it works. So, I thought that was the funniest part of the entire article. But so, they're basically – yes. They're clarifying that developers are permitted to email users about payment methods outside of their iOS app.

They simply cannot put that in the app themselves. The company has also agreed to publish transparency reports detailing app store rejection rates and the app review process. So, more transparency, which is good. And other changes are being made meant to give developers more flexibility in setting their prices.

They will have a number of price points available to app makers from fewer than 100 to more than 500. Okay. Okay. And finally, they were saying in response to COVID-19 that reduce commissions to 15% for developers making less than $1 million a year. They are going to keep that in effect for at least three years now.

Okay. Yeah. I'm glad they agreed to the rules of the lawsuit. Oh, thank you so much, Tim Cook, for agreeing to this. You are so magnanimous. And Instagram is going to require users to share their birthday. An update, the company says, is meant to protect the youth, again, using its app.

So, basically, they've already asked for this for a long time. But if you signed up before the end of 2019, you may not have shared your birth date. I know I haven't. Over the next few weeks, Instagram will begin cookie-style prop-ups, prompting users who haven't previously shared a birthday to do so.

They will be able to dismiss them for a while, but eventually will require birthdays from everyone. They say they will use this information with artificial intelligence to detect when a user may have provided a false birthday, and that some users may then be asked to verify their age with no procedure in place as of yet for actual verification of anything.

As we know, Instagram, not so great at verifying. It's owned by Facebook. What do you expect? What do you expect? I love the fact. It's like, that's so stupid. It's going to use AI to detect that you may have provided a false birthday.

Is it going to do age recognition on your photos? Because if you say you're born in 1902, that- Probably, if I were to guess how they're going to use it, it's going to be based on who you're following, who's following you, and what sort of things that you're searching for. Who's zooming who?

Okay. Exactly. And China is further slashing kids' gaming time to just three hours a week. Oh, this is going to end poorly. Often not known for good ideas. I do like this one. This is going to end so poorly, Brian. So poorly. Three hours a week for one of the biggest gaming countries in the world.

Actually, there's apparently isn't really. Not a lot of people play games there in comparison to, say, here in terms of time spent. But it is interesting they're trying to cap it even further, and it's going to have definite impacts on Tencent because their online gaming thing is a huge part of their company.

So we'll see what happens. But, God, I kind of wish that Canada would put a crackdown on the amount of hours my kid could use my iPad. Well, you can put a crackdown on the amount of hours that your kid can use your iPad. You can be China. Brian, you can be China. I'll leave that to my wife, who's actually Chinese.

She can do the crackdown. And I saw this, and I just scratched my head a little bit. Clubhouse adds spatial audio to create more immersive audio chats. So wouldn't it make more sense if they sounded like runes? No. No. Well, yeah, they seem to think so.

So, you know, you might be wearing, if you wear the right equipment, because they already say it's not going to work over Bluetooth, you'll be able to hear where their voice is coming from, not just what they sound like. Now, if it's all virtual, where the fuck is somebody's voice actually coming from? From the mouth of God.

Like, do you then get a setting in Clubhouse to say, I'd like to be stage right? Oh, it's in the metaverse. Maybe three feet in background. Oh, metaverse. It's in the metaverse. Only metaverse. I got you. Yeah, it's in the metaverse. This is, you know, grasping that one last grasp.

It's like, okay, we got a bunch of money. We got to throw some features in, because our core feature is not really a category design. It is a webinar with no video, and you can't listen to it later, so it's scheduled programming, which nobody wants anymore.

I mean, Clubhouse is just dead man walking. They're just spending investors' money at this point trying to say that they're doing something, and it's just going to be failure.

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From beauty and fashion, to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com. I watch Star Trek Lower Decks.

You're a glutton for punishment. Well, I mainly did it because I hadn't tried out my VPN router system yet, so I wanted to make sure everything worked, and I was able to. Because Paramount Plus is not available in Canada. If you try to launch the app and you're on a Canadian ISP, it basically just says, we're not available yet.

We hope to be with you soon. That is so stupid. I know. And I noticed that I had forgotten to unsubscribe, so I knew I had a valid subscription to Paramount Plus. And so, why not? So, I, you know, set everything up, and I switched everything over on my Apple TV.

Pretty flawless, pretty quick. It went great. And I was able to access Paramount Plus, which is fantastic. And then I was able to subject myself to watching Star Trek Lower Decks. They've learned some lessons since last season. I'll give them that. It's fine. It's not great, but it's fine.

Okay, define fine. Because it's supposed to be funny. Is it funny? Did you laugh? Did you guffaw? Did you slap your knees? I had some minor chuckles. Great. Okay, Star Trek Lower Decks. The purveyor of minor chuckles. I also used my VPN setup to be able to get the Grand Tour Lockdown, which is out on U.S. Amazon Prime, but you have to pay for it in Canada.

So, I got it for free by switching everything over. And I'm glad I did, because this felt a bit like a return to form for me. It's another one of their, you know, trip ones. It was done during COVID, so lots of funny COVID, you know, them being old men complaining. About, like, having to follow rules.

It felt a lot less scripted. I laughed quite a few times. It was nice. I'm glad I watched it, which I was not feeling like the last couple times Grand Tour shows. Yeah. So, here's the interesting thing about this. This has been out for a while now. And I was actually going to throw it in Media Candy saying, Amazon really kind of screwed the pooch because I didn't see anything about this.

I saw it a couple weeks ago, and I'm like, did they really just release a new one that has not been promoted to me? Yes. Yeah, they have not really promoted it very much. No. Which is interesting. So, since you put it in here, I went and watched it last night. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.

It's – the issue that I had with it is, man, these guys are really old. Yeah, they're getting old. They're really old. Even Richard Hammond, who is like, you know, the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed guy. The young spry one, yes. No, he looks like a haggard old man now. They all do. Yeah, I mean, granted, COVID times, but – COVID times.

I thought it was okay. I didn't like the ending at all. I didn't get the ending. I mean, it totally – I'm just like, what the fuck was the ending? But for the most part, it was fun. I mean, it was fun. The thing is, I think our expectations are so low now based on the previous ones that it's like – That is very true.

We have very low expectations of them now. So, I kind of hope they pack it in and just stop. I do too. I mean, Jeremy said that they're going to be back for sure because I think that they do have like a 400-year contract. That's true. They got a lot of money from Amazon. But I think if they kept it like this, it would be better because it was low-key.

It was definitely low-key. They didn't go over the top. They didn't try and blow any shit up. And I thought it was fun. I did enjoy it. Yeah. Trust me. It's better than the last three of them at least. Yeah. So, I threw this next link in the show notes. Well, first off because I thought it was a pretty good interview.

Secondly, because there are – three of these items have been around since I was a teen. Danny Elfman, Oingo Boingo, Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails, and Entertainment Weekly. Yeah. Never in my wildest dreams did I think there would be an interview with Danny Elfman and Trent Reznor within Entertainment Weekly.

But that is how the world has changed and how the random weird stuff that we listen to back when we were kids is now totally mainstream. So, there you have it. Yeah. It's a good interview. They did a song together. I don't think the song is all that great, but I liked hearing them talk to each other. It was pretty cool. Okay.

Cool. I'll check it out because I do – oh, I really love Danny Elfman. Trent Reznor, I can leave or take. But, yeah. Right. Anyway. And I paid for the podcast, which I guess we're going to say isn't really a podcast because you had to pay for it.

But it's a podcast behind a paywall? I don't know. It's a show. You paid for audio entertainment. I paid for audio entertainment, and it was not on Clubhouse, and I could not tell where they were sitting spatially. What? You couldn't tell if they were behind you? I did not care, but it's Ricky Gervais and Sam Harris, and, you know, they picked – there's – what?

How many shows? I can't remember. 11 episodes ranging from 30 minutes to 45 minutes. Perfect length for a podcast. Okay. $14.99. It was worth it. I really enjoyed – I like both of them. Cheaper than a movie. Both of them together. You know, chocolate and peanut butter. They went together really well. Okay, good. Yeah. Like I said, cheaper than a movie.

That's, you know, at least, you know, five hours of entertainment for 15 bucks. Yep. And Shirley Manson is back with her The Jump podcast. New season, new artist. So, you know, I love Shirley, and I like to hear Shirley talk to people. So, if you have an interest in any of the musicians she's actually talking with, worth a listen.

These are free. I listened to two of them. I listened to the David Byrne episode, which I thought was fascinating. I really liked that episode. And the Alanis episode, which I'm sure you had issues with, but – I didn't have any issues with it. You know, Alanis has turned herself into like this.

She's done a bit of a revisionist history on herself. That's all I'm going to say. Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. Yes. But it was fine. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. Because the nice thing about Shirley's show is that they have buckets of money, and they actually play the songs that they're talking about.

Exactly. Yes. They spend the money to be able to license the tracks. Exactly. So, no, I really like it. I'd probably end up listening to the other ones just because – it's Shirley Manson, man. Come on. Yeah. Talk about, you know, crush of crushes.

He's just got to. I've been watching Icon, Music Through the Lens, which is a PBS special on music photography. And it is so good. This is one of the ones where I'm kind of just – I watch like half of an episode a night because there's only six episodes, and I've been like really slow trickling it out.

I was going to watch some last night, but I ended up watching The Grand Tour. It's really fascinating because, I mean, music photography for me was one of the best things. It's so much fun. It's so much fun. And I want to go through – it's actually got me inspired.

I'm not going to NFT them, but I'm actually going to go make a coffee table book of all the bands that I've shot. So I have like a record of the stuff that I've done, and it's just really cool. It's really cool to see the behind-the-scenes stuff and see the photographers and hear their stories about, you know, how they got the shots.

It's really, really cool. It's on PBS. Some of it's streaming. You might have to go to Sweden for some of it, which I did. But yeah, it's a really cool, really cool series. If you like music and you like photography, it is the peanut butter and chocolate, like you mentioned, of TV.

And I've been watching Clickbait on Netflix. Adrian Grenier's in it. Vince from, you know, Entourage. Oh, yes. That show you love. I love it. It's coming back, by the way. They finally got everybody on board, even Adrian. So they're waiting on Marky Mark to sign off and go talk to the – basically, they're like, we got everybody on board, but we don't know anybody at HBO, so Mark has to go hat and hand to HBO to get them to give us money to actually make the show.

I'm just like, oh, God. So we'll see how that plays out. But anyway, this is a murder mystery type of thing. It's an eight-part series. We're at 6.25 right now. Right. But it's fun. It's one of those ones where you – they don't tell you who it's going to be.

Like, they telegraph every single character, so you're always just like, oh, who's this person? Who's that person? What have they done? It's just fun. It's seriously like Lifetime Channel quality show. Excellent. Yeah. So it's fun. But it has to do with a quote-unquote internet crime.

Ah, gotcha. Yeah. All right. And I saw this news, and I got both intrigued and terrified. Apple is building a classical music streaming app after buying Prime Phonic. Now, I am a big fan of classical music. The biggest part with classical music is curation.

There are so many versions of everything, which are the good ones, which are the ones that you have to listen to, which orchestras, which – there's a gazillion things. And people have been trying to crack that nut for years. I mean, I remember way back in the early days of the web when there was a music store, the warehouse, and I was contracted to build out a classical section because they were doing their own version of a curated, you know, best of by the best composers in the best time, et cetera, et cetera.

So people have been working on that for years. What I can tell you is Spotify is absolutely failing at it, and I don't even think they're bothering because there's no bread or butter or money in classical music for them. So it's a horrible experience. So they say that they're going to release their own dedicated classical music app next year, which will combine Prime Phonic's user interface with some of Apple's own features.

I'm hoping one of those features doesn't go into your own library and destroy it because that seems to be one of Apple's biggest features for their music apps. Yeah. And I'm happy to hear that it's going to be a separate app, but not the Apple music app itself. There's no – I'm assuming it's going to be some sort of subscription probably because, again, classical music does not make money.

So we'll see. I'm colored intrigued but also worried because Apple just seems to always fuck up their music stuff. Yeah, because I have – since I have Apple One, I get Apple Music and the interface is terrible. Half of my albums, my favorite albums in the world aren't there, even though I have it tied to my physical account, which has all of the MP3s.

Most of it still doesn't show up. Basically, what I've done now since I got this super phone – I was going to talk about this next in Absinthe Doodads, but I can do it now. So since I got this 12 Pro Max, it's crazy. My iPad use has gone to almost zero because this thing is so freaking big that it does almost everything my iPad does.

And it's just nuts. But I just uploaded my entire music library to it and said, screw it. I'm just not going to wait around anymore. I'm looking forward to this for sure. I've been listening – I think it's KUSC here. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, yes. One of the best classical stations and I found – because that's what I have my car set to when I get in is playing classical, which I have found driving on the 405 when I have to go to Beverly Hills is the greatest thing in the world.

I am just calm. I am just always calm now when I drive. So I love me some classical music and I've been getting back into it a lot. So this is good timing. Yeah, KUSC is great. You can't beat it. And I'm 99.99% sure you can listen to them via any of your Ladies in the Tube.

So you should check it out if you don't live in the L.A. area. You can still listen to it. Yeah, yeah. I actually have it set on my Sonos. So if you go to the Sonos app, you can, you know, tie it in and listen to it through there. So it's a great station for sure. Apps and doodads. So I put this in here just because I like it when anybody confirms something that we've been saying for like 10 years.

And that's kind of what happened. This is from Wired. You're probably not using the web's best browser. Remember when web browsers were useful tools? Remember when you could follow sites you like, check your email, see your calendar, all without leaving the browser? Or should I say, remember when you could do all that without big tech feeding your personal data into the yawning maw of surveillance capitalism?

Nice. I remember those days because I am still living in them thanks to a web browser you may not have heard of. Well, you have, dear listeners, Vivaldi. That's right. That's right. The browser that we championed a while back, then went away from, and then kind of came back to. And then I think you went away from it, but I've not left it.

I've been using Vivaldi strongly for at least about two years now. And they just came out with 4.0, which seems like it's very good. So, I mean, I thought it's been good all along. I don't even use all the bells and whistles, but I just think it's really good at basically keeping as much of my data private as I'd like to have private.

Yeah. So, I went to Brave for a while because I had a bug in mine where when I would create a new tab, the URL bar, the location bar would not get focused. So, I'd have to type command T, then command L, or you'd have to remember to do that because I would start typing a, you know, a search or a URL and it would just go off into the ether and it wouldn't do anything.

And it pissed me off so much. I'm like, fuck you guys. I'm going to Brave. And Brave was just, I grudgingly used it. I kind of bent it to my will to make it do most of the things I wanted to do. But it still sucked because the great part about Vivaldi for me is speed dial.

So, when you open a new tab, you have a curated giant list of the sites you go to the most. Vivaldi, I mean, Brave kind of had that with very limited types of sites you could put in there and you could only have like a very small amount. You could have eight.

And I'm like, well, excuse me, no. Even MySpace let us have more friends. Seriously. Seriously. So, when I saw this, I'm like, ooh, they got a new version. So, I went, downloaded it. And the great thing is everybody's Chromium based now. So, it imported all of my Brave settings, all of my passwords and everything that was just such a nightmare before because it's all using the same tools in the back end.

And it just brought it in. And it took me like five minutes to set up. And I've been back on Vivaldi and I fucking love this new version. The web panes are really cool. So, I've got like a little Twitter pane pop up that I can just click on that. And I can see if there's anything to look at.

If not, close it. I don't even have to go to, you know, a new tab to open it. It's fast. It's just, it's everything that I loved Vivaldi for, but it works again, which is great. So, I'm so happy that it's back. And my app of the week is called MECO. M-E-C-O.

I found this, Mark Fraunfelder, hat tip to him for this one. I found it on his newsletter. What it is, is it's an app for iOS. I don't know if there's an Android version that didn't look. I don't care. But what it does is you set it to newsletter sender addresses, and it will take all of those emails that come from your newsletters and give you a nice clean interface to look at your newsletters outside of your inbox.

Right. Which is, and it creates a new, like, like I'm in Gmail. So, it creates a new thing for a new folder for those or a new tag or whatever, and just keeps them separate. So, they never hit your inbox, which is awesome. Like I said, the interface is pretty cool. It's free right now.

I would prefer a paid version where I could actually put in more than one email address, because you can only use one email address, and I have newsletters coming across five different emails. So, which is, you know, it's too tough to go consolidate, because those are the logins for the sites, and you and I share some of these logins, and it's just like, oh, Jesus fucking Christ.

Can I just add another one, please? But for what it is, so I use my main one that gets, you know, 90% of my newsletters, but it's a really nice little app to say, like, I'm in newsletter mode. I'm going to go sit outside, have a cup of coffee, sit with the dogs, and read my newsletters.

It's perfect. And then, like, when I wake up in the morning, there's not a hundred newsletters crafting up my inbox. Yeah. So, check it out. It's good. Brian, I've been reading again, or listening, as it was.

I haven't been. I read Double or Listened to Double Star by Robert Heinlein, back from the 50s. Great book. You could have written this book and not made it have anything to do with sci-fi, but it's a fantastic book.

It's very much like, what was that Kevin Kline movie where he became the president? Oh, God. I love that movie. Yeah. Dave. Yeah, Dave. Dave. Such a good movie. This is basically Dave. Okay. So, it's really cool, but Dave on Mars. Elon Musk.

Yeah, it's a short book, but it's fantastic. Heinlein is just so fucking good. I've been getting into this. You know, when I want to do sci-fi now, I just prefer going back and reading classics that I haven't read because it was so good back in the 50s, 60s, 70s. And now, it seems like all of the sci-fi that we get lately is just all near-future sci-fi.

It's near-future, professor, hot girl, blah, blah, blah. Cory Doctorow, like, I know how to install Tor type of bullshit. It's like, I want to go back to the old days. And this one is so good. And I'm also listening to Drunk, How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland.

This book's fantastic. It's a history book about alcohol. History of booze. It is. And he basically posits that we would not have modern civilization without people getting fucked up together. And it makes a great case. It is a fascinating book about the history of booze.

And the psychology behind it. And, I mean, I highly recommend it. Brian, you'd love this book. It sounds right up my alley. Brian, I have a hat tip to a friend of the show, Chris Lockhead, who pointed this one in my direction that I totally missed.

Bloomberg has canceled Professor Scott Galloway's TV show after he joked about his sex life in a video topless in a hard hat. Did you watch this video, Brian? I did. I love Scott Galloway. I love the fact that he actually tried to make a promo video that way, not really understanding that Bloomberg is Bloomberg.

It's great. It's awesome. It sucks that he got canceled, that they decided not to give him a show. But he poked the bear. What did you think was going to happen? Exactly. He poked the bear. He poked the bear.

You know, he doesn't need it. He doesn't need the show. He doesn't need the money. He's got enough shows. I think he's got like 18,000 podcasts. No, he doesn't. Brian, after this, I don't know if he, well, you don't, do you still listen to Pivot? Because he's been gone. No, he's on vacation though. It was a planned vacation for all of August.

Oh, sure it is. Sure it is. No, it was, it was. Okay. He says he does it all the time. So he's coming back to Pivot in his own show. I think the next episode. Well, again, it's his planned vacation. He took August off. Okay. We'll see how this goes. He said that before any of this happened. Okay. That he's going to do that. So we'll see.

I mean, if he comes back and he doesn't have anything, I mean, Jesus Christ, he can do his own podcast anytime he wants. That's true. That's true. I've actually been enjoying Pivot more without him. Now, if they could just replace, what's her name? Kara Swisher. Kara Swisher. If they could replace Kara Swisher. So basically you want Pivot as a completely different show that isn't Pivot.

Exactly. That's exactly what I'm looking for. Might I recommend Grumpy Old Geeks, Jason? That sounds like a mighty fine show. Where would I find that? I don't know, since nobody else can seem to find it, according to the stats you posted on Twitter this morning. I know. Oh, God.

Maybe we're just the morons of the week. But yeah, it's just like, what the hell? I love him. I really do love him. And I think it's hilarious. But yeah, you're not doing a show for MTV, man. You're doing a show for Bloomberg. I know.

I mean, what is the thought process? It's like, let's go full on village people for this shit. So good. Dave Bittner is back.

Dave is the host of the Cyber Warrior 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 he's finally the co-host of Recorded Future, where he takes you inside the world of cybersecurity, threat intelligence.

I've been watching too much Big Brother. I'm going to go, Dave Bittner. Pacers, Hot Rodders, Sunday, world of wheels, wheels, wheels, wheels. You might pay for the seat, but you're only going to need the edge. I have gone my whole life without ever attending an event like that.

I feel like I'm missing out. Me too. I would like to, though. I hear it's very loud. I think going to a tractor pull or one of those things. I'm fascinated that they bring in so much dirt into an arena. So much dirt. Yeah.

And then tomorrow, they're going to have a basketball game. Right. That's the crazy thing. Or an ice hockey event. So they got to, I guess they lay down the dirt on top of the covering of the ice or something. I guess once you have ice, you keep the ice as long as possible.

No, the ice actually, they make the same day. The ice is pretty cool. Oh, really? Yeah, they make the ice the same day. They just have a, basically they fill it with water and freeze it up. They can do it that fast. Yeah, they can. It's amazing technology. But I did see a monster truck rally when I used to live in Virginia Beach.

And you certainly are missing out if you have never been to one in person. It is spectacular. I mean, it is spectacular. I hear it's like going to an air show where you're not prepared for how loud fighter jets are.

Oh, yeah. Right. Which is funny because right down the road is where all of the air shows. This is when I lived by Oceana Naval Air Station. So we'd go see three air shows a year. But one time we went to go, we went and saw the monster truck rally.

And the things that I take away from that is, yes, they are insanely loud. They jump higher than you can imagine. And they're bigger than you can imagine. And it was just, it's just fun. It is just stupid fun. Well, having both of those things right in the same area, I'd imagine.

There are a lot of people in their 40s and 50s that live in that area that have hearing aids already. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes. What, Bob? Yeah. Oh, dude. When a carrier would come in and it would offload, it takes three days of constant overflights to unload an aircraft carrier.

And then three more to put all the planes back on. So we lived a couple of miles from the end of the runway and shit would just fall off our walls all the time because of the vibration. And this was back in the days when the F-14 Tomcat was king. This was Top Gun days.

You know, this was the 80s. So I love those things so much. I love air shows. You cannot keep me away from an air show. No, they're a lot of fun. We used to go down to the Andrews Air Force Base open house regularly and see that one.

But I've been to the one you describe also. I've been down there as well. And, yeah, it just never gets old. I don't know. It's American firepower on display. I feel a little bit of shame for just how, you know, jingoistic it all is.

But, boy, is it fun. It's so much fun. Yeah. Yeah. When those blue angels are coming by and you can almost, like, touch them as they're coming across and blowing your hair out the way. Fortunately, I was never at any of the shows where anybody crashed.

So there's always that. But there's always – it's like going to see NASCAR, you know. It's just like at any given moment, all of us could be dead because a bolt came loose. And that's kind of part of the fun. Yeah. Okay. No, it is a lot of fun. It is. All right. Well, thanks, guys. Listen, I'll talk to you next week.

All right. Next week, we'll be talking about Disney on ice. I've been to that. I have been to, yeah. Okay. You guys can talk about that one then. Those of us with kids.

Yeah. Yeah. Because if it's worth doing, it's worth doing on ice. That's right. That's right. Next year, Hamilton on ice. So I've picked this story up because it just seems right up our alley. We spent a lot of time talking about things that we're kind of okay with as long as there's a warrant, things that we're not okay with if there isn't the warrant.

I just love this story. Sheriff's deputies in Colorado tracked down and arrested a man using Apple's Find My iOS app, claiming that an officer had, and this is in quotes, of course, lost his work phone in the bed of the man's truck after the suspect fled the scene. So they recognized this guy.

They knew that he had a warrant out, and he was in flight to avoid prosecution. So while trying to persuade this guy to get out of the car, according to the release, the officer left the phone on the rail of the truck bed to go retrieve his handcuffs, at which point the phone allegedly fell into the truck as Sandoval sped off.

So there you go. Okay, okay, okay. It's not so much that he put the phone on and it fell off, that he went to go retrieve his cuffs. That's why they have the bat belt. Why would he have to go, quote-unquote, retrieve his cuffs? I believe the entire tone of this article is somewhat suspect as to the police's story about how this all went down.

Tongue firmly planted in cheek, as it were? So they're saying that, obviously, you know, the real issue here may be, was it an accident or not? Because if it was not an accident, well, then we've got some issues. Accidentally on purpose.

I'm reminded of that scene, I don't know, or sometime early on in The Simpsons where Chief Wiggums was at The Simpsons' house and he says, where did I put my gun? Oh, yeah, I put it down when I got a piece of cake. Like, police officers just willy-nilly leaving their phones around on other people's cars.

And, yeah. I'm going to have to talk to Yellen about this. The story got a little bit further into it as to why they seem to have found him so quickly. And it was the officer had realized, oh, dear, that's my work phone. That's property of the government here. I should probably find that as soon as possible.

So then he used his personal iPhone to start to track down the work iPhone. And, well, well, this guy seems to be driving around town. We should send some squad units after him. So, yeah. Okay. There you go. So there's that. It is an interesting question. I mean, I say I'm going to run this by Ben Yellen to see what his take is.

Is this a Fourth Amendment violation? If you accidentally – it's interesting. I don't know. As we say, get Yellen on the horn. That's right. That's right. Exactly. We need an expert on the Fourth Amendment. Get Yellen on the horn. And then, of course, I have the story about the T-Mobile hacker who said that the carrier security is just awful.

His name is John Binns. And he told the Wall Street Journal this. And he broke through using readily available tool to find an exposed router and took a week to delve through customer data. It's stored in a data center near East Winnetachi, Washington, wherever that might be. He provided evidence to back up his claims of involvement.

And he says he breached T-Mobile and stole the data to create noise that drew attention to him because he apparently might be a little bit nutso. He wanted to highlight his claims he had been kidnapped in Germany and placed into a fake mental hospital. There's no evidence to support that. We just know he did break into T-Mobile.

And apparently, yes, the security was awful. Well, he might be in an actual mental hospital soon or at least some facility run by the state. Yeah, I mean, I guess this puts question to his – his claims must be considered with a grain of salt given his history of mental challenges.

So we'll leave him with that. But, yeah, certainly a big stain on T-Mobile's record. Not that it's been great. I mean, this is their fifth in three years, I believe, and now they're getting just a ton of class action suits against them for this.

So T-Mobile has to up their game when it comes to this because it's pretty bad. I mean, just – it's interesting to me like – so T-Mobile is the low-cost provider, right? Right. Low-cost mobile provider here in the U.S.

And so if you're someone who's shopping on price, is this going to affect your decision to use T-Mobile or not? Quite the parallel to the discussion we had just a few weeks ago where we were talking about how there's now a division between people who use – who pay the premium for Apple products and their security and people who prefer to get the cheaper, almost free Android devices and no security.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, should security be expensive? Should – to – the entry level for security, must there be a barrier to entry? Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. What about Ryan Reynolds?

Is he going to come save the day with Cricket Mobile? Who knows? But, yeah, none of these guys actually own their hardware. They just rent Spectrum from the other providers who actually built the towers. Yeah, they piggyback. A lot of cable providers here in Canada do that. Yeah, yeah.

You'd think that with all that extra time they have on their hands from not actually having to build infrastructure, they could, I don't know, put a fucking password on it. But who knows? Yeah. I have – like I've had my parents' mobile accounts on – I think it's called Ting Mobile.

Yes, I use Ting. Yes. Ting is the same guys that are from Hover, which is a subdivision of Two Cows, which is out of Toronto, where Brian lives now. Yeah. I have a Ting – I have a Ting phone too, yeah. Yeah. For people like my parents who basically don't use their phones or any data, it's a very reasonable way to hook up something.

I mean it's probably $30 a month for both of them. It's a very reasonably priced shiny brick that just sits there. Yeah. Well, I mean I pay – That's exactly what it does. I pay $8 a month for mine, which I – so I got a SIM and I put it in my Galaxy S7 Edge that I have.

And so just in case, you know, because I live in earthquake, fire, tsunami, death country here, in case the main network goes down, I'd have at least another phone to be able to back up to and check things out. But yeah, it costs me $8 a month for not even using it.

When I use it, it jumps to $11. When I turn it on, basically when I turn it on and the voicemails all come in from all the spammers, I have to pay another $4 a month. So I rarely turn it on. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But again, it's one of those companies who are just buying time from the other providers.

And hey, that can work out. Yep. But going back to the password issue, let's talk about Microsoft Azure. I love this. Microsoft Azure cloud vulnerability is, quote, the worst you can imagine. You have no idea, my friend, what we can imagine on this show.

I was going to say, I don't know. I can imagine quite a bit. This really isn't that far on the scale, to be honest. Yeah. Yeah. So their Cosmos DB product had 3,300 customers open to complete unrestricted access by attackers.

The vulnerability was introduced in 2019 when they added a data visualization feature called Jupyter, Jupyter Notebook, to Cosmos DB. And it was turned on by default. That's Jupyter with a Y, of course. Yes, of course. Jupyter.

Jupyter. Jupyter. So I can already imagine something worse. You know, Amazon Web Services for like the first five years. Oh, 10. All of their customers. 10 years. All of their customers were open to complete unrestricted access by attackers for quite some time.

Yes. Yeah. Put it in a bucket and say, fuck it. Yeah, Microsoft has been taking it on the chin here the past month or so between this and the print nightmare thing. And they're just not up to their normal standards.

Not up to their normal standards. Yeah. Yeah. It's a shame. I saw a headline last week. I forgot to put it in the notes. But it was like Google and Microsoft are basically setting aside their earmarking $30 billion for cybersecurity over the next X amount of years.

And I'm like, OK, this shouldn't be news. I shouldn't be reading about this because Microsoft sells the product that everybody uses to break into everything. So maybe this should be, I don't know, job one. You know, I would like to see, you know, that whole like back in the auto plans, they had zero days without or 340 days without an incident or without an injury.

I would like to see that without a cyber attack or 0.05 milliseconds without a cyber attack. Yeah, but I mean, don't you run into the issue like it's it'd be like if Bob on the assembly line for, you know, Corvettes lost his arm two months ago and nobody knows it yet.

Right. Yeah, that's true. They have to backdate all these things. Right. Turns out. Turns out five months ago. Yeah. Is there a zero day for amputation? I don't know. I don't know. Poor Bob. Poor Bob. But yeah, it's these things are going to happen.

But I thought it was just interesting. I just really like the title. The worst you can imagine. I'm like, my friend, my friend. Yeah. Let me pour you a beer. Don't sell yourself short. Yeah. You know what else I noticed recently? I was talking to my son, Jack, who just headed off to high school this week for the first time.

He's a freshman? So far, so good. He's a freshman. Yeah. All right. What year was he born? Oh, God. 2006. Oh, OK. So he's one year older than the iPhone. We had a story earlier that kids that were born in 2007 are now heading off to be freshmen in high school because they're 14.

And to make you feel old, it was the same year that the iPhone came out. And I feel sad. I know. I know. Well, so what is interesting to me is that evidently his generation of kids think Microsoft is really cool because of the Xbox.

Right. That makes sense. Now, for us who grew up in the Mac versus PC days and were on Team Mac, Microsoft was not cool. Speaking of Bob. There's nothing cool about Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of Bob and Clippy.

But, you know, I think Microsoft has done a great job and making – with things like the Xbox and certainly they've done well in the cloud world and their 365 product and so on and so forth.

Who would have ever thought that people would consider Microsoft to be cool? But here we are. I don't know. I mean I think they've been – One of us always did. Well, yeah. Well, one of us was also a rollerblader, so – Yeah. No. Between the two of you.

But they've been – I haven't had a problem with Microsoft for years now. Once – what is his – I can't remember his name. Sacha Novella or whatever. I can't remember the CEO's name. Once he came in, he really kind of turned things around a lot. And I think he really kind of upped the quality of the company.

Yeah. The one thing that really bugged me was they made that really super cool Surface desktop machine that they didn't really do anything with. That really big one that folded down and it was like a tablet and you had the little wheel that you could move around. I think the problem – the problem with that device is they kind of doubled down and they tried to move like their mobile operating system.

They tried to bake it into the standard windows. And I think that just became a casualty of the pushback towards that where everybody was like, no, no, we don't want a mobile operating system on our desktops. Yeah. Well, they're going to be really upset when the new Mac OS comes out and they get an M1 chip because I can run mobile apps on my M1 Mac now.

But I just thought that was a super cool piece of hardware. And I was really bummed when they first came out with it that it was just so underpowered. And I'm like, put all the chips in it, man. Come on. I would have bought one. I totally would have bought one. But I guess not. But yeah, I think – I still think they're doing pretty good right now.

I've got an Xbox. I like it. I'd like to get the new one. But obviously you can't because they didn't make enough of them. So yeah. But I see how – I can totally see how they would think that Microsoft is cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, God. That means Macs are for old people. That's right. They are. Well, having a computer at all is for old people. That's true. So you don't have a desktop at all. That's true. Yeah. True that. I thought this one was really funny. This is a hat tip to our friend of the show, Vinny Lee.

Banksy NFT buyer duped in a 244,000-pound hack. So this guy spent $336,000 on a fake Banksy NFT. And what's cool about this is – you can take cool in one way or another here.

The hacker actually hacked Banksy's website, put up the NFT page, put a piece of fake NFT art on OpenSea, and then went into a Discord channel and told everybody to go buy the Banksy drop. And this guy did. So, yeah.

I mean, I can see how he got scammed by this. Banksy got pranksied. Yeah. I mean, this came off of Banksy's official website. So why would you not trust him? That's not so much a scam as you got screwed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That is a caper. That is a caper. Yes. So I feel bad for the guy because – well, I don't because he bought a fucking NFT. But anyway, I still – it's a clever, clever hack. He had $336,000 in disposable income.

Yes, to Bernie. Spend on a gift. Yeah. Just spend on a gift. Poor guy. My empathy for him only goes so far. Yeah. Yeah. That is true. That is true. So I just – I thought that was a pretty clever hack. It is. It is.

I put this story in here from The Washington Post and it's called YouTube Magic Dust, How America's Second Largest Social Platform Ducks Controversies. And it really outlines how, you know, with people coming after Google and coming after Facebook, that somehow YouTube seems to escape a lot of the criticism.

Like YouTube has – there's never been a top executor from YouTube who's had to come and testify before Congress, for example. And I think this is interesting. I was curious what you guys thought. Why does YouTube, which certainly has no shortage of horrible content on it, why does YouTube escape where the other major platforms don't?

I think maybe it's because Congress doesn't really realize that YouTube and Google are the same thing or just a spinoff of it. So they just get the Google guys to come in and just talk about that because, you know, YouTube is under Alphabet. Yeah. That's a good point.

They could just group them together. But yeah. YouTube has garnered some initial goodwill by being one of the first out of the gate to basically de-platform some crazy folks. So they've kind of made some waves in that they're attempting to do something. But you are right.

And all of this horrible stuff that we see on all social media is all over YouTube. Maybe it just gets buried a bit more because there's so much on YouTube. I wonder, too, if because YouTube is much more unidirectional in the way that information goes through it.

In other words, it's a much higher barrier to become a YouTube creator than it is to be in a Facebook group and be a contributor to a Facebook group or to basically a chat room or anything like that. So I wonder if people don't think of YouTube as being as interactive as the other ones are.

You sit down and watch YouTube. Agree. It's not really a social network per se in that if you have some horrible content on YouTube, you can't really spread it on YouTube. You spread it on other platforms. That's a really good point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And also, because I mean, other than commenting, it's not a social network per se.

It's the second largest search engine, though. So there's a lot of stuff there. But also remember that the other platforms have a face. You know, there's Sundar Pichai at Google. There's Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. There's Jack at Twitter. So these guys are out there as like the big CEOs.

But the CEO of YouTube is a woman and doesn't really – she keeps her head down for the most part. So it's interesting how that kind of works out. So I think Sundar might be taking the heat for that. But, I mean, they have been called in front of Congress before basically for the children's stuff.

Yeah. It's mostly the kids' stuff. The algorithm, yeah. Yeah. Which I 100% agree with. It's fucking horrible. You damn. So this last story in here I thought was interesting. Kind of flew under the radar a bit. But the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, has charged eight brokerage firms with sanctions after they got hit with BEC compromises.

Their employees' email accounts got taken over, and that exposed personal data of thousands of clients. These are folks like KMS Financial Services, Satera, Cambridge Investment Research. And basically the SEC has come at them and said you had inadequate security, and so you're going to be fined.

I believe it was around $8 million, something like that. Right. And the firms have all agreed to settle the charges. Better to, I guess, make it go away and minimize the PR exposure here. Is that $8 million total across all the firms, or is it $8 million per firm?

I don't recall. That's a good question. I mean, it doesn't matter. That's true. It is funny money for all of them, so it doesn't really matter. Yeah. Exactly. But I think it's interesting. Go ahead. I think it's, you know, just pay the fines and let all the coverage and all the eyes and all the heat go on Robinhood, because that's where it all is right now, right?

So you can fly under the radar as being the old school, you know, financial organizations and just, okay, yeah, sorry about that. Here's some money. You know, we didn't mean for that to happen. Focus on that Robinhood and the gaming thing that's going on. Yeah. Go. Yeah.

I just thought it was interesting that this is the SEC coming at them, that you have this organization that has regulatory oversight on these investment firms, and basically they're sending a shot across the bow and saying, hey, you all have to do a better job here.

And by you all, I mean the whole industry, or there will be consequences. So I think that's a good thing. It's a good thing. I mean, we don't actually know what the SEC's mandates are for in-house security for these people, because I mean, I remember when, Brian, you and I always had to do this, when if your company wanted to take credit cards back in the day, long ago, you had to harden your servers and you had to have people come in from the, you know, the credit card companies and they would check your servers.

They would stress test you. And they would give you a list, yeah. Exactly. And they would see, and then you'd get a list of things that weren't up to date, you know, and then you'd have to update those. And then they would come back and they'd give you a, you know, a, you know, stamp of approval or not. And they would check you every couple months.

So I'm wondering if they have these same type of regulations inside these companies and they just, you know, haven't been, I don't know, up to date with them or things like that. Because it seems like, you know, if you're under the SEC's purview, you should have some kind of, at least, you know, checklist of things that you should be checking for.

So maybe they just didn't, didn't fill those out or not. I'm digging into the article here and it is indeed a chump change for them. Satera is paying $300,000, Cambridge $250,000, KMS $200,000. So these are, you know, executive lunch bills.

But, you know, maybe it's a first step. I don't know. Yeah, they're paying those to stop the bleeding from the lawyers because the lawyers are going to make a hell of a lot more money than just the fine. So it's just like, you know what, let J, J, J, and J go back home and let's just pay you so it goes away because these guys are going to charge us $5 million just to fill out the paperwork so you can get $350,000.

Right, right. But as part of it, they are agreeing to improve their security. So I suppose that is a good outcome as well. They're agreeing to it, but are they going to if these, you know, these fines are such chump change? It's just cost of doing business like we always talk about.

Could be, little Mary Sunshine, could be. I'm just saying. On that happy note. Hey, hey, look. There's a precedent. Welcome to our new show. What's the fucking point? That's it. That is it. Everything's terrible and we're slowly dying.

Everything is awful. We'll be right back after this. Oh, that bombshell. All right. All right. All righty. Well, thank you, gentlemen. I'll see you next time. Take care. Bye. Closing shout outs.

Over at Patreon, we've got Laura Leslie and Fakie McMade Up just edited their pledge from one pound to five pounds. So thank you very much, Fakie McMade Up. Thank you. Over at PayPal, we've got Adam, Thomas, Charlie, Simon, Michael, Matt, Matthew, Jonathan, John, and Judge.

Sounds like the book, the Bible. Every time these guys come up again. The Bible of GOG. And we've got a five-star rating over at iTunes from Davi Torres, who says, amazing show. I listen to a full episode every day commuting. No matter if the episode is from last year, all the shit happening on the internet is still funny.

Stay grumpy. Thank you, Davi. Davi. Thank you. Over at the tip chart, we've got a $10 subscription from Adam D. And we've got another 10 from Desiree. Super fan. Hope you're taking care of yourself, girl. And we've got Jennifer MC with a $5 subscription and a $10 sub from Anne Q.

Thank you guys so much. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schilmeister. 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 520. 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.

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