521: Beans!

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. And if you're listening right now, we're going to need to see your vaccine passport. Otherwise, you need to stop listening because we are tired of your bullshit and we'd like to get on with it. Please. Thank you very much. Okay. Somebody's having some vaccine issues up there.

Not so much up here. It's more of the U.S., of course, because, you know, I'd like to go back. No, you're not coming back. No, you're done. Forget it. Okay. I'm not allowed back to visit. Okay. Nope. I'd actually be okay with that. Yeah. Yeah. Have your friends come up there. All right. We'll do.

Yeah. Get poutine. There's poutine all around. Now I'm hungry. All right. Let's get into some follow-up here. Barrett wrote in and said, and now the feds want to get into the McFlurry game. And this is from Gizmodo. Of course, the FTC has now sent letters to McDonald's franchisees to find out what is going on with these newfangled Flurry machines that are always broken.

And I'm glad there are no other pressing concerns for the FTC to worry about. So they're getting involved. Well, I mean, this is kind of a major antitrust case with a major American corporation. It's not like Joe's Hardware store down the street. So I can understand why they might be wanting to get their hooks around this one.

All right. Well, go for it. But here's the deal. It's a fucking ice cream machine. Why has ice cream become so difficult? I mean, people have been making ice cream for fucking hundreds of years. Come on. Yes. Now, if it was beer we were talking about, I mean, then I'd be worried. Yeah. Then we would definitely want the full, you know, the full might of the United States, you know, attorneys behind it.

But for some, you know, I've never even had a McFlurry. I think, I mean, I think that's just the, all the, all of the milkshakes go through that same machine. So like, you know, I mean, a good vanilla milkshake from McDonald's after, you know, with some French fries and a hangover is pretty nice.

I got to say, but I haven't had one in 30 years. So apparently nobody else has because the machines don't fucking work. Well, that could be why we haven't had them. Who knows? And Bootlegger wrote in here, he said, I heard you guys say in a recent episode that streaming services refuse to play Killing an Air by the Cure.

So I went to check it out for myself. I can report that I was able to play a live version on Spotify and the original on YouTube. I think what you may have is a California problem as it's geolocated to not play in California, but that's just a guess. Great song, by the way. I'd never heard it before and I loved it. YouTube, obviously, you know, algorithm sucks.

People upload shit all the time. I guarantee you it's not official. Spotify, yes, you were able to play a live version. That's it. I can concur from the USA. There's no version that was available from Canada. The live version from the Cure Anniversary live album in Hyde Park 2019 is there.

That's it. Not the original recording from either the Best of Standing on the Sea album, which isn't here at all in Canada. I cannot find that one. Or the three imaginary boys deluxe edition or even the USA compilation Boys Don't Cry is a single. Or the other versions which were available in the USA.

I'm a Cure fanatic. I know all of them. Basically, you can't get any version except for the one above, which will at some point probably get removed as well. So it's Staring at the Sea is the one that I have. That was my first one. It was on dual cassette. It was great. That's the CD that I have. So I was specifically talking about Apple Music because I pay for Apple Music.

And Apple Music is supposed to have this quote-unquote Apple Match system. Yes. So once your Apple Music app on your computer has it, it should be uploading and then you should get it on all your devices. This does not work. So because I tried it.

I had everything in there. So I have spent a little bit of time and I had to just say, fuck it. I uploaded my 182 gigabyte, 182 gig of music to my damn phone just so I could have the saga there because I just, I'm pissed off about it.

I am trying to figure a way around this. So here's how you get around the bullshittery of Apple Music. You do have to upload every single track in your library or at least the tracks that you want to your phone. I recommend just uploading everything and then dealing with it later.

Once it's up there, it unhooks syncing through Apple Music. So if I like want to download a song that is on Apple Music streaming, I have to go back and I have to quote-unquote re-sync the, you know, all of my devices to use Apple Music again.

Now on the device where I uploaded everything, I can still listen to, you know, the song that shall not be named by Apple. But here's the fuck that part. It's not available elsewhere, right? No, you still can't. No, I can't get on any other of my devices.

Yeah, yep. And I can't, on every other song, I tried this, you can delete it or like remove the download and then re-download it. That song, you cannot do it. It will not let you remove the download. Period.

It's like the U2 album. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The cure is the new U2. So it sticks. It's always there. I re-synced it. But here's the fucking crazy part too. Once I uploaded everything, it had all of the proper cover art.

It was all there. It was great. It looked fine. All my, you know, all the crazy bootlegs I got from you, you know, that gigantic cure library that I got from you ages ago is all there. It works great. As soon as I re-synced to Apple Music, it went and changed all of the cover art.

So now, my Staring at the Sea album has some movie called The Son of Rambo. That is the cover art now for Staring at the Sea. Awesome. It is just such a shit show. You just made me very happy, Jason, because I realized you have my cure library pre-being destroyed by Apple Music.

And I'm going to need you to put that up on the Dropbox for me, because I need that back and organized, because I have slowly been picking at it over 10 years, and I think I've given up on it. You've got it in pristine condition. Well, I don't know how far back it goes, but I will upload everything I've got to you on some secret server somewhere.

Okay, I just got, I got very excited. Everything will get to me except for killing an Arab. Yeah, exactly. I will, you know what, I'll even put it on a USB drive and ship it to you, but it'll cost you two boxes of maple cookies. Fair trade for the entire cure library, all my bootlegs.

Yep. In the news. Apple has finally come to its senses and has decided. Walk it back. Walk it back, exactly. Can we do an Irish exit on this one, please?

Yes, they are going to hold off for now. They are going to delay the scanning of users' photos for kiddie porn. For now. For now. Due to protests from, I don't know, everybody that ever had an iPhone, except like maybe 10 people. Right. If you've got nothing to hide, don't do it up there.

Eric Schmidt put his iPhone up there and said, hey, I'm okay with that. Yeah, so is this expected? Absolutely. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. So no surprise there. One thing that they are going to do is something that I think you and I have been like, why the hell doesn't this exist already?

They're going to add driver's licenses to Apple Wallet. They have made deals with, I guess, Arizona and Georgia to be the first states to adopt the feature with Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah to follow. I almost said you too, because that's stuck in my head right now. So yeah, you'll be able to basically have your driver's license in your Apple Wallet now.

So you could literally just leave the house with your phone, which is cool. I like that. The company says the U.S. Transportation Security Administration will enable certain airport security checkpoints as first locations that will accept IDs on the iPhone or an Apple Watch. Very cool.

Of course, you'll never know which ones do it, and they'll be closed when you have to go to the airport and you only brought your phone. But, you know, that's the way it works. Yeah, exactly. Or you ran out of juice. Yep. So still bring your driver's license with you. Yes. For the time being, do it. But I'm glad that this is actually moving forward.

It's kind of a no-brainer. Brian, isn't this a slippery slope where they're just going to track you everywhere? Oh, wait. They do that already. Never mind. They don't already do that. Let me put my damn driver's license on my phone. It's fine. Speaking of tracking you everywhere, subway passengers in Moscow will now be able to pay for their rides with just their faces.

They don't even need their phones anymore. No, they don't. So you register with the Moscow Subway app. You upload a photo of your face, attach your bank card, and what could possibly go wrong? They have, since 2017, more than 189,000 cameras with facial recognition in Moscow.

You thought London was bad. Holy shit buckets. Holy shit ski. London perverts to be, you know, still a free country, you know, England and all that. Yeah, but I had no idea that the Moscow Metro was so huge. It's like one of the busiest in the world.

Moscow's not a small place. No, I know that. But, you know, I don't know. It just didn't click. Now it does. Vodka recognition. That's what they need. Yes. And Vincent wrote in and said, hello, my pretties. Got some GDPR pennies to drop into your box. I wouldn't mind a teensy bit of that gazillion pounds sterling.

And this is WhatsApp hit by a $225 million fine. And because of WhatsApp's planned appeal in the Irish court system, this will mean that we will see years before any fine is actually paid. So even when they get slapped with a big fine, who the hell freaking knows anybody's going to have to pay anything.

Yep. Yep. So basically what they do is they put that money into another, like, interest-bearing account. They do the appeal and then they just pay the actual fine. Kind of interest accrued, yeah, during the appeal process. So free money, free money. I've heard somebody just bought $225 million in Bitcoin.

In Banksy NFTs. Oh, this one, I was going to put this in more another week, but screw it. Facebook apologizes after AI puts primates label on video of black men. I was confused and I thought I had opened up an old show when I saw this story because I'm sure this has happened before and we've talked about it.

It wasn't Facebook before. Before it was Google. Oh, okay. All right. Yes, I thought it was Google before, but Facebook has called it an unacceptable error. The company has struggled with other issues related to race as well. Some of them not happening from their AI, I'm sure.

I love this. Danny Lever, a Facebook spokeswoman, said in a statement, As we have said, while we have made improvements to our AI, we know it's not perfect and we have more progress to make. We apologize to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations. Well, if you know you have improvements to make, maybe not fucking launch it to the world.

But they move fast and break things. They do. They do. How many more unacceptable errors, Brian, do you think people can tolerate? I think it's a lot of them. I don't see anybody getting off Facebook. Nope. Not at all. Nope. Nope. You should get off your next flight on Virgin Galactic, though, because...

Well, actually, you can't because they're grounded at the moment. Because the FAA said, hey, you guys didn't really stick to the course, did you? Turns out there was a red light warning in the spacecraft. And it alerted the crew to an entry glide cone warning.

Now, it's an interesting article because it talks about, you know, in one of the meetings they had, it's like, well, if you see the red light, you're kind of screwed because... Or the yellow light, you know, instead of before they even read them, because it's like it's too late to correct.

And so the interesting thing about this was, the long and the short of it is, instead of, I don't know, aborting the flight, which they should have done to, I don't know, protect the billionaire on board, they're like, his reputation is more important than the lives of the crew and the people on board.

So let's just push on through. As we have said, while we have made improvements to our AI spaceship navigation system, we know it's not perfect and we have more progress to make. We apologize to anyone who may have almost died. Exactly. Exactly.

Oh, God. Yeah. I, you know, I would like to know the names of those two pilots and make sure that if I ever did go on a Virgin Galactic flight, that they are not my crew. That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. They have an abort button for a reason, guys.

Seriously. Yeah. And this is in sad news. The ISS is cracked and facing irreparable failures, and they could be about to get a lot worse. So apparently the oldest... Cascading system failures? Yeah. The oldest sections of the ISS are, you know, starting to...

Old and, yeah, get wrinkles, I guess, and crack. So they're just, they're keeping an eye on it right now, but it's probably not going to be too long for this world. I mean, it's already going to be past, you know, it's standard operational date from when it was launched, and people keep adding on to it.

I guess you could, you know, have a ship of Theseus thing here where you just keep putting on new segments and detaching the old ones and, you know, deorbiting them. Yeah. But I guess it depends on how important that... But it doesn't seem the money and interest is there. Yeah. Yeah, that's the thing. It's like, hmm, you know, does it really make sense?

Is it like, you know, maybe we should make a new one with new technology? Because it is really old. It's really old. I know a couple billionaires that really like to be in space. That's true. That's true. Just saying. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Virgin ISS.

I think we should get on that. That way we can just keep them up there forever. Right. Oh, and this is, I thought, one of the most important stories of the week. You know, I've been talking to friends recently, and I think I may even mention this on the show. I think Bitcoin is, you know, basically a mental illness because of the things that you have to do to your brain to rationalize how it actually is something that's important.

And same thing with NFTs. It's like, if you have to describe the fundamental foundation of how money works to tell me how your product is cool, something's wrong. And I've seen a lot of people who get into Bitcoin who really have turned into conspiracy theory nuts.

They're much more paranoid because they think the government's going to come after them. And I think it's really funny that, hey, instead of having private transactions like we used to have, let's put everything in public so everybody can see every transaction we've ever done. Because that way, it's anonymous.

You follow me? You follow me? Sure, yeah. I'm crazy. You followed me? I personally store my Bitcoin in a pizza parlor. In the sub-sub-basement. So, you know, I think a lot of the things that we're dealing with on the internet are really fucking up our brains.

And I've said social media, and we've said it, and doctors have said social media is really bad for you. You know, internet addiction is bad for you. So this next story is Gen Z is developing unexplained ticks after going online, and doctors are concerned. Well, I think everybody should be concerned.

This is something where basically young women between the ages of 12 and 25 years old are getting these weird Tourette's-like ticks. And it comes down to having kind of a fundamental underlying mental illness, like, you know, depression or anxiety, coupled with TikTok.

Wow, they couldn't have named that better, then. Exactly. Yeah. And it's really not a good thing. I read the entire article. And now, here's a line from it. What took the pair one step closer to understanding the condition were the tick-like behaviors themselves.

For instance, several people would uncontrollably say the word beans. What the fuck is going on? I don't know, man. I just know that, like, I've been scaling back my social media, and my kid is not fucking getting in the shit, ever.

No, no, no, no, no. You've got to go full Amish on that shit. Even the other night, I, like, somebody sent me a TikTok. I opened it up, I watched it, then I swiped up. That idea. Two hours. Brian, two fucking hours later, I put my phone down.

Beans! Beans! Beans! The only reason I put my phone down is because my arm fell asleep. God. I'm telling you. No, that's bad, man. It's really dangerous stuff. Like, I'm scaling back iPads, I'm scaling back mobile phones.

If the kid wants to do anything, he's watching a goddamn TV, and that's it. Mm-hmm. Because we all know nothing's wrong with us. Beans. Beans. Beans. Good for your heart. The more you eat, the more you fart. The more you fart, the better you feel. So I have beans with every meal. And buy some books. TikTok.

Yeah. And Trin, finally, for news, sent us a YouTube link why you should want driverless cars on roads now, and writes in thoughts. Oh, I have thoughts. It's a sponsored video by Google Waymo showing a car at a carefully controlled circumstance not fucking up, a.k.a. what we usually call an advertisement.

Get the fuck out of here with sending us this shit. I saw it was an 18-minute video, and my thought was, don't send me fucking homework. It's an ad. It even says it. It says it's a sponsored video. It's an ad. That's my thoughts. Fuck those cars. Sorry, Trin.

You can do better.

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Media candy. Brian, I watched a movie called Enemies of the State. I'm intrigued. I looked at the picture and the description. Yes, yes. I was intrigued as well. Then I watched the movie, and now I'm no longer intrigued.

I'm annoyed. I'm very, very annoyed. All right. Off my playlist. Gotcha. Yeah, I would not bother with this movie because there are so many twists and turns with it, and it seems like really poor research on a lot of the filmmakers' parts.

And, yeah, it's not what you think it's going to be. It's about a kid who was in Anonymous and also ran a node for WikiLeaks and got some sensitive data from WikiLeaks. But then after he got the data, his house was raided by the FBI looking for kiddie porn, and he swore that the government up and down was behind it, and they said that he was taken and tortured under drugs and all this other crazy stuff.

And there is actually paperwork that kind of says that the government did actually torture him under Thorazine and different cocktails. Right. But the guy tried to abscond from the U.S., and first he went to the Russian embassy, the Venezuelan embassy. They were like, oh, no, bro, no, bro.

And eventually fled to Canada, where Canada was like, no, eh? And, but you got to, I mean, I don't know. It really annoys me, this movie. It really, really annoys me. By the time of it, my roommate and I look at each other and goes, well, there goes two hours.

We're not getting back. Right. All right. Good to know. And I also watched The Protégé, new movie that's out with Sam Jackson and Michael Keaton. Michael Keaton is like some super kung fu guy in this, which was the hardest part of this movie to believe.

Yeah. Yeah. It was, I mean, it gets a solid meh for me. It was okay until the end. I thought the ending was terrible, but. Right. I mean, it was okay in the middle, but it's out now, so I thought I'd throw in a quick review. Right. And I watched Bitchin', The Sound and Fury of Rick James.

This is on Showtime. It's a documentary. And I found out about it because it turns out somebody I know, Cary Gordy, was Rick James' manager, you know, at the end. And Cary's in it. Cary is hilarious. He's a boolean. He's funny. He's one of the best parts of the documentary.

But I never knew the story of Rick James, like his backstory. Oh, man. It's fascinating, dude. Oh, yeah. I don't know if you know, but I ran his web presence for quite some time. Oh, cool. Very cool. Do you know Cary? I imagine he would be part of that. No, because by the time that I got involved, he had already moved, the estate had moved on, so there was none of the original management.

It was estate management, so, yeah. Got it. Got it. Yeah. That's too bad. Cary's fun. Anyway, this is a fantastic documentary. Highly, highly, highly recommended. Yeah. Rick James is a fascinating dude. From Buffalo. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. No, it's a sad story, but trust me, better than the last two movies I recommended.

I had a damn long shot. And finally, Billions is back, so I'm a happy camper. I am a very happy camper. I'm telling you, Brian, you've got to get on the show. It's so damn good. I know, I know. It's on my list. I definitely got to get on that. Miles wrote in. Hey, guys. Been listening for a little over a year now, and I love your show.

Thank you for being you. You recently talked about the lockdown episode of Grand Tour, and I felt obligated to pause to write this and recommend Clarkson's Farm. I did not expect to enjoy the show at all, but came out loving it. The show is full of heart and often humbling for both Clarkson and the viewer. I recommend you give it a watch if you haven't already.

Take care and stay grumpy. Yeah, a lot of people have told me that Clarkson's Farm is actually much better than the Grand Tour these days. It's actually – it was a very good show. Yeah, except it got canceled. Yeah. Well, you know, that happens to good shows. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, maybe it'll be worth a watch.

Yeah. And Barrett wrote in, great reason to love – or to have Hulu, and this is the Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez show, Only Murders in the Building, which is kind of an intriguing concept. A bunch of murder podcast fans that get rolled up in, like, a real-life mystery.

I've heard it's really good. Yeah, I don't have Hulu anymore because Hulu's not very good. No, it's free with Spotify. Don't have Spotify either. Yes, we've discussed that. It's not very good either. I'm looking forward to the new show, Killing an Arab. Oh, wait.

That'll never get released. That'll be the documentary for grumpy old geeks. To eight years of bitching about not having one here song available on streaming media. One single – everything else is available but that one damn song. Cops and doodads.

Brian, with all of the fires and crap going on in Southern California, my home is very dusty and dirty nowadays just because of all the shit in the air. So, I have doubled down on my cleanliness routine and I have upgraded. I got a Dyson Outsize. Nice. One of those, like, basically battery-powered vacuum cleaners because I love vacuuming.

I actually find it very zen-like to vacuum. I find it therapeutic. Yes, except I hate the cords. I hate the cords. I just want to be able to take it down and do it. So, I dropped way too much money on a fucking vacuum cleaner. Now, the fun part about the Dyson Outsize is it's not here yet.

It was supposed to be here on Saturday. I have gotten no less than 40 emails from Dyson and UPS telling me when my thing is going to arrive. So, five times a day for two different packages because I got one free add-on. So, I doubled the emails because they gave me something free.

And, yeah, it's still not going to get here until tomorrow now. Correct. You guys can stop sending me the emails. I get how-to videos from them now. I get, you know, how to use all of the accessories videos and all this crap. You are going to be very, very happy with this thing.

We have two Dyson cordless facts. We have got an older one, and then we recently got the V8 Animal, which is built specifically for pet owners for hair. But I have a child, and he makes just as much of a mess. It is by far the best vacuum I've ever owned in my entire life.

I freaking love that thing. We also have, and you may want to look into this, we have two of the Dyson air purifiers, which run basically constantly in our, one in our living room and one in our bedroom, and do a great job of cleaning out the air. I've got like seven air purifiers right now, so I think maybe I'm good for that, but maybe I'll upgrade one day.

But I got the V11. I know. I'm looking at that. With all the pet attachments. It is a beast. I have vacuum envy. Brian, I suck more than you for the first time ever. Well, I can't say that. Oh, God.

I've got a new website called theconversation.com. Have you seen the site before? No, I have not. There's an article called, Your smartphone is not making you dumber. Digital tech can enhance our cognitive abilities. Now, I read this article, and I'm like, okay, good. But then I read the comments.

Now, so theconversation.com is articles basically written by, you know, smart people, like actual college professors and things like that. And I'm reading the comments. And the comments are the most civil comments that I've ever read in my life.

People are saying, oh, that's actually a very good point. Oh, I never thought of it that way. You might have something there. Well, no, I think you're wrong. Let me explain why. And I'm just like, I'm like, what? I know. I was reading through them, too. And it's funny, because, like, I think it was either Slate or Salon basically just announced they're shutting down their comments section, and they made, like, this big bullshit excuse, the reality being, you know, spam and people being dicks.

This is the best comments section I've ever seen. I know. These people are nice, smart. Yeah. And it's really cool, too, because they have a whole section for their RSS feeds for their site, so you can get it section by section in your RSS reader, like, you know, people should do. I love this website. I am going to donate to these people, because, damn, they're smart.

Very nice. And then Andy M sent in a link. Trillion frames per second camera takes photos of light moving. I could give a shit about the actual story here. What I have a problem with is clickbaits. M needs to put just anything, anything.

This is a site called Tweaktown that I've never heard of. The story, the story, the story was in 2013. Yes, it was. Now, I looked at the website. The story was published September 1st, 2021. It's an incredibly old story.

The person that published the story, Jack Connor, didn't even start working for Tweaktown until two years ago. Why are you posting a story that came out in 2013? Slow news day. This is useless.

This is the problem. This is why you can't find anything useful on the internet anymore. We're buried under old shit that keeps getting reposted. Yeah. Yeah. Also, it's not a trillion frames per second camera. It can take one trillionth of a second frame, but it cannot do a trillion frames per second, because what it does is it takes a bunch of them over and over and over again.

They have this mirror that they move, and then they piece it together. So what looks like one little light stream going through this bottle is actually not the same light stream going through the bottle. There are a trillion light streams. It's just like, come on, guys. This is bullshittery all the way down.

It really is. It really is. This one kind of bummed me out. Pharrell and Grimes backed music startup. Rolly files for administration and reboots his luminary to refocus on beginner musicians. Rolly makes that little keyboard that I got that took forever to get here.

Yeah. So here's the thing about it. I wish I'd have given you one before you left for your kid, because I never use the damn things. I got two of them. They're sitting in a drawer. I've determined that I'm never going to learn how to play keyboards. I'm too damn old, and I just don't care enough.

I'd rather hire somebody to make music. I think it's more the second one. Yeah. It's more the second one. Yeah. You just don't care enough. No, I don't. So I got two Lumi keyboards sitting in my drawer. But I mean, I got like, what, a year of content making fun of these people out of it. So it was kind of worth the price. We got some good shtick out of it.

Very true. Yeah. At the library. Well, Brian, I've only got one book this week, but I've read it three times. It's really good. It's called Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday.

It's an older book that I forgot that I owned, and I went back and re-listened to it, because his new book is coming out called Courage is Calling, Fortune Favors the Brave. I like Ryan Holiday. I think he's really good at curating old philosophy. I think he's really good at it.

Unlike a lot of these people. This guy reads more than anybody I've ever seen. His newsletter on the books that he reads is fascinating. I never want to read almost any of the books he's read. So it's really nice when he takes them and distills them down into bite-sized nuggets that I can use.

And I really have taken a lot of what is in this book about just turning shit back off, because you know you have to. We talk about it all the time. We just talked about how social media is making people literally insane. So I take a lot more time now, and I enjoy my walks without my headphones.

I actually go out without headphones. Well, I keep them in my pocket in case there's a crazy person. I've got to put them in my ears so they think I'm listening to something. Useful for that, yes. Yeah, yeah, that's just a defense mechanism. Come on. But I don't even listen to that when I'm going, so you can just listen to nature. It's fun. It's nice. And I feel more refreshed than when I listen to an audio book or dare to podcast while I'm walking.

I know I shouldn't be saying that since our numbers are in this shitter, but it's nice to go for a walk sometimes with just nothing or just sit in silence and maybe just read a book and just focus on that. Don't have a thousand inputs. So I'm just saying, it's a good book to kind of get you kicked in the ass for that sort of thing.

Okay. There's another book out that I really want to read. It's called A Book of Secrets, Finding Solace in a Stubborn World by Darren Brown. Sadly, you can only buy it in England. Damn it. I thought, you know, it's digital. Why can't I buy a Kindle version of a book in, oh, middlemen in publishing houses.

Yes, the no longer open and free internet. That's that, you know, the whole point of the internet was to stop having boundaries and gatekeepers. Yeah, the gatekeepers that we thought we got rid of. Yeah, they're back. They're still here. They never left. They were just cowering under a rock. So sometime I'm going to get this new Darren Brown book because his last book, Happiness, was just awesome.

It was just awesome because it's mainly not about happiness. It's about death and how you deal with it. Anyway, if anybody lives in England and wants to send me a copy, please do. This is a bit of an older story.

I meant to do it last week, but we just ran out of time. But I just like it because I think Mandy Patinkin is one of the coolest people in the world, one of the best actors, and just seems to be killing it on social media. We talked about him last time when he was making fun of his wife's inbox and was working through it and deleting it.

This time around, it's a more emotional thing. He is randomly apparently on TikTok Beans. TikToker Amanda Webb Beans, who uses the handle AlaskaWebbBeans, said the film was one of her father's favorites and he had just recently passed away and Mandy Patinkin ended up seeing it and he and his wife reacted to the video and they talked about behind the scenes stories and talked about connecting with loved ones that he's lost and he's followed up with further tweets where he shared grief tips and things like that.

And then he suggested something called the dinner party. It's a place 20 and 30-somethings who have experienced loss can connect. And he just seems to be the coolest dude ever. I like Mandy. It's so funny because you heard so many stories about how horrible he was to work with. And most of the cast and crew that I see other stories about say he was just a doll and a gem to work with.

I don't know who to believe, but the more he talks, the more I believe that he's just a gem and a national treasure. I have been rewatching Dead Like Me, which, you know, he stars in and that really was a good show because I didn't even realize this. Do you know who created Dead Like Me?

Beans. The same guy that created Discovery, surprisingly enough. I can't stop it now. Beans. Space beans. Space beans. Space beans. You know what you're going to have at the dinner party? Beans. Beans. The dinner party, though, sounds like a really cool website.

You know, if you have to deal with things like this is this is the shit that the Internet was made for. Exactly. Yes. You know, where people can get together and talk to each other in a safe space and talk about their grief and their loss and feel better. That's great. That is great. Yeah. But then we have the next story, which is Zoom dysmorphia is following people into the real world.

Beans. Beans. So I everybody has gotten this at some point or another. I mean, if you're on Zoom a lot or doing any kind of video where you're on the screen a lot, it's messes with you. It really does. I mean, I hate I lost 20 pounds just so I could do those damn Twitch videos.

Not because I wanted to be healthy, but because I didn't want to look like a schlub. God forbid you be healthy. I know. Jim, jeepers. Just eat more beans. Eat more beans. So, yeah, this is it's really a thing. It's really a thing. And I'm not surprised at all.

I was pretty lucky throughout the pandemic in that I didn't have to hop on Zoom very often. So that was that was a bonus for me. I don't I don't have the the hatred and the dysmorphia that so many people seem to have for it. Yeah, I didn't get it from Zoom because I RTFM didn't figure out how to turn my own video off, which everybody should do.

It's not that hard. There's a button for it. You don't have to watch yourself the entire video. Although I think some of the people that turn that off are the ones that work on masturbating because they're like, oh, they can't see me. It's like that that monster from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'm blanking on the name right now.

Yeah, let's just call him beans beans. Anyway, yeah, you can turn this stuff off, but you don't want to look at yourself in a camera too long. You can go a little cuckoo. That's why actors go cuckoo and watch their stuff. Now, this last one, I put this in.

I know I put a lot of notes in here for this one, but it's gut instinct could see you fall for COVID misinformation. Now, I would like to point out that the reason I put this in here was because, duh. Just duh.

Duh. Yeah. If you, if, you know. Encouraging people to think twice before sharing might slow down the spread of false claims. Duh. Duh. Beans. Duh. Beans. Thinking might be good for you is what this comes down to.

Maybe you should think. Maybe you should think. Hmm. If only. Too much work. Too much work. Beautiful world that would be. Security? Ha! Dave Bittner is back.

Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast, co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy and surveillance and privacy. And finally, he's the co-host of Recorded Future, where he takes you inside the world of Cyber Threat Intelligence. What up, yo?

Hey. How are you? Peachy keen. Yes. Yeah. Listen, before we dig into things here, I just want to geek out just for a minute and say I finally replaced my 27-inch iMac with a new Mac Mini.

Welcome to 1990. Well, but this is the M1 Mac Mini. Ooh, fancy. And I have to say, it is freaking awesome. Aren't they snappy? It is unbelievably fast. Yeah. The other thing, I just, you know, for shits and giggles, I ran the Blackmagic speed test on the SSD.

Holy crap! It's 3,000 megabytes per second read and write. Not megabits, megabytes. Three gigabytes per second read and write. On the internal built-in hard drive. Like, I mean, I don't think I've seen a single beach ball since I got this thing.

Yeah. It may very well be the best Mac I've ever owned so far. Now, I haven't done anything that's intensive when it comes to the GPU, so I don't have any real way to measure that. But, boy, if this is the entry-level thing, I'm just really looking forward to seeing what's next with the pro versions of these chips.

It's amazing. Yeah, they're pretty incredible. I've got the M1 Air, and the only thing that it's missing are ports. That's really it. If it had more ports, I would use it full-time. Because right now, I'm on a loaded MacBook Pro 16-inch, you know, like $4,000 machine.

And I swear to God, the $1,000 M1 Air is 10 times as fast. It's ridiculous. Yeah. Well, and the other thing is, the fans never spin up. It's silent. It's completely silent. Yep. It's beautiful. Mine doesn't even have a fan, so even if it wanted to, it couldn't.

Right. It'll just melt. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, good stuff. Good stuff. So, anyway, thought I'd share. Well, you know, I think part of this, too, is that it has been so long since I've been excited about a new piece of computing hardware. Yeah.

Like, I really miss that. Like, I was talking to an old buddy of mine I used to work with. Like, when we would get a new, like, I don't know, a Mac 9500 in the shop or something, you know, and everybody would gather around and unbox it and pull out this giant tower and take the side off and put the graphics cards in and load it up with RAM and the new hard drive.

And it's just been a while since there's been anything exciting like that. You know, computers have just gotten so mundane. They just all work. Yes. I mean, the last time I was impressed by anything, I mean, I think it was the first time I got an iPad.

I was like, oh, this is cool. But it's been a long time since I got a cool feeling out of anything. Right. Right. I remember that with the first iPhone because it was like, oh, this is the real internet on a phone. Wow. You know. Yeah.

Well, sort of it was. Sort of. Well, but I mean, compared to everything else. Compared to the Razer, yes, it was definitely a step up. I think I had a color trio before I got the iPhone. So just being able to render a web page and have it look anything remotely close to what the web page was supposed to look like was a revelation.

I remember getting. Pinch and zoom was boner inducing. It was just like, you can do that? I just remember getting my iPhone and being disappointed. What? No snake? Yeah. That was the best game. Come on. You were coming from a BlackBerry, weren't you?

Yeah. I was actually a BlackBerry guy for a while. And I tried some of the, there was a brief period there where there were other players other than like Android or BlackBerry or Apple. And so I played around with some of those for a bit and, you know, then everything else went away and I was like, oh, all right, I guess I'm getting an iPhone.

Yeah. Yeah. I still do miss my Danger Sidekick though. Come on. Those were great. The Sidekicks were pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let's talk about something else. Let's talk about something Star Wars because I saw this and thought you guys might get a kick out of it. The title's a little clickbaity, but a customer discovered their $350 Lego set was missing pieces.

The company's response was brilliant. And so I went through it. I read it. I don't know if the company's response was brilliant or if it's just called good customer service because they're like, oh, you're missing some pieces. Here, have some. Yeah. That's what customer service used to be.

Yeah. Yeah. It's such a low bar now that anything above horrible is just, we're shocked by it. Yeah. Yeah. And he didn't have to shame them on Twitter to get his pieces back. Yeah. I mean, I've got to say, as having a son who is just getting into Lego now, so I'm really entering this world, they are a pretty brilliant company.

I mean, they make it pretty easy to, because they're all, it's, the Legos of these days are not like the Legos we grew up with. I will tell you that. They are very specific pieces. And if you lose one, there is a catalog and you are able to find it and you are able to order it and they cost like five cents, but then they get you for $3 in shipping that five cent piece.

But nevertheless, you get that piece that you have lost, that very specific piece. And they have a brilliant, let's not use brilliant again, because again, it's much like their customer service was just customer service. It wasn't brilliant. Their website is just a website, but the bar again for all these things is so low, it is a brilliant website.

You know, it works and you find what you need and you get it. So that's good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Things working is definitely a, it's a high bar to reach nowadays. It is. It is. It's crazy. Yeah. I do, by the way, have the Mos Eisley Lego set that is mentioned in this.

Of course you do. Of course you do. Yes. We have a land, a land speeder with the Luke. That's the first Star Wars one that he's gotten. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, young Jack was the one who actually assembled this one, but it's, it's a, it's a very nice set.

Really great play value, all kinds of fun little things in it and little Easter eggs and things. So it's one of the, one of the best sets I think I've seen them make in a long time. So I'm curious. I highly recommend it. I'm curious because, you know, I mean, I gave up Legos obviously long before all of these custom sets and specific pieces and things like that, back when you used to have to use your imagination and things like that.

Right. Is it still as fun? Because it seems like it's like all you're doing is just putting the same thing together and not having as much like, well, you don't have to get these crazy custom sets. That's, that's the thing. They, they have like basic builder sets that, that you can still play with as old, but certainly with these custom sets, I mean, if you take them apart and tried to build something else, you wouldn't be able to really make much.

You're, you're, they're more like, they're more like air, you know, model airplanes with these custom sets. Yeah. That's exactly what I was going to say. Okay. It's like model airplanes without the messy glue. Uh, and some of the big sets can be a bit tedious.

Uh, I, a few years ago, I put together the giant Millennium Falcon and, um, that one, what gets tedious is you spend 20 minutes putting together a piece of landing gear and then it says repeat four times, right now, yeah, now you need seven of these.

So here's the next hour and a half of your life, but I find it fairly therapeutic. I just, I sit at the dining room table, I put on a podcast and I just follow the instructions and it's a really nice way to sort of disconnect your mind for a while.

You're using your hands, you're, you know, following instructions. Um, it's just challenging enough. And when you're done, you get something really amazing. Also, I think when you get to these high level sets, they're designed in such a interesting way that throughout the construction of it, I find myself, uh, having little moments of delight where I go, oh, that's so clever.

I know. Like, uh, for example, um, uh, I, for Christmas, uh, I got the, uh, Lego grand piano. Okay. Um, and it's, it's, you know, it's one of the bigger, more complex sets, but it's one to one. Yeah, exactly.

Right. I had to get a bigger house. Yeah. So many black pieces, so many black pieces. Uh, but in the, you know, a piano has the, the mechanical part of the piano is called the action.

And on a grand piano, the action is a whole separate piece that you can slide out of a piano in one piece. And it's built that way, but they actually have a working escapement in the piano's action and the escapement is the part of the piano where when you hit a key, the hammer swings up and hits the strings, but the hammer disconnects itself from the key.

So once that hammer is activated, it's no longer connected to the key and you no longer have an effect on it. That's an important part of how a piano works. They built it into the Lego version. Like that, that sort of attention to detail is just delightful.

So along the way, while you're building it, I, for me, I just, I get these little moments of, boy, these engineers are clever. Yeah. And so it's really gratifying in that way too. I'm constantly surprised as I'm putting them together that I'm like, what am I doing right now? And then when you figure out what it actually is supposed to be that you've just built and how it connects to the other parts, it's quite, it is pretty ingenious, but I will say just as a, as a tip to anybody out there with, with kids around my age, do buy, first off,

your kid is going to want one of these specialty things because they're, they're brilliant at branding and they've made licensing deals with everyone. So you've got Star Wars, you've got Disney, you've got everything. But do buy a regular set as well, because yeah, you don't like, to your point, Jason, these, these custom sets are not really like the, the joy of building something yourself.

So you need, you need kind of both sets. You need the standard ones and then the kid's going to want a branded cool thing. Cool. Yeah. I almost wish I had glued together my Millennium Falcon because it's not like I'm ever going to take it apart. I was going to ask, cause I remember you could buy like the spray glue from when you're done to kind of coat the whole thing so it wouldn't fall apart.

I was going to ask if you actually got that and did that. No, no, I am afraid of dropping it someday or something like that, which actually happened. I had the big X-Wing, the big, you know, I don't know how many hundreds of pieces X-Wing and that was in my office for a while and we moved offices and one of my office mates came to me with a very gloomy look on his face.

It was like, oops. Red five is down. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Porkins, pull up. Yeah. Okay. On Lego Ha this week.

Well, at least we've branched into some kind of new nerddom. Yeah. I mean, it's fun, man. It really is. I'm with Dave. It's very therapeutic. My kid is too young to like follow these instructions and put these things together yet. So I'm the one that has to do it, but I enjoy it. Yeah. It's a good time.

Yep. Excellent. So we've got a little bit of follow-up from the Banksy NFT from last time. And in a strange twist of fate, the perpetrator gave back the $300,000 in the Ethereum. The Banksy hacker was very Banksy.

Yeah. Well, when you look at the entire story- Not a hack. It doesn't really- Well, it was a hack because somebody hacked Banksy's website to put up the NFT page. So there was definitely a hack there and a little bit of fraud. But the thing is, the guy who bought it, his name is Pranksy, and he swears up and down that he had nothing to do with any of this, which I have a hard, hard, hard time believing.

You guys? I don't know. I mean, I was talking- It's funny. I was talking about this. I was on Smashing Security this week, and we were talking about this story. And, you know, Banksy himself is known for being a prankster.

So could Banksy have a hand in this as well? Yes. Yeah. It's just- And nobody knows who Banksy is. So- Well, Brad has a pretty good idea. Is that right? Yeah. I think I do know who it is. So- They certainly got a lot of publicity out of this.

So- Like, Banksy needs more publicity. Come on. Right. Right. Well, and why give the money back also? Is this the kind of thing where the heat was too hot or, you know, because this isn't the first thing we've seen in a couple of the last few weeks where the scammers have given the money back?

Yes. Where cryptocurrency is given back. Yes. Yeah. I don't know. Don't know. Don't know. But it does not have the ring of truth to it, as Judge Judy would say. Yeah, I think that's right. It seems like there's more to this than meets the eye, for sure. Yes. Transformers.

So speaking of something that is more than meets the eye, have you guys seen these new lightning cables? Yes. This is a tale as old as time, right? No. No. No, because there used to be USB plugins that did the same thing as this.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All right. This one's a little bit more complicated. This one actually has Wi-Fi built into it. You can actually exfiltrate data from up to a mile away. The damn thing looks exactly the same as the regular cable, except for the $139 price point.

Right. But have you guys covered this yet, Dave? It's only $10 more than the actual Apple cable. Actually, it's almost cheaper than buying an official Apple cable. I've been buying these on Amazon because the price is right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I have not laid hands on one of these.

I'm certainly aware of them. There's a lot of chatter about them. They are very clever. I understand the use case for this. I understand the security researcher use case for this.

At the same time, there's a part of me that wonders, what are we really making better in the world by having these out there in the world that anybody can buy them? Yeah, but isn't it just a case of if you can build something, someone will? Yes.

You know, credit to traditional retailers for not carrying these things. You kind of have to go to specialty sites for them and all that. And this stuff is going to exist. If it can be built, it will. And that's that, right?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I wish there was. Remember when they had cop stores and you could, you know, they'd have all the cool cop stuff, but to get into, you could go in and look around, but to buy anything, you actually had to show them your real badge and say, I'm actually a cop. You can't buy like half the stuff unless you're an actual cop.

It'd be nice if we had some kind of credentialing system for security researchers that said, okay, you know, show me your little, you know, secret decoder ring that shows me a hacksaw catcher before we can buy one. But there is no such thing as that. But it would be fun if there was.

I would like to see a little utility from someone like Patrick Wardle over at Objective-C that just detects this. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I was, I mean, I'm tempted to get one just to, just to try it. I'm curious just about how it works.

Yeah. You know, seeing the ins and outs of it and just like, you know, kind of taking a look at it and playing around with it and all that sort of stuff. I have no reason to have anything like this. And I do think it's abhorrent and you can, you don't even have to spend more than two seconds thinking about it to realize how easily this can be misused and cause massive problems and marriages and blah, blah, blah, blah.

See, that's the thing. It's like, once you have it, once you have it, how hard is it not to use it? That's the real downside. It's like, well, for some of us, it's pretty easy. Well, speak to yourself. But I think about, you know, we talk about the USB drives being left in the parking lot and people plugging them in.

You know, anybody who's worked in any sort of office knows that if you leave, any sort of cable like this in the lunchroom. It's gone. Somebody's using it. Yeah. It's just gone. And so how easy to place something like this.

Oh, free charging stations. Come on. Yeah. Right, right. Yeah. In an airport. I mean, we just don't think of these things as, we think of these sorts of cables as being benign. And now they're not. They're not. And so, yay. Another reason for anxiety.

Well, another reason to follow pretty basic standard security, which is use your own fucking cables. But again, say you have a spouse that doesn't trust you. That just, you know, you're not looking at your cables all day. They just swap out a cable on you.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it would be interesting to look at, you know, what the, like the SSID is for the Wi-Fi network that comes by default. I'm sure you can change it to something, you know, like AT&T, 2734, QR, FU, you know, which, you know, obviously people would.

But, you know, sometimes people are lazy. So you couldn't be able to find it. Oftentimes. Well, as we've discussed oftentimes in this segment, the people that use these sorts of things tend to be lazy. Right. Again, I'd love to see some sort of automated countermeasures for this, just peace of mind.

But that, of course, that's just cat and mouse. So. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But, yeah, I am tempted. But 140 bucks is a lot. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, why would you spend that money if you don't need something like this? Right.

Brad, it's called shits and giggles. Come on, man. That's what we do. What you need to do is find someone who has one and has a use for them and swap out a regular cable for it. And it'll take them a while before they know that you've swapped it out because it looks identical to the actual Apple cable.

Oh, and imagine trying to go on some kind of like infiltration if you're, you know, doing an onsite red team type of thing and you like drop the cake. Like, you know, it's like one of those old three's company things. You're going in under stealth and you've got your bag of cables and you've got the one cable that is like the secret super cable and you trip and boom, all the cables get all mixed up.

It's like, I could definitely see like, you know, kind of a three's company moment with, do you have the right one? I don't know. And then somebody plugs it in. It's like the wrong one. And then the right one goes to the wrong place. And oh gosh, hilarity ensues. Well, think about how easy it would be to get one of these on the shelf at an Apple store or a Best Buy or a Target or something like that.

I don't just, I mean, yeah, I'm just like, it's so, it would have to obviously be connected. So you're really only going to get what somebody is typing when their phone is connected and charging, right? Right. The USB-C, the USB-C is an interesting one though too, because, you know, if people are charging their keyboards with it or things like that, it is definitely a, you know, an interesting use case for what these things can exfiltrate, but that's kind of why I want to get one to see what you can actually get out of it because most people just plug it in, charge their

phone and then unplug it, you know? Yeah. Yep. But I think a lot of people leave their phones plugged in at their desk at work. That's true. And then that's true. And then they, you know, they type and text and all that sort of stuff and just leave it charged in while they're working. Yep. Because why not?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Well, they'll be sold out soon. Now comes the time where it's just like, hmm, yeah, I'm going to skip it. I'm going to skip it. This last one I thought was pretty interesting. ProtonMail logs activists' IP addresses with authorities after Swiss court order.

Now, ProtonMail has famously said that we are a no-log type of outfit, but the Swiss popos said, we kind of need this one, so you're going to have to. And they're like, do I gotta? They're like, yeah, you gotta. And they're like, well, okay, dad.

If we gotta, we gotta. And they did. And then they got them. They got the bad guys. But everybody's up in arms about this. So ProtonMail is really rapidly trying to tell everybody, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude. It's okay. It's okay. As long as you're not a criminal.

Yeah. And using a highly secure email service. But this is the sort of thing that we've talked about in this segment. They got the court order. So we gotta have some semblance of law in society.

And they went through the proper steps. And I don't have a problem with this. So a couple points here. They didn't get the contents of email messages. They got the, basically, IP addresses. The metadata. Yeah, they got all the metadata.

And I think another interesting wrinkle in this is that I believe the law where they are says that they have to notify the user if they're logging the information. But there is a part of the law that says they can have a delay between when they start logging and when they tell the user.

And in this case, they delayed for, wait for it, eight months. Ooh, that's a delay. Yeah. Yeah. So basically law enforcement convinced them, however, arm twisted, however you want to categorize it, to delay for eight months.

So they were collecting information for eight months, logging. Again, I was talking with someone else about this. And I wonder if this is the sort of thing where you could have a canary in the coal mine kind of page up that I guess it's hard with a specific account.

But we've heard many of these security kind of companies will have a canary in the coal mine page that says, as long as this page is up, we are not sending any information to the FBI. And then when that page goes away, it's like, oh, yeah, right, right.

So they may be forbidden from saying that we're sending information to the FBI, but they're not saying that just this this one page just went away. Right. Hard to do with an individual user, but yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, maybe you don't want to do it with an individual user if the user is breaking the law.

You know, it's like, hey, you're on your own, dude. But yeah, this also comes back to if you are doing nefarious things, you need a VPN. So go to GOG dot show slash VPN and get yours today. Indeed. I'm sure that's the use case that they want you to promote.

Hey, if the checks keep coming, who cares? Yes. I believe the ProtonMail people said also use the Tor browser. That's a great way to keep your IP address from being logged as well. Yes. Only the CIA knows about it then. Not the Swiss authorities.

Yep. Yeah. Evidently, the folks from France are who nabbed him. This was a Europol thing. All right. Yeah. Yeah. All righty, gents. All right, guys. All right. Talk to you next time. Have a good one. I'm going to go buy some Legos.

Yeah. Do it. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Paul and Florian. And thanks to everyone who upped their pledges this week. Thank you. It is much appreciated. Mm-hmm. And over at PayPal, we've got Nikolai, David, Melissa, Nicola, Shaleen, Doug, and Breed.

And over at our tip jar, we've got Mario P., who moved his sub from Patreon to Stripe. Thank you, Mario. We got a $5 sub from John L., another $5 sub from Glenn B., a $10 sub from Linda M., and $10 from Damian B. Thank you guys so much for keeping the lights on.

Thank you. Thank you. And no new iTunes ratings this week. Boo, boo, boo. There's a holiday here, so I can see that. That's true. I can see that. In a sad news, Michael K. Williams is dead at age 54. He was Omar and the Wire, is on every news network known to man.

It was. That's why I was surprised that you actually put it in here, because it has been everywhere. And when I looked at it, I thought I read it as Michelle Williams dead at 54. And I was like, she was 54? No, no, no. She's dead? Yeah. And then I said beans.

The only reason I put him in here is because he was recently in Lovecraft Country, which got canceled, unfortunately. But he was fantastic in it, I thought. And he was great in everything else he was in. He was one of those actors I really, really liked. So it was very sad. Yeah. So yeah, yeah.

I was listening to the Marc Maron interview he did with him earlier this year, and it's just heartbreaking. It's like, oh, man. Bummer. Yeah. Well, there you go. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. I'm Jason DeVillebeau. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoyed the show, visit gog.show slash donate to help keep us the lights on.

Beans. Yeah, I speak good on the internet's beans. 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 521. 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 to send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air, preferably not advertisements for Waymo this time. Much appreciated. 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 beans.

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