530: The Other Shoe

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

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I got a little short bit of follow-up here, Brian, because it always makes me giddy. This is a story over at the New York Times called Tech Can't Fix the Problem of Cars. And it's a long article talking about, yeah, the things that we were promised.

Where's my flying cars? Will probably never come to pass. And one of these guys, Dr. Norton, he doesn't believe it either. And he says, the whole boondoggle depends on us agreeing that high tech is better tech. That just doesn't stand up. This is not only Dr. Norton's view.

Even most driverless car optimists now say the technology won't be ready to hit the roads in large numbers for many more years. Like, say, oh, I don't know, 20? Yep, that's what I'm saying. I mean, we're no doctors. But for about nine years now, we've been telling you it's still 20 years away.

And it is not 11 years away now. It is still 20. Yep. It ain't coming. Give up the ghost. Done. Lame. In the news.

So, Brian, last week, Facebook stunned the world. Mm-hmm. I'm not talking about the meta thing, though. No. That was just like... Nope. Derp. Yep. This one was, they posted a blog post, and they said, an update on our use of face recognition.

And they said, in the coming weeks, meta will shut down the face recognition system on Facebook as part of a company-wide move to limit the use of facial recognition in our products. As part of this change, people who have opted into our face recognition setting will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos, and we will delete the facial recognition template used to identify them.

What did I immediately say at the time, Jason? I said, what's the catch? And I said, where's the other shoe? Look up. Where's the other shoe? Because it's a-coming. It's coming. And it took, what, 24 hours? Roughly.

Maybe 72, 48. Maybe 72, maybe 48. One of those Nick Nolte movies. Yeah, yeah. And, nope, they said, they came out and said, well, we're doing it on Facebook. But everything else is open game. See, when you restructure and you have a company at the top called Meta, and then you have Facebook, and you have Instagram underneath that umbrella, also as companies, the term company becomes fungible.

Yeah. They're saying, yeah, well, you know, that's just Facebook. That's just Facebook. It's ironic that the one with face in the title is the one that will not have facial recognition. Good point. Good point. I figured, you know, for them, they've already got the data. They've got the hookups.

Because what it normally was back in the day was it was a way to create that social graph and link people together. Well, here's the thing. They've got that already now. They've got that social graph. They don't need to keep building that. But they've also got other signals to get it from.

So they don't even have to do the face recognition thing anymore. It's probably expensive to run with all of the crap that's coming at them from the government side of things. You know, chances are that it's going to be just a headache for them. And if there's no value to it, it costs too much money, and it puts them in the crosshairs of the government, it makes sense for them to delete it and come away with a quote-unquote win.

But that win gets completely reversed when the other shoe drops and they come back and say, well, yeah, well, we were just talking about these guys over here. No, these new guys, the new guys can use it all they want. Yes. So shocking. Yeah. Yeah. Immediate backtrack, basically.

There you go. But it's not shocking. That's the shocking part. No. It's totally not shocking. No. And I also have another story about Facebook, which is also not shocking. A new antitrust suit from P-H-H-H-O-T-O, because English, alleges Facebook copied and killed the competition.

So, obviously, this was launched in 2014 and invited users to create and share short GIF-like – I just wanted to say that to piss people off – videos. If that sounds familiar, that's because Boomerang, which was an app made by Instagram and which is now part of Instagram's core app experience.

No, Brian, it's Boomerang. Boomerang. Boomerang. With five Gs. Boomerang. So, this is nothing new. We know that this is Facebook's modus operandi. This is what they do. But the interesting thing about this particular lawsuit is they have Mark Zuckerberg literally on video.

They have saved all of this. On or about August 8th, 2014, Zuckerberg downloaded and installed the app onto his phone, entered the phone number of his device into the photo app, created a personal account, and posted a profile picture of himself, reproduced below in the law documents, to his gnome photo account.

So, they're literally including receipts, including the selfie and video that Mark Zuckerberg took when he was testing the app to then steal it. Us did. I don't know. It's just there. So, yeah, I just thought that was hilarious.

And you can actually follow the link in the show notes, and you can see the video that Zuckerberg did, which just shows how much – he looked creepy back in 2014. He is like – he's metamorphosizing into something. He's eventually just going to turn into a giant roach or something.

I don't know what's going on. His appearance is just changing. It's weird. It's so weird. It's so weird. Yeah, he's turning into data before our very eyes. He really kind of is. He's becoming robotic, and like – his skin is all like – I don't know. So strange.

What a weird man. So strange. There will be conspiracy theories long into the future about him. Crocodile man, crocodile man, living in the Denver airport. Oh, God. So, Elon, back in the news. Back in the news.

Yeah. So Sunday night, I'm just going through, and I kind of caught the Twitter thread as it was happening. And I voted on the poll where he was – should I pay tax? Should I sell my stock? I'm like, sure. Yeah. I'm like, sure. Why not? And I don't know who the 40-some percent of people who said, no, keep it all, bro, are.

But what got me was the one that he sent to Ron Wyden where he says, why does your pee-pee look like you just came? Now, I thought it was a dick thing. I thought he was saying that Ron Wyden had a little pee-pee. But, no, he was talking about his profile picture.

So, I had to roll that one. Well, I mean – We found that out later. To be fair, he's still asking a senator why he has an orgasm face. That's true. That's true. Why are you rocking the O face? Yeah. It's still, you know, a bit fucked up. You think?

Yeah. Brian, do you think that the world's richest man talking about a U.S. sitting senator saying, why does your profile pic look like you just came? You don't think that's fucking inappropriate? I think so. You saw my response, which was just immediately, oh, goddammit, now I have to sell my Tesla stock.

You ain't got to do a goddamn thing. I don't have to, but I'm trying to do this ethical, like, I only want to invest in good people. Oh, shit. I can't invest then, can I? No, you can't invest. You're done. Yeah. Put that shit under your mattress and just, you know, just keep the moths away from it.

It's the best you can do. Yeah, that's about it. So, you know, the news that came out was that, okay, well, he was going to have to do this anyway, which is what I thought because I listened to his interview with Kara Swisher where he said, like, I got till December and I got to get rid of this stuff, you know, and I'm going to have to pay taxes on it.

So this was just kind of a, I thought, a nothing burger. So that was, you know, when I saw it in the news the next day, yeah, I figured it'd get some pop, but everybody was like, oh, my God, blah, blah, blah. And I'm just like, dude, chill. He was going to do it anyway. I thought the pee-pee thing was much worse, but it turns out I was wrong.

So, you know, he's already called people pedophiles before too, so whatever. Yeah. What did he call Scott Galloway this time? Like a nincompoop or something? Something like that. They were in a little Twitter beef too, which was funny, but not when you consider what's at stake here. Yeah.

I just like there's an index out there now that bets against everything that Scott Galloway represents. Anything that he says, bye, they go, nope, nope, here's the index, go the other way. Well, I mean, he's fully transparent about that. He always follows up his recommendations with, what do I know?

I'm usually wrong. Twitter is rolling out a new feature that makes it easier to search a user's tweets, so you can look through Elon Musk's entire catalog of fuck-ups and missteps that don't seem to matter. This has actually been there for quite some time. If you've been a power Twitter user, you knew how to do this sort of thing, but they're just going to make it that much easier.

And of course, they point out it's possible that this feature could make it easier for people to dig up other people's old troublesome tweets. But as always, it's a great social media strategy to not just tweet potentially harmful content in the first place. Also, what have we always told people?

Delete your old tweets. TweetDelete.net is a valuable service. It is a very valuable service. And I posted a couple of weeks ago on the power Twitter search and how to use that. So there was a link to that that you could go check out, but I'm too lazy to go dig it up.

So you can search our show notes for it if you really want it. But it's a whole thing to tell you how to do these power searches that were already there. Right. And then I saw this bit of news. Researchers are working on giving robots social skills. MIT's CSAIL computer science researchers are trying to fix robots by teaching them how to interact with other robots to further their own goals according to a new paper.

This research could lead to improved human-robot interactions in assisted living facilities, for instance, and even help psychologists better measure social interactions between humans. So a big part of the thing here is that they're trying to use robots to figure out why humans do what humans do, to which I say, couldn't we just, I don't know, cut out the robot part of the equation here completely?

Yeah, seriously. Unless you're talking about a very socially aware AIBO. And also, shouldn't we start by working on giving humans social skills again? Because we seem to have lost that in the last decade or so. Well, not even that. The past two years. No, unbelievable.

The past two years, nobody has social skills anymore. I will get to that in media candy. Boy, will I. Okay. Yes. Okay. Good. And Apple has hired Tesla's director of autopilot software in the pretty significant nod to the fact that they are definitely now working on a self-driving car, which will be 20 years away.

Yes, it will be. And finally, in the just, oh my frigging God, I just want to shoot myself. I should have shot myself eight years ago when we first started talking about this news. Uber is considering dispatching yellow taxis in New York City. Yes, the companies that they helped to try to put out of business are now being turned to because nobody wants to drive for Uber anymore.

Chalk this up right next to Amazon opening bookstores. So the theory here is we can't get enough people to drive Ubers in New York City anymore because basically it doesn't pay to do so. So in order to keep our name alive and to keep our key people being able to order Ubers, we're going to back hire the New York cabbies.

Isn't that great? I really want to know. I want to see what's going on inside of the taxi and limo commission right now. I'm very curious. I just want to hear those conversations. They're like, are you serious? I mean, he's like, are you fucking kidding me?

You fucking kidding me? These fucking assholes want to come back in here and send our cars out. Fuck those guys. Reenactment. Thank you. It's like I was there.

Media Candy. In the strangest news of the week, Brian, ABBA has a new record out called Voyages. By all accounts, it's very good. It's an ABBA record. It's an ABBA record.

I stopped listening to ABBA in, I don't know, the 80s. Well, I think that's also the last time they put one out. Yeah. I mean, I liked ABBA back in the day. I mean, if they're on the radio, I won't turn them off generally. But a new ABBA record is not really the thing that I was looking for when I woke up that morning.

And the real problem I have with it is when you go to their Twitter feed, they've got this, you know, like cartoony 3D rendered version of the band in spacesuits. And then if you click through and you see the band as they are now, whoa, that's jarring.

They're not young people. No, they're not. They're not. All right. So on the opposite end of the spectrum, I actually had a bit of a chance to spend some time just with my wife. We dropped our kid off at the grandparents' house and drove down to wine country out here. And we were just listening to some music.

She, you know, as I've mentioned, she works for a label and we were listening to one of the rising stars. Actually, she's a huge star already on the label. Very much on the opposite end of the spectrum. I think she's 19, tops. Olivia Rodrigo and her album Sour, which actually was surprisingly good.

I didn't hate it. There's one song that is just basically a straight up Elastica ripoff. So if you remember that music and enjoyed it fondly, this is pretty much that. Oh, I did. I do like Elastica, yeah. Not bad. Yeah. It's worth a listen if you want to listen to what the kids are listening to these days.

She's kind of a potty-mouthed Taylor Swift. There's a lot of F-bombs. And finally, the Salvation, inspired by the Cranberries for Pieta organization album, is out and available. I listened to all of that this morning. A lot of interesting covers.

For the most part, it just made me want to go listen to the originals because you and I both love the Cranberries and all the songs are phenomenal. The one standout was, not surprisingly, the Sinead O'Connor cover of No Need to Argue, which is one of my favorite of all the Cranberry songs anyways.

And it's a really interesting, faithful take on it. But the difference between the young Dolores O'Reilly singing it and the aged and wisened Sinead O'Connor take on it is stunning. I actually really enjoyed it.

I mean, there's a bit in the original song where Dolores is like, you know, she's singing it. And there's this, like, wistful high note that she, not really a note, just kind of a whisper that she makes. Then it's all, like, you can tell it's, like, full of longing and loss. Sinead is just kind of a guttural moan of, like, fuck this shit.

And it's just awesome. Because it's just, like, you know, it's the 40 years on take on that feeling of when you know a relationship is going to end and there's no point anymore. It's just great. So, yeah. Well, that's good. I will definitely check it out. I didn't realize it was finally out.

I've forgotten about it after we talked about it. It is out on all streaming. Yes. Dexter is back with season nine. It's been a long time for Dexter. You were a Dexter fan, right? Huge fan, yeah. It had good seasons. It had bad seasons. But overall, it was a great show, except for that ending.

Yeah. See, I didn't even mind the ending. I just, I remember season two, the black dude. Surprise, motherfucker. The best line the entirety of season two. Did you watch the new one? I have not. I do not have Showtime currently, so it's take the time to go to Sweden to find it or wait until it all plays out and sign up for Showtime for one month.

Yeah, I just went to Sweden. It was good. Good. It was just like an old Dexter episode. I really enjoyed it. Excellent. Fantastic. There's a little bit of cheesy CG in there. It was fairly cheesy CG, but I've thoroughly enjoyed it and found it a good restart to Dexter.

Excellent. So. I'm excited. Yeah. I, yeah, I had no complaints, you know, because when you, I even, you know, I'm like, oh, this is a little cheesy weird here. And then I've just remembered, I'm like, oh, it's Dexter. Dexter was like that. That's the name of the, I mean, that was the show was like, so. Yeah, no, it's good.

I definitely enjoyed it. And there's a new movie, Finch, over on Apple TV Plus with Tom Hanks, a robot and a dog. Right. Tom Hanks, a robot and a dog walking to the apocalypse. So I can't watch things with dogs if the dogs are going to die.

So I, I generally don't. So I did find a new website called, I mean, it's probably an old website. It's been around forever from the looks of it. It's called does the dog die dot com. Yeah, it's been around forever. This is what the internet was built for, people.

Shit like this. So I went and I looked and, spoiler alert, no, the dog doesn't die. So I did not go back and watch Finch though yet. I have heard nothing but glowing reviews for it. Same here. That's why I wanted to watch it, but I couldn't if the dog was going to die.

I'm in a fragile emotional state thanks to the pandemic. So I need to know that there's good at the end of the rainbow. And I say that even after watching a TV show about a serial killer. Well, let me tell you something else that you should not watch then if you're in the fragile emotional state.

Do not watch the documentary Four Hours at the Capitol on HBO. This documents the Four Hours at the Capitol on January 6th when the insurrectionists invaded the Capitol. And boy, oh boy, I have no hope for humanity anymore.

None. Zero. Zilch. These people were a small subset of the world. Come on. Well, there are fucking a lot of people there, Jason. I don't know if I realized because I think I was in shock at the moment when it was actually happening and watching on CNN and all that sort of stuff.

Boy, this was bad. This documentary shows you how bad. It was really bad. And I'm not sure. I get they were doing a documentary. And I think the thought was if we let some of these insurrectionists talk about the experience and what happened, people will understand that they're crazy.

But the people that like this stuff think they're not crazy and you gave them a lot of time to explain their crazy ideas. And this is almost like I think you're going to recruit more people than than repel people because people are fucking dumb.

It was good. I was riveted. I was terrified. I was deeply saddened by the state of the world right now. That's very well done. So I can recommend it, but not if you're kind of crazy. Don't watch it then. Okay. How long is it?

Hour and a half. No. No. Hour and a half. Yeah. Reader's Digest version of trying to take over the government. Yes. Yes. These people are fucking nuts. Anyways, I watched Star Trek Prodigy Episode 2. This was now with more Janeway and highly enjoyable for that.

Still not appropriate for the age group that we were originally pitched that the show was going to be for. That's all I got to say about that. But I'll continue watching. It's pretty clever. I don't mind it. So we'll see how the first season plays out. And there you go.

It's funny. It's funny. After we talked about this on the show last time, I've had absolutely zero thoughts about going back to watch Episode 2 and zero shits to give about the show. It left no seed of desire to watch another episode.

So I'm going to leave. Definitely leaving that one to you to bear the flag on. Yeah, we'll see how far I get on it. I don't know. You know, I might drop off at some point because it doesn't stick with me. Even Lower Decks, as crappy as the first season was, stuck with me and intrigued me more than Prodigy does.

Mm-hmm. And finally, some major thing, Season 4 teaser has dropped and hints at trouble in California. But more importantly, they've dropped the release date, which will be Summer 2022. So we know it will be coming next year. I'm hoping... It's taken so damn long.

Oh, who knows. I'm hoping that it will be good. I'm also hoping it will be the end. Because the kids are getting older and the charm is wearing off. Yeah, I... You know, when you put this in here, I'm like, do we really need another season? I don't think we needed Season 3.

I'm not sure we needed Season 2. I'm with you on that one, too. Season 1 was pretty damn good. Let's just drop it there. I think it was good as it was, but we're getting 4, so hopefully they don't screw it up.

At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love.

From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.

Ups and doodads! Microsoft's OneDrive app will now stop syncing with Windows 7 and 8 as of March 1st, 2022. That's right. That's it. Okay. You can still use the web to manually transfer files, but that's clearly a hassle if you routinely access cloud files from an older PC.

If you're using Windows 7 or 8, do you even know what the cloud is? That's been a long time ago. How do I get these floppy disks up to the cloud? This is mostly important because how will our nuclear bunker devices update to the cloud anymore? They're still on XP, dude.

They might still be on XP. That's true. And slightly more modern news. Alexa has now pushed a new update, which will allow you to move music amongst different devices with your voice, which is kind of cool. And I tested this out yesterday because my place here is four stories on which three of which we have Echo devices for listening to music.

So I started in my loft and I said, Alexa, pause. I walked down to the next floor and I said, Alexa, resume music here. And it did. And it did it flawlessly, which is kind of cool. I like it. Cool. Yep. All right. I found one the other day on my Siri because I was doing something in the kitchen and I was listening to a podcast.

Something interrupted it and it stopped the playback. So I said, hey, S lady, resume audio. And it worked. I'm like, holy shit. I just made that one up and it worked. It started playing for my podcast. The resume is definitely hit or miss on Alexa. I don't know why.

Like, it's just weird. Sometimes it works and sometimes it's like, it just talks to you. Like, I have no idea what you're fucking talking about. I'm like the music that we pause, play it again, start, do whatever, do not understand. Yeah. That one upstairs.

She's a bitch. I'm not going to listen to anything. She says that one, that one downstairs. She's really nice though. I'll talk to her all day long. You want, she wants me to play something for you. I'll play it. But that one upstairs. Sounds like you're slipping into New York cabbie mode again. I'm going back into, I was sorry. I was, I was trying to be the, the, the crazy, uh, New York Alexa housewife anyway.

So I got the, uh, the USB-C charger anchor nano to 65 watt GAN to PPS fast charger adapter foldable compact charger for Mac book pro slash air galaxy S 20 S 10 gas Dell XPS 13 common note 20 slash 10 plus iPhone 12 pro mini iPad pro pixel and more.

Why does your PPS look like it just came? Uh, it's 55 bucks. These are little tiny bricks that, uh, anchor puts out with a USB-C connector. I've got two of the previous gen on them and they're fantastic.

They, the, that GAN two crap that they have inside of it, like pushes as much juice as the device can take. Nice. It doesn't overload it, but it's a super fast charge on it. And this one is huge. So the brick isn't huge, but it'll do 65 Watts on this thing. So you can, you know, really power up a laptop pretty quick on it.

So I'm kind of, kind of happy about that instead of, you know, if I go anywhere, I can put it in my bag and it's a lot smaller. It's great. You have so many travel devices. I know it's, I go to all these places in my head and my bags are packed, but just can't get out the fucking door.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and I told you, I, I signed up for Grammarly, Grammarly for the year and I paid for it and they, uh, they rolled out a bunch of new stuff for the iPhone and iPad users. So their app works across both of those now, which is fantastic because, um, the inside of the Grammarly editor, it actually syncs to the cloud and probably works on windows seven and eight too, maybe, I don't know, but, uh, it's great.

Cause I can be working on a piece in, uh, on my Mac. And then if I'm, you know, want to keep going or add some notes in on the phone or the iPad, it's just, it's there and ready to go. And, uh, you have a keyboard too, that's built in that you can switch to on iOS and it will give you grammar and spelling and, you know, all the, all those instructions along the way.

It is pretty cool. Nice. And one of the, one of the neat things I found in, in the Grammarly editor on the desktop, there's like a plagiarism button. Nice. It's like, really? So you click that and it'll go scour the web and compare your article to other articles out there.

And it will tell you how much of your article is like somebody else's article. Is it trying to stop you from plagiarizing or helping you to plagiarize? A bit of both. You know, you could kind of use it either way. You really could. I'm like, I'm kind of stuck. What other articles are like this one that I can steal from?

Where's a good paragraph I could pull from somewhere else? And hopefully no one will notice. Yeah. The most I've hit so far is 10% when I, when I'm writing the, the Pivoteer news. Damn it. I'm looking for 90. Find me something better. I know. I mean, the gamer in me is like, I got to get my score up, man.

I'm never going to get on the boards like this. But yeah, I, I'm in love with Grammarly so far. It, it has turned out to be just such a time saver and I just look smarter. It's great. At the library.

I read the book range. Why generalists triumph in a specialized world by David Epstein. And, uh, I am a generalist. So I, I love books about generalists in general, but, uh, and this book had, it was good for the first half.

I could not tell you what was in the second half. I just zoned out. And haven't you found that case studies and things like that? Well, that, that's the format of these kinds of books generally, isn't it? Like they get the meat of the idea out in the first half. And then the second half is just like supporting arguments about it.

And it's just like, I got it already. I know it's crazy. Yeah. All of these books, you know, all of these types of books can be, you know, 30 to 60 pages. Get the point across and say, you know, Hey, we did the research. It's all in the bibliography. Go look it up if you want to, but go about the rest of your day.

You don't have to read the rest of this shit. We told you everything that was important already. What was that stupid service that like advertised on every podcast in the world, except for ours that was supposed to do basically like the CliffsNotes of books for smart people and the smartest people in the world use Blinkist. Blinkist.

That's the one. These books were made for Blinkist. Yeah. I've even thought about signing up for Blinkist for just for these. Yeah. You know, when these come across, I'm like, okay, let me get the CliffsNotes on these and just go with that. Because it was not worth like a 14 hour read for, you know, two hours of content.

But, uh, and I did pick up this set of books because I have noticed in my, everybody I know who I've been interacting with in person, um, our vocabularies have gone to shit in the past two years. Like, I don't know about you up there in the great white North, but I have a problem with my roommate has a problem with it.

A bunch of other people that we were hanging out with this weekend, they're all having problems with it. And some other friends, same thing. You can't think of the words that you want to think of, even though they're basic words that you normally know. You, you want to know, uh, uh, an ironclad way around this and it has served me very well for the last, uh, two years or so.

Have a young child who asks you what everything means. And then you have to become a thesaurus because they're like, well, how do I explain this? And you just need all the other words and then you have to work through it. And, uh, yeah, just having a kid who's learning language is, is basically bulletproof for this sort of stuff.

Not recommended if you don't want a child. Yeah, I think I'll pass. Yeah, I'll pass. I went out and bought some books. I bought the, uh, the Merriam-Webster's Everyday Language Reference Set. It comes with a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a vocab, um, expander. Right. And it's not called a vocab expander, but I forgot the fucking word that it is.

So, um, it's great. They're paperbacks. I love diction, I love, uh, paper dictionaries because I can just flip through them and just, you just read words when you're bored and, you know, just kind of stimulate your brain a little bit. But it has been a problem. Um, I mean, it's certainly, I'm not going to get a kid.

It's certainly been heightened during the pandemic, but I, again, blame social media and texting. This is a huge problem for language. I don't blame social media and texting. I blame binge-watching Netflix and not speaking as much. I mean, how much TV have we watched during this damn thing? A lot. A lot.

Yeah. And we're not having water cooler discussions about it either. It's just like, watch it. Okay, I'm going to bed. Actually. Wake up. I'm having those again, which is weird. And I was actually thinking about this, and I know, you know, maybe next week we can do this because we devoted an awful lot of time when we were first getting into the pandemic about work from home because you and I are both experienced with work from home.

Um, people are starting to go back. I'm going back to an office. So I, I was like, why haven't we talked about that? And then I realized, oh, you're not going back to an office. That's why we haven't talked about it. There's no commonality here. Yeah. And, uh, if I were a betting man, I'd say you'll probably never set foot in an office again until you retire.

So, uh, but maybe I'll talk about it a little bit because a lot of people are going through that right now. I'll put something together for next week. Give us, give us your tips and tricks, Obi-Wan. All right. I will think about that. We could use it. I know, I know, uh, Bittner's back in the office, but he is the only one. Well, he's, he, he never stopped going.

That's why we got some very amusing videos in the early pandemic. Yes. Yeah. And, uh, get to see Dave in a robe and his liquor cabinet quite often. So yeah, yeah. That'd be cool. Yeah. We'll open up the show next week with some of that. Yeah.

Security. We are here today with Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast, co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy and surveillance and privacy.

And finally, he's the co-host of Recorded Future, where he takes you inside the world of cyber threat intelligence. Welcome to the show, Dave. Hello, gents. Welcome. Or welcome. No, not, that's what you said. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next week. Yeah. Uh, no, good to be back.

That's what I meant to say. Good to be back. Thank you for having me. There you go. You got the host gene built in. Yeah. Welcome to my show. Hey, just reach into my grab bag of canned responses and, uh, see what comes out. It's like rolling the dice. Yep. Absolutely. Uh, listen, I wanted to kick things off this week with another, uh, fun YouTube video.

Um, this is called Why Rollerblading Died. And continuing our conversation. Bites the tongue. Bites the tongue. Our friendly little, uh, rivalry here between rollerblading and skateboarding. And this is a video from a guy who by all sounds of it is a Brit, which I think is interesting that he's commenting on U.S. pop culture, which presumably he was not a part of, but that's okay.

Never, never kept a YouTuber from commenting on something. Um, but, uh, I thought it was an interesting analysis of sort of the difference between the origin stories of rollerblading versus skateboarding and the culture behind them and the rise and fall of, of both of them.

Um, and, uh, I, I wanted to know what you guys thought about it. I have not had a chance to watch it because I think you just put this in here this morning, didn't you? I did. I did. Yeah. All right. Well, a couple, I, I, then I will proceed and the advantage is mine.

Okay. Uh, next week. Follow up with your follow up on the follow up. Right. There we go. Uh, you know, I, the, the, his thesis is that when rollerblading rose to popularity, it rose on a wave of eighties optimism and glam with all of the neon colors and all that sort of thing.

And, uh, skateboarding was much more grungy and, you know, loose fitting clothes and, um, you know, all, all of that skateboard culture kind of stuff. And so that was the origin of the, um, well, uh, yeah. Okay. Long-term certainly.

But in terms of like fad pop culture, you know, rollerblading had its meteoric rise and then it's, it's precipitous fall. Uh, I, I, I don't know that this guy has his timeline exactly right.

And that's what mostly what I'm interested in your take on Jason. When you get a chance to watch this, it seems as though like to me, skateboarding has been around a lot longer. It's been a lot more ubiquitous. It has what I think a much deeper culture. Um, and this guy, I think it's some of the timing wrong about when things happened, particularly on the skateboarding side of things, but you're a lot deeper into that world than I am.

So I'm, I'm curious, uh, for your perspective. So let's revisit that next week and maybe by then our listeners will have a chance to watch as well and they can provide their opinions also. Yes. Uh, you can hit, hit us up over on, uh, gog.show slash discord.

If you want to throw us some, uh, some stuff about this one, the easiest place to get ahold of us, um, but I will definitely check it out. I do know my skateboarding history fairly well. So it is a, a long, rich history. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's some oversimplification. Starting with the Egyptians.

Okay. Fair enough. We lost Brian. You bastards. Brian hasn't been saying much. Oh. I'm back. You can hear me. Yeah. I don't know what, what the fuck happened.

My mic wasn't working at all. Like you guys obviously couldn't hear me. I was making a bunch of snide jokes about being a cyclist and, uh, yeah. It was comedy gold. It was comedy gold and you missed all of it. Uh, yeah. So sorry about that guys.

So then I quit out the window and I came back and here I am. So. All right. All right. Podcasting at its finest. Yes. Isn't it great? A little bit of follow-up. We talked a bit about, uh, Apple's getting bricked, uh, when they did upgrades and apparently the, uh, macOS Monterey flaw has been bricking some T2 Macs.

So, you know, Terminator 2 and that's the deal. The T2 chip exists in most Macs released between 2018 and 2020. Uh, Apple is not saying which systems are most likely to be affected. However, they say only a very small number of users ran into the problem. Uh, they are coming out. They always say that.

Yeah. They do always say that. And they say, if you've ran into trouble, please contact Apple technical support. It's not clear if you'll have to send in your Mac for service, but it's safe to presume this will sour your upgrade experience as anytime a computer gets bricked, it tends to do. Yeah, it's, it's not usually a positive thing.

Um, yeah, I will say that my coworker whose machine got bricked and it was an Intel MacBook Pro, uh, they were able to get it back. They, um, they ran a firmware update on it and amazingly, as soon as the firmware update completed, uh, it resumed the installation of Monterey, like where it left off, which is strange.

Yeah, exactly. Very strange. It makes, makes no sense. In the meantime, he'd gone out and bought a new M1 Mac Pro or Mac MacBook Pro. So took advantage of that situation. Right. Mission accomplished. Right. Exactly. So now I'm, I'm frantically Googling how to brick my MacBook Pro.

Yes. So, um, I will say I saw some other folks commenting that, um, this updated version, the, the one that is supposed to fix this problem has introduced a problem of being able to format external hard drives using Apple's new file system.

So if that's something important to you, be wary that evidently you can't do that as a bug. Oh, all right. Okay. I, uh, I actually upgraded my, uh, Intel, uh, Mac Mac mini yesterday. Ah. That's what it was. It was Mac mini.

I don't know if those have the T2 chips in them, but, uh, I thought the T2 kind of came around with the, uh, um, fingerprint scanners, but I would be wrong. Yeah. They play a big part of that. I mean, it's the whole secure enclave thing, but you're, yeah. Yeah. I have an Intel Mac mini at home.

I'm curious. I don't know. Good question. Yeah. It took about an hour. Okay. So it's, it was one of the, the last Intel ones. It might've been the last Intel one. It was loaded with 64 gig of RAM. Wow. Like I said, it took about an hour. Yeah. Yeah. Nice little machine. I love that thing.

Yeah. They are. They are nice. The graphics cards were better. That was the only, the only bummer. Cause I was running it for, um, uh, Twitch. My whole video set up, my three camera video set up with my black magic and all that stuff and, um, OBS. And it was having a problem.

It was definitely struggling. Yeah. That was definitely the weak spot on the Mac, the Intel Mac minis. Anyway, I guess the new ones, the M ones don't have that trouble. Yeah. My M one so far on my 14 inch is still great. Yeah. So good. Get Googling, Dave, get to Googling.

And, uh, Thomas wrote in, he says, hi guys. I've heard Dave mentioned iOS and mobile anti-tracking solutions. And even you guys throwing around the idea of building a pie hole solution as a on a raspberry pie as a time, poor father of two young children. I found an excellent solution for blocking trackers across my family devices and home network.

I've been using next DNS now for several years. It's a cloud SAS version of pie hole and simply blocks DNS requests from your device or router. And it's great for smart TVs. You can use for content filtering as well. No need to reroute traffic via VPN and it supports DNS over HTTPS. Two for extra privacy.

He also said, clear your DNS cache and, uh, gave us the fuck HBO.com URL that we talked about last week, which now points to our show. So there goes that deal. I was wondering about that. Cause I clicked through on the fuck HBO link and it just went to grumpy old geek.

So I figured there has to be a story here. Uh, did you guys talk about this last week and I missed it? Yeah. Yeah. I think I found it in an old, uh, uh, rant that I did about Deadwood when they canceled Deadwood. And I, I think in the old days I owned fuck HBO.com. Oh, okay. I put it out there that it was available now and, uh, Thomas, uh, took it and ran with it.

So we'll get the heat and, uh, you'll get the traffic. Yeah. There you go. Uh, I took a quick look at this next DNS thing. It looks interesting. I'm going to look into it. I will note that, um, uh, if you search around, there are people who out of the goodness of their hearts have put web accessible versions of pie holes out there.

Of course, you use it at your own risk and who knows what the security implications are and all that kind of stuff. But, um, there are people doing that, uh, who seem to be doing it, trying to do it for the good of the community. But, uh, you know, anything that's free is suspect, of course. So this is a reasonably priced product.

Uh, I'm going to check it out. So thank you, Thomas. And as I discussed at the time, I brought this up with my wife and my wife was horrified that she would not see her ads anymore and said, under no circumstances should you install any of this. I like my ads. Okay. Can't win.

Just can't win, man. You can't win. She doesn't have to use that DN. I mean, you just put, yeah, just use it on a device. Yeah, but then I, then I really start to veer into full-time IT for the house and I just can't be bothered. Gotcha. Yeah. Then, then the next time anything doesn't load, it's just like, did your ad thing screw up the house?

Yes, exactly. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Yeah. I've had that conversation in my house. It's the first thing that comes to you with a booming voice. What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? I don't know. What did I do?

What did you do? My internet's not working. What did you do? Yes. I was messing with that. Yes. So in the interest of family harmony, I just don't do anything. And, you know, I just use ad blockers on my personal system and that takes care of everything.

Yep. Yep. Happy ads. Happy marriage. There you go. I got this one from Mike Swannigan this morning. He said, there may be a steep privacy cost if you park at this Trader Joe's. And it's the Trader Joe's in Hollywood. And I was looking at the article and I was going to summarize it here in the notes, but it is such a shit show that we have to just kind of – I got to run through this here.

So what it is is the landlord that owns the building where the Trader Joe's in Hollywood is, which I've been to many times, a fine Trader Joe's. Everybody there is nice. But as it is a Trader Joe's, parking there is stupid. No matter what Trader Joe's you go to in the world, parking is stupid.

Yes. That is true. Even the Trader Joe's here in Maryland, it is the same. Yeah. I don't know what it is. It's just stupid. So they have a service that runs the parking garage there. It's a Venice-based company called Metropolis Technologies.

And what they have done is they have revamped the technology behind parking because, of course, that's what we needed. Because it needs to be disrupted, yes. Yeah, it did. It did. So somebody pulled in and said, I'm sorry, sir, but you have to download the app before you can park here.

And the person was like, no, I don't think so. Because he's tired of giving up all of his shit. And he was very smart to do that. Because if you go through the Metropolis privacy policy, basically they say, we can track everything that you've ever done, even in the past.

And we can do what we want to with it. And it says, even your browsing activity may be tracked across different websites and different devices or app. For example, we may attempt to match your browsing activity on your mobile device with your browsing activity on your laptop. Because I got a fucking parking space.

Right. Thanks. Now, I'm going to go ahead and assume that this is just boilerplate legal, that they couldn't be bothered to match to their own systems. And they're not actually doing any of this. It's just somebody said, hey, we have to have some legal here. So let's throw it all in. I agree with that.

And I will add that I think it may also be in there because I suspect, like most companies, most startups these days, their ultimate goal is to have someone buy them. So by having that in the privacy policy, it makes it potentially more valuable for whoever purchases them.

Yes. Because, look, we have data, too. We've never done anything with it, but it can be yours for a shiny Bitcoin. I like this quote, and by like, I mean hate, from Alex Israel, who is Metropolis's chief executive. He says in this article, it says he posted online in February that parking represents the last bastion of non-institutionalized, underdeveloped, underutilized, and under-monetized real estate in the U.S.

Well, Yahoo. Right. I don't know about you, but every parking spot I've ever been in in Los Angeles has definitely been monetized. Yeah. Yeah. And then some.

Yes. And then some. So, yeah, just beware of the Metropolis if you run across them is all I'm saying. Fair enough. What happens if you don't have a smartphone? Are you not – you can't park there? You can – no, you can go to the kiosk and enter your license plate information and some other personal information about your, you know, your credit card and all that good stuff.

Oh, boy. And use a kiosk to pay for it, but you still have to put in your license plate information. Right. Which, right there, I'm like, okay. Like, even when I go to – when I used to go down to Santa Monica and see Brian, you would go to the kiosk, but you would give them money. They would give you a little piece of paper that you would then put in your car so when somebody walked by they would say, oh, he paid, or oh, he didn't pay, and then either go about their merry way or give you a ticket.

Yes. That's the extent of it. They didn't need my license plate information or anything else, and they used my credit card just fine. I don't have any problem with them making this sort of thing optional to make it faster to get in and out, but I think you should still have the option of paying with money.

Yeah, and that's how they run the public parking spots here in Toronto. The city has what they call – colloquially are called green pea parkings because there's a big green pea sign, and the city has an app, and you can use that to pay for your parking. Or there are the convenient little stalls over there where you can use real cash or a credit card and get a ticket.

Like, doing both is fine. Don't take all my datas. See, if it's the city running it, the government running it, I'm surprisingly more apt to get the app. You know, they're incompetent, and nothing's going to happen with that data. Yeah, that's true. But they do have rules.

They do have rules that they have to follow. Yes. And selling your data to the next town over so they can get ready when you're coming to town is not part of their purview. Yes. Sounds more like a Shelbyville idea. Man, so you guys covered the Robin Hood hack over on the Cyber Wire, Dave?

We breezed by it, yeah. I mean – Yeah, kind of a little thing, a little tempest in a teapot. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of personal information. Nobody – as this article points out, nobody really lost any money. But a big data breach, but mostly just names and that sort of thing.

Stuff everybody already has, anyway. Yeah, and I hate to be that lackadaisical about it, but that's kind of where we are. It really is. We've been talking about this for almost nine years. Trust me, we are lackadaisical now. Yeah. I mean, I remember when we used to get breach fatigue because we were so upset by hearing every week there's another breach.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Now it's just like, eh, what'd they get? Mm-hmm. Okay. They got passwords? Okay. Whatever. Yep. Unless I get something from have I been pwned, I just don't care anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When was the last time you guys got one of those?

I think I got one like two weeks ago. It's been a while. No, I haven't gotten one in quite some time. But I did some real due diligence a while back and used the convenient feature in 1Password that lets you know when you're using easy passwords or you haven't changed one in a long time.

Or you're using duplicate passwords and I just spent an afternoon, a stunning, wonderful afternoon going through and changing passwords everywhere. Boy, oh, boy, what fun it was. Right. I've done that, too. Yes. It's good when there's just nothing on TV.

You know? Yeah. The weather sucks. You can't go for a walk or a bike ride. There's nothing on TV. Guess I'll change my passwords. Yeah. But because of that, I really haven't had any notifications in quite some time. Yeah. I did the same thing, just allowed my password manager to let me know when it thought I should change a password.

And when it prompted me to do so, I did so. And so that's my situation. You let your password manager take you on a guided tour of the internet for an afternoon. That's right. Random strings of characters. Yeah. I wish I would go through and find the websites that are dead and just get rid of those logins.

That would be a nice feature because I've got like 1,700 logins in my 1Password account. And I'm sure like 700 of them are dead. Wow. That's a lot. I get around. Evidently. Jason signs up for all this new shit.

That's pretty much it. Yeah. Right. Got to get that username on Ello first day. Oh, then I got to get all 10 of the other ones that I need. Glad those days are over. Nobody cares anymore. Mm-hmm. Ready, shoot, aim. So Google is, I got this one and I'm just like, oh no, this saddens me.

Google wants every account to use 2FAs and they're going to start auto-enrolling users. Now, this makes me sad because I help a lot of people that have Google Apps accounts and they can barely remember their own password. Yeah. Let alone the switch over to 2FA for their accounts.

Oh no, I just do not look forward to it at all. Yeah. I mean, it's like, you know, I didn't sign up for this shit, Google. You know, it's already a pain in the ass. But the trick here is, though, they're only going to do it if you have a recovery phone number or a backup email attached to the account.

So you can get rid of those, make your account less secure to avoid making it more secure. Wow. I might have to do that. I'm telling you. At least for some people in my life who I do not want to do IT for. Yes. Mm-hmm.

Yep. I mean, talk about the law of unintended consequences coming home to roost. Yeah. But I mean, overall, this is a good thing and we need to do this. And, you know, they're, I mean, Microsoft is going in the other direction of pushing away from passwords altogether.

Oh, don't even get me started on Microsoft. This week, I had to. I get so many phone calls from Microsoft. I think we just did. God. Oh. I get more phone calls from Microsoft than I now get from car warranty places. That's where I'm at.

Yes. Well, because I'm in all Microsoft's shop at my new job and I'm switching back and forth between my Mac and my work laptop, which is a PC, and I'm going in and out of different, you know, I'm at my home network and then I'm on my home US VPN network and then I'm in the office network.

And Microsoft does not like any of those things, and it's always phone calls to verify. Oh, really? I've never gotten a phone call to verify. I wish I'd have gotten a phone call to verify because I'm trying to log into one thing. Then it's like, oh, you need to change your password, which I'm like, oh, no, no, no, no.

Please, dear God, no. The worst thing is having to change your Microsoft password. And they're like, okay, well, you can use Authenticator for this. I'm like, oh, no, no, no. Please not Authenticator. Can I just put in my username and password? An hour later, I just gave up. My password has been changed four times. I don't know what it is.

I couldn't get into what I needed to do. My Xbox is now just a nice shiny white brick sitting there that I can't use. I just hate everything about Microsoft's user authentication policies. They're just garbage. That's me with Discord, and I ran into it again this week.

There was something else I tried to get into Discord for, and it just threw up all these stupid roadblocks. So I was like, threw my hands up and said, okay, that's fine. I don't need you. It's fine. It's fine. It's just a bunch of furry memes you've been tagged on, Dave.

Don't worry about it. Yeah, that's it. Oh, well, now I'm freshly motivated. I was going to say, now we might actually put in the time. Blizzard is the same way with battle.net. It's impossible. If you haven't logged in in a while and you come back, use your same username, password, same machine even.

They're like, oh, no, you're being hacked. We're locking everything down. We're sending the teams to your house. Forget it, man. No, you can't play StarCraft today. Uh-uh. Which is the way it – I just wanted to update it because I've got to play in two weeks, and I know it takes that long. Yeah, I don't know what's going on with these people.

Yeah. Overall, though, I think it's good to make multi-factor the default. Mm-hmm. When it works. And I think Google's works pretty well. Yeah, I guess out of all of them, that's the one I've had the least problems with.

Yeah, I mean, we're mostly a Google shop here and, you know, where we use hardware keys and it rarely pesters me for it. And when it does, it's not that big a deal. I have the hardware key on my key chain, so it's usually always with me.

How many Gmail accounts do you run in parallel? I don't know, four or five, something like that. Okay. Okay, so it's not just one. Okay, because I've got five accounts that I'm going back and forth with all day. Yeah.

So hopefully that won't be an issue. But it's not my accounts. I can handle it. It's the other people in the family. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah, I do. I know exactly what you're talking about. Then that is the problem. Yep. No doubt about it. Yep.

Oh, well. I wonder if I can just give another 20 bucks a month to just not do it. I'm going to pay you not to use my service. Yeah. Can you just downgrade me from your fancy pants stuff just so I can not have to deal with this?

It's worth $150 for me. I'll give you $150 a month. Just leave them the hell alone, please. If they get hacked, fuck it. I don't care. You might as well just buy some insurance. You know, just buy some hacker insurance against being hacked.

So when it happens, and it will, you're ready to go. And it will. Mm-hmm. All right. Well, that's all we got this week, guys. All right. All right. I'll see you next time. I'm looking forward to talking about why rollerblading died. I guess I'm going to have to watch that damn video. I'm looking forward to it as well.

Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got James, Jonathan, Curtis, and Robert. And Robert sent us a lovely note that we forgot to talk to with Dave about. So we're going to move that to next week, and we'll talk about Mac software replication and things like that.

But thank you very much, Robert. Yes. Appreciate it. Thank you. And over at PayPal, David, Breed, Mark, Ralph, and Jens all sent us some cash. Thank you all so much. And over at Stripe, Linda M., Glenn B., Alden R., Andrew S., and Jeff R. also threw us some bones.

Thank you very much, folks. Thank you. And we have a new five-star iTunes review from Eric Judd in Canada. Weekly Essential. I saved this podcast from my weekend commute to Ottawa. It makes the one-hour drive fly by. I love these guys. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

And that's all I got. So until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy the show, visit gog.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on, and we'll love you forever. You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies. It's easy and absolutely free.

Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 530. From there, you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as links to our swag and Discord channel. If you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans, you can also head over to gog.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash review and toss us a snarky review and preferably five stars. Stay grumpy.

At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new. Every day. Start with today's special value. Then, explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love.

From beauty and fashion, to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.