541: Apologetic Beavers

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. Caught this one over on our Discord channel, Brian, and it gave me a little tickle. It's called the Crypto Miner Tycoon Simulator Trailer. Right. It's a trailer for an actual simulator that is listed on Steam. So it looks like it's an actual game. At first, I thought this might be just, you know, somebody playing graphic designer having some fun, but it looks like it might be an actual game where you get to play a Crypto Miner Tycoon.

Okay. So if you come in rich, you stay rich. And if you come in poor, you end up even poorer. Or maybe if you keep playing long enough, everybody ends at zero. It's basically an entropy simulation. It's a completely new definition of zero-sum game. Yes.

Yeah. So I'm thinking, I'm watching this thing go, and then it just made me think of Ender's Game. I'm like, ooh, maybe the designers of this game were just like, you know, using humans as some way to program their AI to like actually get better crypto out of the miners.

I don't know. I was just thinking out loud. All right. Well, not bad. A little more NFT news, of course. I mean, God, we try to get away from this, but it's just everywhere. And I don't know why we're still yelling about it. Everybody that listens to us understands our position on it. For the slow people in the back, Cent, which is the U.S.-based platform, which got some infamy for selling an NFT of Jack Dorsey's first tweet for $2.9 million,

has halted most transactions because people were selling tokens of content that did not belong to them, its founder said, calling this a fundamental problem in the fast-growing digital assets market. Yes, somebody who started one of these exchanges, runs an exchange, is basically making a living doing this, is flat out coming out and saying, this is all bullshit and there are fundamental problems with it that we cannot solve.

There you go. Yep. He highlighted three main problems. People selling unauthorized copies of other NFTs, people making NFTs of content which does not belong to them, and people selling sets of NFTs which resemble a security. He said these issues are rampant with users minting and minting and minting counterfeit digital assets.

We can try to police it, but it's like a game of whack-a-mole. Maybe you just get out of the business then because it's obviously not good. I think this is a pretty fundamental problem with Web 3, he concludes. Yes. Yes. Since nobody really still knows what Web 3 is besides, you know, the...

A grift. Yeah, it's some kind of massive grift, but we'll figure out what that is as time goes on. We'll figure it out. You know, we just jump off the cliff, Brian. We're going to build a plane as we plummet to the air. Even though we know there are fundamental problems with our plane design, we're doing it anyways. Are these blueprints to a submarine?

There's no wings. Wait, there's one. We stole it. In the news. Guess who's back? I'm not referring to the Super Bowl halftime show.

Movie pass. Back from the dead yet again. This is what? Three, fourth, fourth bat at this? I don't know. This one's really swinging for all the buzzword fences though, Jason. All right, hit me. Co-founder Stacy Spikes, who's back at the helm, says movie pass 2.0, I guess because we had 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, all of which failed.

Here we go. Is being built on a Web 3 framework and will have a kind of virtual currency. Well, can it have, what kind of, what is a kind of, what are you talking about? I don't think that they really know. So members will get credits that they can use for tickets for themselves and friends.

Unused credits will roll over, roll over minutes, to the next month and you'll be able to transfer them to other people. There will be tiered plans, but there is no idea of pricing at the moment. They will show you how many credits you have and available screenings at theaters. In other words, they're going to make really crappy deals, so you'll be able to use the credits on nothing.

Credits will work differently during peak and off-peak times. A Friday or Saturday might cost more. You'll also be able to reserve specific seats at some of MoviePass's partner theaters, just like you can do if you buy a ticket. There will be ways for people to earn credits through an app via a pre-show experience.

In other words, watching ads to earn more credits. And to make sure you're actually watching them, the app will employ facial recognition and eye tracking. There it is. Yay! They're also opening up a portion of the company for equity investment.

Why just use the app when you can own part of it? Do you have to buy in with a kind of virtual currency? Or your eyeball, apparently. Those who take a stake in it will receive benefits such as lifetime membership. The lifetime of MoviePass is...

About a Scaramucci or two, so I'm not sure that that's really going to do you much. So here we go. He bid less than $250,000 for the assets to regain ownership of MoviePass. Obviously, he thinks he can do something here. He did not get customer email addresses or other data.

So they're starting over basically from scratch, as it were. I'm pretty sure you can find those pretty much anywhere. So you can reload. I mean, he's pointing out the theaters are struggling and he's saying he's fighting the good fight to get people back in theaters. Sure, they've definitely struggled with the pandemic forcing many to at least temporarily close their doors.

But I'm not sure, as the article points out, a Web3-based service with a virtual currency and facial recognition component might not be the lifeboat these chains or their patrons are looking for. Agreed. Really, you think? I just, you know, I mean, obviously you just immediately go to a Clockwork Orange, don't you?

Yeah, I just, I'm wondering, do movie theaters need to be saved? How many times do we need to come out and save them? If, you know, if they're not working, they're not working. Yeah, I mean, you know, let them go. There's still a couple drive-ins out there for the niche thing that people enjoy. And there'll be a couple movie theaters for the people that really want to go to movie theaters.

But I think we've learned something people like to watch at home. We have big TVs now. Yeah. And our popcorn doesn't cost $25.50. I was thinking when they said that, you know, it's going to be powered by a virtual currency. So now we've got, like, kind of a value tracker on our phones that lets us know when the price, you know, when the exchange rate has changed enough.

So my popcorn will be cheaper, which would probably be in the middle of every movie because nobody's getting popcorn at that time. So then they're going to have to start changing when the ads are played in the movie because everybody's rushing out to get popcorn in the middle of the movie now because the price tanked on the virtual movie pass currency coin.

Isn't life hard enough already? Why are we complicating things? I don't understand. Yes. Well, here's another head scratcher for you. Texas is doing meta over Facebook's facial recognition practice, which, if you remember, Illinois did a while back.

Texas is trying to do it now, and they're going to be looking for hundreds of billions of dollars worth of fines. Everything's bigger in Texas. Good luck, Texas. Everything is bigger in Texas. I'm surprised that it's a Texas thing. You know, Texas is usually the hands-off place where you can do what you want as a business.

It's why Elon moved there. But okay, good. I'm down with this. I'm happy. They need money to rebuild their power grid. That's why. Yeah, that's true. And more meta bad news. As Variety reports, the company has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a 2012 class action lawsuit accusing the company of violating users' privacy.

So they allegedly overstepped – we have to continue to say allegedly because they're settling – overstepped its bounds in 2010 and 2011 by using tracking cookies that monitored browsing after users had signed out despite promises to the contrary. We covered this back in 2012.

So they're finally paying out because it just dragged on and on and on. I love the fact that they're trying to – here's the way that they're spinning this. This is so old that it's probably just in our best interest to settle it and move past the issue. We don't need to have this drag out anymore.

Who even remembers? Facebook? Who's Facebook? Who's Facebook people? We're metas. Yeah, we're metamates. Metamates. Ahoy, metamatey. I can't believe people are actually still employed there and are willing to be called that.

But this is the seventh largest privacy or breach-related settlement in the U.S., according to the law firm with another Facebook case, which was $165 million payout over facial recognition, the number one. So, you know, they're – I would say death by 1,000 cuts, but it's going to take 100 gazillion million – gazillion Google cuts to actually do anything to Facebook.

Yeah, well, considering they're pulling in, like, what, $38 billion a quarter? Yeah. Kind of – you need a lot of cuts. Yep. That's a whole lot of cutting going on. And the whole thing with the metamates is just – I didn't even put a link in the show notes because so many people sent it to us. Yeah, this whole, like – they're really, you know, going whole hog on the rebrand over there at Meta, trying to distance themselves as far as they can.

From that Facebook name. Yep, yep. And they even hired that one guy that we all love so much. He's like – he's kind of like the head of the Intelligentsia division now, trying to, you know, backfill their horrible reputation.

Right. So I'm sure that that's going to work out great. Speaking of things that are working out great, Peter Thiel backed crypto startup BlockFi to pay $100 million in a settlement with the SEC. Okay. Yeah, another drop in the bucket for Mr. Thiel.

Yep. So – or even BlockFi. So it may – but, you know, some people are at least getting fined for these things. Yeah. Step in the right direction. Yeah. This is a head scratcher right here. The San Francisco Police Department, some of my least favorite cops in the country, they have been using DNA from rape kits from women who, you know, basically reported a rape and had a rape kit done.

They've been using that DNA going forward to try and convict these people of crimes that may have happened in the future. Oh, okay. So a woman was busted for felony B&E, I believe, based on DNA that was in a rape kit that she submitted years ago. This is obviously not a good thing for the San Francisco Police Department in, you know, many, many ways.

How many times – how many things are going to have to be sorted through to find out where these things came from if people actually do step up and say, hey, that's a really bad thing to do? I don't know. This is a – it's kind of a bad one, I think. I mean, granted, there's not that many people in San Francisco, so you could say it's a Tempest in a teapot, but – It's not a good look.

No. It's not the direction I think you should be going. Yeah. So, no. Bad idea, people. Yeah. If they're fingerprinting DNA for anything, get at least – they've got piles of man poo all around the city. Start with that. Poo tracker. It is.

Seriously. And I just threw this one, and we usually don't cover general silly tech news – or non-silly tech news, but Akamai has bought Linode, however you prefer to pronounce it, for $900 million. So, that's a pretty good haul.

I remember when they started. Yeah. We were one of their first customers when they started. So, that's a good payday for them. I've always liked their service. I thought they did a pretty good job of it. And, you know, you could say that they were keeping AWS on their toes, but AWS was so much bigger.

$900 million is like an afternoon for AWS. That is true. Yeah. But I like Akamai, and I like Linode, so good for them. Good for them. Happy for them. Something I'm a little less thrilled about, Virgin Galactic is still kicking around after they're stock tanked because, you know, unsustainable business.

But they're trying to make it sustainable here. They're looking for 1,000 people to buy its $450,000 spaceflight tickets. I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a spaceflight today. Yes. They have opened up to the general public ticket sales as of yesterday. And you can put down a $150,000 deposit.

You can get the $300,000 later. For that $450,000, you will get a 90-minute ride to the edge of space, including the signature air launch and Mach 3 boost to space, the company said. They've sold 100 tickets to space at the updated price as of right now. Around 700 people, including Elon Musk, have made reservations.

You will enjoy several minutes of weightlessness and spectacular views of the Earth from the 17 windows. You also get several days of astronaut training, a fitted and branded Under Armour spacesuit, and membership in the future astronaut community, whatever that might be. Future astronaut community.

Okay. That's for the future time when we redefine the line of space so you can actually be an astronaut. That's going through litigation right now. And the writer over at Engadget throws in this line. These suborbital spaceflights definitely aren't cheap, but are far less than the $55 million you'd pay for an orbital 10-day SpaceX flight.

And goes on to kind of make an inference that this is a better deal. So I wanted to run some math because I enjoy doing that on this show. Just running the math here really quick. There's 14,000 or 1,440 minutes in a day. So divide that by 90, which is the length of the Virgin Galactic flight.

That gives you 16. So you could do 16 flights in a day. 16 times $450,000. Works out to $7.2 million per day times 10 days, which is what you would get with the SpaceX flight. And you actually go into orbit as opposed to just suborbit.

Only works out to $72 million. So it's actually more expensive if you spent that amount of time on Virgin Galactic as opposed to SpaceX. And you're only suborbital. You're not orbital. So my argument is you actually get better bang from your buck from Bezos. There you go.

Look at you busting out the math. So if you're one of those people that can easily throw down half a mil for a flight, you might as well go all in. But to bring us back down to Earth, let's talk about real people and real money. Not you crazy, rich people. New York City is going to raise the premium pay for Uber and Lyft drivers.

Yay. Good job. All right. Last week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that they would increase minimum driver pay for both Uber and Lyft. It's the second such move since 2018. They will have to pay, both RideHail apps will have to pay New York City drivers a minimum of $1.161 per mile.

And 0.529 cents per minute, which amounts to roughly a 5.3% raise. Wow. With that kind of money, they'll be flying into orbit in no time. Exactly. Maybe 100,000 years. Yeah. Oh, and by the way, if you think that's not a lot of people, I was a little surprised to find this out.

There's an estimated 90,000 drivers in New York City alone. No wonder traffic sucks so bad. Yay, gig economy.

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Okay. Starring Kristen Bell. Snappy title. Whom I do love. The title led me to believe that this would be some sort of kind of, you know, space ballsy take on... Parody. Yeah, parody. Two episodes in, it seems to be taking itself pretty seriously, so I'm a little bored and not continuing.

Okay, well, you should maybe, just for shits and giggles, check out the scene in episode five, I believe. Yes, that went viral because somebody complained that she was watching it with her parents, and Kristen Bell gets absolutely railed, as she said in the tweet, and she replied, sorry, or oops, or something like that.

I did check out that scene because I find Kristen Bell extremely attractive, and boy, did they do a good job of covering up every absolute bit of her that I wanted to see. Exactly. That's what they do. Brian did not get to go to the good place. No, I did not go to the good place at all.

And this is Netflix. Netflix has got tons of nudity all over the place. You can see anything you want to see. You can see men, you can see women, you can see whatever, and no, Kristen, you can't see Kristen Bell. That's the rule, apparently. Nope. Apparently, they don't have that much money. No, they do not. And then I went on to manifest season three.

I thoroughly, like I said, I was kind of not so sure in season one. Season two, I was all on board. Season three, they're doing what shows do when you don't have a plan or you realize that you're actually making some money here and you need to stretch whatever your plan was.

They're introducing new characters for no reason I can figure out, although it is nice to see the daughter from The Americans. She plays one of the new characters. Oh. I find myself kind of doing what I did with The Witcher season three, which I have it on, and it doesn't really hold my interest.

So I'm on Twitter, which is sad because I really did enjoy the first two seasons. But I'll keep it going. See what happens. Yeah. I've been tweeting my way through The Beforeiners, too, season two. It is not the greatest. But we have been watching Inventing Anna, the Anna Delvey story.

I don't know if you know much about her story from before this became a thing on Netflix. But very interesting con artist in New York City. It's pretty good. And Anna's played by Julia Garner, who is Ruth in Ozarks.

She's such a great actress. She's really, you know, I mean, just seeing her everywhere now. She was also in The Americans, right? She had a character. She played a character in that for a brief period of time. Yeah. Almost positive. There's a girl that looks like her. Oh, OK. But I don't think she was it now.

But yeah. And I finally went back and I watched What We Left Behind, looking back at Star Trek Deep Space Nine. They've got it on YouTube now and you can watch the whole thing for free. Cool. With ads. Well worth it. Well worth it if you are a fan. They do do one thing where I was I just wish we were in the same room together because they they broke a scene for the first scene of season eight, which doesn't exist.

So they were just, you know, making it up on the spot. Right. And of course, Ron Moore was in the room since he was one of the main writers on Deep Space Nine. And they literally are just making shit up as they go along and no care whatsoever about, you know, what happens in the future. Just like, oh, that sounds good. Yeah.

Why not? Yeah. Space worm. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Let's kill Nog. Wait, what? No. Or, you know, then they moved on to Discovery. Let's all talk about our feelings and let's give the ship an AI that has sentience and gets sad. Yeah. Did they name the ship Marvin?

Please tell me they named the ship Marvin. That would have been perfect. But it is it is good. I recommend checking it out. It's it's a nice watch for one of my actually for my favorite Star Trek. Cool. Yeah, I'll definitely check that out. I was a big fan of Deep Space Nine as well.

Although I never you know, for me, it's all next gen. That's that's number one for me. Anyway, speaking about the home of Star Trek, Paramount Plus, which we fondly remember as CBS All Access, which was it them that put out that amazing press release the day they'd launched and they talked about how.

Yes. The biggest day ever. CBS All Access. Okay. Good. Yes. We had a we had a record download record download day. The first day that anything was available. Yeah. Well, they actually have hit some numbers that give them some reason to crow. Now they're at 32.8 million subscribers.

Well, not bad. Not bad. Considering there really isn't anything on there besides Star Wars or Star Trek. Star Wars is Disney, which has much, much bigger numbers. So but it puts it ahead of Peacock, which has nothing, including nine million paid subscribers who are paying for nothing, as well as smaller platforms like ESPN plus 17 million.

Wait, hold on a second. How is that sentence structured? How can you say placing it ahead of Peacock with nine million paid subscribers as well as other smaller platforms when the smaller platforms have more subscribers than the Peacock nine million subscribers? No, no, no, no, no. It's not. It's not. Yeah, this is poorly worded. They're still talking about CBS or Paramount plus is still ahead of Peacock and ESPN and Discovery.

All right. All right. And the only other is a Grammarly subscription is all. Definitely. That just confused me because, you know, I read. Anyways, the other notable bit of information here is you will now be able to bundle Showtime into your Paramount plus subscription should you choose by upping the amount that you pay per month, which I mean, there are about 7000 ways to get Showtime through different places.

So I'm not sure if the math works out, but I guess it does. OK, so. Yeah, for me, it does because I have to pay. I get Showtime whenever a show comes out that I want to watch like billions right now. I'll just subscribe to it and then unsubscribe. But it's like 12 bucks a month when you have to do it through the app.

Right. So if it's just an extra, you know, five or four dollars a month add on to Paramount plus, that actually saves me money. There you go. Cool. So good news. Yeah, definitely. And they're changing the name again. Viacom CBS is now going to go back to Paramount.

OK. Because, yeah, Sumner Redstone's finally dead, so I guess they can do what they want. They should just call themselves Metamount. Yeah, the problem with Metamount, though, is I actually enjoyed working at Paramount. It was one of my dream jobs. So I'm good with the name change back, but yeah, let's let's stick it for a while.

Let's not let's not suck it up. And I saw Seth Rogen tweet this. It is an animated special that they're putting on Amazon called The Boys Presents Diabolical. And it looks pretty good to me. It's kind of like the Animatrix where they do multiple storylines inside of the same universe.

So apparently there's going to be eight different cartoons in here. So I'm kind of looking forward to it. Did you get a chance to watch the trailer? I kind of dropped out of The Boys. I enjoyed the first season. I just haven't stuck with it. Oh, season two is even better. And season three is right around the corner.

So it's one of the few things I'm looking forward to. Well, let me tell you something I'm looking forward to, Jason. Barrett sent this to us. Apparently, soon we'll be able to register things like eggplantpeach.com.

Okay. If you use the Opera browser. Anyways, these are emoji-only. Okay, so you're talking about emojis. Emoji-only web addresses, which will only work in the Opera browser. Yes, they have announced on Monday that they are enabling emoji-only based web addresses to bring a new level of creativity to the internet.

Okay. Eggplant, water, eggplant, water, eggplant, water. Yeah. I feel so creative now. The integration is a part of a partnership with Yatt, a company that sells URLs with strings of emoji in them. And here we go. I love this press release.

It's been almost 30 years since the World Wide Web launched to the public, and there hasn't been much innovation in the web link space. People still include .com in their URLs, says the Executive Vice President of Mobile at Opera. In a press release. God, imagine that.

Wow. Yeah. You have a TLD in a domain. Hmm. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So Yatt pages are unique domains generated when someone purchases a string of emoji, which itself is called a Yatt. The owner of a Yatt can create an NFT of their emoji string, and the company plans to eventually let users connect their Yatt's to electronic payments, probably using a Yatt coin.

According to the company, musicians are among the early adopters of Yatt's. For instance, one musician, Kesha, has a Yatt page. One. Okay. One. And all it does is forward to keishasworld.com. Oh, there's pesky kids in those .coms.

Come on. It's been 30 years, Brian. Why are people using such a .com? Yes. Yatt co-founder Naveen Jain said, Yatt domain, emoji domains let users personalize their internet identity, potentially giving creators, artists, and others more visibility online.

Okay. It's surprising to see Naveen Jain in here throwing his head in with this crowd. It's kind of sad. But yeah. Yatt stands for yet another thing. Yet another thing I don't fucking need. And again, it only works with opera. Nothing else. Yeah. And it won't work with anything else because nobody else is going to sign on for this stupid ass crap.

Exactly. Speaking of stupid ass crap, Al writes in, Hey, guys, I just had a great idea. You should set up the website to accept BAT. Yes, we will set up our Yatt enabled website to accept BAT from the Brave browser. Take your Yatt, put it in a BAT. I know you hate crypto, but I'm sure all the listeners would donate some BAT to you if you set up contributions.

I would like to donate US dollars, but I'm a broke ass student at the moment, and this way I could contribute something. Cheers from BC. It would be mighty hypocritical of us to accept a bullshit coin at this point from a browser we both said nope to because they did some shady crap with that bullshit coin. Tell a friend to listen.

That'll do us much better than tossing us some useless bat shit. And let's see what else has happened in apps and doodads. Ford is making it easier to 3D print accessories from its Maverick pickup. In case you had a 3D printer and a Maverick hybrid pickup truck, you can now make an ashtray or a cup holder or a phone mount tailored to your latest handset.

Notably, absent from any of this stuff is anything that you would need to go to a Ford service clinic for and where they still sell you the parts that you need to make your car run. But you can make a mud flap. Basically, these guys just made a little divot that you could put an accessory on.

So they kind of made an accessory mount and said, you can create all of this stuff now that works in this little mount. I'd never even heard of the Maverick until this article, you know, and I spent almost an entire day on a Ford lot the other day trying to get rid of my Fords.

They're not really doing a great job on the Maverick branding. Yeah, you know, would you get the Maverick or would you get the Goose? I don't know about that. That's a tough one. The Ford Goose. The Ford Goose. And my favorite SSD got an upgrade.

I love these SanDisk Extreme Portable SSDs. They're kind of rubberized. I've been using them for years. They just don't die. They finally came out with a four terabyte version, which is the, you know, the Holy Grail sweet spot for me because I've got like 3.2 terabytes worth of crap.

Yeah. And it still drives me crazy that I got this new shiny MacBook Pro M1 rocket machine and I only got a two terabyte drive. Drives me crazy every day. I still, every time we do these stories and I look at the price, I just, I scratch my head and I remember buying a 10 megabyte hard drive for around $400.

Yeah. And as far as hard drives go, this is extremely expensive. Yeah, this is a pricey one. So it's four terabytes. Yeah, it's $449 before tax. I think it worked out to like $470 for me after tax and all that, those shenanigans. But yeah, these things are amazing. I mean, yeah, you can get a four terabyte plug-in, you know, platter drive for 20 bucks a terabyte now.

But this thing fits in your pocket, works great, and it's fast. So I copied over almost the entire thing, you know, within like two, three hours last night. So for a couple of terabytes, that's pretty snappy, I got to say. At the library.

Well, guess what, Jason? What, Brian? I completed all 716 pages of Termination Shock by Neil Stevenson. I tried to catch up to you yesterday, but I fell asleep. So I have to say, the last 200 pages, I was definitely riveted.

I'm not sure what percentage it was, but, you know, it was a very slow start. Listeners to this podcast are probably so over this book at this point, because I think we've been talking about it for two months. But I finally finished it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. As I slid into the last 100 pages, I started to go, oh, no, there's no way he's going to wrap this all up.

I'm going to want to know more. There's going to be a sequel. It's going to be 7,000 pages, and I'm going to have to read it. The Termination Cycle coming next. Yeah, I mean, I feel, well, obviously, for a 700-page book, the ending wrapped up real fast.

There's a hell of a lot more to explore. And, yeah, I'm sucked in again, Jason. I'll read a second one if it comes. Okay, okay. Another four years. We'll keep an eye out for that. Yeah, I'm on my way.

I'll finish it just to get it finished. And I did pick this up for when I'm done. It's called How to Be Perfect, the Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur, going back to The Good Place. He's the creator of The Good Place. Great show. And he did a really good podcast with Tim Ferriss this week.

So there'll be a link to that in the show notes, too. I like the interview enough where I went and bought the book. So I don't know if the book's any good, but I'll give it a shot. But definitely check out the podcast episode. He's a smart guy. I really like him. And a good writer. Security?

Ha! We are joined again by our friend Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast, co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans, with Joe Kerrigan. And finally, he's the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy and surveillance and privacy.

Welcome back to this non-Boba Fett episode, Dave. Whatever shall we do? I'm a little saddened. I'm not going to lie. I mean, we could speculate about the Obi-Wan show coming up, but, you know, that's, yeah.

Look, it's Security Ha and Star Wars Corner. And that's just the way it is. That's the way it is. I did see a tweet that we got, which made me think about this. And now I freely admit, I do not listen to our own show. But I am here.

Well, I'm at least 70% here for it when we record. So I mostly remember what we have talked about. But Mr. Dom tweeted us and said, unsubscribed from GOG podcast, just too much negativity about the book of Boba Fett. I feel we were all very positive about the show.

And if anything, it was just constructive criticism because we wanted it to be even better. I would concur with that. Yes. Okay. I don't know. You know, fans are going to fan and that's fine. Yes. And I wrote back and said, thanks for listening.

The way it goes. You know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's all you can do. That's all you can do. That's all you can do. You put yourself out there. Yeah. What about talk about some obscure browser? What do you think that's about? No clue. We try to avoid browser talk. Yeah.

The only time we ever bring up browsers is when somebody sends us one. Pretty much. That's why we mentioned it recently. But yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Fans get a fan. I like that, Dave. We're just taking the piss. Could be. Could be. All right. So let's get into actual security since we unfortunately have no Star Wars to talk about, which again saddened me greatly.

Yeah. It appears we're inching closer and closer to what we've kind of had existential dread about for a while now. Ukraine is grappling with more cyber attacks as fears of an imminent Russian invasion reach their climax. It makes it sound much more exciting than it actually is.

Netblocks and Gizmodo have reported that the Ukraine Defense Ministry and two state-owned banks have suffered denial of service attacks flooding their sites with traffic. The country's armed forces website also appears to have suffered an attack. This is obviously trickling down to actual Ukrainians who have problems doing banking and things like that.

And we've seen kind of this pattern before. Before invasions, you disrupt infrastructure and create chaos. And that helps soften the target a little bit. This article said that the U.S. claimed the invasion could happen as soon as tomorrow, which was yesterday.

And thus far, still no invasion. So I guess we're still teetering on an edge, but not good signs. Yeah, a little bit of shelling. There's been a little bit of shelling this morning, actually. The Russians hit an elementary school, of all things. Yeah, well, you've got to soften the target by taking out the children.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So shots fired. So hopefully, it seems as the Ukrainians are showing restraint and not responding to it. But we're, yeah, we're balancing on that knife's edge right now. Everybody's hoping for the best, but planning for the worst.

Yeah. Well, back on our home soil, the FBI has said that the Blackbite ransomware group has breached critical U.S. infrastructure. By critical U.S. infrastructure, they point out the San Francisco 49ers. Which I would... That's fair.

That's fair. Yeah. And it was right before the Super Bowl that they weren't playing in. Right. Imagine America without the National Football League. You know, Anthony, would people be more upset if they lost the NFL than they lost their electricity?

That is a... They'd probably be most upset for losing their electricity because they would keep them from watching the NFL. Yes. It's not quite the same on a wind-up radio, I suppose. You know. Probably. No. No. So Blackbite is one of these ransomware-as-a-service entities that we talked about a million years ago that basically has an affiliate program which allows its ransomware users and they get a percentage of proceeds.

So, yeah, that's been going on. I couldn't really find what the... I guess they maybe don't want to publicize it. What exactly the critical infrastructure sectors were that got hit. I don't know if you have any further info on that, Dave. But, yeah, I just did find it hilarious. No, I don't have any specifics, but there's just been a lot of signaling from folks like the FBI and from CISA just putting everybody on high alert to expect disruption.

Just, I don't know. It's probably stating it too strongly, but just be on alert to expect the possibility of disruption. I feel like that that is, you know, we're going back to the immediate post-9-11 aftermath of always being in yellow or orange or red.

Shouldn't we always just be expecting disruption at this point? Yeah, but that's no way to live. That's true. Right? I mean, yeah. So, I don't know.

We'll see. You know, as this passes by, I guess you can hear in my voice I'm struggling with this because it is good advice and these people know what they're talking about and they're watching things and they know things that we don't know and so for them to be putting us on alert for things that are happening a world away, it makes sense because of what we saw with the pipeline being taken down, you know, solar winds and all that stuff.

So, I don't know, you know, please hold on to the bar. Yeah, and even Canada isn't immune right now. You know, it's been inescapable living up here that the trucker convoys, I know this has even made nudes in the States, so something's got to be really bad for something to happen in Canada and be reported on in the United States.

We've had our freedom convoy protests. Basically, it's what they've kind of called here like a very long-lasting January 6th Ottawa attack going on where they've rolled in and they've surrounded the city and certain, you know, certainly the civic centers and things like that and they aren't leaving and they're honking horns all night long.

And as per usual with these sorts of things, it's, okay, first off, 80% of Canada is vaccinated. I think they did a, they did a, they released a survey that found like 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated. So this is a 10%, it starts as, you know, we don't want vaccine mandates.

We don't want to wear masks. And then it becomes Heil Hitler because then the, you know, the Nazi stuff starts to come out and it just starts to get insane. And that's where we're at now. So Canada has decided to invoke the Emergencies Act to rein in basically the crowdfunding because unbelievably, these people are getting millions upon millions of dollars to support them and keep them going.

And what they're finding out, of course, and here's not much of a shock at all. A lot of this money is coming from the U.S. These aren't Canadians protesting. This is shit disturbers. Do we have to say it? These are make Canada great again type bullshit going on.

And it's being funded by the usual suspects. The people that you think are doing it are exactly the people that are behind all of this. So there you go. Right. Do they have red MAGA hats with ear flaps? No, but I mean, again, you see the pictures from the convoys and they're in Canada protesting things happening in Canada, but they have Trump banners.

So, you know, whatever. And I think that's, that's really, that's really what's upset a lot of the, can we, can we send him up there? No, no, he's not vaccinated. Oh, wait, he is. Damn it. That's right. Actually, he is vaccinated.

That's the problem. That's the crazy thing. Yeah, that is the crazy. That, that, that disconnect does not occur to all these people. It really just doesn't. It's amazing to me. I think that's the thing that's actually upset the Canadians the most. Certainly in all the news reports, I've been hearing the man on the streets, interviews in Ottawa.

Yes, it's 21 days on. It's getting frustrating. Please go home. You made your point. But the thing that really upsets Canadians is the fact that we know it's the U.S. that's funding it. It's not even our own thing. It's, it's, the Canadians are getting upset because it's a foreign government that is basically financing and encouraging this.

I think interesting to me that you're starting to slip into referring to Canadians as us. It's hard not to. It's hard not to. I'm living here now. It didn't, it didn't, it didn't take long, Brian. No. I mean, my, my wife and son are both dual citizens.

They're Canadian citizens. And I spent most of this week going to Canadian government offices trying to make myself legal and proper and correct here. And let me tell you, bureaucracy is bureaucracy. It sucks in every country. Yeah. It's just as bad here, except there are a lot more, there are a lot nicer about it.

That's, that's the only difference. I was going to say, they're very apologetic about it. They really are. We're very sorry that our system is not working right now. I'm very sorry that this piece of information that you really need in order to even get paid from your job may take another five to eight weeks for you to get it because there's something wrong and we don't know what it is.

And I'm very, very sorry. Have a donut. Yeah. That reminds me, I was, I was talking with Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. Anyway, the head of Microsoft, the chief security officer for Microsoft Canada.

And we were talking, he's a regular over on the Cyber Wire. And we were talking about how different threat groups have different names and the names have to do with the part of the world that they're in. So the Chinese threat groups are named pandas. The Russians are named bears and so on and so forth.

And he suggests that if Canada ever had a threat group, they should be named apologetic beaver. That sounds perfect. And I think we have the name for our podcast. Kevin McGee.

I'm sorry, Kevin, your, your last name escaped me. Kevin McGee is the chief security officer at Microsoft. Good guy. Good guy. I can guarantee he won't be listening to this show. So we're good. Probably not. No. He's also, he's also available in Canada. It is. And we're technically can con. So if any Canadian agencies would like to throw me some money for this, we can actually get some grants apparently.

So we might apply for those, but yeah, I hear Kevin stop listening because we were bagging on the Mandalorian too much. And your hatred for Martin Short. Don't forget. Oh, that's true. That is a big black mark up here. People are not pleased with me.

Oh, yeah. We need the money. Take one for the team. I love that Martin Short. He is just, I mean, those faces he makes. I just can never get enough of them. He's just a wild and crazy guy. Okay.

Well, I know I was getting to my point here in a second. The funny part about your whole story is there is a tech aspect to it because Canada is now going after the crypto wallets of some of the people who are trying to fund this mother trucker.

Yeah, because, you know, crypto is basically a great system that is used for nothing evil or illegal ever or money laundering. No, that's not what it's for. Well, not for much longer at the rate that they're catching these people. Yeah.

Yeah, I did kind of gloss over the whole tech aspect, which was I was supposed to talk about how it's like they shut down GoFundMe and crypto wallets and all the different methods that people are using to funnel the money up here. It's amazing how difficult I find it to transfer money up here, but everybody else seems to have no problem.

It's amazing. You just need to embrace the NFTs. Yes. If I just buy a few Beaver NFTs and send them to myself. Right. Yeah, that's all you need to do. Although I would not probably recommend doing any sort of Internet search that includes the word beaver.

This is a good point. Or do. I don't judge. That's right. We did, after all, all grow up in the 80s. Yes. All right. So, I have a story here.

Interesting website that the folks at Amnesty International posted. And, you know, whether or not you're a fan of them and what they do overall, I think I like them, although sometimes I think they can go a little too far. I feel about them the same way I feel about PETA.

In general, I'm supportive, but sometimes, come on, guys. Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put it. They have a really interesting website that tracks the NYPD's surveillance machine. They have cataloged, basically, they crowdsourced all of the publicly accessible video cameras in the city of New York.

And it is really, I guess it's too, at this point, you can't say it's surprising because we all know about the Panopticon in which we live, but to be able to go into this website and put in a starting point and a destination the way you would in Google Maps or somewhere else and have it map out for you all of the cameras you will pass along the way is a bit sobering.

It's a stunning use of technology. This is an amazing website. Yeah, it is. Because I had always heard that London was considered like the most surveilled city in the world, but I think New York has basically just said, hold my mini craft beer.

They may have taken over. I'd be interested to find out, is London or New York now the number one city in terms of being surveilled at all times? It's crazy. It's crazy how many cameras they have. I just did from the airport to my friend's house in Brooklyn, and it's just like, wow, I'd just be on camera the whole time.

But it's that way anyway. A few years ago, we had an incident here where there was a mall shooting, and a few months after it happened, I saw a presentation by the police chief, and he outlined how they were able to track down the person who was responsible for this shooting.

And really what struck me about his presentation was how many times in between when that guy left his house and made his way to the mall and walked around the mall, how many different cameras he was on from getting money out of the ATM to buying coffee at McDonald's to passing by roadway cameras?

And so they were able to just track after the fact, able to track from home to his ultimate destination via camera. And this was probably a decade ago. And now the quality of the cameras is so much better.

Like even, you know, back then, it's actually a, I just finished reading this book, Termination Shock that I've been reading for two months, which we joked about earlier. But there was a brief aside where they talked about like, you know, grainy cam footage from 20 years ago versus like high resolution cameras that actually move and track movements and all that sort of stuff and how good the surveillance cameras are these days.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Zoom in. Magnify. Well, I did a little research where you guys were talking in the Chinese city of Taiwan, T-A-I-Y-U-A-N, located in the Shenzi province. They have about 117 public cameras per 1000 inhabitants, which is the highest.

A chicken in every pot and a camera on every face. Yeah. Yeah. Second up is London with 73 cameras per 1000. And yeah, we come in way lower, like New York and L.A. have seven and nine.

Okay. For 1000 inhabitants. So. Well, look what you can do. We ain't got nothing on London or the Chinese. Interesting. Yeah. Very cool. So there you have it. There you have it. And I thought this one was just too funny. Three former Getter employees say the social media platform laid off it.

Entire security and IT teams. And one said it was run like a high school operation. So they basically dumped the entire IT and security staff. All two of them. Yeah, that's it. Well, and I mean, that all basically means the clock is running on this site, right?

I mean, it's only a matter of time before somebody just pones it and it's circling the drain. I mean, I always felt like the site and I can't remember the name of the other one that sprung up to I always just felt like these were just money grabs anyways. I always felt like they never had any intention of really building these things out and making them real.

They just wanted to get all the donations and siphon the money off and buy Beaver NFTs and hide the money. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think it's probably a fair assessment. Yeah. So I can't remember if this one or it was the other one that I can't remember the name on was the one that used the Mastodon back end.

I think it might have been Getter. Because they didn't say Parler. Cobbled together. Parler. That was Parler. Yeah. Parler. Yeah. Parler did that. They just cobbled together an open source, you know, kind of back end and ran with it. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, have at it, guys.

She's ass to the wind right now. All 12 people that have signed up, go get their deets on. And I found this one, and I just thought it was fascinating. It's an article titled, Never, Ever, Ever Use Pixelation for Redacting Text. This is over at bishopfox.com.

And it is a great breakdown on why you should not ever use, you know, blur or pixelization on letters to try and, you know, redact them or hide their meaning. Now, what you can do, though, is definitely punk people that might be reading your stuff with fake text and then blur that and then put that in.

That would be kind of fun, I think. Yeah. Agreed. Right. Right. Right. You could virtually rickroll them. Yeah. That would be awesome. So if you do have people that are tracking you down, that's one way to be fun with it, I guess.

Yeah. I saw this story earlier this week. In fact, we were considering it for our Research Saturday show, but didn't think there was quiet enough here to do a whole episode on. Well, that's us. We just take your trash. Right. But it's fascinating, and I think this stuff is just going to get better.

I mean, you see some of the de-blurring tools that are built into Photoshop now. And they are practically indistinguishable from magic. How is it possible? And yet, here we are. Well, doesn't it really just come down to just about anything that you can do with an algorithm you can undo with a reverse-engineered algorithm of that algorithm?

So it's going to happen. It's the computer. Yeah. Giveth and they taketh away. So. Yes. I guess. I guess. No. And I do have, I've got the Topaz suite of their Gigapixel stuff. Oh, I've played with that. It's amazing. Oh, it's incredible.

I bought all of them. And you can do some really cool stuff with it. Even the video ones are really nice, too. If you have some old family footage you want to punch up, you can even almost kind of rotoscope it. If you, like, super set the blur on the things, you can get some really cool effects out of it. Those tools are just, it's unbelievable.

I mean, you can put Photoshop's built-in stuff, which is magic to shame. You can take, like, an old 640 by 480 photo that you took with your old flip phone, run it through this thing, and it's like you shot it on an iPhone. It's crazy. Yep. One of the examples that really struck me was when Disney Plus released the Muppet Show that they had up-resed.

And the Muppet Show was shot on video in the 70s. So that would have been one-inch videotape, you know, composite, standard-definition video. And they've up-resed this stuff. And, like, the detail of the fabrics in the puppets is unbelievable.

Yeah. It's really amazing. Yep. Yep. That's the future, man. That's the future. We don't need no more stinking Luke Skywalker. Do it ourselves. I guess not. Closing shout-outs! Over at Patreon, we've got Harrison, Mark, and Karsten.

Welcome. Thank you very much. And over at PayPal, we've got Miles, Sherry, Natalie, Linda, Derek, Edward, Nathaniel, Dag, Ramsey, Tom, and Michelle. Thank you. Over at Stripe, we've got Sean and Theodore. Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! And after basically going an awful long time without any reviews, we got four this week.

The first, Co-Teddy Bear. Gives us five stars. Great grumpiness. Love these guys. Love the banter between them. I always put them at the top of the list when the show arrives. Security Ha is one of my faves, as is at the library. I've gotten some great suggestions, and I even tried some they stated weren't good, and they were right.

Dave Bittner is a great addition to Security Ha. Just got back from vacation and had five episodes to listen to. Score. Keep on grumping. Hang on a second. We put out one episode a week. That means you had a five... You must be European. A five-week vacation. Must be. Must be French. Damn it.

And Bob Hellbringer writes, five stars. Great show. Jason and Brian are worth at most two and a half stars each, but that adds up to five stars, so there you go. Well, thank you, Bob Hellbringer. We're like peanut butter and chocolate. Yep. Something like that. Speaking of treats, Angel of Cake gives us five stars.

Great show for friends and foes alike. I was going to give the show two stars, but after seeing how handsome Dave Bittner is, I upped it to four stars. I was then drawn to thoughts of my enemies when it occurred to me that giving the show five stars will help boost it in the algorithm. This increases the odds that my enemies will have to watch it, too.

Enjoy the show. Deliveroo! And Cheezic writes in with... Cheezic23 writes in with a five-star great stuff. I wish I had found this podcast sooner. The guys are great. The episodes are very educational and informative. Don't know what show you're listening to. Keep up the great work.

Insert snarky comment. Well, thank you, Cheezic23 and everybody else that wrote in with your reviews this week. And we've also got a question that came in that I want to address real quick. It's, hello, Jason. I'm about to buy a Fujifilm X100V. I'm not sure if you've used one before, but if you have, I wanted to see if you had any expert opinion on it.

I have not used the Fujifilm X100V, but I did have an X-Pro1 for quite some time, and it was a great camera. I think they're out to the X-Pro3, but Fujifilm cameras are awesome. I love them. And he also goes on to say, also a longtime listener, and I've always heard you plug Adorama, and I wanted to use the code at checkout, but the code is no longer valid.

Yes, sorry. On those older sponsors, for some strange reason, I don't understand why. They turn off the coupon codes after a while. So SOL is, I believe, the new coupon code for that, because we got nothing. Sorry. But check out the Fujifilm X100V and let me know how you like it.

It's a good camera. Yep. Okay. I got a camera in my phone. It's pretty good. Just saying. And we lost PJ O'Rourke this week. The writer and humorist has died at the age of 74. A conservative writer and humorist whose acerbic wit and writings often won admiration on both sides of America's political divide.

I agree. I love this guy. I thought he was one of the funniest guys out there. Incredibly smart and intelligent. We have lost a great voice, which is unfortunate. Though O'Rourke often reserved his sharpest barbs for the left and Democrats, he admitted that in 2016's election, he would be supporting Hillary Clinton over the Republican nominee Donald Trump.

She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters, he said. Loved him. So funny. True that. Yep. Oh, good stuff. He will be missed. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schelmeister. 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 541. From there, you can find links to everything we talk about in the 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 the snarky review and preferably five stars. Stay grumpy.

Didn't really end it on a bang there, did we? Yeah. We were kind of like one of the people that didn't place at the Olympics because we certainly didn't stick that landing. Yeah.

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