542: The Sneaky Leakies

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. Brian, it's been an interesting week. You mean war? Well, that too. It covers everything. It's been a very, very exciting week. Interesting. It's been an interesting week. But I'm in the house today, so that's the only point that I was going to make.

Who cares about the war? I'm just saying if you hear some dogs in the background, it's because it's 35 degrees in my studio and I'm recording from my bedroom today. Sounds positively warm to me. It is. It is. It was 35 degrees in my studio, so you got to say that's worthy of going in the house for. Yes, I agree.

Even as a Canadian now. Yeah. It's cold out there. Yeah. Today is Twin Peaks Day. It is Twin Peaks Day. I didn't know if you were going to notice that. Yes, the day that Agent Cooper rolled into Twin Peaks and said hello to Diane, and it's today, so it seems fitting for a weird week all around.

That's true. A little follow-up here. There's a great article over in The Verge where they interview Molly White, who is the web person behind Web3 is going just great. One of my favorite websites that I check constantly because it's just too much fun to watch the NFT world kind of implode.

Well, it's imploding and exploding at the same time. It's going off the chain, as the kids say, but it's also still on the chain. Yeah. Can you make dad Bitcoin jokes? I don't know. I don't know.

But speaking of the Bitcoin and the chain, there's an article, and I found this over at Web3IsGoingGreat.com, which is why I put this here. Kickstarter says they won't make changes to Kickstarter without you. And this is after a big backlash where they said they were going to start putting shit on the blockchain a la Web3.

And in this interview, one of their C-level executives basically just comes out and says he has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. I mean, like, none. Did you get a chance to read this?

I scanned through it a little bit. I mean, it just I don't I don't know how this got through whatever levels there might be at Wikipedia to to finalize and be put out there. And I don't understand anything anymore. It's just like I feel like every organization just has somebody within it that's running around screaming crypto, crypto, crypto.

Yeah. And this guy, this guy, he's the chief operating officer. His name's Sean Lowe. He is equating blockchain with open source and saying, oh, well, blockchain is going to be better than the open source we've been using now, which just shows you right there. This guy should not work at a tech company whatsoever. I mean, I don't know if he knows how to operate anything for a chief operating officer.

Yeah. What exactly is he operating over there? He's operating his secretary to go print out his e-mails so he can read them. No operating heavy machinery on crypto. That's my new rule. When I was on Facebook this week, I was doing some searches for my post-strokey condition, right?

Yes. So on these boards, you can do searches because it's a Facebook group, you know. And you should be able to search for things. So I'm searching because I've got this condition. I'm trying to find other people that have it and figure out, you know, what they use to get through it. Is it, you know, a drug from the doctor? Is it chicken soup, you know, taken rectally?

I don't know. I just want to know. But the general consensus was pot. THC is good for this condition. Now, I lost the post that I was on, so I went back to go search for it. This is where I discovered that on Facebook, you can search for CBD, but you cannot search for THC, even though they are in the exact same post.

It will return zero results for THC, zero results for marijuana. But I'm sure that, you know, jihad and all that just come back just fine. Yeah, of course. And that was, it was frustrating as hell. I'm just trying to find these posts that I was just looking at that I know have the letters THC in them.

But, nope, Facebook will not let you search on it. Yeah, I mean, Facebook is one of Facebook's biggest problems. And, I mean, they're not in the business of actually being a useful anything for the customers. We're just, you know, we're ad fodder. That's all we are.

That's the business that they're in. But, like, you know, I always see, like, a post. Like, I'll be wandering around and I look on my phone when I'm bored for a couple minutes and I'll see a post and I'll go, oh, yeah, I'd really like to read up on that or read more about that or see what my friend said or whatever it might be.

And unless you save it immediately, when you try to go back and find that post again, good fucking luck. It is gone. You will never, never, never, never find it. Yeah, except, you know, in 10 years when some hater of yours can go back and dig it up and cancel you for it.

God forbid you want to find it in 10 minutes. So that brings me into a story that we had over at Clash Royale. You know, the game that we have. That's still a thing? We're still playing. Wow. Playing GOG.show. It's like six years almost that we've been playing this. Isn't that crazy?

Mm-hmm. So somebody tried to write in one of the messages, porn. Well, it turns out you can't write porn in the chat. You can write everything else that you could possibly think of. It is, you know, it is a Bulgarian's paradise on there.

But God forbid you try and do the word porn. It cannot be done. We tried for, you know, I know I tried like half a dozen ways. I'm putting it on multiple lines, offset by asterisks, all sorts of stuff. As soon as you type in that N, boom, it's done.

You cannot. It's all asterisks. What about the old favorite, P-R-O-N, or zero N? Oh, dude, don't even start. Yes, of course, that one's done. Any permutation that you can come up with, spaces don't matter. Like I said, spaces, line breaks don't matter.

You cannot write the word porn. It's mind-boggling how these people come up with this shit. But again, I'm sure you can use it to plot some sort of authoritarianism uprising somewhere. Because, you know, they won't block any of that stuff. No, no, no.

You can write whatever you want there. That's what I'm saying. You can write literally. I cannot find anything else that they will censor except the word porn. That's amazing. I love how these companies just arbitrarily decide to censor some things but then can't be bothered doing. You know what it usually comes down to. It's a keyword search for things that will immediately get us in trouble and be bad news for us.

And then anything that's hard, well, forget that. In the news. Well, over there at Meta slash Facebook slash, you know, Zucklandia, they had a little kerfuffle this week with one of their employees called, his name's Jaron A. Miles.

Now, this is an interesting case because he got sniffed out as being a possible pedo by a bunch of amateur, you know, pedo hunters, which I did not know was a thing.

Coming soon. There's actually, there's a group out there. There's a group out there called PCI Predator Catchers Indianapolis. So it's apparently got franchises. They caught this guy not doing anything but just talking about some inappropriate communications he had with a 13-year-old boy.

Okay. It doesn't look good for him. I'm going to say that. It's a bad look. Yeah. It's a bad look. Especially for somebody that's head of global community development. I know. What kind of community are you developing there, brother? So I just thought this was a kind of an interesting case because he has not been charged with any crime.

As far as we know, he's just been kind of outed on YouTube by some folks. Yeah, it's a strange world we live in. Well, it's bad enough that he's effectively canceled, right? Like, so he's off social media completely. He no longer is employed at Meta.

He's not a MetaMate anymore. No, it's not. Whether he resigned or fired is unclear. And, you know, at some point somebody – because, look, this guy was pretty high up, has a lot of connections. People get quietly hired somewhere and told, you know, stop trying to talk to 13-year-old boys.

The New York Times had a very long read about who is behind QAnon. Apparently a couple groups of scientists got their heads together and rolled out some AI and kind of basically rolled it back to two of the original people who posted on it. So what we've discovered about QAnon is the one who smelt it dealt it.

And I thought this was already solved on the HBO series. I never watched it, but I always – I thought that they outed somebody at the end with a hot mic. I don't think that they ever had, you know, like actionable proof. Not that this is actionable proof either because this is forensic linguists doing analysis of text messages, which I'm sure is not going to be admissible in court yet.

Maybe soon. Q has been caught by a cunning linguist. It's one of those shows. I know. It is. I'm telling you I come in the house. I come in the house and it's just magic. I can tell.

Okay. Let's keep going. Keep on rolling. Just like the convoys. I'm trying. All right. Bear in the air. There's a bear in the air. I saw this one of Futurism and I just had to chuckle too. Apple employees are unionizing and they're using Android phones to keep Apple from spying on them.

And I just love this. These organizers have switched to Android phones to avoid any potential spying. Do they know what an Android phone is generally good for? Spying. Not security. Yeah. That's pretty funny.

Damned if you do. Damned if you don't. Yeah. And I saw this article and I think we talked about this before, but it's come up again. You can't copyright AI created art according to the U.S. officials. The U.S. Copyright Office has denied an effort to copyright a work of art that was created by artificial intelligence system.

Now, this is this guy, Dr. Stephen Thaler, who is on a one-man mission, basically. He keeps attempting this. I don't know if he's bored in life. Maybe he needs a good book. Or, you know, this is just the hill that he has decided to die on. He is going to keep testing this all around the world until he gets AI, like, considered to be copyrightable, apparently.

I don't know. So, he's working at it and he's not really doing very well. It's not happening. So, he applied to register this work as a work-for-hire to the owner of the creativity machine. However, the office said that current copyright law only offers protections to the fruits of intellectual labor that are founded in the creative powers of the human mind.

As such, all copyrighted work must be created by a human being. And the office says it won't register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that lacks intervention or creative input from a human author.

So, as far as we know right now, AI stuff, you cannot copyright it, which is interesting because, if I'm correct, and I've done a little bit of research about this, a lot of these NFTs that are being rolled out, these, you know, all the different, like, series, some of them are very much AI created, right?

Like, they do all the different iterations. Somebody comes up with the first one and they use some software to basically create, here's the whole line. Of these stupid NFTs that you can buy, which is an interesting thought because it's basically now saying that those are not copyrightable.

So, if somebody right-clicks and steals it, tough shit. I don't think they really use AI to come up with NFTs. It's basically just a bunch of, you know, sorted lists and some permutations to RAND. That's about it as far as it gets. And then it just places the assets, you know, on the grid.

We built something like this with our old friend of the show, Dave Riegler, for a site back in with, I think we were using Shockwave for it. Shockwave or Flash. And we actually, we built it. Yeah, that's what it was. We built a runtime in Director to actually spit out, you know, probably 50,000 graphics.

All the different permutations for this website that basically we're spitting out NFTs. We didn't even know it. You didn't know it. You just weren't monetizing them, Jason. There was the problem. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, since we're not really claiming that, you know, the machine made all the decisions on it, there's definitely human input here because people are creating the graphics that are eventually becoming the piece of the artwork.

So I could see how they could make a claim that it was all human intervention. There was no AI involved. Okay. Fair enough. Speaking of NFTs, the NFT marketplace OpenSea is investigating a phishing attack that has left more than two dozen of its users without access to some of their most valuable digital tokens.

Now, you may scoff initially at the number two dozen, but when you start to realize that, sure, there may be hundreds of thousands of users, but those two dozen are probably holding most of it because they're laundering shit. So there you go. Panic hit the platform when someone stole hundreds of NFTs.

Over several hours that afternoon, the attacker targeted 32 accounts and taped 254 tokens. Among the stolen NFTs are tokens from the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Azuki Collection. So again, like I said, the expensive ones. One estimate by Molly White. She's back again. The creator of the Web3 is going great blog.

Pegged the haul at 641 Ethereum, which is approximately 1.7 million at the time of this article. So they certainly attacked the right accounts. Yes, yes. And now these people are suing. And it's a very interesting thing about how they're claiming that these things are worth all of this money.

And all of the mainstream news articles tend to be putting worth in quotes, which I think is really funny. Well, again, we've seen the tide turning on this sort of stuff. People are not drinking the Kool-Aid in media anymore. Yeah, exactly.

Just in corporations who are trying to basically spin the next leg of their business off of it. And there was an auction at Sotheby's that has been canceled for CryptoPunks. Apparently, the seller got wind that there wasn't a whole lot of buzz happening around his big old auction because he thought it was going to bring in about 30 million.

And the other rumblings were it was barely going to hit the reserve of 14 million. So he said, you know, let's just pull it off for now. I'm going to hodl. Let me give this guy a little bit of advice. Take the 14 million. No shit. Take it and run.

Run, run, run, run, run, run, because this shit's going to tank. I'm sorry. It just is. This is ridiculous. And you know it's going to tank when almost the entirety of Fiverr has been conscripted into making NFT art now, which is ridiculous. I mean, it's ridiculous how many people.

But it's good for the people on, you know, Fiverr. The artists. They're making a nice Fiverr. See, this is how we figured out how artists can make money on the Internet. They basically make NFTs for other people. Yes, that's good enough. And speaking of stupid ideas, Virgin Hyperloop.

Remember them? Yeah, it was going to be the next big thing. Yeah. Well. Nope. Like most back of the napkin ideas, not doing so well. They have laid off 111 workers, which is almost half of its workforce, which is interesting because they just got a new contract.

But apparently it doesn't take that many people to dig a hole. So actually, no. See, that's the problem. I keep getting this confused with Elon. Elon's a boring company. Boring company. Yeah, that's different. That's just a standard old tunnel.

This is the Hyperloop is, I think it was going to be above ground. And it was going to be basically, if you're old enough to remember drive-through banking, when they would send the money in the little pneumatic tube, this is going to be sending people through that. Yeah. Yeah. And they did some tests. They got the cars up pretty quick.

But what they're saying is they're going to skip the passenger thing and then just going to go for freight, which probably is a better idea, honestly. Yeah, I agree. I was not too eager to sign up for one of these rides. No, not at all. I mean, especially because there's no windows.

You can't even see how fast you're going. Yeah. I can just go on Star Tours and get the same experience.

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With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. Media candy. Brian, for the past couple of weeks, we've been talking about Paramount Plus and making the old joke about CBS All Access.

On day one, they made the press release that we've had a record day in downloads because it's the first day of downloads. Yes. We've been milking that joke for almost seven years now. Still funny. I know. Because I looked it up because somebody – I was reading an article about Paramount Plus and how Paramount and Viacom and CBS was changing.

And they said that CBS All Access was like almost eight years old. And I'm like, no. No. There's no way. That does feel wrong. That feels totally wrong. Yeah. Because it is a little wrong. It's seven years and three months.

Okay. I'm like, oh, God. You rounded up quite a bit. But anyway, seven years it has been since Discovery was teased at us. And, yeah, it still feels new to me. It's like they just changed the name to Paramount Plus last week.

Yeah. They grew up so fast, Brian. It's a bit weird. They do grow up so fast. I don't think I subscribed until Discovery launched. They're coming into their fourth season, right? So, I don't know. Yes. It does. I was going to ask you. It picked back up, it looked like. So, I didn't know if you were going to pick it back up with the season continuation.

Oh, has it started again? No. Okay. Okay. Well, you know, I'm really worried about the AI. It was very – the ship. The ship was depressed last time I left it, Jason. So, I need to find out if the ship got Prozac or CBD or maybe it wasn't able to search its own records.

It needs to call Better Ship online counseling. There you go. God. So, I have picked up some of the HBO shows last week. Tonight with John Oliver has come back. Same show as always. Very clever. Very funny. I enjoy it. I'm going to keep up with it.

And I dip back into real time with Bill Morris since I found myself logged back into the HBO app. And, you know, now that he's not whining about COVID so much anymore, I don't mind listening to him again. I find him frustrating. I agree with him sometimes.

I find myself disagreeing with him more often now. His take on cancel culture and various other things, I'm not really up for. But, you know what I found he's a good replacement for me now is Adam Carolla. Because Adam Carolla went off the freaking deep end and has never come back.

But with Bill Maher, I get opinions and thoughts that I wouldn't normally think of and they're not as annoying. So, I don't mind it. It's fine. Okay. To each their own. To each their own. I tried. I tried. I can't do them. I know.

So, what actually happened to Adam Carolla? I don't – you know, I haven't followed him for a long time. You followed him a lot longer than I did. But did he just go COVID cuckoo? He went COVID cuckoo and he never came back. He and Dr. Drew are just – and he's ultra conservative now. And the thing that I dislike about both Adam Carolla and Bill Maher is they spend all their time screaming about Hollywood elites.

They're fucking Hollywood elites. Yeah, look in the mirror, bro. Look in a mirror. Like, give me a break. Adam Carolla is always up on, like, Kevin Costner's ranch and hanging out with Jimmy Kimmel's best friend. Bill Maher is always at Hollywood parties. Stop pretending you're not that.

It's so annoying. Anyways. Yeah, I just – I gave up on Carolla. Carolla doesn't even really get good guests anymore. Like, it's all – he's all Fox crazy right-wing stuff now. He doesn't even do entertainment stuff anymore because, like, all of his friends also, like, abandoned him.

Like, David Allen Greer, when he used to be on Adam Carolla's show, was the funniest thing in the world. They don't even speak to each other anymore. They're done. So, good times. Another one bites the dust. Yep. I did see that the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is back for season four.

Have you jumped in yet? I have watched the first two episodes. I'm not sure if any more have come out. They did that thing where they dumped two because, you know, there you go. But not the full season, so I guess we have to wait. The first episode was actually legitimately hilarious.

The second one, not so much. But I guess they're trying to build a story. If they go past this season, I'm not going to watch anymore. I'll finish out this one, though. Okay. I couldn't even get into season three. I went back and when I saw that this was on, I'm like, oh, interesting. I think I should finish the last season because I thought I had, like, an episode or two left.

And no, I had the whole thing. I stopped after the first episode. I still enjoy it. The acting on it's great. The story itself is the problem now. Okay. That's too bad. That's too bad. It was such a good show at the beginning. But I did watch The King's Man on HBO this week.

Right. Just because I was bored. It was late. Couldn't sleep. A little bit of the ultraviolence? It's sort of. This has Ralph Fiennes in it. And, you know, wasn't Voldemorting out on this one. But he, I don't know. It's a weird sequel.

It's actually a prequel. If you've watched The King's Man, the original one, then there was a sequel to that, which was terrible with Elton John. And there were some funny bits in that one, and this one was just a weird hybrid of both, and it wasn't very good. It just wasn't good. Well, off my list then.

Because I did, I very much enjoyed the first one, even though it was insanely violent. The second one, I remember, had a couple chuckles, but overall was kind of crap. And I saw the advertising for this, and I was going to watch it. Now I'm not. Yeah, if you need something on in the background while you're, you know, doom scrolling, fine for that.

You know, it's one of those. You don't really have to pay that much attention to it. I did see this one. I thought, okay, time to feel old again. Tori Amos' album, Little Earthquakes, it turned 30 in January. That's a long time ago. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I follow a lot of, like, the Facebook sites, like Post Punk and all that sort of stuff. And basically, all it does is depress me when every morning I just, like, the first post I see is some beloved album that I listened to in my youth that, you know, foundational for me.

40 years old. Oh, great. Yeah. Stuff from my college years and all that. 20, 30 years old. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, but the interesting thing about this one is that she's doing, like, a standalone comic with it, which is pretty cool.

Of course, Neil Gaiman's in it. What, she's not doing NFTs? No. Uh, yes, yes. There are NFTs involved, so, sadly enough. Um, but, uh, Margaret Atwood has a story in it, too, which brings me back to another point, which is I listened to her on Tim Ferriss' show.

Mm-hmm. And you got to listen to it if you haven't listened to it. Man, she is still sharp. Oh, yeah. She is so sharp. She's amazing. But, and she's your neighbor. Well, she's a true Canadian treasure, unlike Martin Short. Brian, I bought a new microphone last week.

Oh, okay. Called the Beacon. Uh, it's a, it's a, it's a, a USB. Do you have room to stand in your studio anymore? Because it's got to be full of mics at this point. Well, that's all it did. My storage locker. Okay. So, plenty of room. Um, this is, it's a new USB mic, but it has digital, uh, signal processors built into the microphone, so I thought it was pretty cool.

The software looked pretty cool. The video I saw was a really nice demo for it. It's about 300 bucks, um, and I'm looking for a really good USB-based mic with good software. Mm-hmm. Because the Shure MV7, um, is okay. It's decent, but, uh, it's really plosive heavy, no matter what you do to it.

Uh, so I thought I'd try the Beacon out. Beacon comes, take it out of the box, ooh, fancy, weights, really nice, put it on the boom arm, plug it into the, into the computer, go to download the software, downloads an .exe file.

I'm like, what is this, 1996? Turns out, nope, no Mac support, no Linux support, Windows only. Hmm. Ah. I gotta say, the one thing that Beacon does have going for it is their return policy is fairly seamless, and that reminds me, it's sitting on the floor in my garage.

I should take that to FedEx. Uh, but yeah, uh, it's, I, they're obviously going after the streamer market, but, which is sad, because if this thing does half of what it says it can do, it would be one of the best podcast mics out there. But I don't know, but I don't know, because I don't have a PC. Well, I do, but I'm not about to go set it up and install it just so I can use a mic that I'm not going to use every day.

Right. And another bit of follow-up, uh, Brian, do you remember that airport tag, TWA, uh, band I got for my Apple Watch? Mm-hmm. Yeah, and we wondered how long that they were going to last. Yeah. Uh, till now. That's how long they last. Okay, not as long as CBS All Access.

Yeah, yeah, the, uh, yeah, CBS All Access is still going. Um, yeah, the discovery I made was, uh, ba-dum-ching, it just kind of fell apart. So I went out and I found the Nomad Rugged Band just to kind of do a little change of pace, get the, um, you know, get the tactical look going back.

Uh, it's expensive. It was like 60 or 70 bucks with shipping. Um, very heavy. It's kind of like a really high-end, uh, Casio G-Shock, uh, band. So. Right. Uh, they make a lot of other stuff besides, uh, bands, which I found out, um, which is worth checking out.

It's a pretty decent-looking brand, but, uh, this thing is definitely heavy and it is rugged. It will last, outlast this watch, uh, by a long shot. All right. I'm still using my, my two originals I bought ages ago. I've got the, well, the one that just came with it, the fabric one, which is my day-to-day and workout and I can wear it in the shower and everything.

And then I've got my fancy, I'm going out black leather with white stitching band and that's it. That's all I use. Yeah. My, my fabric one is a little, got a little funky cause I wore it a lot. So that got a little too funky, uh, for just going out in, you know, day-to-day wear and the leather one that I had, I got the Apple leather one.

And that felt just fell apart just over time. So, but I think I've had Apple watches longer than you have. Yes, you have. Uh, I found a cool app called paste this week. And what it does is it's basically just a clipboard manager. The pace. But the nice thing about it is it, uh, it syncs with iCloud.

So anything I copy and paste on one machine is available on other machines, which makes it easier to go back in history. I'm sure privacy people are just going, Oh my God, but I don't care. It's actually useful. Um, I found it on set app because I am a member of set app, uh, where you get all those apps for one low monthly price.

Right. And, uh, talked about on the show before link will be that to that in the show notes. Uh, but there's like 200 apps. I always check like the new stuff that comes out. I think that's how I found paste, but I also, uh, found tot again, uh, cause we talked about tyke on the show, which is a little, um, utility.

My friend Andre Torres wrote years ago. And, uh, I noticed on Twitter, he's like, I don't even know how to code anymore. So everybody that's asking me about this here, it's up on GitHub have at it. So he gave it away. Right. And then, then following that tweet, he's like, or you could just go get taught.

I'm like, okay, we tried taught before on the show and, uh, it looks to be a little bit better. Um, there's a nice little toggle for, uh, rich text to plain text, which is, I use this thing mainly just to convert, uh, formatted text to plain text to pop it in show notes 99% of the time.

So if you're looking for a little scratch pad, that thing's pretty good. Um, have you seen time.is yet? No, no, this is the most well-designed. What the hell time is it in X website that I've seen? It is a great single, single use website, but I was trying to find out what, what time it was central in central time.

Cause somebody sent me a meeting invite in central time. And I'm like, who the hell lives in central time anymore? Uh, besides like the 1970s TV shows. Uh, so I, I popped it into here and it does exactly what it says on the, it's, this is cool.

It's very pretty, isn't it? The thing, the problem is in my phone, I've already set up, you know, times for the cities that, uh, 99.999% of things for me are relevant to. So I can just use that. And the one time that I would need something like this, I will never remember this website.

Probably. Yeah. Okay. Well, also considering most of the time when you just type in the question in Google, it gives you the time that you're looking for and you don't need another website, but. Or I can just ask my lady in the tube. Yeah, you can do that too.

That's how I got to my next website, which is howlongago.com. I was checking to see how long ago it had been since we started the show and it has been eight years, 10 months and 30 days since our first episode of Grumpy Old Geeks. But also cute little website just tells you exactly how long ago something was.

Cause I did, how long ago was the date in Google and the Google gave me days and I'm like, I don't want days. I want, I want, you know, human numbers. I'm sensing a theme in this show about how we're talking about how there are so many things out there that make us feel old. Yes.

That's pretty much it. That's pretty much it. So remember when meta, well, before they were meta, when they were still just Facebook that happened to own Instagram, felt like they needed to start. Yeah. Start, start to put some, you know, usage time limit options on their apps, you know, for the children to help them out.

Yes. Yeah. They're rolling those back. Of course they are. Nobody cares anymore. Yeah. Nobody cares. So, and they're just starting to, for the few people that were using it, they're starting to roll up the daily time limits. They're changing as part of an app update that says they're saying it's to help things get more granular, but the defaults are, you know, inching up instead of down and all that sort of stuff.

So they're basically just starting to get rid of all this crap because nobody cares at all. I'm surprised they don't have an add-on that you can buy for extra rollover minutes, even though it's a completely, it's a completely voluntary system. If they sold rollover minutes, you know, somebody would pay for it with Ethereum, no less probably because you can't get a Libra.

Yep. And a true social has launched Donald Trump's Twitter like social media platform is finally launched. Even on the Apple app store, CNET has reported, although some users are reportedly having trouble creating accounts. Some people have gotten error messages when they try to enter a birth date, email, or phone number, while others say they were replaced on wait lists.

None of this is surprising. I, you know, that, that happens when people launch a new service. You can only test things so much and it looks like they at least kind of tested a bit this time. So that's good. Um, you know, it's basically a Twitter clone. Uh, you can, uh, post truths to the platform's equivalent to tweets and it's possible to reshare posts on one's timeline, blah, blah, blah.

So it's, it's here. Uh, they are working on a verification policy that it would publish quotes in the coming weeks and quotes. Once again, another, another app, another service with a roadmap rather than actual plans. So, yes, yes.

I just checked and I am still on the wait list at number 312,238. Except the email I got right after that said I was in the 200,000s, but this number has not changed in days because I tried to get on the first day and I could not get on. I w I would like to experience the truth, Brian.

This is part of the job. Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't? I know, uh, we don't get hazard pay, so gog.show slash donate, please, uh, to help us out with that. Yeah. I mentioned the tindler, tinder, tindler, tinder swindler, uh, on a previous episode. Yeah, exactly.

Um, and, uh, how this guy basically got away and lives in Israel now, like a little douchebag he is. Well, he jumped up on Cameo and, uh, Cameo basically says, yeah, uh, that's okay.

We're fine with that. He didn't do anything illegal, did he? Uh, not that he has been charged with. Not, not, not at least for what was in the television show. He has not been charged for that stuff, I believe. What's the problem? Um, yeah, yeah, uh, I just thought it was interesting.

So he's got like 55 star reviews already too. People like him. People like him. All right. Well, take the money while you can. You know how we found out about this? Hmm. My roommate was actually going to buy one from him to send to somebody else we know who liked the show.

But the, the, the signup process took so long that, you know, she got through, got the signup thing done. And then actually went in, ordered it. And then they said, it's going to be seven days. Would you like to get it in 24 hours for an extra a hundred dollars? Then instead of having an upsell where you can just click yes, you have to delete it and start all over again.

And then pick that ad on when you do it. And when she started over, I just looked at her and I go, is it $300 funny? And she's like, it ate $30 funny. And then boom. So cameos, bad UI, lost a sale. Sorry, Simon.

All right. Speaking of things that are making us feel old, I am reading the nineties, a book by Chuck Klosterman. Now the nineties were obviously a fairly pivotal decade for me. Lots of things happened and it was a good time.

And I love Chuck Klosterman's nonfiction. He's written some fiction stuff. I've not enjoyed that, but he's an excellent journalist and it's very good writing. And I've loved all of his other books. I hadn't written or I haven't read anything by him in ages. I don't think he's been releasing too much recently that has been nonfiction, but this has come out and it's getting some buzz and I'm about halfway through it and it is excellent.

And with the theme of the show makes me feel very old. It is a theme. It is a theme. I did get through how to be perfect. The correct answer to every moral question by Michael Schur. How was it? If you've watched the good place, it's pretty much, you know, that you've seen most of it because yeah, he taught most of the stuff that's in this book is all the research that he did to go into create the show.

So if you paid attention in class, there's not a lot to be gleaned. There is some interesting stuff, you know, on how he came to his conclusions and things like that for the show. But for the most part, it's kind of like a B minus, I'd say in stars, however many stars that is.

I don't know. In a surprise turn, we are bringing back Moron of the Week, which has been absent for quite some time. Starring the person that we've banned from the segment. Exactly. If you're going to resurrect something, let's go whole hog here.

Kanye West says he's raked in over $2.2 million in STEM player sales in just 24 hours. This is after the announcement that Donda 2 would be released only on the Donda player, which is that little STEM player that we talked about when it was first announced.

And I forgot that he had anything to do with it. And yeah, so not so great there. And I do like one of the comments. Was it Ali Funnabill? He says, hello, nah, I'm going to just wait until it leaks online instead of buying the STEM player.

Yeah. And it'll be on streaming media within two weeks. It probably is already. Apparently his launch party didn't go all that well. And he threw down his mic and stormed off. He's got problems. Like, I actually feel a little bit bad making fun of him at this point because it's obvious that he has actual, like, actionable mental issues at this point in time.

So get some help, Kanye. Yeah, but he drives around my neighborhood in a $500,000 SUV. So, you know, there's a great line. Only a little. Only a little. Only a little. Yeah. Yeah, there's a great line in that movie, The Edge, where Anthony Hopkins says, never feel sorry for a man with a plane.

So I think I can not feel sorry for a man with a half a million dollar SUV or a minivan. And this one is just a, I see what they're doing here. The bunnies have left the mansion inside Playboy's quest to reinvent itself as a tech company was from The Information.

Thanks to Chris Lockhead for sending this one over because he has an actual subscription so I could read the whole article. They are basically going whole hog on NFTs and Web3 and trying to make their own OnlyFans. Kind of got beat to the punch there. Yeah, yeah, a little bit, a little bit.

So they're kind of playing catch up. And I don't think the Playboy brand is strong enough, especially, like, for kids. Like, again, things that make you feel old, thinking about Playboy. Exactly. They've pivoted quite a bit, though. It's mostly a female-run company now, which is a good thing, I think, for that kind of brand.

That's what you need. What doesn't help is, you know, I've been watching this special on A&E called The Secrets of the Playboy Mansion. Oh, they were not a lot of good people in there originally. No, no. So I see why they're trying to clean house big time. And this was my original story for Moron of the Week.

Randy Zuckerberg has decided to get behind the mic again. And she has – she sang a song about crypto, Brian. Oh, joy. Did you listen to this? Yes. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I meant to put a warning in there before I posted it, but – Not safe for human consumption.

Not safe for human consumption. What's really funny, though, is I watched her previous video that she got somewhat famous for, as far as nepotism can take you with a bad video. A friend of mine popped up in the middle of it as one of the dancers. David Prager was in it.

I was just like, what? Tripped down memory lane. But, yeah, this is just a public service announcement. If you see this link in the show notes, do not in any way, shape, or form feel obligated to listen to the song. It's really bad. I'd recommend you do not.

It's really that bad. Just don't. I did so you don't have to. Security? Ha! Joining us today is 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 to War Day, Dave. Yes, yes. Lots to talk about today. What's the latest from you two gents? I got a quick FordPass update. After I turned in my car, I was doing the experiment that we always talk about and left on my app to see if I could still turn the car on or off after a little while.

Right. Just because, you know, it's for science. For science. Sure. Yes. Yeah. Of course. And of course, I couldn't get up the cojones to actually do it because I'm like, what if somebody's doing something with it right now and they're, you know, working on it and I start it, they can lose an arm.

This is where my brain goes. So I didn't do it. But about three days later, I got a note from my phone that said, hey, this car has been a full factory reset. So your access has been revoked.

And I'm like, oh, good. That's good. That is good. They're at least doing something about that now over at Ford. Yeah. OK, well, Ford's doing something. But what if you made a personal sale of your vehicle to someone else? Well, then you got to do it yourself. Yep.

Yep. SOP. Tear those pages out of the manual. I saw this over at the next web and I figured it's a good starting off point. Snowden was right. Pandemic surveillance is here to stay. And my reply is, well, duh. Of course it is. Yeah. They don't give it back once they have it. I want to – yes.

On the topic of Edward Snowden, my comment here is a broken clock is right twice a day. And while I understand Edward Snowden's place as a symbol of what he did and all that sort of stuff, since he has gone off to Russia and become whatever level of celebrity you want to consider him, I can't say that I've been impressed with really much of anything that he's done.

Like he doesn't strike me as being a particularly insightful thinker or anything. So I just kind of – I've chosen to – to the degree that I can ignore him, which isn't always possible in the line of work that I do, but that's my take on him.

I'm curious what you guys think. So he's a one-hit wonder. I mean he's basically – he's just kind of a Twitter gadfly screaming the same line about, you know, I told you so. And anytime something goes vaguely bad in terms of surveillance and all that sort of stuff, and yeah, I mean, you can nitpick that and you can cherry pick all your stories and, you know, he's amazingly silent anytime there's any good news.

He's there right away as soon as there's bad news though. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I think one-hit wonders is not unfair. I don't know. You know, the folks that I know who are in that world, I think – I don't know if we've talked about this before, but, you know, he's – the things that he did put people in harm's way, put good people in harm's way, they say he could have gone about it in different ways.

Now, the flip side of that is the people in the privacy world and the surveillance – or the – I'm sorry, the secured world, clearance world is what I'm trying to say. They can say that and there's no way to really fact-check them because everything's – you know, they say people lost their lives because of him and, well, maybe.

Okay. They say that. Show your work. Right, right. So I'm always skeptical of those kinds of things because I think it's easy for them to be repeated and exaggerated and without there being any backup, they become unofficial facts and I just think that should be taken with a grain of salt.

But I still – I maintain my opinion that beyond the very useful conversation that Edward Snowden started and the change that happened because of him as an individual, I remain unimpressed with him since then. He's starting a cover band with Julian Assange soon.

I'm surprised they haven't. What would the name of the – what would the karaoke night the two of them would have together? What would the name of that band be, I wonder? The Panopticons. The Panopticons. Right, right. Let's see.

The Leaky Sneakies. Yeah, something with Leaky. I was going – it's got to be Leaky. Right. I think, yeah, Sneaky Leaky I think works. That sounds good. Yeah. That rolls off the tongue. And Chelsea on drums. There you go.

As we get together today, the invasion of Ukraine has begun in full measure or certainly, I guess, unambiguous measure. And so from a cyber point of view – News is no longer saying incursion or police action.

They're now saying invasion. That's right. So we have crossed that line and that is where we are right now. From a cyber point of view, obviously, there's – everyone is on edge because of the possibilities of what could happen there.

Everybody has got an eye on their critical infrastructure. I would just – as a reminder to all of our listeners, I believe it was Kim Zetter, the journalist and author who said, if you have not done so, please, please put your cyber house in order right now, which means if something is important to you, have it on multi-factor authentication, period, end of statement.

Just do it. And not in the cloud. I know it – If you need access to something. It sounds overblown. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Evidently, there have been – we've seen the past couple of days, there's been a lot of DDoSing going on of various organizations in Ukraine, some of their banking systems, government websites, things like that.

Evidently, there have been ransomware that's been injected and as misdirection for wipers. So, to track your attention with the ransomware and the – your files aren't actually being encrypted. They're being wiped. There's speculation that the wipers are actually there to hide the tracks of whatever other things that they may have done inside of some of these critical systems.

So, the bottom line is the Russians know what they're doing. They're good at what they do here. They have used Ukraine as a testing ground for the past decade or so. So, it's not surprising that they have their talons deep in here. We just have to see how this plays out and hope that in the time – the past couple of years since we've had some of these things accidentally trickle around the rest of the world, things

like NotPetya, the pipeline issue we had on the East Coast here, that we've done enough hardening of our own systems that things will not affect us. But better safe than sorry. So, just to go back to some of our prepper conversations, to not be on a slippery slope and not panic and all that sort of thing.

But do take care and make sure that you're – make sure you're taking care of the basics. Something I wanted to touch base with are the two of you. Since the three of us are all of that age, we are children of the 80s. One of the things that has come up here is – in Putin's presentation, he made a speech yesterday and he said, whoever tries to interfere with us and even more so to create threats to our country, to our people,

should know that Russia's response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never experienced in your history. We are ready for any development of events. All necessary decisions in this regard have been made. I hope that I will be heard. Our coverage of this pointed out that there have been some who are seeing this as a veiled threat of nuclear war.

And while that seems unlikely, it's – there's a shadow of that hanging over. And I'm just curious as children of the 80s, those of us who grew up had our formative days during the Cold War and there was that shadow of nuclear war hanging over us.

First of all, when you were a teenager, how much did you think about that? And second of all, does this reignite – if so, does this reignite any of those feelings? Who's going first? Brian. You go, Brian. As a teenager, yes, constantly.

I mean we talked about the movie The Day After, all that sort of stuff. I mean we had drills where we were inexplicably climbing under our desks to save us from nuclear fallout considering I was a stone's throw from Los Angeles and about 7,000 naval bases.

And as my mom always told me, you don't need to worry about any of this. If there's a nuclear war, we're dead immediately. But again, that's not something you want to hear. So yeah, thought about that constantly as a teenager.

Do I think about it right now? No, I don't. I don't see this escalating to that point. And if it does, very little control over the matter anyways. But I don't think it's going to – I don't think we're barreling towards that anymore.

I think there's – it would take a madman. Now, some are arguing that Putin is turning into that and is basically doing a Hail Mary pass here for himself more than his country, basically him.

That if he doesn't turn the tides here and exert some control back again, he's basically finished because the Russian economy is collapsing. The Russian military is a shadow of what it used to be. There's no way to get any of that back. So, you know, will he go totally nuts?

I don't know. I hope not. But I personally don't have that fear like I did when I was a teenager. And it did seem that, you know, that – well, right now it's – there's only one person, right? Right now, Biden and other leaders are taking pretty – you know, they're saying we're not going to get involved other than financially, you know, we're going to impose sanctions, et cetera.

When we were teenagers, it was Reagan – you know, Reagan was playing chicken with Russia. Biden is not playing chicken with Putin right now. I think Putin would like him to. I think Putin's whole speech is about, you know, come and get us.

We'll see. Yeah. What do you think, Jason? Well, to the 80s, absolutely. I still have the same dream that I had in the 80s after seeing the day after. It comes every now and again. Not a pleasant one. But so I would say it probably never went away.

Do I think that this is the run-up to nuclear war? Nah. Cooler heads will prevail, I believe. Yeah. But if they didn't, not a lot you can do about it. So might as well go about your day. Trust me, it's not going to stop me from watching guys' grocery games tonight.

Let's just put it that way. Yeah, I would agree that I think it's highly unlikely that we'll see anything like that. I wonder how much saber rattling will there be. It's funny as a teenager, it wasn't something that I really have any recollection of being really afraid of.

Like I understood it from an intellectual point of view and I watched the day after like we all did and went through those drills. But I don't recall ever really feeling any sort of visceral fear about it. And I'm not sure why. I don't know what that says about me or what sort of particular, you know, sociopathy I have.

Let me take a stab at this as an amateur psychologist. Yes, please. Jason's demeanor pushed him towards punk rock. My demeanor pushed me towards goth and industrial. You were listening to musicals. I think you started off as a much happier individual.

My sunny disposition served me well throughout my teen years. That's what I'm saying. Race guys are going to clear up. Put on a happy face. And I'm like, I'm like listening to like the world is a vampire. Right. Right.

You know what? I think also. Hang on. In the morning, I would listen to the Dead Kennedys when I was skating. But in the evening, I'd be outside the theater waiting to get cheap tickets to go see any musical I possibly could. So I had I had a hybrid crossover there somewhere. I think also because my parents were decidedly not intellectuals.

And so conversations about politics was not something that happened around our dinner table. So I think part of it was I just really wasn't tuned into these sorts of things. These were not things the family was talking about. So perhaps I was just blissfully ignorant of it.

Yeah. I mean, maybe as I mean, I was just drawn to like I was you know, I read 1984, like fifth, fourth or fifth grade. Like I was drawn towards dystopians and and and all that sort of stuff. So, you know, when when the real life version pops up, you don't just kind of ignore it.

You sink into it. And that probably was not very healthy. So at some point you decided to take up smoking. Well, yeah. Oh, boy.

All right. Let's let's move on because I know we're going to be talking about this next week. And again, after that, this is going to be going on for quite some time. The air tag stalking thing has come up again because, you know, a lot of people are a lot of anecdotal stories popping up.

A lot of people, you know, my my friends friends found it in a bag in her purse and she had an Android. So she wasn't notified. There's a lot of this stuff coming out and air stock air tag stalking concerns continue to be voiced to fight the fact that Apple's tracker is the least suitable one on the market for anyone with malicious intent.

I'm not sure if that's much comfort to people, but basically, yes. If you're using an air tag, there are a lot better tracking tools out there, mostly your phone. So and the article kind of lists off all the different things that Apple is doing there.

They're actually doing, I think, as much as they can for a device that is meant to track things to make it safe to not track people with it. So they're doing a pretty good job of that. And that's kind of the whole point of this article. There's going to be a study about it, but they're basically just saying air tags are pretty safe, really, if you know what you're doing.

And if you really want to track someone, use something else. Yeah. See, this is where this really pisses me off. This whole thing about, you know, all these stories and the stupid people who think that this is the end of the world with everybody's going to have a tag and track and blah, blah, blah. Air tags were awesome until these people came out of the woodwork because they worked.

And, you know, every time that there's another, quote, unquote, anecdotal story that comes out, they, you know, they react and make them worse of a product. It's like I don't want it beeping all the time because if I put one in my car and my car gets stolen, I would like it to not tell them that it's there.

Pretty please. You know, it's like the whole point of it is so, OK, I can find my car. Great. I can find my bag. I don't want the person who stole my bag to know because I might be standing behind them with a baseball bat because my air tag led them to them. But it's like they're just making it worse.

It's like now I want to have to, like, hardware hack it, take it apart and find the beeper in it and turn it off. Ah, funny you should mention that. Funny you should mention that. I saw a story about a week ago of a gent who had briefly put up an Etsy shop where he was selling modified air tags with the beepers disconnected.

I'd imagine very briefly. It was brief. I suspect he's probably just found a more welcoming market for his goods. But, you know, there you go. There's another story that I enjoyed probably about a month ago.

Somebody had put air tags on his scooter. He had a little electric scooter and he was smart enough to put two on. He put one on that was easy to find that was his decoy air tag and then the other one was hidden. And I think we covered that here, didn't we? No, I don't think so.

No. OK. Sure enough, the scooter got stolen. It was in New York City and went to some – the equivalent of an electric scooter chop shop and he was able to track it down because sure enough, the bad guys found the decoy air tag, figured that was it and didn't remove the other one.

And eventually he was able to get his scooter back. But I love the notion of installing two. One is a decoy. I think that's smart thinking. Yeah, it would be even smarter if the second one you installed didn't have the damn speaker on it. There you go. There you go. Well, as with most things, the world actually provides a perfect solution to many of our problems.

And if anybody's really concerned about being tracked with an air tag, I suggest that you purchase and befriend a bunch of magpies. Because according to this story, which I love, an animal ecology professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia said he and his team recently witnessed a mischief of magpies, which is also a great group name, display a rare cooperative rescue behavior.

When they attempted to track the birds, they developed a lightweight but tough harness the birds could wear like backpacks and carry a small tracker with them as they went about their daily lives. In the true genius of the story, they also created a feeding station that would wirelessly charge and download data from the trackers.

How cool is that? It even had a magnet for freeing the birds of their harnesses. So they thought this was going to be great. But ultimately, their study fell apart in mere days. Within 10 minutes of the team fitting the final tracker, they saw a female magpie use her build to remove a harness off of one of the younger birds.

Hours later, most of the other test subjects had been freed of their trackers, too. And by day three, even the most dominant male in the group had allowed one of his flock to assist him in removing the tracker. So, solution. Nature finds a way. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Birds are smart. And, you know, when we were growing up, remember, humans are unique in the animal kingdom because we're the only ones that use tools. And how many times has that turned out to not be true? Right. Exactly. Never mind that chimp back there. Right.

Yeah. Exactly. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. Also, chimpanzees with guns. Let me lock you in a room with a chimpanzee who has a gun. See how you feel about that. No, you know. So, anyway. Yep.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I have a friend who's going through the process of befriending a crow in her backyard. Ah, okay. Treats out for the crow and at the point now where the crow is bringing her little shiny objects in exchange for nuts and berries and things like that.

So, you know, fun little project. All fun and games until she loses an eye. Well, I was going to say that what you don't want to do is get on the bad side of a crow. Hell no. I have stories about researchers who have to wear disguises across their college campuses because they've gotten on the bad side of a group of a murder of crows who are now coming – who put a hit out on them and are now coming after their eyeballs.

Yeah. They're scary. You don't mess with them. Even in the parking lot at Ralph's, I'm just like, have a nice day. You guys be cool. Right. Right. Put down your tribute to them so they clear the path to your car. I just – I am always fascinated by Jason's psychology.

It's amazing. We leap from like he's showing up with a baseball bat to destroy a human, but he's super nice to the crows. Because animals are better than people. Yes. That's simple math right there. Yep. Lover of dogs.

Yes. Hater of people. And crows. Right. Yeah. I don't see – I don't – yeah. I don't see any – I don't see any conflict there. All that makes perfect sense to me. See, Brian? You're the abnormal one.

Well, you know, I'm the one that didn't have – No, let's not be hasty. Let's not be hasty. I'm the one that back in high school was not lining up for musicals. I'll give you that. That could be my fatal flaw. That's right. So on that, Jason and I are in perfect alignment. Closing shout outs.

Over at Patreon, we've got Michael. Welcome to the club, Michael. Thank you. And over at PayPal, we've got Andrew, John, Tom, Mark, John, Andre, Joseph, Michael, Humphrey, and Jason with the big 50 bucks. Thank you so much. Woo! People named Jason rock. Over at Stripe, we've got Karen Ross, Roman, and Daryl.

Thank you all so, so very much. Excellent. And we have a new five-star rating from MG2AXA. Entertaining and useless. I love listening to the show, but I don't know why. I get no practical or useful information out of it, but it's just straight up entertaining. I used to not like it when they would trash Trump or get political, but now I just have to remind myself that these are the people who think democracy is at stake when they see a guy in a buffalo hat.

I don't really care if someone disagrees with me politically, so keep up the great work, and I can't wait for next week's grumpiness. Cheers. I think it's worth pointing out that the guy in the buffalo hat broke into the Capitol, but, you know. Stop proving him right, Brian. Okay. And in sad news, we've lost Mark Lanigan, a grunge pioneer and the Screaming Trees singer who passed away at 57.

He had a successful solo career as well, and he's done some work with other people, particularly Greg Dooley as a—oh, gosh, why am I blanking on the band's name? I knew I was going to do that, and I'm supposed to put it in here. Whatever. He's done some great stuff in some of my favorite albums of all time, even though I can't remember the name of the artist's name that they did it under right now.

Big loss. Big loss. So I'm quite sad about that. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoyed the show, visit GOG.show slash donate to help 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 542. 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 that we can read on the air.

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