549: Chaos Muppet

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

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. It has been an interesting day in Los Angeles. We have definitely been plunged headfirst into third world country territory, Brian. You got out just in time. What's going on? Wake up, turn on the light, put my pants on. Boom. Entire house goes dark.

Like most of the San Fernando Valley lost power this morning. Lovely, eh? Okay, so there's that one. Then over in Santa Monica, your neck of the woods, there's apparently some kind of prowler on the loose a la 1950s. One guy has completely suspended mail service for part of Santa Monica because nobody can catch him.

Okay. One guy. You're going to suspend mail service for one guy. Well, no big loss with the mail service. I just remember that it was basically nothing but junk mail by the end of my tenor there. So that's pretty much all it is now. Yeah. Anyways, well, that's fun. Things have been moving along normally here. Of course, I'm going to say that. And next thing I know, a beaver is going to chew through our power line. So that's what happens here.

Of course, of course. Moose out of nowhere. It's funny. Following up a little bit from last week, we were talking about the coffee machines in our respective offices. And I intellectually understand that the CEO of my company listens to the podcast, but I don't let that affect me. I think you and I are both kind of like, we're just here doing the podcast and we're laying it out. And whoever listens, listens. And that is that.

But on the plus side, he on Friday when I came in after he had listened, he kindly pointed out the very well hidden power button for the coffee machine. So now I know where it is. All right. And I guess I've discovered that this is the appropriate HR channel to discuss issues. Brian, would you like a raise?

That sounds good. Cool. Okay. You know, I'm just saying. Here we go. Ah, and Star Trek's first NFTs. We talked about them last week as they were announced and roundly denounced by anybody that has a brain and is into Star Trek. But we have some more details on what these actually are going to be now.

You can spend $250 on the season zero pack and be a zero and you'll get unique algorithmically built starships that you can flaunt and sell to other Trekkies. There will be 20,000 items in the first wave with 2,000 more in reserve and they are incentivizing early buyers.

Starship owners will receive crew member NFTs ahead of their wider release in season one and season two will let you use that crew for missions in a play to earn game. So this isn't just a Star Trek thing. This is a directive from the top from Paramount. They're planning to offer NFTs across key franchises. So we're going to get a lot of these things.

You know, it's not clear that there's any sustainable demand for and trust in digital rarities. I would say it's clear that there isn't, even if they're attached to well-known sci-fi series. So if you are, if you want to idiotically go where many morons have gone before, by all means, I like to check in on these things and get the pulse, you know, because I see them in the Twitter feed and the official postings from Star Trek or Paramount or whatever.

And I go look at the comments and, um, I mean, I'm sure some people are going to buy these things because there are a lot of idiots out there, but in general, the online zeitgeist on these things is, this is horrible. I can't believe you're doing this.

We don't call them idiots, Brian. We call them speculators, right? They're digital speculators. And yeah, this is the dumbest thing, but you know, it just, we've talked about NFTs enough. We'll talk about them a little bit more later, but, uh, yeah, this is not, not a bright move from the top brass at Paramount, but they see money, Jason.

They do see money. I was going to say, if it's anything like it used to be, that's all that matters. And I saw a really interesting article over at Slate called the worst part of working from home is now haunting reopened offices. And you know, the gist of this is basically there's been a push to hybrid. Nobody's really trying to force anybody back full time unless jobs actually physically require you being there. It's funny because all of this debate online is really about us like white collar workers, blue collar workers have been going to work, will continue to go to work and will always go to work.

So it's a very, uh, it's a very, you know, airy subclass that basically is having this huge debate. But anyways, it's the, it's the one that we're in. So we'll continue to talk about it. Uh, a lot of people have returned to their offices for summer, all of the week, and they found that they're the only ones there or others are stay and staying isolated in their offices. And they're still having all their communication over email, Slack, or zoom.

So as a result, they're spending the time commuting to and from the office, purchasing the, uh, outrageously increased lunch prices from the very few places that are still open around your office and, uh, still just kind of sitting there and doing exactly what you would have done at home. Yeah. It's interesting. Now that I've got that office that, uh, I'm renting the first floor of the building. It's a pretty big building. Um, is a massive, like haircare conglomerate.

And since I've been going there, I've been seeing the, uh, we've got a big open courtyard where people go out and have lunch. Uh, and I've noticed it, it getting gradually more and gradually more and gradually more as, as the weeks are progressing here.

So I think people are coming back because when I first got the place, it was a, it was just a ghost town. Right. You know, you go by the cafeteria and there's like literally one person there and it's the janitor cleaning the seats. It was, it was pretty sad. Now it's, now it's, uh, starting to bump a bit. It's starting to bump.

So good. Yes, we are having a very privileged argument over the, uh, who's going to go to work thing. Yeah. And then the other bit of the article kind of just gets into, you know, it's, it's really coming down to how difficult, difficult it actually is to get, uh, people to commit to synchronized schedules.

So you're actually having people come in at the same time, particularly people that actually, you know, would interface and interact with each other and you would get those benefits. And I find that's a struggle in my own company as well. There's a lot of people that just don't want to come in and then you're, you're just trying to go like, okay, can you do Tuesday?

Well, this person can't do Tuesday, but I need you two in here together, figure something out. And that's kind of where everything's at right now. Can't you buy a corporate, uh, account for Calendly and have just everybody figure it out? Yeah, we could. Pretty simple little service there. Well, the problem is every time that I try to make this big push with the company, another wave hits.

We're, we're actually in what they're calling the sixth wave here. So there's a lot of pushback about like, I don't want to get on public transport and I don't want to do all that right now. So we'll try it all again once this subsides and before the next one. Uh, the sixth wave sounds, you know, decidedly dystopian.

It really does. I know. Uh, speaking of dystopia, we've talked about the death of retail on this show for the length of the show. And, uh, we're usually pretty early, but man, we were really early on that one. Kmart is down to three stores.

They're still hanging on. I think we predicted that they would be gone five years ago by now. Well, they're hanging on tooth and nail. One can argue that if you're down to three stores, you're pretty much done. I mean, there used to be one in every single town. Sometimes more than one. No, there used to be several, several in every single town.

We're getting down to the part where, uh, they're going to have their own documentary, a la Blockbuster. But, uh, yeah, I mean, it makes me a little bit sad because I learned to shoplift at Kmart. There's always Target, Jason. No, there was no Target when I was a kid and it's too bright in there now. And now they have surveillance, which is just not fun.

Not fun. But I, I learned, I learned my dark arts stealing Zoids and Penny Racers because they were small enough to fit in your pocket when you were like seven or eight. Right. I have no idea what Penny Racers are or Zoids for that matter, but I know nerds. Yes. And yeah, nerds are the other thing that I stole too.

Uh, thanks for reading the show notes where I didn't. Um, no problem. That's, uh, yeah, that's the only thing that has survived. Yeah, exactly. Uh, nerds are the only thing that survived from back then. And Penny Racers were these tiny little cars that you, that had the springs in that you would pull back and let them go. Oh, my kid has one of those.

Yeah, but if you put a, these are really small and you could put a penny in the back of them and then they'd do wheelies and tricks. Ah, okay. They were cool. Cool. Yeah. And Zoids were these, uh, little dinosaur robots that you would wind up, but they, uh, just had, you know, just different types.

They were just dinosaurs that were mechs, basically. They were pretty cool. I thought they were fun. But, uh, I, I put some links in the show notes for, uh, the oldsters if you want to go get some pictures and relive it. But, yeah, speaking of robbery, uh, Jack Dorsey's first tweet. Mm-hmm. Uh, you remember when Jack's first tweet went on sale?

Oh, yeah. Right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. Uh, well, the guy that bought it, uh, he put it back on sale and, uh, thought it was going to go for like $48 million. Well, it ended at $280. Even for that, I'd have bought it. No.

Oh, come on. Just to say. Well, I mean, is this surprising? At least, it's a screenshot. And it's Jack. Ew. In the news.

Brian, not since the slap have we had so much amateur discourse on the internet. Uh, then Elon Musk and his rotating Twitter trolling, shenanigans, whatever you want to call them. Yep. It just never seems to end.

And every single podcast I turn on now. I was listening to Cal Newport's podcast this morning. Cal Newport. The guy who says, you know, don't get distracted. He distracted me for 20 freaking minutes with his opinion on Elon Musk on Twitter's board, which means that somebody should have pulled that chunk before it went to air because they recorded it, obviously, when Elon was still going to be on the board.

That was annoying because it came out this morning. Come on, Cal. You can do better. But it's gotten to the point where I, I, I stopped. I don't care anymore. Do you care anymore? Did you even ever care? I care because so many people revere and look up to and see Elon Musk as a role model, while I see him as a man child who has way too much money.

Um, he may be a genius, but he's actually a sociopath asshole. And the fact that so many people look up to him and his shenanigans and think that this is somewhat genius, it gives me great sadness for the state of humanity. In so far as I don't give a flying fuck what he does, um, and I still have Tesla stock, so I suppose I slightly care.

Um, no, I, I, I, I follow it just because it saddens me. It's sadness porn, Jason. This is like my version of watching, since Game of Thrones left the air, this is what I've got left. We need to just rename him Elon Snow. It's perfect. I wish he would die.

Casey Newton's latest piece. He had one line that just had me really, really going. But you can know you're dealing with a top tier chaos Muppet and still find yourself unprepared for the next turn of events. I love that Elon is now a top tier chaos Muppet. I agree with that. I haven't heard that.

You know, I mean, all right. So Tesla is arguably, you know, a very good company. They, they make very good cars. They do a lot of things. Um, I think that they would be doing a lot better if they had a board of directors that actually had some influence over Elon. Or even better still, Elon just kind of steps away from operation instead of doing kind of this Jack Twitter thing that he's doing where he's kind of sort of being involved with Twitter, but, or Twitter.

Well, not Twitter too. Uh, with Tesla, but not really. But then he's also got SpaceX and then he's also got, you know, baby mama drama. And he's also got the, wait, don't, don't forget the, uh, the monkeys playing a brain pong. Don't forget that one. Right. And now, you know, I, I saw this morning, he's launching a hostile takeover of Twitter.

So, you know, he didn't want to, he violated SEC rules by buying way too much stock. And there's going to be tons of lawsuits about that from shareholders. Uh, then he, then he, you know, was going to be on the board and then he, you know, got himself off the board in the most lame ass way possible.

And apparently it's too much. I, I don't care enough. And it's taking, Elon is the new Trump in that you cannot get away from him and it takes up too much headspace. And I don't want this in my head any more than I wanted Trump in my head every day.

Everything seems to be designed to get himself in the news cycle and make sure everybody hears his goddamn name because he's a sociopath narcissist every fucking 10 seconds. And I'm tired of it. Put him in jail. He broke a lot of rules. Fine him. Preach. Preach.

Do something to him. Don't let him keep running rampant doing whatever the fuck he wants. Somebody be a goddamn fucking adult. Okay. That's how I feel about it. Jeez. Ryan, I figured it out. He is sucking all the oxygen out of the room so it can fucking take it with him to Mars.

That's where it's going. That's why everybody is so loopy and lightheaded now. He's actually stealing the oxygen for his evil plan. Let's get him. Let's get him. Well, we'll see. If you happen to be a Twitter shareholder right now and if Elon Musk is successful in this, I would expect there to be a bounce.

But I would sell it immediately after a set bounce. Just my personal advice. And speaking of Twitter, we talked last week about the embedded deleted tweets that just kind of did nothing and didn't say this tweet has been deleted or anything. They're talking about Twitter has reverted the change somehow or other.

They're doing something. I don't really know. But the interesting thing I saw about this article was the idea originally was that if you embedded a tweet, even if you as a user deleted your own tweet, the embedded tweet would stay there forever, which means you're not deleting your tweet.

Right? That's a good point. Like if you if you're giving users the option to delete their tweets, but your thought behind the behind the feature of an embedded tweet was that if you deleted the tweet, the embedded tweet would still be there because CEO Jack Dorsey stressed the role of the platform as a kind of public record that don't offer fucking delete.

Well, here's the thing. I think the whole kerfuffle is it just does. It just needs to say this tweet has been deleted. No, I agree. And that's I'm sure that that's what they're going to do. But like I said, the interesting thing I saw that part of this article for me was the fact that they didn't want it to be that way.

Initially, they wanted even if you deleted the tweet, the you would anybody if anybody anywhere embedded the tweet that would stay there, even if you deleted it. Well, that's fucking ridiculous. Yeah, right. That's my point. OK, now I get it.

Yeah, that's absolutely fucking ridiculous. OK. All right. I saw this article on IFL science and I thought it was funny. It's kind of a throwaway. Not really like I don't buy most of this crap anyways, but impulsive psychopaths like crypto. Research shows how dark personality traits affect Bitcoin enthusiasm.

Mostly, duh. But yeah, they get into this whole dark tetrad that they call with our four personality traits. Machiavellianism, narcissism and psych psychopathy plus sadism and how they basically all line up with people that are super into crypto.

OK, well, here's another one where I'm getting vindicated by IFL science, because did I not say probably a year ago that crypto is a mental disorder? Yep. You did. There we go. Just saying. And then on the heels of that, I saw this article, the growing lightly controversial industry teaching kids crypto.

I would say if more people knew about it, it would be less than lightly controversial. I think it would be very controversial. So here we are talking about it this summer in L.A., dozens of children aged five to 17 will attend the third ever session of crypto kids camp. Well, they'll learn about everything from artificial intelligence to virtual reality using hand on games and activities.

But this is obviously a lot of Web3 stuff and a lot of crypto stuff. It's a week long camp, which costs 500 bucks. Therefore, I'm already placing a burden and a specific type of person that would be able to afford said camps. Dividing kids into four age groups and has them spend a set amount of time on different tech modules that follow the acronym.

Again, I would like to remind everybody that this camp includes five-year-olds. They're teaching them the acronym BEASTMODE. That's blockchain, evolution of money, artificial intelligence, security, cyber, technology slash virtual reality, mining and machine learning, online games, drones, and engineering.

BeastMODE. You know some nerd got such a hard-on when he finally finished coming up with that acronym. Or she. Or they. Or Z. Yes. Who the fuck ever? This is the one article in this week's show notes, Brian, that got me physically angry, like agitated.

Well, I'm particularly upset as I have a five-year-old who will never be taking any of these courses whatsoever. I'm also worried because this is starting to just basically expand online as well, not just camps. Children's Media has also capitalized on Web3. Zigazoo, a TikTok-like platform for ages three to 12, is releasing NFT collaborations with recognizable YouTube sensations such as Cocomelon, Blippi, and Serena Williams' Kai Kai universe.

If you have a kid, you know at least one, if not two, if not all of those. So, great. Now my kid is going to want a Blippi NFT. We're trying to teach kids about digital and financial literacy and empower them to create their own art and go build the future of the web, says Zigazoo founder Zach Ringelstein.

Zach, fuck you. Your kid's going to grow up and, like, turn the household into a DAO, and you're going to have to, like, buy tokens to pay for his, what do you call it, his fucking trucks, his allowance.

You're basically going to have to give him allowance tokens. Unbelievable. Also part of this brave new world, crypto-only virtual piggy banks for kids, books, and YouTube explainers with titles like C is for Cryptocurrency and an NFT-based kids' TV show starring tiny plush cactuses.

C is for con artist, kids. I know. And like the end of this article, perhaps, some have argued, that what kids need is better education about more stable methods of investing. Well, you know, if you do get desperate, Brian, you can send him off to camp, at least. You know?

I mean, if you just give up. One day, if it turns out that everything that we've ever known is wrong, and you go, damn, kid, you should get on that NFT bandwagon that I missed, you have a place to send him. Right. Thank God I got that season zero Star Trek ship.

It's worth five cents now. At least he's not an Etsy seller. So he's avoided that so far. So, yeah, a bunch of sellers are basically going on strike to say that, hey, Etsy, you're charging too much because they're raising their rates and it's confusing people and making them angry and, you know, business.

Business. So, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Then leave, I guess. Or strike. You can strike. But the thing is, they got to keep the lights on. So sometimes you got to raise prices. Shit. I can't even buy ground beef for under 10 bucks now. So suck it up, Etsy people.

That's all I got to say. Or get a Stripe account and sell it yourself and do all the marketing work. Exactly. It's a mall. They built a mall. They're raising their rents. Yeah. It happens. Yep. Well, Meta is going to close a loophole in its doxing policy in response to the oversight board.

And I'm only pointing this out because I believe this is the first time that the oversight board has done anything and Meta has decided to listen to them. Wow. I know. That is a first. Yeah. So Meta, unlike decisions around whether a specific post should be taken down or left up, Meta is free to completely disregard public policy proposals from the oversight board, but is required to respond to each recommendation individually, which one would argue, what's the fucking point of having an oversight board if they don't have to do anything?

PR. Oh, yeah. That's right. I forgot. That's why they did it. That's it. Yeah. So this has to do with users will be able to share photos of the exterior of private homes when the property depicted is the focus of the news story, except when shared in the context of organizing protests against the residents.

So this is all about posting photos of people's homes online and doxing. Okay. When they're allowed to do it, as in if it's an actual somewhat of a news story or a politician or a high-ranking government official in a publicly owned official residence.

Okay. Can't you just, I mean, you could go to court and say, look, we were making future news. So it technically would be news if we were allowed to show up in protest, then we would be on the news. But, you know, they are, so they're kind of going against their own recommendations temporarily, as it were.

Because we need the time. It would be news if we were allowed to show up. Call, call Jean-Claude Van Damme. Everybody get it. Get him on the horn, please. Now, what I thought was particularly interesting about this is one of the recommendations from the board was that it would make a change that makes it easier for doxing victims to get help more quickly.

Because I don't know if you've ever tried to use Facebook's customer service. It is non-existent and impossible. And they basically said, no, we're not going to do that. Nope. Nope. Okay. No way we're going to help people that actually got screwed. Not going to do that.

Well, yeah. I mean, come on. They are just recommendations, Brian. I don't have to do anything. And we had an interesting occurrence with a GM cruise and self-driving unit, which has been offering public taxi rides in San Francisco. And for the most part, it seems the service hasn't run into any notable problems until last weekend when one of the company's vehicles left police confused by its response to a routine traffic stop.

Yes, the police attempted to pull over a driverless cruise vehicle. Okay. When the car decided to basically take off instead of pull over. So, there's video of this. It's quite amusing.

The cruise commented on the clip stating its vehicle yielded to police and tried to move to the nearest safe location for that traffic stop. Yeah. Cruise has said that we work closely with the San Francisco Police Department on how to interact with our vehicles, including a dedicated phone number for them to call in situations like this.

So, basically, auto manufacturers that are creating self-driving cars have to give manuals or have 1-800 numbers for the police for how they deal with them. Oh, this isn't going to last very long. No. Uh-oh.

Nope. You know what the cops are going to want real soon? A button. Big red button. They need a kill button. Big fucking red button. Yep. That's it. And I agree that they should have one. A hundred percent. I agree that the cops should have one.

The people inside the car should have one. Because I know they're taking away the steering wheels, but is there an oh shit button? We've never discussed the oh shit button. There needs to be an oh shit button. Yep. Yeah. So, I think that, yeah, this isn't going to last very long. Especially if, you know, just through random happenstance the car goes, no, no, no, I'm going to stop over here.

I'll see you in a minute. I'll wait for you to catch up. That doesn't fly with law enforcement. At least last time I checked. Yeah. And finally, in a news that seems to be being greeted as a good thing, but I see as the final nail in the coffin and the actualization of the commercialization of space, the first all-civilian space crew is docked with the ISS.

Yes, it's a fully private space crew, including commander and former NASA astronaut, and then a bunch of businessmen. They'll conduct science experiments along with outreach and commercial activities. So, if you're rich, space is the place.

Mitten some NFTs in space. Yeah. And this is Axiom Space's first mission, AX-1, the first of several private ISS missions the company plans to launch in the coming years. It will build the first commercial module on the space station as well as a module that houses a sports arena and a film studio.

They better hurry the fuck up because I don't know if they've caught the news on the timeline for the ISS decommission, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be decommissioned by the time they get fucking space stadium done. What they really need up there is a podcast studio.

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Media Candy. So, Brian, the other night I'm sitting down to do some emails. I got a ton of emails to get through from when people were writing me when I first had my stroke because it's the last thing I want to do is think about it and get back to those emails. So, I figured if I have to be in pain, let's make it complete.

So, I put on the movie Moonfall that you thoroughly trounced last episode. Why would you do that to yourself? Because I don't trust you anymore, Brian. After the discovery debacle of season four, I give zero, zero credence to your reviews.

Well, I believe just from the notes that you've put in here, I've re-earned your trust. No, you haven't. Because I think with Moonfall, Moonfall is one of those movies that if you get the joke, you kind of know what the movie is going to be. But if you don't and you try and take it seriously, it's going to be the stupidest fucking thing ever.

What you have to know about this is, if you'd seen it at the beginning, it would have explained everything. There's a secret code that happens at the pre-credits when they show all the produced-by credits. If you see the Centropolis blimp, you are in for two hours of just kick back, get some popcorn and not give a fuck-a-tude.

These are the guys that wrote Independence or made Independence Day. I know all that. It was still horrible. Okay. It was horrible. But here's the thing. Ever since Independence Day, they've been trying to recapture their destruction of the world glory over and over and over again.

And it just gets more comical every iteration. So you just have to know the progression. And then it's just funny as shit if you're in on the joke. Because when they finally had the moon rolling off of the entire planet, I'm like, okay, they've upped the game.

They've done well this time. I mean, it gets to the point. It's just so ridiculous. I laughed my ass off. I had a great time with this movie. All right. Well, I mean, at the beginning, according to my notes. The stupid fat kid, because, of course, the fat guy has to be the one.

He's basically playing a fat Jeff Goldblum in this one. He asks, what would Elon do? Of course. You know, which I'm sure made you happen. Try to buy Twitter. Yeah. Did you? I figured you were going to throw something at the TV for that one. The cat's name was Fuzz Aldrin. That was funny, I thought.

It was cute. The whole megastructure thing was fucking stupid. But that was the key of the thing. But did you notice how many Kaspersky product placements were in here? I did. I did. They were everywhere. Of course, AI. They had to throw that in there. But all in all, it was so terrible that I just laughed my ass off while I was doing the emails.

It actually perked me up. All right. Well, we can agree it was terrible. It was terrible. But I got way more out of it than you did, I think. Yes. Because I enjoyed it. I did not enjoy it one bit. And the car chase scenes, I'm like, oh, those are the effects Brian was talking about that were totally 90s.

I'm like, wow, that's bad. That's really bad. Yep. Okay. So Netflix is back in the news with adding a two thumbs up button instead of one thumbs up when one thumb just won't do. Can they add a thumb up the ass button? As soon as we get to five thumbs, then we're back to where we started.

Then they'll just go back to one star. It is. They're going to eke back up to five thumbs. Right. I'm telling you. And then they'll go to one star to simplify things. And then the whole cycle will repeat again. It is the Matrix. It is just the Matrix.

I started to watch Upload. That was the first thing I watched before I watched Moonfall. It's a nothing burger. There's just nothing to keep you there. It's too intellectual. So you had to downgrade to Moonfall. And when Upload is too intellectual, you've got problems.

That's a sad state of affairs, my friend. That is a very sad state of affairs. Yeah. It's nothing. It's fine. It ran in the background and did not upset me, which is about all I was asking for. It had a couple of good jokes. Okay.

I did get very upset by Picard. It is just we need to have a drinking game where we go scene by scene. And the first person to call out what movie or novel that that scene was ripped off from gets to tell everybody else to drink because that's all it is.

It's like you can backtrace this. They literally played darts with previous scripts and storylines from science fiction and are just making a mishmash. They are assimilating the history of sci-fi for the Borg. And throwing in musical numbers for no reason whatsoever.

Thank God for fast forward. I don't know if you saw in the news, but Patrick Stewart's wife is going to be in an upcoming episode and she's a singer. So she's going to be doing another musical number. Picard the musical. I honestly didn't even know he was married.

My hopes for Picard have dwindled. It's not good. It's derivative. It's uninteresting. And given the subject matter that they had to work with and the cast they have put together, I'm so disappointing.

You know, it's really sad, though, that I thought about because you sent me the thing the other day that they had wrapped on season three already, which means they can't go back and fix it from feedback. We're stuck unless they do some reshoots, which I doubt they'll do because they're too busy selling NFTs.

Yep. Yeah, it makes me sad. Well, on the plus side, the one great hope of Star Trek, Star Trek Lower Decks. I never thought I'd be saying that phrase. Season three trailer has been released. Yeah. Here's hoping.

It's the only good Star Trek out there. Cerritos. The Cerritos could save us. You know, we got left. The one starship where every time I hear it, I think of Cerritos Auto Square. Cerritos Auto Square. I still have that commercial stuck in my mind. Yep. Yep. They added the dot com now.

I hear it all the time. It's a very sad thing. Also sad is billions. I have one episode left. The finale is in the tube, but it's really hard to get to it. Me and my roommate both are having a hard time with it because what I loved about that show they have destroyed.

They have, Brian, discovery-ified it. Oh, no. The entire show up until this season, the protagonist was a cutthroat, vicious motherfucker. This guy was like Swearingen in Deadwood, right? Kill you as soon as look at you.

The new guy, 180 degrees, everything about feelings. Everything about feelings. I shit you not. Every character. Feelings, feelings, feelings, feelings, feelings, feelings, feelings. Everywhere. They've ruined it. They have ruined it. So, you know, I used to like those guys a lot.

The team behind it. But, yeah. No more. Sorry. You're done. You're done. I did watch the new documentary, Tony Hawk, Until the Wheels Fall Off. Did you get a chance to watch that one? Or any plans, Stu? I'm not a skateboarder, so this has zero interest to me.

Okay. It's actually not so much about skateboarding, which is pretty cool. Just top-level athlete shit, which is pretty interesting. And, you know, his history. I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it. There's a good Wall Street Journal article that'll be in the show notes, too. It talks about Mr. Hawk, who I have. I think I got my first autograph from Tony Hawk when I was 12 years old at Mount Trashmore.

I love his Twitter feed about not being semi-recognized. Like, everybody says you kind of look like Tony Hawk. Oh, it's great. So funny. I've been watching Queen of the South. Okay. You know how you like crapper sci-fi? Yep. Queen of the South, definitely crapper TV. We only started watching it because there was a big thing on Netflix that said, Season 5, Queen of the South, now playing.

And my roommate watched them when they were on USA. So she was, like, all excited for a second. And she's like, oh, wait a minute. They finished that. And it turns out, yep, they're just playing the last season over. But we got into it. I'm two seasons, two and a half seasons in. Crapper TV. Great.

If you like Burn Notice, I guess you'd like this. It's kind of the same quality and aesthetic. I did start to watch The Outlaws last night. Have you seen the trailers for that? No. It's an Amazon Prime one? No, I have not. Ah, okay. It's got, was it Stephen Merchant? It's one of his new shows.

So if you like Stephen Merchant, which I do believe you do. I do. You'll probably like it. It's also got Christopher Walken in it. Oh, wow. Cool. You have to watch it now. I guess I do. Yeah, it's a BBC show about seven people who are on community service for various crimes.

When I saw that this was coming, I got really excited because I thought that they were remaking an old BBC show called Misfits. I remember that one. Yeah, it was the, it was kind of the same premise. A bunch of people on community service and there's an electrical storm and they all get superpowers.

But they're all degenerates and crappy people. It's awesome. It is one of the greatest shows ever made, which is why I was so excited that they were remaking it with Christopher Walken, but they're not. It's a completely different show. Right. It's funnier. So check it out. I watched the first episode last night and I enjoyed it.

It's, it's got that, that lovely British sense of humor. And yeah, I think that's, oh yeah, the Warner Brothers discovery deal closed. Who cares? That's an interesting one to me because that's, there's three significant. They've got three different pay networks that are now, what are they going to do?

Are they going to roll them into one? Are they going to try to keep them separate? I, I don't know what's going on here. Is it, you know, is HBO Max going to get Maxer by getting CNN and discovery? I don't know. It's one of those things where it's just big boys playing with Monopoly cards, you know, it's like, okay, all it comes down to is where does the bill go that month?

You know, although it is funny that John Oliver can now make even more fun of AT&T. Yes. Oh yeah. And speaking of the bill coming, I'm apparently, the 2022 World Cup is coming, which is great. It's going to, they've just managed to make it more and more expensive.

I'm going to have to pony up big bucks to be able to watch all the games. That's just what it sounds like. At least in the U.S., Fox Sports has confirmed it will stream all 64 matches live through its app. The first match takes place November 21st. Of course, you cannot use that app unless you've got the pay TV subscription.

So, thanks. Oh, double ding. Yep. So, uh, I'm, I got to see what my Canadian options are here. I can, I don't know. I've got to look into this, but, uh, man, it's the biggest sporting event in the world. And you guys are just trying to screw us left, right, and center.

Thanks. Well, if, if it only works in the U.S., you can send me a few bones. I'll set it up here and I'll point a video camera at the TV and I'll stream it. All right. How's that? Sounds great. I'll just keep that up. Do you remember like way, how many years ago was it that we were still, we had like quick cams and we were watching some of the World Cup games together from, because they were on like three in the morning.

Yep. Connectix, quick cams. You were in, were you, were you in London or Venice? I was in Venice at the time. You were in Venice. I was in Chicago. We just set up cameras and it was, it was just so we could see it. We weren't even listening to the same game. Like, cause I had like Mexican radio on to listen to it and you were listening to some other thing.

Like, cause the radio is the only way to listen or to watch the game back then. But yeah, we had, we had, this was when we had Pearl scripts and shit to just update every now and again, the picture on the, on the screen. Yeah. Good times.

That was so much fun. And that, and I, and I hated soccer back then, but I was just like, you got me into watching it and I watched all the games with you and we had the, you had the cameras out. That was like early two thousands. Yeah. I can't even remember anymore. It must, maybe the Korean one. I don't know. Anyways. That was the, well, that was the same time at the same time when I talked about that AOL instant messenger BlackBerry that I would carry around.

Yeah. I lived in the same place. So that was the level of technology we had back then. Giant CRTs. I think I had a Mac G4. It was great. It was the old days. Something that's not great though. CNN plus not doing so well.

Yeah. That's definitely going to get rolled into something. It's not going to be standalone too much longer. Yeah. Scott Galloway is having his quibby moment right now. They're cutting, they're cutting bait fast. They're like, okay, this isn't working really badly. They, I mean, they expected millions of people in the first couple of years.

So 10,000 after the first week or so is really not going to keep them on that track. I looked at it. There's literally nothing I want to watch. Well, the thing is the way it was kind of being sold at the beginning was, okay, so will people pay a certain amount of money for hard hitting news and politics, but they don't have any hard hitting news or politics.

They have opinion shows. Which is what CNN and MSNBC and everybody else, Fox is already streaming for, not on a pay network. Or, well, I guess you are paying for, you're paying for cable, but not on a separate app that plus that you're paying even more for.

They didn't deliver on what they promised. Not that I'm sure that would have worked anyways, but this is just more of the same. It's just more opinion pieces. No, thanks. Why would I pay for that? I don't care about parenting with Anderson Cooper. You know, none of that stuff. I looked at him. The interview stuff actually looked fairly interesting, but here's where they really screwed the pooch.

They gave away that lifetime discount to $2.99 a month for life, you know, because it's usually $5.99. Yeah. What they didn't do was give a free trial like everybody else and then converted the stupid people who didn't cancel the trial like everybody else.

That's how you start a streaming network. You give away access at the beginning. And you know, people forget that they paid for it and don't see the $2.99 charge. Yeah. I mean, and then you start, you start talking about your, you know, your record download numbers a la CBS All Access, you know, just like they did.

And then profit. Yeah. That's all you got to do. Then profit. Ups and doodads. Susan writes in just got one echo unit and my questions about horse racing stuck me in an Alexis study of media use.

I think I asked for the studies, personnel names, publication, study methodology and authorizations and so on responses from echo asked me to state book movie preferences. Could tell me who is, could you tell me who is funding this? I tried telling echo I'm sight impaired, but words like podcasts and audio books trigger movies and book questions.

So I was like, I've never heard of the study thing. So I have no idea how to answer Susan's question. I'm sorry, Susan. This was just a segue. You were a segue to me today. I was going to get an, pull out an echo and try and see what this kerfuffle was all about.

And then I'm like, oh, wait, I gave them all to Brian. I have no more echoes. Then I go to Amazon. I'm like, I have an office now. I can get my own echo and put it in my office because I have my safe space. You cannot buy a lady in the tube anymore. They're gone. It's, uh, it's, it's ladies in a ball or ladies in a puck.

Yeah. You got, you got balls, you got pucks and you got video cameras. I don't want a video camera because I got nobody to video camera with. So why would I want to spend the money? The balls, I'm sure they don't sound as good as the old tubes do. Yep. Right. Um, no, the balls actually sound really good.

Not going to lie. They're pretty good. Oh, they do. You have a ball. I do. I have two balls. I've got two ladies in a ball. All right. You got two ladies in a ball. You should let them out. Get some air. Yep. How are the microphones? Cause that was always the problems with the dots. Microphones are good. You could not get those things. No, I, I, I, as I, I'm about to go into a small rant here to, to kind of answer Susan's question.

But if you're looking for something that just like to play music, uh, the echo balls are fantastic. They are fantastic. Oh, really good. Echo is funded by Amazon. That's what happens here. And it's gotten significantly worse. It is probably, I definitely don't use it as much as a smart speaker anymore.

Because it'll, I, I'm starting to believe it miss, it intentionally mishears you and just tries to funnel you to something that you can buy on Amazon, be it a, a, um, a subscription to a streaming television station or, um, a movie or a book that you can purchase.

That's it's just gotten worse and worse and worse. It really has. That's not good. Nope. So just use it as a speaker. That's, that's what I do. I just play music on them at this point and ask, ask about the weather. That's it. Okay. You need to do any real research, get out your laptop.

Well, I think, I think what got me about Susan's thing, it sounded like she was part of a research study about horse racing. I that's, that's what it sounded like to me from her email, but, uh, I, I'm not, I don't entirely follow exactly what you're asking. So feel free to write us back, Susan and clarify, clarify, clarify as it were.

But I think, I think, uh, I'm going to stick with Google then. Cause everybody says Google's better. If you're just going to use it as a smart speaker, I just need it as a smart speaker. I don't need the other he has and Guga. So, and what I really like as a smart speaker is the Sonos, which I'm using in the office and it sounds great.

And I was worried about echo, but it's, it's fantastic. It's, it's great. Uh, I don't have them at home. I might consider switching to that at some point. And they've got some news they've acquired mate, a Dutch startup best known for co-creating a Bluetooth speaker powered by light. I don't know how that works.

Ooh, I'm glad you, I'm glad you figured out the pronunciation on, on, on that because I was like, Hmm. Oh, I'm totally guessing. I didn't like look. Oh, okay. M A Y H T. Mate. That's what it sounds like to me. They specialize in an audio technology called heart motion.

So light and heart motion. I don't claim to understand any of this, but they're saying that they can basically make speakers sound really, really good at 10 times more compact than other models. Uh, and without a sacrificing base output, which I'm not entirely sure I believe, but Sonos did and they're paying a hundred million dollars.

So maybe the Sonos will get smaller because they are pretty, they're, they're bricky, but they sound great. They sound great and they're heavy as hell. Yeah, they are heavy. Yeah. I don't know how they're going to keep the base response the same. They can't, how, I mean, it's about moving air. Uh, I found a really cool browser extension this week called Twemex or Twemex.

Either one. It, uh, basically puts a little sidebar into your browser while you're surfing, uh, Twitter on the web, which I do quite often. And it gives you a lot of like, uh, quick search features that are really nice. If you just want to like dig down on somebody's Twitter profile and find stuff like, uh, their most popular tweets or search just their tweets.

It's a pretty cool little, little, uh, add on free for now. So go grab it. Check it out. And YouTube has told users that picture in picture should be available in a matter of days across all devices running iOS 15 or later. Now I know the kids like to watch all their stuff on their tiny devices, but now you can have a tinier window.

Yay. Yeah. Have you ever used picture in picture on iOS? I don't even use them on TVs. I watch one thing. The problem with it, I don't, nobody does it on purpose on iOS. It just happens. And you can't, you got to figure out how to get it back and get it gone.

Oh yeah. It happens to me all the time. It happens to me all the time with the ESPN app. I'm not even trying to launch a video and I accidentally do. And then I can't figure out how to get rid of it and get back to the article I wanted to read. Yeah. So that's why I'm like, this is, why would YouTube tell everybody about this? This sounds like a pain in the ass. I don't want your picture in picture, please.

Well, iOS 16 will be coming soon and they're going to be doing more expanded focus modes work. And I just bring this up because I don't know if you've played with focus modes in iOS 15 yet. Have you?

No. They are the most maddening. I just, I don't get this feature. It drives me crazy. It is synced across all my devices and it never knows when I'm awake, when I need to be disturbed, when I don't need to be disturbed, who's allowed to disturb me, what apps may disturb me, what apps are not allowed to disturb me, who, what, when, where, why, how.

It's crazy making. I've stuck with do not disturb everyone or okay, everybody come and talk to me. That's it. That's it. That's all I want. Yeah. I, all I wanted was to be able to time do not disturb mode and the rest of it. I want open season.

That's it. And I can't figure it out. I'm, you know, I guess my chops are just gone. I just cannot figure this out anymore. It sucks. So it'll suck more in iOS 16 progress. Yeah. Fuckers. And speaking of progress, DuckDuckGo is in the news with a new beta browser.

Great. Okay. Just great. I applaud the thought of DuckDuckGo. I just don't ever use it. Because the search results suck. Yeah. They're not as good as Google's. No, that's the problem. It's like, okay, let me, let me, let me think about this for a second. You have one job. I need that job done.

You can't do that job. I'm not going to use your browser. Sorry. Or your search engine. They made the really strange decision to use WebKit instead of Chromium. Mm-hmm. No plug-ins then. Like, almost nothing where I'm like, I can't live without my plug-ins. There's not a reason to have a browser that can't have plug-ins, you know?

So I don't think this thing's going to be a flash in the pan, but who knows? Who knows? They say they did it because they want to own the stack. Yeah. Okay. Good for them. That's about it. Yeah. That's all I got. Good luck, DuckDuckGo. And Barrett writes in for, and we put this in the, from what could possibly go wrong files, New Speedcam app lets anyone anywhere submit evidence of drivers speeding.

Awesome. And that was sarcasm. Did you read the comments? This is unbelievable. This is, vigilantism as a service is between citizen and this. Just stop it, people. Don't turn everybody into the fucking old grannies screaming, get off my lawn.

Let the fucking trained professionals handle this shit. Also, you know, you're driving. Put down your fucking camera. Stop, stop filming me and sending it into Speedcam anywhere. God damn it.

At the library. I don't know what got me started on this, Brian, but I went back and I found a copy of Anthony Robbins' Personal Power 2, The Driving Force from the 90s. You mean the types of books that we scream at people not to read?

Yeah. Yes. General self-help books. Yeah. I wanted to go back and listen to, because I, when it came out, I basically, I busted my ass to buy that thing. It was like $280 when it first came out and you could get, you could get a payment plan. I got the cassette version, I got the cassette version, I got the cassette version so I could put it, put the cassettes in my Walkman or play it in my car and drive around and get my personal power too.

And it is really interesting to go back and it is really interesting to go back and hear Tony Robbins' self-help from the mid-90s and then knowing what I know about self-help now compare it and contrast it to, you know, the whole, the whole genre. The evolution of the bullshit industry.

Exactly it. Exactly it. Exactly it. Because after I bought, the two second history lesson, after I bought Personal Power 2, spent all that money, got hounded from collections. Them and Columbia House, the same people were coming after me. My seven copies of R.E.M.'s, uh, out of time, uh, document cassette that I, yeah, that basically, uh, I got seven of the same one.

So I'd always have one and they always wanted me to buy more and they sued. And of course, anyway, I was so disillusioned with self-help that, you know, for the past, what, 25 or 30 years, I've been following it and debunking it wherever possible. It's the same damn story over and over again.

It's crazy. It's crazy. They literally are telling the same story. They're just, they're just, they basically bought a thesaurus. Yeah. And they come, they come up with a catchy acronym or something, you know, beast mode. Beast mode. And here's, here's, here's where I found the proto, uh, self-help because I was just bouncing around.

Everybody's a, everybody's a fucking Stoic nowadays. If you go back and read letters from a Stoic by Seneca, the first chapter, you will find 10 tenants that Tony Robbins ripped off for personal power to fast forward to now you've got, uh, was it Ryan holiday doing the same thing?

It is just a perpetual cycle over and over again. So I got four CDs or four tapes worth in. And I cut the experiment because it, it proved itself that self-help still is bullshit. No matter more fascinating thing to me is you have a cassette player still. Dude, you didn't see the cassette player I got?

I don't think so. No. Oh my God. Oh, okay. I got it. I'll, I'll dig up a picture and send it to you. I have a mint condition GE tape player that we all had, you know, with the handle and everything and the built-in speaker. I can see it now. It's 4C battery. I got one mint condition at a garage sale.

That's amazing. With the built-in mic or not the built-in, but the external microphone too. Wow. Awesome. Okay. It is awesome. And, and this is one of the rare ones that you can find that somebody, somebody's batteries didn't explode. That's always the problem.

You find them and then you flip it over and you look in the back and it's all melted because somebody's battery exploded in the seventies. Like, damn it. Anyway, I got a real book. I'm reading the broken room by Peter Klines. I came across this book because we were talking about Brandon Sanderson last week and I misattributed the ex heroes stories to Brandon Sanderson.

Uh, he did steel heart, which we were reading at about the same time as ex heroes. So I always got those mixed up. Yeah. Those both like came out around the same time or we at least read both series around the same time. So I've never been able to keep the two straight in my mind. Yeah.

Same here. Yeah. They kind of interleaved because they were coming out. There's like a multiple books in each series and they were just kind of, they would drop back and forth. And it's like, which one are we watching today? I don't know. So I got some links in the show notes to steel heart and Peter Klines and Brandon Sanderson's websites, but, um, uh, the broken room, Peter Klines loves rooms in his, in his books.

Uh, he, his one book that I really loved, uh, was 14, uh, which was just about a really crazy, uh, apartment with Cthulhu type space aliens. It was all, I love his books. He loves time travel and he loves a room. Give him time travel in a good room in a multi-universe thing.

You're set. Uh, and this book is, this book is new book. I'm three quarters of the way through and I'm loving it. Like the other books. I'm a huge fan of Peter Klines. So, um, might be a little tainted, but I'll, I'll give you the, the skinny on the ending next week. If it was a thumbs up or down, but so far I'd say, I love this book.

It's a super thumbs up. Cool. I'm working on a sci-fi book. Hopefully it'd be done by next week.

Security. Ha! We are back again with Mr. Dave Bittner. He 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.

Hello, Dave. Hello. Hello, gents. Good to be back. Hello. Sadly, no Star Wars talk this week. No. No. Nothing Star Wars-y to talk about. Yep. It's a sad state of affairs. You already missed us bagging on Star Trek, so there's no good news.

Ah, okay. All right. I just started watching Picard the second season, so I'm one episode in, so we'll see where that takes us. Okay. Okay. Listen to the show for spoilers. Yeah. There was some interesting TV on, though.

John Oliver covered Data Brokers this week. Did you guys get a chance to check that out? I did. Oh, it was heavily covered on Caveat this week. It was Ben's story. Yes, it was deliciously delightful, wasn't it? Well, it's always nice when something that we've all been screaming about for years and years and years hops into the mainstream, as it were.

And it's both a combination of, really, again, and then finally, maybe somebody will actually listen, because they are certainly not listening to us. And I'm thinking, yeah, all I can think of is, this asshole's going to get all the credit. We've been doing this for 10 years.

Jerk. But what I dearly loved about it is, it's to the point that you've continually made on this show, and I'm sure elsewhere, Dave, politicians don't care until it affects them directly.

And John Oliver took it to them. I mean, not as much as I would have liked. I would have liked him to name names. But I'm sure he would have been taken off the air and sued out of existence if he did that. Yeah, I wonder what will happen next.

What is – if he gets no response – because I haven't seen anything in terms of any response from congresspeople. And so I wonder what happens next. He must – I suspect he has some sort of escalation plan in mind, right?

I'm sure. They do not go into these things lightly. They follow things through to the bitter end. So, yeah, no, when I saw him going down that path and I was thinking to myself, he's going to do it. He's going to do it. Yeah, he will spend the money and they will get the data and they will – yeah, it was just great.

I was howling, laughing. Yeah. My fear is that instead of going after the problem, they'll go after him. Yeah. Right? You know, they'll try to go after him for, you know, I don't know, blackmailing them or, you know, so they'll come up with some sort of – find some RICO charge way to go after him or something rather than – just so that he can't reveal the secrets rather than fixing the underlying problem.

But that's just my cynicism peeking through. I almost wouldn't mind that because it would then take it to the court systems and then he can prove that, like, I did nothing illegal. I purchased things and I managed to de-identify them because I had enough data points and all of this is legal.

And all of these companies – I mean, that was kind of the whole point is, like, this is legal and these companies are allowed to do it. So now I just targeted specific people because that's the target interest that I had. Yeah. And wouldn't discovery be interesting in a case like that?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to wherever it goes next, but it's unfortunate that it has to happen that way perhaps for things to change. But I'm glad John Oliver is out there doing it because hopefully it will lead to something.

Yep. Yeah. He's got a bigger budget and better lawyers. That's right. That's right. I wonder how – if it's fun – what is his team of lawyers like, right? Let's take a certain type of lawyer because, you know, how many times do they say, you want to do what?

We have to prepare for what? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. I'd like to think of it as back in the old web days. And John Oliver is kind of like the sales team and the lawyers are kind of like the engineering team. He's out doing crazy shit and comes back and tells us what to do.

And we're like, you did what? You told him we could do what? Yeah. Computers can't do that yet. No. Well, I said they did. So now we're going to have to figure out how. Yep. Build it. That's pretty much where we get to.

Like, build it. Oh, so I thought this one was pretty interesting. It's making the rounds. Well, it kind of made the rounds. I couldn't find a whole lot of attribution on this one. Maybe you can help me out, Dave. But it's about Ukrainians are using Find My iPhone to find out where the Russians who stole their phone are actually traveling to.

And in this one case, in this article, where they're retreating to and they're being able to see where all of their gear has gone. Did you guys cover any of this? Have you been able to fact check it a little better? I don't know. I saw this story come by, but it wasn't something that we spent very much time on other than it was a whole bunch of stories like this of all of the new and interesting ways that Russian troop movements have been tracked in this modern age.

And this is certainly one of them. And, you know, it's also interesting because they didn't take down the Russians, didn't take down the cellular networks. And there was a lot of speculation is because they needed them.

They were relying on them for communications because their communications were so bad. And that's been a way to track them. Yep. They got to keep the gram going. Got to keep them grams coming. You know? That's the way it works. Yeah.

Just sort of only tangentially related, this past week I attached an AirTag to my father's car keys because he lost his car keys twice in two weeks and several hundred dollars later of reprogramming remote controls for cars and so on and so forth.

And finding the old ones and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He now has an AirTag on his car keys and he considers it a freaking miracle. So he can look on his phone and there's a map that comes up and tells him where his car keys are.

This is a great world to be living in. What a time to be alive. Quite helpful. Well, and also from his phone he can make the little AirTag beep, which is helpful too because he would leave his keys in a pair of pants that he would have. He would hang in his closet and then he would be gone for a week.

It's funny. I actually used the beep on my AirTag yesterday because of my car keys. And specifically, the AirTag fell out of the car keys and I had to use my phone to find the AirTag after it had fallen out of my car keys. I had my car keys with me, but as I was going into the sushi restaurant to pick up my order, it had alerted me that I had left my keys behind.

And I'm like, no, they're in my hand. And when I got out of the Jeep, it popped out and flew across to the other side. And so I picked up my keys. Sure enough, it had flown out of the protective silicone holder. So I got home. Once I found it, I used the little beep thing, found it, got it back home, and then duct taped it to my keys so it won't fall off again, which I highly recommend you do too, Dave.

High tech, low tech. An elegant solution. Yep. Yeah. I A-teamed that shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. His is in a little, like, it's a little leather, kind of old school leather kind of thing with a snap on it. So we'll see. Okay.

Yeah. So it's turtles all the way down. Soon we'll be strapping AirTags to our AirTags to find our lost AirTags. Well, you got to put a tile to the AirTag so you at least have separate. Right. Right, right. But now I've lost my phone and I can't find any of those things. But you can use your watch to find your phone.

I don't know where my watch is, man. Oh, no. I thought it was noteworthy that DuckDuckGo launched their own browser this week. We collectively shrugged at that. Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, it's sort of another entry to the game.

Right. But I think they have the reputation and could perhaps move things forward. I'm thinking of the person who's using Chrome or using Safari and is trying to think, is this worth switching over that maybe DuckDuckGo will help them? The very rare people that use DuckDuckGo's search engine instead of Google.

This will attract those five people. Yeah. It's a fair point. It's a fair point. Nipping around the edges. I mean, they're going for the privacy and security brand. Right. And, you know, so then you go with Apple because you're laying on that brand and you're building on that.

That's what they're going for. So I'm sure it will be moderately successful for them. I can't see myself ever using this browser, but I get it. And most of the things that I saw in their bullet point list of features, I already have through plugins like the cookie thing and all that sort of stuff.

So, you know, it's okay. You built it in, but I've already got all that going on and my browser works great on all my devices. So, yeah. I mean, I think as a turnkey sort of thing for people who are interested in this, they can go with a name that they trust and they know that this organization is in good faith dedicated to protecting their privacy.

Yeah. That's a good entry in the field, I think. Okay. Yeah. Good luck to them. I share your thoughts that I don't see widespread adoption of this, but if they can make it work for them and make it work with their own business model, I don't necessarily see it being a bad thing.

Nope. I always like new entries in the market. I'm fine with that. Well, the bad thing about this was it was on the news a lot yesterday when it popped off. And the downside that I saw was that they said, if you're not using one of these privacy browsers, you might want to try DuckDuckGo.

And they showed the list of privacy browsers. Vivaldi wasn't up there, which sucked because it's the one I use. But the top of the list for everybody was Brave. And I'm like, oh, dear God, please don't have people go download Brave. Please don't. Please don't. We did it.

And I feel bad about it every day just from all of the layering of crypto crap that they put in there. It is like we know where their flag is, you know, planted and it is planted firmly in crypto. So, yeah. Well, I'm using Brave every day and I like it.

So, OK, I'm not using any of the crypto stuff. GM, bro. OK, crypto, bro. I've got an NFT bridge to sell you. I know. I know. But and here's the thing, like once I had invested the time in all of the Brave stuff and finding the plugins and getting it configured the way I wanted to.

Debraving it. Well, but you guys were talking about Vivaldi. I took a look at it, but it was just it was like, oh, I've got to switch again. I don't want to switch again. I totally understand that. I'm just I am fine here. I don't I have it set up.

So I don't see the crypto stuff. It's back there. I've opted out of all that stuff. And I have to say my browsing experience with Brave is much better than it was with Chrome just because it is blocking more stuff. I don't see nearly as much of the crap that I saw before.

So I it's not to say that I don't think you're everything you guys are saying is true and valid. And were I to start off completely new today, would I make a different choice? But it's too late for me. Here's where I am. Save yourselves.

Tell my wife I love her. Yeah, kind of settled in here. And I 100% understand that. Like I there could be a great new browser launch tomorrow. And I would probably think about eight years before switching again, because it's just working the way I want to.

And I'm too damn lazy now. Yeah, here's the deal. I switch browsers when a browser breaks. I went to Brave because Vivaldi broke on me. The the there was a dumb bug that happened to me and I couldn't fix it. So I went to Brave. It worked it. The thing didn't happen on Brave.

Then Brave broke and I came back to Vivaldi. And I'm like, oh, they fixed my bug. I can stay here forever now. Until the next update. Until they break, which is which happened last week, which I forgot to put in the notes. Vivaldi put an update out and it killed basically Vivaldi on all M1 Macs.

And then they put up another one which killed other stuff. Right now it is. It's only half broken. So I always recommend keeping at least one window open if you want to not have to relaunch it every time until they fix it. And I think on this one, is it fixed still?

Oh, they did another patch. The non-crashing patch actually broke the about Vivaldi menu item. But now that seems to have been patched and has been updated. So I just keep I just keep tweeting about it and hoping someone sees it.

They liked one of my tweets. So I'm guessing the Vivaldi team has seen something at least. Software's hard. Yes. Yeah. So it's customer support. That's why nobody does it anymore. That's right. That's right. How did we get here? So other big story that I thought was worth talking about was the raid forums got taken down.

Big hacker forum, dark web forum where you could go and buy all sorts of things. They seem to specialize in databases and those sorts of things. But a big international effort and took down raid forums, arrested some of the operators, seized the domains.

So kind of a big deal, I think. Operation tourniquet. Operation tourniquet. Yes. Who names these things? That's that's really what I'm curious about more than anything else. But I mean, good. Yeah. I mean, keep shutting them down. I don't care what you name your operations.

As ridiculous as they are. Mm hmm. But I think we're also this is yet another example where it seems as though these folks seem to believe that they can operate with impunity and be outside of the reach of law enforcement. And to some degree they can, especially if they're operating in Russia, but eventually they go on vacation or they have their their server seized or that, you know, they get they get shut down.

And the the the the the the botnets get shut down, you know, that sort of thing. So you can get away with it for a while. We're seeing this. But not forever. Yeah. Well, but also, I think, like, at some point, do it do do these folks who are running these things start to think this is not worth my time?

Yeah. You know, the the risk, just the risk reward isn't worth it. And I don't know where we are in terms of tipping that, because if you can get in and, you know, make your fortune really quick and get out, then that's one thing. But it seems as though the folks who do this, they get in and then they stay in because I guess, you know, fortune is addictive.

Well, I mean, I think there's another aspect to it, too. It's it's you think with this skill set, you know, is it is it better to try to do something illegal like this and make a ton of money or go work for a Google and get a really, really good paycheck for a long time?

My hunch is the type of people that do these sorts of things that create these hacker forums and all that sort of thing. They do not have the personality types to go work at a Google. So it's not like they have other options. There's there's a certain personality type that is attracted to this sort of thing.

They do not play well with others. You know, they're always going to be looking for the grift. Right. And right now, this is can be a profitable grift. And then it isn't. And, you know, I suspect a lot of these people don't go don't go on to, you know, very well respected careers at big companies.

You know, who knows what they do? There's also the organized crime aspect of it as well, because, you know, they might not have the choice to stop once they start making all that money, because their bosses who take most of the money as a cut probably say we want more. You know, it's not like they can just go.

I'm going to go work at Google today and we know where you family gets killed. You know, yeah. Right. That's a really good point. Yeah. That's a really good point. Yeah. I do think that having your organization shut down and your, let's say, Bitcoin confiscated is one thing.

But actually getting jail time, getting rounded up and locked up, I think, sends a different message to these folks. So we'll see. We shall see. We'll see. Yeah. All right. Well, that's what I have for you, gents, this week.

And I'll see you guys next time. Maybe we'll have some Star Wars stuff. Star Wars is coming. I'm excited. Oh, God. Here we go again. Over at Patreon.

Nobody. Nobody. Just a reminder, you get the episodes early and they're ad free and they're high res. I forgot the high res last time. So there's all sorts of goodies if you sign up for Patreon. Starts at three bucks a month. Easy peasy. There you go. Over at PayPal, we got Ralph, Mark, Sherry, Miles, Natalie, Linda, and Edward.

Thank you all so much. Thank you very much. And over at Stripe at our tip jar, we've got Jeff, Andrew, and Q. And Theodore. And it is a sad, sad week for me. Gilbert Gottfried died at age 67, which really, way too young. Didn't see this one coming. Too many comedians going too fast.

There's a picture doing the rounds right now of Gilbert Gottfried with, oh gosh, what's the fan? What's the guy's name? Bob Saget. Bob Saget and Louis Anderson. All three passed recently. So yeah, that's pretty crazy. And I haven't thought much about Gilbert Gottfried really until very recently because my kid is going through the Disney movies and obviously he did his Aladdin phase.

So yeah. Yeah. Sad news. I never really liked Gilbert that much until I started listening to Penn Sunday School and they would always talk about him and he would come on and I really changed my opinion over the years about it. I just thought he was annoying, but he was an incredibly smart comic.

Incredibly smart. If you can get past the, the annoying voice, but yeah, of course, as soon as I start to like him later in a happy Easter to Vincent, Vincent just keeps sending me money. So thank you, Vincent. I really appreciate it. You can stop now though.

Everybody paid for my medical bills. I will take this money that you sent me though and go buy some CBD. So thank you very much for the anti-anxiety weekend that I am about to have. So much love, Vincent. All right. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister.

And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy 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. And there's probably a little share button on the app that you're using to listen to us right now.

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